What Is Reformed Theology? (Part 1)

Reformed theology has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts for about thirty years. A renaissance is literally a rebirth or, more broadly, a renewal. In order for there to be a renewal, however, there had to be a classical, defining period of Reformed theology, and there was. When the Renaissance humanists began to read the ancient texts, they were reading the classics, e.g., Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, and for the Christians among them, holy Scripture. The Renaissance movement of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries measured their style against classical authors. The humanists went back to the original sources (ad fontes) to learn from the greats. The Christian humanists read not only famous pagan authors, but they also read the ancient church fathers. For the churches of the Reformation (the Lutheran and Reformed), however, the greatest and most important source was holy Scripture, about which I will say more below.

Though there are many using the adjective Reformed to describe their theology, piety, and practice—some of which flatly contradict what the original Reformed churches confessed—there is an objective definition. It is as objective as the definition of the noun train. If I tell you that I tried to drive across town but my trip was interrupted by a mile-long coal train, I expect you to picture something like a Burlington-Santa Fe train composed of 125 cars. If, when I say train, you think of a giant bunny, we are not communicating, and one of us is wrong. So it is with the adjective Reformed. As with trains, Reformed theology has certain stable characteristics.

According To Scripture Alone

Though the Reformed warmly embrace the ancient catholic (universal), ecumenical creeds, i.e., the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon, and the Athanasian Creed, and though they wrote confessions and catechisms to confess their faith and to educate their children, it is the Holy Scriptures, which we receive as God’s infallible, inerrant Word, inspired by the Holy Spirit himself, that are the final rule for our faith and practice. All other sources, however, ancient and authoritative, take second place. We say what we do about God, man, Christ, salvation, the church, the two sacraments, and last things because this is what the Reformed churches understand the Scriptures to teach. We receive the Scriptures as sufficiently clear on everything touching the things we need for salvation and for the Christian life. The holy Scriptures are, for the Reformed churches, the final court of appeal and the charter of Christian liberty. We recognize that there are difficult places in Scripture but those are relatively few, and none of them affect the substance of the Christian faith. We receive the sixty-six canonical books as Scripture as a unified witness to our Triune God and to Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation.

By Divine Favor Alone

There are two types of religion in the world: those in which salvation is said to be monergistic (God does it) and those in which salvation is said to be synergistic (we do it with God’s help).¹ The Reformation churches confess that salvation is by God’s free favor (grace) alone and not by grace and cooperation with grace. Any addition to grace (God’s free favor to sinners), negates grace. God’s Word says, “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Rom 11:6: ESV). The Reformation slogan for this view is sola gratia (by grace alone). This is a hallmark of Reformed theology.

In recent years, some have attempted to redefine the adjective Reformed to mean only sola gratia. That is impossible. Salvation by divine favor alone is essential and necessary to being Reformed but it is not the end of Reformed theology. With the expression soli Deo gloria (to God alone be the glory), the early Reformed captured the idea that salvation is utterly free to sinners and that because of God’s free favor to us he alone receives all the glory.
Paul says,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth (Eph 1:3–10; ESV).

“To the praise of his glorious grace.” With St Augustine and with all the Protestant Reformers, the Reformed churches unashamedly glory in God’s free favor to sinners earned for us by Christ.

Through Faith Alone

All Christians have always said that faith is essential to salvation. The Roman Catholic Church agrees that we are saved by faith but the Reformation churches define faith differently. When Rome says faith she includes our faithfulness. She says that our obedience makes our faith saving. By contrast, we say that we are saved through faith alone. We define faith in salvation as having three parts: knowledge, assent, and trust. We say that true faith produces good works but good works do not make faith-saving. Further, in contrast to Roman Catholicism, we say that assurance is an essential part of faith, that those who have put their trust in Christ may and should know that they really are freely accepted by God, for Christ’s sake alone, that, on the basis of Christ’s righteousness credited to them, they have been declared by God to be righteous before his sight. God’s Word says:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom 3:21–26; ESV. Emphasis added).

Notice how often Paul says faith or believe in this passage. He does not say “faithfulness,” nor does he say, “faith and works.” Our understanding is that faith is a divine gift and that, in salvation, it looks to Christ as its object. It is Christ, and not faith itself, that makes faith powerful. That is why Paul says,

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph 2:8–10; ESV).

