Pastor Aaron Vriesman’s July essay, “The Ongoing Reformation of the Christian Reformed Church,” celebrates a triumph of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). After years of debate, the CRC demonstrated that confessional standards are living commitments worthy of our allegiance and defense, maintaining the age-old teaching of the church regarding human sexuality. The denomination reminded its members that faithfulness is measured by conformity to Christ, not conformity to the most progressive wings of the church.
As a result of this courageous stand, some congregations sadly abandoned the church, refusing to respect the authority of the confessions. Once they left, the reformation was seemingly complete, and faithful governance continued.
This “Ongoing Reformation” merits celebration. Yet every reformation raises an important question: will it endure?
As a recent graduate of Calvin University, the CRC’s flagship academic institution, I view this question with increasing apprehension. Calvin’s condition must not be ignored. For all the denomination’s courage in recent years, Calvin’s stance on issues of human sexuality — issues which the denomination now says hold “confessional status” — is fickle.
Even as Calvin’s official positions comply, the campus reality is different. Rainbow pride flags adorn many a professor’s offices and are given away like candy by some academic departments. Over this summer’s Synod (the CRC’s annual governance meeting), delegates from the denomination successfully sought the removal of one of these flags from a professor’s office door. Less than a week later, the flag was back, taped behind a sign that read, “You can keep ripping this off my door, and I’ll keep putting it back up.”
The Sexuality and Gender Awareness office — “a community of LGBTQ+ students and allies who gather weekly to create belonging, promote learning, and foster inclusivity” — has become a meeting place for people who represent and regularly advance positions that are impossible to reconcile with the church’s confessional commitments. Last spring, the group disconcertingly advertised scholarships for “transgender” students.
Prominent voices associated with Calvin continue to publicly urge institutional abandonment. In a published interview, Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff posed the false choice that Calvin can either leave the CRC or become “…a little tiny fundamentalist school.”
Dr. James K.A. Smith, a current professor and self-proclaimed socialist, simultaneously trivialized both Calvin’s commitment to the church and the tragedy of divorce. He posed the following question in Calvin’s newspaper: “…should we be thinking creatively and strategically about how to unhook the university from denominational control?” His answer was, “Divorces happen all the time, including institutional divorces. They can even be amicable. Why doesn’t the BOT (Board of Trustees) take this approach?”
The institution charged with forming many of the CRC’s youngest members and future leaders is conflicted about whether to embrace the church and its confessions, or whether it should “be like God,” casting off all external authority.
More than a century ago, Reformed theologian and Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper of the Netherlands aptly described the forces behind this conflict:
“The individualistic character of the French Revolution is only a derived principle. It is not its root principle from which it drew its dynamic. That root principle is its defiant cry Ni Dieu, ni maître! [No God, no master!] Or, if you will: humanity’s emancipation from God and from the order instituted by him. This principle gives rise to two lines, not just one. The first line is the one that leads you to dismantle the existing order and leave nothing standing except the individual with his own free will and his supposed supremacy. But alongside this line runs another, at the end of which you are tempted not only to push God and his order aside, but also to go on and, deifying yourself, sit in the seat of God (as the prophet said [see Ezek 28:2]), and from your own head you create a new order of things. That’s what social democracy is doing.”
Every pride flag on Calvin’s campus is a contemporary expression of that old, revolutionary battle cry “No God, no master!” Each call for Calvin to abandon the church is a call for the university to deify itself and sit upon the seat of God, accountable to only its own desire.
The CRC deserves credit for defeating this individualistic backslide in its churches. But unless Calvin gets its own house in order, today’s “Ongoing Reformation” will prove temporary. The CRC will have won a battle, but they will have lost the war.
If the Christian Reformed Church wishes this reformation to endure, Calvin must once again become a university that forms not merely brilliant intellects and passionate voices, but virtuous Christians — men and women whose intellect, desires, and loves are rightly ordered under the authority of Christ.
Joe Toly is a 2026 graduate of Calvin University.
More from IRD:
The Ongoing Reformation of the Christian Reformed Church
Christian Reformed Church archived articles
As Dissenters Exit, Christian Reformed Church Resists Same-Sex Affirmation
Comment by Thomas on September 9, 2026 at 10:11 am
I`m sure they can find better universities.