The date was December 12, 1924.
The two other ministers and their consistories were also to experience the wrath of their classis.
Rev. Henry Danhof was pastor of First CRC in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He had been a delegate at the synod of the CRC which had adopted the Three Points of common grace. At the synod he had raised his objections to the doctrine and had let it be clearly known that he would never support such erroneous views. He and his congregation were a part of Classis Grand Rapids West.
Rev. George Ophoff was pastor of the Riverbend CRC in what is now Walker, Michigan. While Ophoff had not been present at the synod of 1924, he had expressed his convictions with regard to the Three Points of common grace by joining the staff of the Standard Bearer. This magazine had begun publication in October of 1924, partly because the pages of the official publication of the CRC, the Banner, were closed to Rev. Hoeksema, and partly because an organ was needed to inform the churches of the serious error the CRC had made at its synod. Rev. Ophoff did not only let his convictions be known by joining the staff of the Standard Bearer, but he had also clearly expressed himself on its pages in an early issue. Rev. Ophoff's congregation was also a part of Classis Grand Rapids West.
Classis Grand Rapids West was in no mood to dally. It wanted no discussion of the issues; it wanted no appeals to the next synod; it wanted no clarifications of the positions of Danhof and Ophoff. It simply required of these two men (and their consistories) that they submit without reservation to the decisions of the synod of 1924 with respect to common grace, or suffer deposition.
Those involved refused to submit. All were summarily deposed from office by official decision of the classis.
It was the beginning of the PRC.
True reformation in the church of Christ always involves a going back and a moving ahead. The going back is required because the denomination which needs reforming has become apostate and has moved away from what Jeremiah calls the "old paths." For this reason Jeremiah's admonition to Judah is always important in reformation: "Thus saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls" (6:16).
The old paths for the church of Christ in North America (as well as for Reformed churches throughout the world) were the paths of the Reformation of the 16th century with its sharp and unyielding emphasis on sovereign and particular grace. The old paths were the paths of the Synod of Dordt, which had emphatically repudiated the general grace of Arminianism, had charted the course of Reformed church polity, and had drawn up a confession which demonstrated beyond doubt that the teaching of God's grace for the elect only was the teaching of their history.
This latter insistence of the Synod of Dordt (namely, that what it taught was the historic Reformed position) became evident in its statement that the Canons of Dordt were not to be construed as a new confession, but were a further explanation of some points of doctrine already contained in the Heidelberg Catechism and the Confession of Faith, both of which were official confessions of the Reformed churches of a half century earlier.
The activities of Classes Grand Rapids East and West showed that the church government of the denomination was also askew. Suspension and deposition of office-bearers is a part of ecclesiastical censure of sin and an exercise of the keys of the kingdom of heaven. This task, as well as the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments, belongs to the local consistories and to broader ecclesiastical assemblies. For classes or synods to engage in discipline is the worst sort of hierarchy. Yet the CRC did not shrink from such hierarchy in order to rid itself of men who had been declared by the church itself to be Reformed, but who refused to agree to the false doctrine of common grace.
Faithful officebearers in the church of Christ, declared to be such by their own denomination, had been cruelly stripped of their offices, set naked on the street outside the doors of the church, and told to fend for themselves apart from the fellowship of the church.
And they were thus persecuted for no other reason than that they maintained the sovereignty and particularity of grace, a doctrine of the Reformed churches held since the days of John Calvin in Geneva.
A return to the "old paths," therefore, required also a return to the old true and tried Church Order of Dordrecht.
On March, 1925 the officebearers of the three congregations came together to form a new denomination. It was, in a sense, temporary, because all three congregations had appeals against the decisions of Classes Grand Rapids East and West pending with the synod of 1926. Because of the temporary nature of their federation, they called themselves, "The Protesting Christian Reformed Churches." But no one held out any hope of the synod of 1926 retracting the erroneous doctrines of common grace, and no one expected the hierarchical decisions of two classes to be repudiated by synod. And so it proved to be.
Already the temporary "Act of Agreement" which was signed by the officebearers of the three congregations spoke of a return to the three forms of unity and the Church Order of Dordrecht.
The reformation was complete. The doctrines of free, sovereign, and particular grace were once again given free course, unencumbered by the burden of heresy. The autonomy of the local congregations was once again established on the basis of the Church Order of Dordrecht.
But a true reformation of the church of Christ is not and can never be merely a return to the "old paths." Within the church one cannot live in the past. One cannot dwell on past injustices nor fight battles long over.
This is not to say that the past is unimportant. The confession, worship, and government of the church of Christ throughout the ages are given the church by the Spirit of truth whom Christ promised to His Church prior to His glorification (see John 14-16). The Spirit of truth guides the church into all truth. That means two things. It means, on the one hand, that the confession, worship, and government of the church of the past are the blessed fruit of the Spirit according to which the church must always live. But it also means that the work of the Spirit in the church is a continuing work, so that the Spirit, according to Scriptures which He Himself inspired, continues to reveal the truth in richer measure.
The church of Christ moves forward.
So it was with the PRC.
Some charged the PRC for existing only to inveigh against and do battle with the evils of common grace. It was said that the PRC rode an old hobby horse, lived to criticize others, found its joy in chiding other denominations, and would disappear if it could no longer fight against common grace. This is not true.
Although indeed the PRC are compelled before God to show the evil of false doctrine, especially as it involves their own particular history, the churches have also moved forward by the guidance and direction of the Spirit of Christ.
Because the truth of sovereign and particular grace was the one great issue in the sad history of 1924, it was this truth which, emphasized in the churches, became the principle of further development of the truth within the churches.
Rev. Herman Hoeksema, rightly considered the spiritual father of the denomination, along with his colleague in the churches and in seminary, Rev. George Ophoff, made some distinctive contributions to what the church is called to believe.
It is not our purpose to go into these contributions in detail. But anyone acquainted with many writings which have come from the pens of Hoeksema and Ophoff will know of the contributions to an understanding of sovereign grace which both of these men made in the Standard Bearer and other writings; and they will know how Herman Hoeksema made a significant and important contribution to the knowledge of the Reformed faith in his Reformed Dogmatics.
But if there is one doctrine which is a distinguishing truth of the PRC, it is the doctrine of God's eternal and unconditional covenant of grace. Firmly committed to the truth of sovereign and particular grace, and applying that truth to the biblically defined doctrine of the covenant, Hoeksema has shown that Scripture teaches a unilateral and unconditional covenant in which God enters into friendship with His elect people in Jesus Christ. This was a major breakthrough in the Reformed understanding of God's covenant.
If one thing characterized Hoeksema's theology, it was its God-centered character. To begin with God and end with God - that was Hoeksema's purpose in all he did.
Beginning with God in the doctrine of the covenant, he demonstrated that God is in His own triune life a covenant God who lives in blessed and perfect fellowship with Himself. That covenant life which He eternally enjoys, God chooses to reveal in His own eternal Son, Jesus Christ, the Head of the covenant. He reveals it through Christ by taking Christ, through the way of Christ's cross, into the covenant life of the Trinity; and in taking Christ into that covenant life, He takes all His elect into the very life of the Trinity itself so that God and His people may have joyful fellowship together for ever.
Such positive development of the truth is true church reformation.
And such God-centered theology takes all glory from man and gives it to God - where it belongs.
This is the history of the PRC.
Herman Hanko
Herman Hoeksema
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