The Church – Protestant and Reformed
The Presbyterian Church is often described by the terms Protestant and Reformed. But what are we to understand by that, and in what sense is it true of us today?
Malcolm Watts helpfully draws our attention to a dominant note of what has become known as the Reformed Faith – that of God’s Transcendence.
A Reformed church emphasizes the divine sovereignty, majesty, and glory, and therefore the great gulf existing between God in His transcendence and man in his sin and misery.
This was the distinctive doctrine of the Reformation. It was present in Luther’s teaching, but it was even more prominent in Calvin’s. Believing Scripture to be the ultimate source of all true knowledge of God, Calvin sought to ascertain exactly what Scripture revealed, and thus he drew aside the veil, as it were, to show us God in all the glory of His being.
“Surely,” he wrote, “his infinity ought to make us afraid to try to measure him by our own senses. Indeed, his spiritual nature forbids our imagining anything earthly or carnal of him. For the same reason, he quite often assigns himself a dwelling place in heaven.”
The Westminster divines, with astonishing precision of thought and language, articulated the truth that God really is God. Consider this grand and awesome statement:
“God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, not deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory, in, by, unto, and upon them: he is the alone foundation of being, of whom, through whom, and to whom, are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them, whatsoever himself pleaseth.”