“We would rather be considered not Reformed and insist that men ought not to kill heretics, than that we are left with the Reformed name as the prize for assisting in the shedding of the blood of heretics.”
~ Abraham Kuyper
“If the Reformed confessions are the normative interpretation of the Scriptures, it would seem that Kuyper’s statements about Belgic 36 would require us to excommunicate him as having departed from the Reformation for the Radical Reformation. However, if the Particular Baptist’s were on the right track by paring the chapter on civil magistrate down to essentially Romans 13–and if men like Abraham Kuyper, Meredith Kline, and David VanDrunen can be allowed to make exegetical, theological, and historical arguments that distinguish between cult and culture much more than did the early modern Reformed–then perhaps it is time to be honest about who the Reformed were, what the Reformed believed, and to recognize that we have only partially shared their legacy, while being modest and charitable about our own confessions and our own confessional identities. And, perhaps, it is time to admit that we–wherever we are on the spectrum between ‘new Calvinists’ and the ‘confessionally Reformed’–may have more in common with the Particular Baptists of the seventeenth century than the architects of Reformed identity in the century before them.”
~ C. Caughey & C. Gribben, On Being Reformed
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