Look: to be honest I’m the one who has posed this question, but mostly I am repelled by it. Whether something is “relevant” or not is no marker of its quality or its profundity. One may as well ask whether the music of J. S. Bach is relevant or not.
Things worth taking heed of are not “relevant”, or do not need to be made relevant. They speak across cultures and down the ages, and human beings simply tend to recognise them when they encounter them. What is relevant today, will doubtless be irrelevant tomorrow.
And surely reformed theology is, if anything, more Bach (okay, I know he was Lutheran!) than Beyoncé, more Rembrandt than Jeff Koons?
But there’s more to the question than this—not the least because reformed theology has been criticised for its lack of relevance for more than three hundred years.
Perhaps a little clarification of terms is in order here. What do I mean by “reformed theology” in any case? First, a theology is reformed if it observes a key methodological principle: the supremacy of Holy Scripture in all matters of faith. Reformed theology is remorselessly, stubbornly biblical above all things. Now, to be sure, it participates in the centuries long conversation over the interpretation of the Scriptures, and it recognises the ancient creeds of the Church. But it holds the Bible as authoritative over the Church and over reason and over experience.
But if that’s the method of reformed theology, does it maintain a certain content?
Well yes, it does. It is worth observing that there other theological systems that claim the same method—the Lutheran and the Arminian, for example—and yet come to different conclusions. There are certain key theological themes that mark out reformed theology as distinctive.
By Grace, Through Faith
The first of these has to be justification by grace, through faith, alone. Once again, Lutherans and Methodists might say they agree with that.
But it is the distinctive way in which the emphasis on grace has soaked through reformed theology that makes it unique. It is worth saying this because often people think that the doctrine of predestination is the distinctive thing about reformed theology. That is true up to a point, but the doctrine of predestination is there to affirm, and defend, the primacy of grace.
Predestination is there to affirm, and defend, the primacy of grace.
On the reformed reading of the Bible, God is sovereign over all things, in creation and in new creation. The effects of sin have left human beings not just guilty in the courts of divine justice, but unable even to turn to God unaided. And thus not a skerrick of human effort can take away from the glory of God in rescuing his creatures. Jesus Christ is supreme.
It is true that insistence on the absolute sovereignty of God has bequeathed to the reformed tradition some of its knottiest problems. Taken in the wrong way, the doctrine of predestination can be a counsel of despair, or (worse) a counsel of complacency. It can, in distorted form, suck the life out of evangelism and prayer. If the sovereignty of God is not carefully construed, then God becomes the author not simply of good but of evil as well.
And it is further the case that wrestling with some of these questions has sometimes made reformed theology look like an exercise in seeking impossible answers to unasked questions. At its worst, reformed theology can elevate systems of thought over the more complicated realities of Scripture, on the one hand, and human experience on the other. It can feel like the attempt to make several square pegs squeeze into a round hole.
These problems are, I don’t think, endemic to a reformed account of Christian theology, but there is a danger even today that reformed theologians will become more and more obsessed with abstract and speculative questions. And then the relevance of reformed theology will indeed be hard to demonstrate.
But that would tragic. Because the theology of the reformed tradition is a word that twenty-first century Australia needs to hear.
Why?
Precisely because reformed theology is a theology of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It presents a diagnosis of the human condition that is a genuine challenge to the prevailing winds of humanism. It says: without Christ, human beings are without hope. It does not give us a false comfort; it provides us instead with a searing diagnosis of the human soul—one that is confirmed again and again by experience.
Reformed theology says: without Christ, human beings are without hope. It does not give us a false comfort
But God’s character is to have mercy. He is gracious God: a God who is love before he is anything else.
And so reformed theology lays all the emphasis on Jesus Christ as the only hope for human beings. But he is a real hope, since he not only shows us what kindness and love truly are, but also makes peace with God by the blood of the cross. What Christ achieves is real, because he achieves it where we can’t.
What contemporary reformed preachers and theologians need to do is not to make this relevant to modern Australia, but to show how it is already relevant. This takes thought. It means not simply repeating the words of our favourite bygone-era theologians, much as we should continue to read them, but to find fresh ways of saying what reformed theology says – which I believe is what the Bible says. We should read John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, but continue to ask: how would they have done their theology in the world in which we live?
And that reminds me, too: a reformed theology that is true to its roots and yet always fresh will be fresh because it will always be seeking to read Scripture better, and to refine and revise its theological convictions in the light of a deeper insight into Scripture.
Is reformed theology still relevant? Certainly, reformed theologians may lose their relevance, and be lost in answering the questions that no-one is asking. But as far as it is Biblical theology and as far as it is a theology that majors on the grace of God in Jesus Christ as the only hope of humankind, then reformed theology never goes out of style, we can be sure of that.
