Annual Meeting – October 20, 1967
Wish to say something about the portrait of a Protestant. However I now have some misgivings. I thought I was perfectly safe but I think I have spied somebody who was present when r spoke along this line some time ago about 500 miles from here. I have misgivings also because the people who very likely need this most, I suppose, hear it so little. And probably those who need it so little hear it so much. I assume that you are the kind of Protestants I would like to speak about. Therefore looking at you is an inspiration and that ought to be of help in presenting my thoughts to you. I would like to look at the Protestant from a few different points of view and say five things about the “Portrait of a Protestant.”
I
The first thing that comes to my mind is this:
Nobody stands so straight and so tall as the real Protestant. Why? For the simple reason that he stands for something.
On the way down here I heard a broadcast about some demonstrations—anti-war demonstrations, a lot of ruckus and disorder and rioting. It is very difficult to believe that the people who are the heirs of the Bolshevik Revolution of fifty years ago in Russia do not have a hand in all this. Those people stand for something and so they are willing to riot, to raise disorder, and go to jail for it. They have their portraits. As you know, this is the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Communists get out the portraits of Lenin, Marx, and others. They want to be like them and stand for the same things.
I remind you also that this is the 450th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. The tragedy is, that while the Communists are celebrating with gusto and while they stand up to defy law and order, the Protestant Reformation is being sabotaged and its voice of testimony is being muffled. It is not exactly a popular thing today to highlight the Protestant Reformation. 0, you can call it a “Festival of Faith.” But “Protestant” has gotten to be a word that is now suspect. It has become sort of a bad word. The Protestant is now being looked at askance; he is a persona non grata. The whole thing is becoming passe. And so it is a comforting and inspiring experience to be in the presence of those who are Protestants “unashamed and wholly committed.” It’s not the popular thing today to get out the portrait of a Protestant. You have to go up in the attic to find it, but it is exactly the thing that you and I ought to do.
I believe that it is a common and unfortunate mistake to assume that Protestantism is mostly or primarily negative, and that to be a Protestant, you have to stand against something. The meaning of the Latin term from which “‘Protestant” comes has a different connotation. Protestare means, first of all, to affirm or to avow something, to stand up for something and to be counted. That’s what Martin Luther did: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; so help me, God.” The Protestant stands for something.
Now the peril of Protestantism today is this, that it has developed an aversion to this kind of thing. Protestantism has caught the vision of ecumenicity. It is called a vision, and if you and I are not swept along with it, we come to be regarded as bigots, we’re narrow. You’ve got to have your mind stretched for that kind of thing. Now I’m not averse to mind-stretching, but there are limits, and if you stretch it beyond the limits you won’t have any mind or any commitment left. Catching this vision may mean that in reality you are catching a disease—a malady which is an ecumenical fever.
The danger today is that when you really take a stand, when you avow a commitment, you run the risk of being thought to be archaic, you are not scholarly. Scholarship amounts to this in the eyes of so many people, that you are searching. You are on the search for truth, but it is a search in which you never arrive. You don’t find it, and you don’t ever stand up and say that you know there is a finality about anything you affirm.
But there are what Ecclesiastes calls “nails well fastened,” truths that are final. At least I think that is the correct interpretation of Ecclesiastes 12:11–12. I have learned it from Dr. Wyngaarden, here present, so my source of information is good. The “goads” of Scripture mentioned in this passage are the questions and problems that Scripture confronts us with to make us think. The trouble is that we are averse to thinking, to come to a conclusion, to arrive at a position, to have commitment. And so much of Our modem means of mass communication do not expect us to think. That is why publishing and editing a church paper is such a competitive pursuit today, to publish successfully something that’s going to ask people to think.
But Scripture goads us on to think even as an old-time driver would goad his lazy oxen to move along. Scripture also provides us with the answer in each case, the “Thus saith the Lord,” truths that are like “nails well fastened.” Scripture says, “Here’s the answer.” Of the making of many books there is no end in this sense, that these books never speak the last word. And in that sense, they leave the reader with nothing but weariness of the flesh. Those are the books that are written apart from Scripture. But the words of the wise, given by the one Shepherd, always give the “nails well fastened,” final truths on which we can stand.
I don’t think that the greatest danger or threat to our churches today is posed by people who openly by the spoken or the printed word take a position that is not Reformed. Of course, they are a real threat and I want to be second to none in warning against them and against what they say and what they write. But the greatest peril, I believe, is posed by the large number of people who always sit on the fence.
