November 2007 - Protestant Reformed Churches in America

Protestant Reformed Theological Journal
the historical development process became the focus of attention.
The philosophies of Hegel and Darwin were merely different forms
of this way of thinking.
Finally, then, historicism arose at the end of the nineteenth
century: There was never a fixed truth and there had never been
one. Everything is in flux. However, if there is not any truth
outside of man, then—according to the people’s demand—the truth
can be found only in man himself, that is, in the existence of man.
Thus existentialism arose, the predominant philosophy in the twentieth
century. This existentialism was still convinced that an individual
human being could find the truth in himself—in whatever
way. But at the end of the twentieth and in the beginning of the
twenty-first century, man has given up asking for truth. Instead
he flees into a state of intoxication.
For men’s attitude towards the Word of God this means that,
beginning with deism, and then increasingly in the following centuries,
man has had difficulties believing that the all-powerful God
gave His word as a truthful, life-creating Word. It is this Word of
God that, as “the seed of rebirth,” procreates man into life (I Pet.
1:23). Therefore it must be the task of Christ’s church—including
our small church—to confess that God’s Word is the means
by which He saves people. In other words, in the center of the
service stands the Word of the sovereign God. Here the center of
the gospel is the message that God was in Christ reconciling the
world unto Himself (II Cor. 5:19).
Such a proclamation is possible only via confrontation, not in
a kind of conformity or even retreat into a religious idyll. The
prophets in the Old Testament never saw themselves as assistants
for the fulfilling of a need-orientated religiousness striving after
quietness. They didn’t sell any wrong dreams and illusions, but
they protested against a false religiousness.
The Confessing Evangelical Reformed Church wants to do
the same. We want to keep to the Holy Scriptures as the inerrant
and infallible Word of God, which is inspired and profitable for
doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness
(II Tim. 3:16). We do not want to be conformed to the world,
but we want to be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Rom.
12:2).
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Vol. 41, No. 1