When we prioritize the least successful students over their more well-prepared peers, we invariably lower standards for all students. Educators focus on gaming the system to produce “high” grades and graduation rates and in the process, everyone loses sight of why learning matters in the first place. Schools only work when teachers believe in the value of their lessons and students feel responsible for their own learning. In the absence of those vital components, everyone is less likely to succeed.

A few years ago, the school district where I teach became enamored with a book called The One Thing by real estate mogul Gary Keller. Keller argued that, rather than spreading out effort over many different objectives, the secret to success was to identify and focus on the one thing that mattered most for achieving your goal. Taken with this insight, our superintendent asked every principal in the district to determine the “One Thing” that would be the unifying focus of their campus efforts. When teachers returned from summer break that year, we learned about this new initiative and the specific cause that our principal had selected for us to rally around.
Our high school wasn’t going to focus on helping students develop better problem-solving skills, increasing student engagement, or even on aligning our curriculums more closely to the demands of standardized tests. In fact, we weren’t going to focus on anything that would be relevant to the majority of our students. Our One Thing was to improve the educational outcomes of our “critical students”—the lowest achieving five percent who had not passed standardized tests and were most at risk of not graduating. In a school with over 2,000 students, we were told that improving the scores of our bottom 100 was what mattered most.
While a bit more blunt than is typical, this was only stating a hidden reality of which most educators were already aware. Public education, today, is far more concerned with raising the grades and test scores of its lowest achieving students than with pushing all students towards a higher standard. Of course, schools would love everyone to learn more and they are eager to highlight any academic achievement that they can use to create the illusion of educational excellence. But in a world of finite resources, the priorities are quite clear. Whenever a school has to choose, they will sacrifice the benefit of the many to focus on the least successful few.
Many would argue that this is how it should be—that schools should embrace the Rawlsian ethic and direct the majority of their attention to supporting the least advantaged, whose environments or talents make them less likely to become successful students. Such sentiments are particularly common in education, where I’ve often heard teachers make the case that: Good students don’t really need you. They will do well no matter what. The students who really need you are the ones who don’t care about school. As progressive as this sounds, it speaks to a culture that does not actually believe that the subjects they teach matter.
Considering the needs of each student, why should so much emphasis be placed on teaching algebra to a high school student who still can’t multiply single-digit numbers in his head. By high school, most “critical students” are years behind their peers. They often don’t know the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship, where China is relative to Australia, or that “I” is supposed to be capitalized. Barring an enormous and unlikely investment of energy, they will not enter a field that requires academic competency. This is not to say that motivated students should not have access to remediation. But the vast majority of critical students would benefit far more from getting work experience in a specific trade than from prolonging this painful educational charade. It seems foolish for a teacher to pay less attention to students who are likely to need higher-level academic skills in their future, so that he can pull uninterested students aside to quiz them on the parts of the cell.
By contrast, most other students need to be challenged to go beyond superficial task work. But, the higher-order skills that high schools should be focused on developing require a level of attention, rigor, and skilled feedback that remediation-focused teachers are not able to offer. Consequently, the majority of high school graduates today are not adequately prepared. A 2010 report revealed that of the 23 member universities in the California State University system, all of which demand a college-preparatory curriculum completed with at least a B average, “68 percent of the 50,000 entering freshmen at CSU campuses require remediation in English/language arts, math, or both.” And if these same standards were applied by the California Community Colleges, “their remediation rates would exceed 80 percent.”
The report (which comes from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and the Southern Regional Education Board) goes on to argue that most other states would have similar findings. Indeed, according to former professor and United States Assistant Secretary of Education, Chester E. Finn Jr.:
For years now, the College Board, the American College Testing program, and, more recently, the National Assessment of Educational Progress have supplied data indicating that the percentage of 12th graders (or 12th-grade test-takers) who are truly ready for college coursework is somewhere below 40.
