In 1646, the leaders of Puritan New England gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to chart the future course for their nascent churches. Out of their meetings came the Cambridge Platform, the first confessional statement drafted in the New World. This document embraced the Westminster Confession and set forth a plan of congregational church government that became known as the New England Way.
This spring, 350 years later, some of the spiritual descendants of the Puritans came back to Cambridge. Meeting under the banner of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, they produced a document, the Cambridge Declaration, that unambiguously reaffirms the doctrinal themes of the Reformation: salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, on the basis of Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.
The logo for ACE is the sun rising at dawn with the motto of the Genevan Reformation, post tenebras lux, “after the darkness, light.” But the state of evangelical Christianity, as described in the Cambridge Declaration, might more accurately be captured by the phrase post tenebras–flux, “after the darkness–confusion.” The document states that “evangelical churches today are increasingly dominated by the spirit of this age rather than by the Spirit of Christ.”
The evangelicals of 1996, unlike the Puritans of 1646, do not have the luxury of arguing over the niceties of church polity. More fundamental issues are at stake today. The erosion of a Christ-centered faith threatens to undermine the identity of evangelical Christianity no less than more liberal, mainline traditions. Real revival and genuine reformation will not be built on flimsy foundations. It is proper and timely for evangelicals to be called to affirm with passion and clarity what the church of Jesus Christ has believed, taught, and confessed on the basis of the Word of God.
The Cambridge Declaration does a good job of affirming the essentials of Reformation theology, but its critique of several contemporary ideas and trends is imbalanced, too broad-brushed, and at points, seemingly more exclusionary than enlightening. A more judicious and more precise statement reflecting the considered wisdom of classic theological manifestos in the past would better serve the cause of theological renewal today. Most of those who attended the ace meeting in Cambridge were from conservative Presbyterian denominations, along with a sprinkling of Baptists, Lutherans, and other assorted evangelicals. Members of the Wesleyan, Anabaptist, and Pentecostal wings of the evangelical family were conspicuous by their absence.
It is proper for those of us who are Reformed evangelicals to declare allegiance to the doctrines of grace set forth in Augustinian theology and the great Reformation confessions. However, many of the issues addressed in the Cambridge Declaration concern other evangelicals, too: the evaporation of scriptural normativity, the loss of God-centered worship, and compromise over the sole sufficiency of Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation for all peoples everywhere. We should not draw the evangelical circle too tightly lest, like Jesus’ cliquish disciples we exclude those who are earnestly doing the Lord’s work because they “are not one of us.”
As we call on our brothers and sisters to reclaim with us the heritage of the Reformation, we must learn to live in gracious equipoise with those who don’t ring all five bells quite the same way we do! We would do well to heed the statement of Luther Rice, the great Baptist missionary statesman: “How absurd it is, therefore, to contend against the doctrine of election. Let us not, however, become bitter against those who view this matter in a different light, nor treat them in a supercilious manner; rather let us be gentle towards all men, for who has made us to differ from what we once were? Who has removed the scales from our eyes?”
A reaffirmation of all five Reformation solae is also a good basis for continuing serious conversation between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Despite the brouhaha over the Evangelicals and Catholics Together initiative of 1994, the fact remains that evangelicals have more in common with Catholic Christians who affirm the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas of the early church than they do with certain liberal Protestants who are not sure whether Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on the water, or rose from the dead. True enough, the doctrinal chasm that separates confessing evangelicals and believing Catholics is deep and wide. No easy-going ecumenism should be allowed to sweep aside these differences, including the nonnegotiable doctrine of justification by faith alone. But in the sixteenth century, Calvin, Cranmer, and Bucer, among others, engaged Roman Catholic theologians on this and other important doctrinal issues. Evangelicals need not fear the same kind of honest exchange today.
In reality, ACE is only the latest in a series of renewal movements that have arisen in recent years within diverse sectors of the wider evangelical community. Some of these, such as the Confessing Movement within United Methodism, seek to call mainline traditions back to their historic evangelical and biblical roots. Others are more loose-knit and interdenominational in focus. Each has its own urgent and distinctive witness to bear. While it would be foolish, if not counterproductive, to argue for some grand overarching coalition of reforming efforts, is it too much to hope that all evangelicals concerned with theological integrity and spiritual renewal will pray for one another and uphold one another as they seek to live their “entire lives before the face of God, under the authority of God and for His glory alone”?
Where serious problems exist in evangelical life, they should be addressed fraternally and prayerfully, not with bombast and bluster. The leaders of ACE are to be commended for framing their call for reformation in the context of repentance and prayer. The closing paragraph of the Cambridge Declaration sets the right tone for us all: “We repent of our worldliness. We have been influenced by the ‘gospels’ of our secular culture which are no gospels. We have weakened the church by our own lack of serious repentance, our blindness to the sins in ourselves which we see so clearly in others, and our inexcusable failure adequately to tell others about God’s saving work in Jesus Christ.”
This statement echoes the first of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” That is where the Reformation began and it is there, and nowhere else, that it must begin again.
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