We are saved by divine favor alone, through faith alone, in order that we might do good works and live in a way that is fitting for those who have been saved but we do not do good works in order to be saved. That is the difference between monergism and synergism.

In Christ Alone

In the early post-Apostolic church, there arose two great heresies: Gnosticism and Marcionism. These two heresies are still with us in various forms. The Gnostics wrote their own gospels (a century after Jesus was raised from the dead) and made Jesus not a Savior but a peddler of Gnostic secrets. The Gnostics were like the Masonic Lodge and the Mormons. Those groups have secrets that only the enlightened and insiders may know. They spoke of a mean, earthy Old Testament semi-god. They taught that creation is inherently evil. In Gnosticism, one is said to be saved through the secret knowledge that only they possess. According to Marcion, the Bible is in two parts: the first is about an angry god and the second part is about a loving god. The Marcionites tore the Bible in two. In our time, there are those who see national Israel as the thing that unifies all of Scripture and still others think that nothing unifies Scripture.

The Reformed churches agree with the ancient church that there is one story that unites all of the Bible and Christ is at the center of it.² We say that God entered into a covenant of works with the first man, Adam (Gen 2:17). He promised that if Adam would love him with all his faculties and his neighbor (Eve and us) as himself, he and (and we in Adam) would enter into blessed fellowship with God. He also promised that should Adam choose to disobey, he (and we in him) would die. The Lord had made Adam good, righteous, and holy (Gen 1:26, 31). Adam lacked nothing and the Lord even gave Adam two signs: a tree that represented life and a tree that represented death. Tragically and (to us) mysteriously, Adam, the representative of all humanity, chose to listen another voice, to make covenant with that liar Satan.³ Just as God said, that disobedience led to death and separation from God. Adam and his wife were expelled from the wonderful garden in which God had placed them but that was not the end of the story.

Despite their disobedience and sin, God was gracious. He freely made a covenant of grace in which he promised to send a Savior who would crush the head of Satan and who himself would struck by Satan for our sake (Gen 3:15). Christ is the one whom God promised in the very beginning. The whole Bible leading up to the New Testament points to the coming Savior, who is Jesus. Indeed, more than that, God the Son, who would become incarnate, showed himself to the church under the types and shadows (Rom 5:14; 1 Cor 10:6; Heb 8:5, Heb 10:1), pointing forward to his incarnation. The Apostle Paul says that Christ was with his church in the wilderness and that he even gave to his people a kind of baptism and a kind of Lord’s Supper (1 Cor 10:1–8). The New Testament epistle of Jude even goes so far as to say that Jesus led his Old Testament church through the Red Sea (Jude 5).

The Reformed churches say that Christ has always been the only way of salvation. Jesus was saying nothing new when he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). The Old Testament Christians were trusting in Jesus, by grace alone. They were experiencing him through types and shadows and looking forward to his coming. The Apostle

Peter explains it this way:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look (1 Pet 1:10–12; ESV).

As the Reformed understand the great story of the Bible, it is about the outworking of God’s promises in one covenant of grace administered for thousands of years under pointers to Christ that finally came to fulfillment in the incarnation, obedience, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus who himself said,

And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:25–27; ESV).

The idea that the Bible is united by a single covenant of grace administered, under the types and shadows, in a variety of ways, under Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and the Prophets) and finally fulfilled in his well-beloved son (1 Pet 1:17), and that the New Covenant is the new administration of that one covenant of grace, is one of the distinguishing features of Reformed theology and piety, which distinguishes it from other traditions.

Next time: what do the Reformed say about God?

notes

This thought is not original. It comes either from Abraham Kuyper or B. B. Warfield. I was not able to find the original source.
I am thinking particularly of the Epistle of Barnabas (c. AD 120); Irenaeus (c. AD 180), and Augustine (AD 354-430) but this conviction was universally held.
I learned this from the Reformed theologian, Caspar Olevianus (1536-87) in his book, De substantia (Geneva, 1585), which is not yet translated into English.

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Post authored by:

R. Scott Clark
R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.
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