What Is the Reformed Faith? A Message From the Orthodox Presbyterian Church: High Points of Calvinism

1. Relation to What Is the OPC? The companion booklet What Is the OPC? provides basic information about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, including its history, doctrine, and ministries. The descriptive adjective "Reformed" occurs throughout that booklet, but is not fully defined. Basically, when we speak of the Reformed faith, we refer to the true Christian religion as it was recovered during the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In this booklet, we have selected those doctrines and that methodology which position the OPC as a Reformed church. Consequently, the reader will not find here a treatment of those cardinal articles of the Christian religion that Reformed churches hold in common with other churches, such as the Trinity, the atonement, justification by faith, the virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Jesus, his miracles, and the inspiration of Holy Scripture. The Reformed faith holds to all the apostolic doctrines set forth in the Bible and given creedal formulation by the great ecumenical councils of the ancient church.

It is important to recognize that these doctrines have been variously misinterpreted by the several branches of the visible church. Which interpretations belong to the Reformed faith, and which do not? The answer to that question can only be gained through a careful study of the Reformed creeds, confessions, and catechisms—many quotations from which will be encountered throughout this study.

Any adequate definition of the Reformed faith must focus on doctrine. Nonetheless, merely "buying into" some abstract body of truth does not qualify an individual or a church as "Reformed." Rather, the Reformed faith is a relationship to God, through Jesus Christ, based upon the gospel revealed by him and in Holy Scripture.