James A. DeJong is Associate Professor of Theology at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa. His article appeared in the January 23 Renewal and is reprinted by permission.

Herman Bavinck has a twenty or thirty page essay in the first volume of his dogmatics. Cluttered with Latin titles and obscure names, it is a survey of the major figures in the history of Reformed doctrine. Bavinck contended at the time that he wrote that the literature on this subject was very small. If it was small in the German and Dutch languages of his day, it is minuscule in the English of ours. In the last generation no one anywhere, to my knowledge, has published a comprehensive, new survey of this subject.

A year ago Baker Book House republished Heinrich Heppes’ Reformed Dogmatics, with is over a hundred years old and was translated and printed in English in 1950. Heppe’s work is really a synopsis of classical Reformed dogmatic positions; it is not an historical survey of the field. But we are thankful for small favors, even though Ernst Bizer’s fine introduction to his German revision of Heppe would have greatly enhanced the Baker edition if it had been translated and included. Heppe’s work at least exposes us to some of the names and issues in the field. Hopefully this is the beginning of more to come.

In our own ecclesiastical tradition, which has always emphasized preaching and teaching as opposed to the sacramentalism of Rome or the liturgical focus of the Anglicans, there is at present a good deal of ignorance even in ministerial ranks regarding the history of the doctrine that shaped and continues to be reflected in our confessions, sermons and discussions of theological issues. Reformed doctrine courses are being dropped from Christian high school course offerings, probably on the premise that a focus on biblical theology rather than on a “canned” orthodoxy is healthier. In my own seminary training there was no survey course available that dealt with the evolution or development of Reformed dogmatics. This lack of interest in or this lack of willingness to deal with our systematic or doctrinal heritage is something of a conundrum in a church that still pays lip service to “orthodoxy.”

Lack of interest or understanding regarding a tradition’s doctrinal development can have two results. Neither is desirable. First, one can maintain orthodoxy by defending as equivalent to Scripture itself the doctrinal formulation of one or another theologian within that tradition. Such a posture is tenable only where there is an intense lack of understanding of how and where doctrinal statements get formulated. Philosophical assumptions indigenous to any given era and even the spirit of the age have a bearing on how Christian truth gets stated in systematic form. But second, one can write-off the unique and characteristic emphases of the Reformed tradition and promote a vague, commonbrand Christianity. What needs emphasis more than ever, I feel, is that there is a commonly shared theological uniqueness among Calvin, the so-called Reformed scholastics and contemporary Reformed thinkers that sets the tradition off from others. In our era we don’t have much more than a vague feel for what that uniqueness is.

What is needed today is a critical appreciation of what it means to be a systematic Reformed thinker or to be a reflective Reformed Christian. This can be attained by studying that tradition’s thought in the context of the times in which it was and continues to be articulated, modified, rejected, recaptured and expanded. Both Bavinck and Heppe help in this regard. Ironically, what sometimes helps most are the monographs, laden with the models and theories of contemporary academia, which historians rather than theologians are producing. What is needed is a rejuvenation of interest in and love for the Reformed faith as variously formulated throughout the years since the Reformation. Seeing how others have done it, we may be better able to do it ourselves.

REFORMED DOGMATICS SET OUT AND ILLUSTRATED FROM THE SOURCES, by Heinrich Heppe. Foreward by Karl Barth. Revised and edited by Ernst Bizer. Translated by G.T. Thomson. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1978 fFirst English edition 1950, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., Great Britain. Pp. 721, $9.95 paper. Reviewed by Dr. Fred H. Klooster, Calvin Theological Seminary.

Some years ago a young theologian from Westminster Theological Seminary discovered a copy of the British edition of Heppe on the shelves of the Calvin Seminary Bookstore. With delight and a sense of guilt he purchased the last copy available. The British edition has been out of print for about a decade. Baker Book House has performed an excellent service in making this unique work available again to another generation of students.

During a seminar in Basel I vividly recall Karl Barth’s admonition to an American theologian who did not appear to know the classic Reformed theological distinctions. In a reprimanding tone Barth urged: “Young man, you must study Heppe!” In his foreword to this book Barth provides a more extensive rationale for the study of Heppe. It was Heppe and a parallel volume by the Lutheran, H. Schmid, that helped Barth make his personal transition from liberalism to a new theology. During the spring of 1924 as he was struggling to prepare his first lectures on dogmatics at Gottingen Barth stumbled upon these volumes of Heppe and Schmid. Heppe, Barth states, “has done me the service, which he can and will do for others, of bringing me to understand the special direction in which dogmatic science has proceeded in the early Reformed Church” (p. vii).

Heppe had his 57 varieties before Heinz did. In 1861 Heppe published in German, excerpts from fifty-seven Reformed theologians from the 16th to the 18th centuries. He arranged these quotations according to the main headings of systematic theology then current, and laced them together with short comments of his own. In 1934 Ernst Bizer revised and edited the work for republication. This edition G.T. Thomson translated into English for the 1950 British publication and Baker has now reprinted it.

