Editorial Note: In this contribution the Rev. Mr. Kloosterman, pastor of Immanuel Christian Reformed Church, Sheldon, Iowa. comments on the petition (gravamen) presented by Dr. Harry R. Boer to the 1977 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church. In this gravamen Boer asks the church to declare that statements in the Canons of Dort, one of the three Christian Reformed creeds, teaching the doctrine of divine reprobation are unbiblical and ought therefore to be declared non–binding, upon the confessional commitment of Christian Reformed office-bearers and members. Kloosterman argues that Boer’s gravamen asks the Christian Reformed Church, in effect, to jump out of its “confessional skin” as it considers his contentions, and that this is not desirable. if really possible. The basic format of this article i.s a series of comments following key citations from the Boer gravamen which appears in full in the Acts of Synod of the Christian Reformed Church. 1977, pp. 665, 666.)

A Creed Under Attack

“The creeds are the record of the church ‘s interpretation of the Bible in the past and the authoritative guide to hermeneutics (the science of Bible interpretation. NDKJ) in the present From Creeds of the Churches, edited by John Leith. p. 9.

Nothing has put before our church such a challenge to the nature and function of her creeds as has the gravamen (“a formal complaint against a confessional teaching in the church”) of Dr. Harry R. Boer concerning reprobation.* Not only the substantive demands of the gravamen. but also its procedural demands ought to warn the church to quiet the dissension and disagreement about the nature of subscription to the confessional standards of our denomination. For, black on white. the church is being asked by Boer to do non-creedal, non-confessional theology in striking the doctrine of reprobation from the books. To this demand the church ought to say No!, and over against it ought to reassert her commitment to a method of Bible interpretation which does full justice to the oath-bound commitment to the creeds as authoritative statements which “do fully agree with the Word of God.” Of course creeds may be tested by the Scriptures (we are not confessionalists), and of course we may ask by way of a gravamen for the church to declare its biblical basis for its confessional pronouncements. Of course the church “could be wrong” in its doctrinal requirements of its members. But admitting this is not the same as saying that it is possible or proper to act as if one is looking at the Bible for the first time, and that out of such a view one might well discover that things once solemnly and sacrificially confessed by the church are really pure heresy!

In my opinion. the danger of the Boer gravamen is that it moves along such lines as it challenges the church’s teaching about divine reprobation.

Forget: The Doctrine of Reprobation

The Canons of Dort devote an entire Article to this doctrine, saying, “What peculiarly tends to illustrate and recommends to us the eternal and unmerited grace of election (sic!) is the express testimony of sacred Scripture that not all. but some only, are elected, while others are passed by in the eternal decree; whom God . .. has decreed to leave in the common misery into which they have willfully plunged themselves . . . permitting them in His just judgment to follow their own ways. at last, for the declaration of His justice, to condemn and punish them forever . . . And this is the decree of reprobation. which by no means makes God the author of sin (the very thought of which is blasphemy), but declares Him to be an awful, irreprehensible, and righteous Judge and Avenger thereof.” Canons of Dort, I,15

Setting Bible Against Creed

A gravamen in its very nature challenges the Scriptural validity of a given teaching. It overleaps creedal and theolo~ical authority and appeals directly to the Bible itself. Gravamina should therefore neither depend on nor be refuted by creedal or theological considerations. In a proper gravamen procedure neither creed nor theology has any authority. Acts of Synod, Christian Reformed Church, 1977, pp. 665, 666.

The term gravamen is a relatively new acquisition to the church’s vocabulary, at least so far as current usage is concerned. Boer’s gravamen is the first of its kind in the history of the Christian Reformed Church! At the outset of his appeal Dr. Boer. the appellant, demands that the church follow a certain procedure, as indicated by the above quotation taken from his gravamen. In laying down the conditions by which she mayor may not adjudicate his case Boer appears presumptuous.

Notice the command to the church that she put down her supposedly blurred confessional, theological glasses in order to gaze at the Holy Scriptures with naked eyes. and. presumably, with unformed mind. Once again the plaintive cry is heard. now from the lips of one of her missionary scholars, for the church to “get back to the Bible.” The invitation to unclothe herself. to strip herself of the “accretions” of creedal perspective and theological assumptions, as it were, and approach the Scriptures in that innocent nakedness reminds one of earlier naive invitations to return to the supposedly pristine beauty and simplicity of the early church, as found recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

An Impossible Procedure

This procedural question requires an answer: Is it possible to do what Boer wants us to do?