They don’t take a stand. They are not Protestants, they first wet their finger to see which way the wind is blowing. As a minister of one of our large churches said when somehow we got involved in a recent controversy about the atonement, “I get a kick out of it, watching it.” A lot of people just sit on the sidelines and watch. That is the greatest peril, the greatest threat to any church. Too often, they don’t know what it means to stand up and take a position.
Whenever I hear that word “dialogue” I wonder what happened to Protestantism. Dialogue may never become a substitute for witnessing. I can’t engage in dialogue with an open mind as if the historic Christian faith is not stamped with finality. The Lord never told us to engage in dialogue with those who advocate anything but the truth, those who preach any other gospel. The Lord told us to “contend earnestly for the faith,” to take a stand, to witness, and to be true.
II
Taking another look, we should say of this man who stands so tall that there is nobody who bows so low as the real Protestant. Committed to all of Scripture as the Word of God, the Protestant acknowledges that, in the last analysis, God has everything to say and he has nothing to say. He accepts the Bible as infallible and inerrant in toto. And I submit to you that if you don’t do that you don’t have any infallibility or inerrancy left. Without this you have surrendered to subjectivism. But to accept that kind of Bible, you have to bow low.
Sola Scriptura is one of the issues that is still at stake between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. When it comes to the Protestant Reformation all the real issues are still at stake. There have been changes but no basic changes. Perhaps you have read Father Kavanaugh’s recent book, A Modem Priest Looks At His Outdated Church. I have finished about half of it, but if that’s getting together, I say, may the Lord have mercy on us. As I see it, that’s not reformation but revolt. And what is so easily lost sight of is that revolt and reformation are worlds apart.
There isn’t anybody who bows so low as the Protestant, and that’s why he stands so tall. The Protestant is like Lord Lawrence to whom this testimony is found in Westminster Abbey: “He feared man so little because he feared God so much.” And that’s when someone really stands tall. Luther and Calvin stood so straight and tall because they were captives of the Book, the Word of the living God. It is God’s Word and God speaks in it.
The Protestant is the man who is always coming with what the Bible says. I don’t endorse everything that Billy Graham says, and I’m sure you don’t either, but I do believe that no small part of the secret of his phenomenal success is this, that over and over again he comes with “The Bible says.” The trouble with so much of today’s Protestantism is that it comes with no authority whatsoever.
Communism comes with the authority of the state and it has made phenomenal gains. About the time I was born Communism had only about two dozen adherents. Fifty years ago a relatively small group of Communists seized power and subjugated more than 100 million Russian people. Today behind the Iron Curtain they hold sway over a billion people, one third of the world’s population. Now they’ve done that with authority, the authority of the state.
And Roman Catholicism also comes with authority—the authority of the church. But liberal, apostate Protestants have nothing, and they wonder what happened. And now they are following the will-o’-the-wisp of ecumenicity. A counterfeit ecumenicity, trying to recapture and regain that which they know they have somehow lost.
III
Now, if you take another look, 1 would suggest, and this may sound strange at first, that no one fails so miserably as the real Protestant. If you want to find the story of a man who failed miserably, then read the story of Luther. When you follow Luther trying to get right with God by his works and on his own, you have the story or a bankrupt man. Finally, by God’s grace, you know, he came to Romans 1:17, “The just shall live by faith,” and Martin Luther said that was for him “the gate of Paradise.”
To be a good Protestant, you and I will have to admit that in and of ourselves we are no better than Castro, Ho Chi-Minh, the sexual perverts who rape and murder little girls, those unwashed hippies, no better than Judas Iscariot. But there it is deep down in my heart—and I think you will find it in your heart too—“O God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men.” But the man who said that did not go down to his house justified. It is only when I confess and acknowledge that I am bankrupt, and that “nothing in my hands I bring” that my whole life and world view, and my whole ambition in life will really become God-centered.
We love the Arminians but we can’t agree with them. We should reach out to them to try to make plain to them that we cannot tolerate and co-exist with any compromise of sovereign grace.
You may have heard or read that quaint old story about a poor mother in bygone days who had a sick daughter. You know when you’re sick, you can get a strange appetite, and the story has it that the sick child wanted a bunch of grapes. For us that would be simple enough, but not in that day and not for a poor person. Where would that mother possibly get some grapes?