Heppe’s fifty-seven theologians have the Reformed commitment in common. Yet there was considerable change that occurred from the time of Calvin and Bullinger, Ursinus and Olevianus to the times of Maresius, Voetius and Cocceius and that of Francis Turretine and H. Heppe. The theology of the Reformers of the 16th century did undergo some changes in the Protestant Scholasticism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But there was continuity as well as discontinuity. Today the discontinuity is often emphasized without sufficient awareness of the continuity.

Since the writers whom Heppe excerpts wrote in Latin and most of these works were never translated into English, firsthand acquaintance with many of these works has been closed to generations of English-speaking theologians. Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics has long helped to at least open a few windows to this period of Reformed orthodoxy. Until more of this material appears in English translation, Heppe will continue to be of great service. Yet a work that contains quotations taken out of context and arranged under headings different from those of the original writers, must be used with care. Any one who knows something of Calvin’s Institutes and then consults Heppe will quickly learn of the care with which Heppe’s volume must be used.

The publication of Heppe for the first time in the United States and its wide use could help to stimulate solid theologizing in the country. The theological fads of the last two decades show up awfully thin compared to the solid theology of this volume. Heppe is a useful tool, even if its contents are of unequal power. The price is modest for so substantial a volume. A subsequent edition would be improved if it included brief biographies of the fifty-seven theologians and a fuller index which included every reference to each of these theologians. Then one could also more easily read many excerpts from one author and gain something of the continuity of that writer’s thought.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH, by Peter Toon. Grand Rapids; Eerdmans, 1979, 142 pp. $4.95 paper. Reviewed by Peter De Jong.

Peter Toon takes up an important and fascinating subject about which far too little has been written and which increasingly demands our attention. He deals with the relation of the Bible to the churches’ doctrines and the question of how one can test whether a doctrine is acceptable or not (p. xii). Important writers on the development of doctrine are introduced with brief and generally clear summaries of what they believed and wrote about the subject. The discussion begins with John Henry Newman, the Anglican who was converted to become a leading Roman Catholic. In connection with his change he wrote an Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) which showed his divergence from both the common Roman Catholic notion of the unchangeableness of doctrine and the Protestant charge that Roman Catholic beliefs were corruptions of doctrine (p. 13). Among the critics of Newman were the famous Scotch Presbyterian, William Cunningham, who held that although there is an objective development of doctrine within the Bible, “it does not extend beyond the apostles, with whom revelation ceased.” There is also a subjective development in the churches’ and Christians’ understanding of that doctrine, as well as corruption of that doctrine in various ways. Robert Rainy, a student of Cunningham, wrote The De livery and Development of Christian Doctrine, the far too little known, only evangelical, full–length, positive treatment of this subject written in the 19th Century. Regarding doctrine in a more “dynamic” and subjective way, he saw it as “the creation of the believing mind,” “the human response to the divine message” and therefore open to improvement (pp. 42, 43). James Orr, in 1901 published his Progress of Dogma, seeking to defend doctrine against those who sought to down-grade it. He explained the development of doctrine along the lines of his view of theistic evolution, maintaining that the logical order of the relation between doctrines was reflected in the historical order in which they were developed and clarified. Despite its interest and usefulness, I found Toon’s book disappointing. Like a number of our own theologians, although he apparently considers himself to be an evangelical he shows no sympathy for an inerrant Bible: “Very few modern theologians hold to a view of verbal inspiration and most see the books of the Bible as essentially human products which act as human witnesses to revelation. They point to revelation, they record human understanding of revelation, but they are not divinely-guaranteed accounts of revelation” (p. 76).

Toon judges the last confession in the 1976 United Presbyterian Book of Confessions as “perhaps the best example” of putting “into a credal form” “this modern approach to Scripture, dominated by ‘the historical method.’” Because of the modern views of development “we today cannot adopt” the Reformers‘ understanding of the relation of Church dogma/doctrine to Scripture “without major qualifications” (p. 78). “Aware that all Church and denominational doctrine is historically and culturally conditioned, most modern scholars reject all views of development which portray it as merely a continuous, cumulative growth in understanding revelation” (p. 81). “Thus, with the general agreement that historical situationalism has to be taken seriously, it has followed that there is a reluctance in the major denominations to use creeds or confessions of t he past as tests of orthodoxy or heresy for today” (p. 84). Although Toon, personally, says “I concur with the belief of a majority of Christians that God guided the early Church in the making of the foundational dogmas of the Trinity and the person of Christ” so that “they can never be denied” (p. 121), he holds that “there will be no formation of dogma which possesses the quality of Nicene dogma, until it is created by a truly ecumenical council” (p. 122). He expresses general agreement with Hans Kung, who “. . . argues for the indefectibility instead of the traditional Roman Catholic idea of the infallibility of the Church in her holding of truth” (p. 123). The book is a useful introduction to the literature on the subject, but in view of its own faulty views of the Bible’s claims about itself a misleading guide to us today in our pressing problems about Biblical and credal “interpretation” and the proper relationship of Bible to creed. The Reformers and their successors whose views Toon criticizes, whatever their limitations, because of their high and faithful view of Scripture are much better guides in these matters. We need more and better studies and writings on this subject.