Without judging the correctness of his claims regarding the doctrine of reprobation at this moment, will the church be able to answer him without referring to theological assumptions or confessional declarations?

Can we leave the creeds in the attic while we gather on synod’s floor in 1979 to behold the beauty of purely “Scriptural” testimony, and really do justice to the Bible and to Dr. Boer?

I think that procedure is impossible in the life of the church.

It is possible, of course, for the purposes of analysis and theorizing about the path to confessional declaration to distinguish the two strands of Bible and confession. But after such analysis, when the practice of teaching, preaching, believing, evangelizing, etc. is undertaken, such distinctions have no functional significance.

But notice, Dr. Boer isn’t even asking the church to distinguish Scripture from the church‘s confessional understanding and declaration of Scriptural truth. He demands that we separate the two. We claim that it is impossible to do that.

How can one rightly interpret even the familiar John 3:16 without drawing upon our confessional commitment and reflection as to God’s love for the world, or about Jesus, God’s Son? Or how is it possible to isolate the interpretation of Phil. 1:6, “. . . he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ,” from the confessional atmosphere in which we have experienced the comfort of believing that salvation, from beginning to end, is a work of God?

On these grounds then it is doubtful that Boer’s procedural demand is acceptable or his definition of a gravamen defensible. Though the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura (“Scripture only”) holds, and though we deplore with everyone else any confessionalistic exaggeration of anything extra–biblical, though we say readily that Scripture stands above the creeds even in the regulation of the faith and life of the church, these things were never intended to separate Scripture from confessions in the process of understanding what it is that the Bible demands for belief and life.

   

Destructive Results

It is important to note the possible results in the life of the church from here on if Boer’s gravamen and its suggestions are accepted. His strident demand for “the express testimony of Scripture” will, no doubt, be repeated in the years to come by those seeking indubitable proof-texts which command the practice of infant baptism, seeking incontrovertible biblical evidence for the doctrine of the tri-personality of God, and asking for unquestionable proof for the correctness of the Heidelberg Catechism‘s interpretation of the necessity of Christ’s burial (“To prove thereby that he was really dead,” Q. 41). And on and on . . . You see, if the terms of the debate are set so narrowly, in fundamentalist, biblicist style. calling for explicit biblical proof of that sort, we are bound to flounder about in a kind of confessional abyss ’til the Lord returns. And that because the high-sounding expressions, “just the Bible,” or “just tell me what the Bible says,” are not as simple or as innocent as they might seem.

The Spirit’s Guidance in the Church’s History

We have always confessed something else than just some kind of objective, impersonal “express testimony of Scripture.” We have confessed also, and indispensably, the truth of the real guidance of the Holy Spirit (John 14:16, 17, 26; 16:13, 14). This keeps us from all arbitrariness in biblical interpretation. It demands of all of us a respect for the ongoing biblical doctrinal tradition which keeps us from that which American evangelical Christianity too often demonstrates, a rash presumption by an individual that he, over against everyone else in the history of the church, is the first one who understands Scripture.

A Misplaced Charge

The expressed motivation for Boer’s gravamen is a certain “concern for the church.” He alleges that the doctrine of election has been silenced and that the silencing of the doctrine of election in the pulpit and life of the church must and can be corrected only by removing the muzzle, namely, the doctrine of reprobation. In Boer’s words, “To save it (the doctrine of election) from the disregard in which it is increasingly being held in the Christian Reformed Church is no small part of my motivation in submitting this gravamen.”

In the first place, as a descriptive assertion, this is certainly open to challenge. As a pastor who has preached the doctrine of election faithfully and I trust, biblically, as one whose ministerial colleagues attest to doing the same, and as one who has attended small group seminars designed to help preachers preach where such a biblical emphasis was often held up for emulation, I must conclude that Boer’s concern doesn’t ring true. Election is held in high regard in many pulpits and in many a believing heart as a doctrine of greatest assurance and comfort, a doctrine which implies the greatest challenges and responsibilities for God’s people. One wonders how Boer came to this conclusion. And this uncertainty brings then some question as to the degree of his familiarity with and even the nature of his concern for the church.