Well, the king had a vineyard. So to the king’s gardener she went and tried to buy some grapes with a coin. She was promptly rebuffed and sent on her way. But the sick child wanted grapes and so the mother went back with another coin of greater value. Once again she was rebuffed and told to be-gone. But the princess, the kings daughter, overheard it this time and asked for an explanation. When the matter was explained to her, the princess picked a bunch of the grapes and gave them to the poor woman. And in doing so, she said: “You misunderstand, my Father is not a merchant who sells—my Father is a King who gives.”
Even so, Martin Luther found that when he came with his miserable self-righteousness for his justification that finally the Prince, God’s Son, said, “Look, you misunderstand, my Father is not a merchant who sells salvation, my Father is a sovereign who gives. It’s free.”
IV
Take another look, and you will see that nobody thinks so boldly as the real Protestant. The genius of Protestantism consists in part in this that you may and must do your own thinking. Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others could not co-exist with and fit into the kind of thinking that was captive to a corrupt church or to the papacy. They knew that in the last analysis every man stands all alone, individually before his God.
Now this does not mean that we do not gratefully accept the help of ministers, teachers, and books. Neither does it mean for a moment that we despise and set aside the leading of the Holy Spirit throughout the years and centuries.
Today, as always, there are those who seem to think that wisdom began and will die with them. Protestantism requires independent thinking in this sense that I believe something and am convinced of it not just because my min’ s so no just because my church accepts it in certain doctrinal standards found in the back of our Psalter Hymnal, but because I have thought it through with the leading of the Spirit, having come to grips with it in my own thinking. I am to believe it because it is a conviction for which I am willing: to work and to fight, and if necessary, to give my blood.
V
One more look and we see that nobody tries so hard as a real Protestant. 1 mean that [10 one tries so hard to be what God wants us to be with respect to what we are to believe and with respect to what we are to be. The challenge of the Protestant Reformation is this, that we don’t just take out this event in history on October 31, and dust it off a bit, and poke around in the dead, cold ashes of a fire that burned brightly once upon a time. We arc committed to this, that the Protestant Reformation is a dynamic and an ongoing thing that must go on until you and I draw a our last breath or until Jesus comes. A reformation won’t be necessary in the church triumphant but the necessity of it does continue here.
The history of the church is a history of formation, deformation, and then reformation again, and transformation. That’s why I admire your goal as a Reformed Fellowship, and in spirit, I certainly am wholeheartedly one with your fellowship and convictions. The real Protestant seeks reformation in himself, reformation in his own church, and also in the Roman Catholic Church. He is out not just to win an argument, but to win a soul, to win a friend, and if possible to win a church.
Four hundred and fifty years ago there was a crying need for a reformation and God sent it in the days of Luther and Calvin. It struck like lightning. But Luther and Calvin had no monopoly on God’s grace. There is a crying need for reformation today. Let’s never for a moment think that if only we had a Luther, if only we had a Calvin, that things would be different. The Lord is saying to you and me, “Who will do it?” I commend you and congratulate you that to the best of your ability that you as a fellowship, and I trust personally are saying: “Here am I, Lord, send me.”
You have a great name –Reformed Fellowship. Om churches—I suppose most of us are Reform ed or Christian Reformed church people—have significant names. But to have such a name is a great responsibility. Baptists by their name merely call attention to just one of the sacraments, Lutherans to the theology of a certain great leader, Methodists to a certain method, and so forth. But now we have the audacity to say in our churches that we are Christian and Reformed. We claim to be Christian, understood in the light of the Protestant Reformation.
You may have heard that story about Alexander the Great who had a soldier in his army who also bore the name Alexander but he was a coward. It is told that one day Alexander the Great summoned this fellow and said: “Look, I understand your name is)he same as mine and now I am informed that you arc a coward.” He added: “Either you will change your name or otherwise live up to it!” And now our Commander-In-Chief is calling us in this 450th Anniversary “I understand that you have named yourselves after me, Christians, and also Reformed. Either be true to what you call yourselves or otherwise I demand that you change your name!”
At the last meeting of Reformed Fellowship, Inc., this material was presented by the Rev. John Vander Ploeg, editor of THE BANNER. We appreciate his willingness to speak at the luncheon meeting of the Fellowship.