Five Reasons for Reconsidering the New Form of Subscription

Excerpted from a letter to the Board of Trustees of the CRCNA

by Raymond A. Blacketer

As for the deficits of the report, I offer a brief summary. First, the report presents a highly skewed interpretation of Reformed church history and the role of the Form of Subscription (FOS) in that history. It demonstrates no awareness of the role that the Form of Subscription played in the Secession (Afscheiding) of 1834 or the Doleantie (Abraham Kuyper's Reformation of 1886), namely, that the loosening or removal of this instrument was among the causes of these secessions of orthodox, Reformed believers from a church in which the liberal, elite hierarchy no longer valued the confessions.

Further, it portrays the function of the Form of Subscription in exaggerated, overly dramatic terms as a kind of tool of Calvinist Inquisition, or an Ecclesiastical Gestapo, which has little basis in historical fact or in the normal functioning of this document in the life of our churches.

Thirdly, the report makes the unsubstantiated and easily refuted claim that the FOS has stifled discussion and silenced dissent in the CRCNA. Given the healthy, if sometimes bitter, debate our churches have carried on over the past decades over the ordination of women, the relationship between creation and science, the revision of Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 80, and children at the Lord's Supper, this contention is self-evidently false. The report casts doubt on whether “a regulatory instrument is needed to keep us orthodox.” Aside from the dubious and highly debatable nature of this claim, it was not the committee’s mandate to fundamentally alter the nature of the Form of Subscription, but, more modestly, to make it clearer and more understandable for officebearers, and to anticipate and forestall some of the objections and misconceptions that officebearers might have.

Fourth, the committee represents a very one-sided perspective that is strongly biased against the Reformed confessional tradition and that is steeped in the dubious claims of post-modernism, which relativizes and temporizes all truth. It is not the place of a task force to decide for the churches that our Form of Subscription no longer speaks to our current intellectual climate. Rather than accommodating ourselves to this reigning cultural world-view, we as a church should be resisting this radical subjectivism. C. S. Lewis famously criticized this phenomenon, which he called “chronological snobbery,” as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (Surprised by Joy, 207).

Finally, the task force has exceeded its mandate and authority by elevating the Contemporary Testimony to a doctrinal standard. In addition to its failure to carefully study the nature and function of confessional subscription in our Dutch Reformed tradition and in other confessional traditions (e.g. Lutheran and Presbyterian), the committee has failed to reflect theologically on the distinction between a frequently revised and less binding contemporary testimony and the historic Reformed confessions.

In sum, I foresee that this report in its present state will be unacceptable to many officebearers and church councils and consistories. It undermines our confessional tradition, which is the one element that binds all of the various mindsets of the CRC together. It is certain to cause division and has great potential to lead to secession from the church, a secession which, unlike that of the early 1990's, would be historically justifiable on the basis of the 1834 and 1886 secessions. Moreover, it will further deepen the distrust that many members feel regarding the confessional integrity and sincerity of the denomination and its leadership.

Sincerely, in the work of Christ's kingdom, and in the service of the universal church and as an ordained servant in the Christian Reformed Church in North America.

Raymond A. Blacketer is minister of the Neerlandia (Alberta) Christian Reformed Church.