As Habakkuk recounts God’s mighty deeds throughout the ages and looks forward to a future salvation, we see a foreshadowing of what is to come in Jesus Christ, the true Anointed One.

You have likely heard people called “boomers,” or maybe even “zoomers,” but have you come across the term “doomer?” A doomer is someone who holds a pessimistic view of life, who despairs over impending societal collapse, and feels a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in the face of doom and gloom. In all honesty, as Christians we can sometimes find ourselves with a “doomer” mindset when we survey the world around us raging with wickedness, political corruption, and false worship, and question if God is still working and why He allows such evil. Thousands of years ago, a prophet named Habakkuk grappled with this very situation as he looked around his world and cried out to God in despair. Habakkuk’s inquiries and God’s responses offer us a profound reminder that our faith ultimately centers not on our circumstances, but on Christ, the fulfillment of prophecy.
The book of Habakkuk is unique in its genre. Rather than the book being focused solely on the prophecy or the recipients of the message, it gives a behind-the-scenes peek of a prophet’s prayer life as he wrestles with his message. Habakkuk had observed the violence, iniquity, and destruction around him from his own people and brought his frustration to the Lord, crying out, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?” Based on what he knows of God’s holy and just character, he assumes such sinful behavior would be met with swift and heavy punishment—not silence.
God responds to the prophet in an unexpected way. Yes, God will bring justice, but His judgment will not immediately result in the clean, ordered, and obedient world that Habakkuk seems to expect. The Lord’s chosen instruments of retribution are the wicked Chaldeans, a nation more sinful than Judah! Habakkuk wrestles with this. He wonders why God, who cannot look at wrong, will punish wickedness with wickedness? It just doesn’t add up. So again, he makes his complaint known, and awaits God’s reply.
God patiently affirms His plan, but condemns the wickedness of the sinful nations. He broadens Habakkuk’s perspective, and reminds him that though judgment seems slow, it is certain, and “the righteous shall live by his faith“ (2:4). His glory is still the end game, for one day, “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). Habakkuk may not like his imminent circumstances, but God’s plan of salvation is certain, and righteousness will reign in the end.
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The King’s College is a small school. But as the city’s only high-profile evangelical college committed to “the truths of Christianity and a biblical worldview,” it is more well known than its enrollment numbers — over 600 students before the pandemic, down to roughly half that now — might suggest. Its sudden decline has drawn national attention.

Administrators at The King’s College, a small Christian liberal arts college in Manhattan, have been meeting with students in recent weeks to deliver a grim message: All of you should find someplace else to go to school.
Between the pandemic and a business deal gone bad, the college had struggled for years. But what began as a handful of layoffs in November quickly escalated to a doomsday scenario. Now it appears likely the school will close, and school officials have been going from department to department to show students a list of schools that might accept them as transfer students.
The King’s College is a small school. But as the city’s only high-profile evangelical college committed to “the truths of Christianity and a biblical worldview,” it is more well known than its enrollment numbers — over 600 students before the pandemic, down to roughly half that now — might suggest.
Its sudden decline has drawn national attention.
Most of its students are white, and many come from conservative households far from New York City. For them, King’s has been a pathway to a world beyond their lives back home, where roughly half were home-schooled or attended private, often Christian, academies.
In interviews, most said they hoped to stay in New York and transfer to non-evangelical schools, like Fordham University, Columbia University or the City University of New York. Representatives of the college did not respond to messages seeking comment.
“The one truth I am committed to is biblical truth,” said Matthew Peterson, 19, who said he grew up in a “homogeneous” Christian community in Ohio. “I really wanted to come to New York, where I knew I would be confronted with all sorts of ways of living and belief systems.”
Before the pandemic, the school dreamed of expanding, to give its brand of nondenominational Christianity a secure place in the country’s media and financial capital. But it appears instead to have been undone by a pandemic-related decline in enrollment and revenue. An unsuccessful foray into the world of for-profit online education, meant to help, may have only accelerated the downward spiral.
At a recent meeting, Paul Glader, a journalism professor, told students in his department to do everything they could to secure a spot at another school.
“If I were in your shoes, I would apply to all these schools, I would pray a lot, I would talk to my parents a lot. This is your life,” he said, as two administrators standing nearby nodded in agreement. “That being said, I hope we survive.”
King’s was founded in 1938 and moved campuses twice before it shut down in 1994 during an earlier period of declining enrollment and financial woe. It was revived in 1999 by Campus Crusade for Christ, whose founder, Bill Bright, said he wanted the school to educate two million students within its first decade.
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Written by Jonathan L. Master |
Monday, March 27, 2023
Today when people in evangelical churches refer to “Reformed theology” or to “being Reformed,” they often mean something less historically grounded. It is often the case today that when someone refers to holding to “Reformed theology,” they mean that they believe that God’s sovereign grace is at work in electing and saving sinners (the doctrine of predestination) and that God’s Word is inspired and inerrant and has absolute authority.