None of this is likely to surprise Americans. According to 2018 Gallup polls, only three percent of Americans thought high school graduates were “very well prepared for college” and only five percent thought they were “very well prepared for work.” Most people sense that our education system is falling short, yet we struggle to identify many of the most obvious causes and their solutions. Most notably, by placing a disproportionate emphasis on the education of less capable students, schools downgrade the education of everyone else. Teachers lower their standards and their role shifts from academic and developmental experts to that of activity-organizers. Mainstream students skate by without ever cultivating a capacity for logical analysis, synthesis, written argument, or any of the competencies that will be most valuable after high school. Even Advanced Placement courses are often forced to lower their standards, as many parents realize that the mainstream track is inadequate and decide to push their kids into classes they aren’t prepared for.
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In our day it is especially important to be confessional.  When we looked at the dismal state of theology in the American Church, we saw significant and disheartening errors in the average Christian’s views of Scripture, God, man and sin, salvation, the Church, and current issues like extramarital sex, abortion, gender identity, and homosexuality.  Basically all of these errors are clearly addressed in the confessions, so adherents to the confessions can easily avoid them.

Teach and urge these things. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
-1 Timothy 6:2-5, ESV
In our series on Reformed theology, we have covered the Reformed view of salvation through the five solas and the five points of Calvinism.  But salvation is only one part of theology, so Reformed theology must go beyond the five solas and Calvinistic soteriology (salvation) by subscribing to a theologically-holistic Reformed confession.  Therefore a Reformed church must not only be Calvinistic but confessional. This post will look at the impIortance of confessions and the relation between the need to be always reforming with the need to follow a historic confession in order to avoid straying from what Scripture clearly teaches.
The Importance of Confessions
From the earliest days of the Church, defining what we believe has been extremely important.  Throughout the epistles, we see evidence of various heresies that dogged the Church, requiring divinely-inspired reiteration of what Scripture teaches.  One extra-persistent early heresy was Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ.  In large part to refute this, the early Church adopted the various creeds: the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, and Chalcedon Definition.  When we consider this context, it is easy to see why these creeds so strongly affirm Christ’s divinity.  Each generation faces new challenges to the faith, forcing the Church to strongly state what Scripture clearly teaches about those specific topics.  An example in our day is the challenge to biblical manhood and womanhood from feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism.  To address this, a pair of ecumenical councils quite similar to Nicaea produced the Danvers and Nashville Statements that we addressed here.  Since such statements address particular heresies, they are somewhat limited in their scope.  But by the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church had strayed so far from the teachings of Scripture into a wide variety of heresies that a complete and robust definition of what Scripture teaches on all of faith and life was required.  As the Reformation spread, different groups began to form with varying interpretations regarding secondary doctrines, so those groups needed to define their beliefs.  This as the origin of the various confessions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries which ultimately became the defining documents of various Reformed denominations.
We have need of the same comprehensive definition of beliefs. Many Christians do not venture beyond soteriology in defining their doctrines, thus leaving themselves open to various errors.  They chant “no creed but Christ”, and therefore stumble into all manner of heresy.  Lacking a Scriptural foundation, they ultimately worship a god so different than the God of the Bible that their worship is idolatry.  The confessions like the ancient creeds prevent such errors by keeping us grounded in the faith, providing vital guardrails against new and strange teachings.  It is true that only Scripture is inerrant and timeless while the confessions are the product of men.  However, this does not prevent them from being useful to us.  Error comes not only from the denial of what Scripture clearly teaches but from new and creative interpretations of Scripture. There is nothing new under the sun, so any new error derived from a creative interpretation is likely just a restatement of an error that has appeared at some point in Church history.  Therefore, most of these errors are addressed in the Reformed confessions.  But when we ignore Church history, we exalt ourselves over our spiritual ancestors as if we are far wiser and more enlightened than they were, only to fall prey to the folly that they have already so wisely and eloquently addressed.  The errors of Rome at the time of the Reformation were so pernicious and comprehensive that God was especially gracious to gift the Church at the time with many wise scholars well versed in Scripture to create the confessions. We would be foolish to ignore them.
