(Heidelblog) "Strange Fire" & Costals: "Reformed and Pentecostal?"

Quote from a Costalist, Adrian Warnock

Reformed and Pentecostal?
by Mr. (Rev. Dr. Prof.) R. Scott Clark

In view of the controversy over the recent Strange Fire conference up the road, it seemed like a good time to re-post this HB classic from 2008.

 

James K. A. Smith has an interesting post at CT: Teaching a Calvinist to Dance. In this post he says he longs for a “a kind of ‘Pentecostalized’ Reformed spirituality. He goes on to link his quest with that of Edwards. This might surprise some readers, but Smith is at least partly right. He’s exactly right to link his desire for an immediate experience of the risen Christ and for extraordinary phenomena to Edwards. This is the dirty little secret in the modern history of Reformed theology, piety, and practice. We cannot embrace Edwards and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones unequivocally as “one of us” and tell Jamie Smith that he can’t have the same piety that they had or sought.

Second, Jamie’s post illustrates the state of the definition of the words “Calvinist” and “Reformed.” Jamie mentions some modern Reformed folks (Bavinck and Kuyper), but he doesn’t mention (as I recall) folks such as Calvin and DeBres. Our older theologians, who wrote our confessions, confronted the very sort of spirituality Jamie advocates and seeks, and they rejected it. It isn’t well-known now, but the 16th-century Anabaptists were proto-Pentecostals. Indeed, every year in the Medieval Reformation course, when I describe the theology, piety, and practice of the Anabaptists, many students remark that it sounds a lot like the piety with which they were raised.

Guido DeBres, the primary author of the Belgic Confession (1561), one of the Reformed confessions adopted by the Reformed churches as part of the “Three Forms of Unity” (including the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort) wrote a treatise against the Anabaptists, in which he engaged the very questions posed by modern Pentecostalism: the attempt to replicate Apostolic phenomena, tongues, healing, etc. He engaged Thomas Muntzer, who accused the Protestants of being “dead” and he repudiated Munzter’s piety in favor of a Word and sacrament piety. For DeBres Reformed spirituality is antithetical to what is today called Pentecostalism.

The point is that, from the outset, the Reformed have always been aware that a piety of Word and sacrament will not be satisfactory to all, but that’s our piety. We understand that canonical age is past. We don’t live in redemptive history. The apostles are dead. The Spirit isn’t giving anyone the power to raise the dead or put the living to death. We’re not speaking in natural foreign languages by the power of the Spirit and we’re not receiving canonical or extra-canonical revelation.

For more, see:
http://heidelblog.net/2013/10/reformed-and-pentecostal/