Secondly, the procedure of “saving” one doctrine by eliminating another is a questionable methodology. If we grant for a moment that the doctrine of election does need revitalization in the church. to blame the doctrine of reprobation for the alleged disregard of election and press for its excision from the creeds is to begin at the wrong end. It could be that if election is held in disregard today that this neglect is not at all due to a strong belief in reprobation but to a misunderstanding of election. In which case proper education is needed rather than radical elimination.

This brings us, thirdly, to the crux of Boer’s intention. If I read him rightly, he is saying that proper understanding of election is impossible if one holds to a divine decree of reprobation. In laying accusation for the alleged disregard of election, the lot of the accused is made by Boer to fall not on the obvious cultural individualism which infests popular, North American Christianity in our day, nor upon the rationalistic manifest destiny notion that vigorously equates “the people of God’s choice” with ourselves as a nation of unparalleled prosperity and success. Strangely, the lot falls on the doctrine of reprobation! It is charged that because of its supposed deductionism and rationalism, this doctrine obscures the biblical testimony regarding election.

I find Boer’s accusations against the church hard to believe. In reality, surrounded as we are by the forces mentioned above, “saving” the doctrine of election could better be done by setting it off sharply from the prevailing syncretistic combining of God and country, of Americanism and Christianity.

Boer Misreads the Canons

Another quote from Boer’s gravamen deals with the heart of the problem which he feels required to pose:

The question with respect to reprobation is rather this: may God’s response to the sin and unbelief of men . . . have imputed to it an eternal cause for which no warrant is to be found in Scripture? Sin and unbelief are exceedingly dark mysteries on the origin and cause of which Scripture sheds no light. Acts of Synod, 1977. p. 671

In the interest of clarity, perhaps the reader might wish to read this quotation in its context in the 1977 Acts of Synod. Its abbreviation here, however, contains the seed of Boer’s thinking about reprobation. Notice what it is, in each of the sentences quoted above, that is being caused. In the first sentence Boer contends that the Bible offers no proof that God’s response to sin is caused in eternity. In the second sentence Boer contends that Scripture offers no light on the cause of sin and unbelief A crucial shift of focus occurs here! The shift from God’s response being caused from eternity to sin being caused from eternity may have been unintentional; it is nonetheless confusing. In any case, Boer’s assertions about both objects of causation—God’s response to sin and sin itself–are grossly inaccurate reflections on the teachings of the Canons of Dort.

Regarding his first question, whether God’s response to sin may be said to have an eternal cause, the Canons never say that! The definition or explanation of the eternal decree of reprobation excludes calling it a “response” of God in history to human sin.

Regarding his follow-up statement about the cause of sin being a dark mystery, the Canons declare forcefully that the doctrine of reprobation may not be construed to say that God is the cause of sin.

The fact that adherents to that creed do not always succeed in avoiding such a misconstrual is no ground for an attack on the creed, however.

Dr. Boer pays scant attention in a mere ten lines to the Conclusion of the Canons. That Conclusion is a very important statement (somehow lost on us, we admit!) which provides interpretative guidelines for the body of the Canons. It is this Conclusion which shatters those commonly held misunderstandings with which Boer argues.

The central question facing the Christian Reformed Church lies at this point: Is Dr. Boer’s understanding of the Canons accurate? Is what he claims the Canons say really what they say? Or is his accusation against the church a caricature, reflecting some commonly held misunderstandings of the Canons?

I assert that it is the latter. In which case church education is the necessary corrective, not surgery on the creeds.

Maybe you feel that the word accusation is the wrong word, too strong, perhaps. But in reality, Boer accuses the Christian Reformed Church of holding a wrong belief. an unbiblical faith. Boer in effect charges the church with heresy! A serious charge, indeed, for if it is valid we are a manifestation of the false church.

Throughout his gravamen Boer slings around terms like deductionistic and rationalistic, equating them with “unChristian” and “unReformed.” It seems, however, that Boer’s argument is with

L. Berkhofs Systematic Theology rather than with the Canons of Dort. If that is so, a book review would have done the job. There was no need to agitate the church by way of such an appeal to synod.

But maybe Boer has much, much more on his mind than he had told in the gravamen. If that is so, we’ve only seen the beginning!