Reformed

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What is the Historic Reformed Faith?

Narrow Pathway is a Christian website, proclaiming the good news that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, and sharing writings from the perspective of the historic Reformed faith of the Christian church.

First, What is "Faith"?

Narrow Pathway proclaims the “historic Reformed faith”.

But what is this strange expression, the historic Reformed faith?

Jude, one of the prophetic authors of the Bible, described God’s written Word as “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3, NKJ version)

The word “faith” refers to the message of the Bible. Bible is a Greek word that simply means, “book.” So when we call it the "Holy Bible," we're really just saying that its the Holy Book, or in other words, God's own Book. In this ancient book, God has delivered His own Word to His people. God's Word is everything that God wants man to understand and believe about Him, and about His relationship to man.

Therefore, we understand true faith to be “a knowledge and conviction that everything God reveals in His Word is true,” and even more, true faith is “a deep-rooted assurance, created in us by the Holy Spirit through the gospel,” that we have been granted salvation from all our sins, through the grace earned for us by Jesus Christ when He paid for those sins on the cross of death.

In other words, those who hold to the "historic Reformed faith" are Christians who believe the message of the Bible. It's important to express this, because there are many who call themselves Christians, but often their beliefs and traditions do not come from the Bible.

This “Holy Book,” the Bible, contains everything that man must learn, to know the true God, and to be saved from man's sins committed against God.

The teachings of the Bible were the true faith of the early church, for at least four centuries after the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was a church that was built upon the writings of the apostles and prophets. They were the messengers who were chosen by God to reveal His Word to man, and to preserve His Word in a written form for future generations. The apostles and prophets who lived in the time of Jesus Christ wrote the New Testament, the books which finished the holy Scriptures that were written by prophets of earlier ages.

The writing of God's Word had to be completed in the 1st century A.D., soon after the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, because it was God’s plan that the Scriptures should be carried into all the earth by His church, as a written testimony to all men that Jesus is the Son of God and the only Savior of the world. Because the writing of Holy Scripture was finished in the first century A.D., every true church anywhere in the world today has the same prophetic writings from God, that is, the same “Holy Bible”.

The church remained spiritually faithful to God throughout the early centuries after the death of the apostles, because Christian leaders followed and taught the Word of God carefully.

After the fourth century, however, for nearly 1000 years, the faithfulness of the church declined, and church leaders were increasingly motivated by politics and the desire for wealth and power. As time passed, they gave less and less attention to the Holy Scriptures, so that the "true faith" was gradually replaced by false beliefs that were rooted in tradition rather than in Scripture.

What is "Reformed"?

The Reformation of the 16th century sought to reform the errors of the church by restoring a true faith anchored on Scripture alone. The cry of the Reformers was, sola scriptura, “Scripture alone”! This phrase meant this:

All truth that God commands men to believe about Himself, and all doctrinal understanding concerning our relationship with our Creator, must come only from the Bible, that is, the scriptures that God gave to His church through His prophets.

The Reformers of the 16th century understood the principle of “Scripture alone.” They were persuaded that God reveals His commandments, His will, and the way of salvation and life only in the narrow pathway, the Bible.

From their study of the Holy Scriptures, the Reformers also clearly saw that all men are sinful and that salvation from sin is “purely by God's grace alone, only through faith (faith in the true God, Jehovah, and faith in His Word, the message of the Bible), and through Christ alone (the Bible presents Christ as the only Savior for men in all nations of the earth),” and the Reformers restored to the churches many other great treasures of Scripture truth, treasures which had been obscured by the traditions of a church gone astray. Many of these meaningful truths, or doctrines, of Scripture, have been preserved in the creeds and confessions of faith which were written by Reformed scholars. The best of the Reformed creeds have been cherished for many generations, and are still being used by most of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches around the world.

Why do we say "Historic" Reformed faith?

We refer to the doctrinal truths of God’s Word as the “historic Reformed faith,” because the Reformation uncovered Biblical doctrines that had been shut up for ages. The Reformation released the truths of God from the veils of darkness that had been pulled tightly over them by centuries of ignorance, and proclaimed them as light to the fallen world. This Reformation, one of the brightest periods in the history of the Christian churches, continues to cast its rays of light upon later generations, the light that shines brightly and warmly from the sacred pages of Holy Scripture.

There is a great heritage of famous Christian pastors and teachers who have passed down the familiar teachings of “the historic Reformed faith” from generation to generation. Their soul-stirring writings, still read by many today even centuries after their deaths, can be found on many websites, simply by searching for the word, Reformed. way, also.) One such author was John Flavel, a man who cherished the doctrines of Scripture that were trusted and taught by all. He wrote, “By entertaining of strange persons, men sometimes entertain angels unawares: but by entertaining of strange doctrines, many have entertained devils unaware.”

Heidelberg What is "Catechism"? The History of the dearly loved Catechism from Heidelberg