The Reformed Confessions
Last time, I mentioned the importance of John Calvin documenting all of the doctrines that characterized the Reformation—not just soteriology—in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was essentially the first Reformed systematic theology.  Others built upon this by codifying what Scripture teaches on all topics of faith and life.  As the different Reformed groups began to distinguish themselves from each other, it became vital to distill these beliefs down into a single, Scripture-based document that all of the ministers within the group could agree on.  These were their confessions, which laid out their beliefs on Scripture, God, man, sin, the church and sacraments, civil authorities, the home, and eschatology (the end times).  They are often accompanied by catechisms, which are sets of questions and answers used to teach what the confession contains.  Together, these form a robust theology for faith and life.  The confessions were so important to this period that it has been called “confessionalization”.[1]  They became even more important during the rise of liberalism and the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, at which point many churches abandoned the robust theology of the confessions in favor of conversion-focus and individual experience.[2]  That mentality has persisted to this day such that many churches reject the notion of confessions altogether, dismissing them as antiquated human works of little value today.  But the historic confessions provide a necessary bulwark against the liberalism of mainline denominations and the individualistic emotionalism of seeker-sensitive American evangelicalism just as they have historically defended the Church against Roman Catholicism and other heresies.  Therefore, to be truly Reformed is to be confessional.
To be confessional requires understanding the Reformed confessions enough to subscribe to one of them.
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Written by Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith |
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
The point is clear: the single, perfect, pure communion of love between the persons is poured out on us, as we are loved by the Father because of our union with the Son, whom the Father loves. The love of God is poured out on us by the inseparable work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Trinitarian Unity in Communion
The word communion might bring to mind the Lord’s Supper that Jesus instituted before his death and has been practiced by Christians ever since (Luke 22:7–23; 1 Cor. 11:17–34). For now we will discuss the idea of communion more generally. Here is a simple working definition for communion in Christian theology: the sharing of fellowship among God and his people.
The eternal communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is the grounds for our communion with him and one another. Our triune God, simple and perfect for all of eternity, has always been the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Scriptures witnessed to the incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit long before these events were made manifest in time and space. The Father did not “become” a Father at some point in time when he decided to create the Son with some unnamed heavenly mother. No, this would insinuate that the Father changed at some point, which would deny Scripture’s claim that God cannot change (Mal. 3:6). Further, this would insinuate that the Son was created, which would deny Scripture’s claim that he is the Creator, not a creature (John 1:1–3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 13:8). Rather, the Father and the Son shared a communion of love with the Holy Spirit in all eternity—indeed, “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).
If God truly is one (Deut. 6:4), then we cannot treat the persons as a “team” of disconnected beings or three “members” of a “divine dance.” This way of speaking hints strongly at three divine beings who are one only by virtue of agreement or a unity of will.
This is basic anti-Trinitarian Mormon theology. Instead, it’s more fitting to speak the way the Bible speaks: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This verse is simple and yet packed with rich Trinitarian theology. God is love. He’s not a collection of entities or beings who simply love one another, however deeply, which leads them to work together as some sort of heavenly taskforce. He doesn’t love sometimes and not love other times. He doesn’t wrestle between fluctuating emotions. No, it’s much deeper than that—unfathomably so. The best we can make sense of this is to say with John that Father, Son, and Spirit just are the one God who exists in an inseparable communion of love. God loves us as an outflow of his very nature—the one who loves perfectly and eternally.
This one God who is love exists as three persons who fully and truly are the loving God. Do the three persons love one another? Yes. But we say this only insofar as the Scripture gives us language to distinguish the persons from each other. However, if we exaggerate the oneness, we deny that there are three persons who exist in a perfect and pure life of inseparable, mutual love.
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