What is Reformed theology? What does it mean if your church is referred to as Reformed or if a presentation of the Bible’s teaching is Reformed? People in Reformed congregations ask one another, “When did you become Reformed?” or “What made you look for a Reformed church?” Maybe such questions have been addressed to you.
But what do these questions mean? What are they driving at? Are they important? And if so, how are you to understand and answer them?
Answering these common questions can be surprisingly complex. This is partly because the word Reformed has a long history and has been used in many different ways. Sometimes Reformed theology is used in a strictly historical sense and sometimes in a more theological sense. Sometimes it is meant to be precise and technical, but often its meaning is fairly basic.
Historical and Popular Views
At its most basic level, the term Reformed theology refers to the theological conclusions that flowed out of the Protestant Reformation. The early Reformers—such as Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin—had sharp and specific criticisms of Roman Catholic theology as it had developed in the Middle Ages. Among other things, the Reformers believed that Roman Catholic worship was unbiblical; they rejected the Roman Catholic teaching on the nature of justification and the place of individual saving faith. They also rejected Roman Catholic claims about the authority of the pope, asserting that the Bible alone held the place of final authority in discussions of doctrine. They taught that salvation comes through God’s grace alone, by faith alone. They rejected the Roman Catholic understanding of the place and meaning of baptism and communion, returning to the biblical definition of these important sacraments of Christ. These were historical concerns, but they still lie at the heart of what it means to be Reformed.
Within this general Protestant framework, there were divisions. Luther and those who followed him had different approaches from Calvin and the other European Reformers. These differences—largely on the sacraments and worship—set Lutherans apart from the other Protestants. Those who followed Luther became known as Lutherans; those who followed the other Reformers are generally referred to as Reformed.
So, from a historical perspective, Reformed theology refers to the theology of the non-Lutheran teaching that flows out of the Protestant Reformation. When the term is used in this historical way (as in much scholarly literature), it also normally implies adherence to one of the historical confessions of faith that bind together Reformed congregations and denominations.
In popular usage, Reformed theology is often identified with the so-called “five points of Calvinism”:

Total depravity: the belief that human beings are corrupt at their core because of the sin of Adam.
Unconditional election: the belief that God chooses those whom he saves out of his own sovereign love, not out of anything the recipients of that love have in themselves.
Limited atonement: the belief that Christ’s death pays the ransom for a particular people and his salvation is definite.
Irresistible grace: the belief that God’s grace accomplishes its intended result in those who are saved.
Perseverance of the saints: the belief that those who are saved by God in Christ will be preserved to the end.

All of these beliefs are indeed important teachings of the Reformed tradition. Although they were not specifically organized according to the acronym by which they are known today (TULIP) until centuries later, they arose as a response to false teachers who had infiltrated the Reformed community in the early 1600s. Nonetheless, as helpful as these five points are in summarizing key biblical truths about salvation, they do not fully encapsulate, or accurately describe, all of Reformed theology.
Today when people in evangelical churches refer to “Reformed theology” or to “being Reformed,” they often mean something less historically grounded. It is often the case today that when someone refers to holding to “Reformed theology,” they mean that they believe that God’s sovereign grace is at work in electing and saving sinners (the doctrine of predestination) and that God’s Word is inspired and inerrant and has absolute authority.
The Five Solas of the Reformation
There are better ways to define the term Reformed theology, however. For John Calvin and other early reformers, the Reformation was not just about the doctrine of salvation. Worship was of central significance as well. Beyond these two primary concerns, there were other matters of faith and practice inextricably linked with Reformed teaching. Because of this, many have suggested a more full-orbed starting place in defining Reformed theology known as the “five solas of the Reformation.” The five solas (sola is the Latin word for “only” or “alone”) are sola Scriptura (Scripture alone); sola fide (faith alone); sola gratia (grace alone); solus Christus (Christ alone); and soli Deo gloria (God’s glory alone). Put together, these five affirmations express very clearly the central concerns of the Protestant Reformation.
The Covenant
Beyond the five solas, Reformed theology has always been closely identified with covenant theology. In the Scriptures, God works out his saving purposes by means of successive covenants. As we will see, a covenant is an agreement between two parties with duties, promises, and obligations. In fact, the Bible speaks of an overarching “eternal covenant” (Heb. 13:20) that centers on the cross of Christ. Covenants provide the biblical framework by which we understand God’s work in Christ and his dealings with his people throughout history.
The centrality of the covenantal structure in the Bible and the Christian life can hardly be overstated, and the ramifications of this central theme in the Scriptures are significant. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that merely emphasizing predestination, or even the five points of Calvinism, does not do justice to what it means to be a Reformed Christian. Reformed theology is whole- Bible theology, and the covenant is the biblical framework that shows the unity of both the Old Testament and the New.
The Confessions
Lastly, all vibrant and enduring Reformed traditions have confessions of faith that give written expression to their convictions. The best-known of the mature Reformed confessions include the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort (which together are called the Three Forms of Unity) and the Westminster Confession of Faith, which has its own catechisms.
From the earliest days, Reformed Christians assumed that Reformed theology would be expressed in confessions of faith. Therefore, to be Reformed is to be confessional; to be part of a Reformed church is to be in a place in which one of these historic confessions is professed, taught, and followed. We will look at this more closely in chapter 4.
Defining the terms Reformed and Reformed theology is not a simple task. But for our purposes, we might say that Reformed theology is a theology that (1) affirms the five solas and all their implications, (2) recognizes the centrality of the covenant in God’s saving purposes, and (3) is expressed in a historic and public confession of faith.
With that in mind, we can move on to examine the teaching of the Bible on these points and to see how the truths treasured by the Reformers are a great blessing to God’s people.
Questions for Further Reflection

Why is it important for us to understand terms like Reformed theology? How and where have you heard these terms used?
What makes the five solas a helpful summary of biblical teaching regarding salvation? Do they omit anything significant? What biblical questions do they raise?
Why are creeds and confessions necessary for the health of the church? In what ways do they protect us?

Excerpt taken from Chapter 1: What Is Reformed Theology, Reformed Theology by Jonathan Master. Used with permission.
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