1. Why a series on Classic Reformed Theology? Doesn’t everyone know what Reformed theology is?
Reformed theology, piety, and practice weren’t formed yesterday, a century ago, or even two centuries ago. The original writers, thinkers, and pastors in the Reformed tradition wrote in the 16th and 17th centuries. Outside of Calvin and a few others, most Christians today are not familiar with these writers. So a group of us got together and Reformation Heritage Books graciously agreed to take on this project of making available original translations of important Reformed books from the classical period of Reformed theology.
To the degree that many Christians think that Reformed theology can be reduced to the doctrines of grace or to the Canons of Dort, no they do not really know what Reformed theology is. It is much broader and deeper than the Canons of Dort, as wonderful as they are. The delegates to the Synod of Dort (1618–19) who wrote and approved the Canons of Dort, the “five points,” would tell us the same thing. They would tell us that those canons (rules) were a response to a particular problem. They would tell us that those points were never intended to be taken as the summary of Reformed theology. The Reformed churches confess doctrines of Scripture, of God, man, Christ, salvation, church, sacraments, and redemptive history (eschatology) that are all essential to our theology, piety, and practice.
2. Who was Caspar Olevianus and why should anyone care?
Olevianus (1536–87) was a German Reformed theologian who was raised Roman Catholic and who became an evangelical (in the original, 16th-century sense of that adjective) in university in France. He came back home with a passion to make the gospel known. He went to seminary in Geneva, where he studied with Calvin and Theodore Beza, and he studied in Zurich with Heinrich Bullinger and Peter Martyr Vermigli. After seminary he came home to teach school and that project began to turn into a Bible study and then into a congregation.
The city council gave him permission to hold services and his fiery, evangelical denunciation of the idolatry of the mass split the town and Caspar ended up in jail. He was bailed out by Prince Frederick III, of Heidelberg, whose son Olevianus had tried to save from drowning in France. Caspar spent the next 15 years or so in Heidelberg where he helped to form the Heidelberg Catechism, taught in the university, taught in the seminary, and preached regularly. His work on covenant theology, his biblical scholarship in his commentaries, and his work in the visible church in Germany and for the recovery of the gospel attracted students from across Europe and from the British Isles.
An Exposition of the Apostles' Creed
Casper Olevianus
Olevianus’s Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed is a collection of sermons he preached on the basic articles of the Christian faith. It serves as a reminder that the Reformed tradition did not see itself as separate from the universal church, though it was principally opposed to Rome. Rather, Olevianus and his tradition argue for a Reformed catholicity rooted in the ancient confession of the church.
His covenant theology helped form the Reformed understanding of redemptive history and his stout defense of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone helped preserve the light of the gospel in a time when many wanted to roll the clock back to the pre-Reformation church.
3. What was the Apostles’ Creed?
The creed developed over a period of centuries out of the Roman baptismal interrogation. It has 12 articles covering God, man, creation, fall, redemption, the church, sacraments, and the return of Christ. It’s basic Trinitarian structure helped to ground the church in basic Christian truth: One God, three persons; The person of Jesus is one but in two distinct natures. The creed reached its final form in the late sixth century. For a long time the creed was regarded as a genuinely apostolic production. By the renaissance, however, scholars knew that the apostles themselves did not write it. Nevertheless, the creed remained a valuable concise way to confess the faith and it is still confessed today by Christians all around the world.
4. Why did he comment on the Creed?
Even though the Protestants knew that the apostles didn’t actually write it, the creed remained an influential document which summarized the great doctrines of the faith shared by all Christians everywhere. Thus it served as a useful way to organize and explain the evangelical faith and to show that it was not, as the Roman critics charged, a novelty but in fact the historic Christian faith taught in Scripture and confessed by the early post-Apostolic church. The Reformation catechisms, e.g., Luther’s Small Catechism and the Heidelberg Catechism, which Olevianus helped to form, used the creed as a way of articulating the evangelical understanding of the gospel.
5. What can we learn from a long-dead, 16th-century German evangelical?
First we can learn what it meant to be “evangelical” in the 16th century. In the modern period the adjective evangelical has become vague and formless but in the 16th century the adjective evangelical signified anything but “vague” and “formless.” It stood for a robust, vigorous doctrine combined with an equally robust and vigorous view of the institutional church and sacraments. In other words, in the 16th century the adjective “evangelical” denominated something rather different than it does today.
I think Olevianus is a good example of this doctrinal, churchly, Christ-centered account of the evangelical faith. We can learn basic doctrine but we can also learn a spirit, a stance, and a commitment to Christ and to the proclamation of the good news and a passion for that truth. Olevianus knew what it was to be in darkness. He also knew what it was to be set free from legalism and moralism. He had a deep appreciation for Luther’s doctrines of justification and Christian freedom, which Calvin shared, and for Calvin’s doctrines of the church and sacraments. Renewing these virtues among evangelicals today can only be for the good.
