The Nicene Council: The Church Reformed

ECCLESIA REFORMATA ET SEMPER REFORMANDA THE CHURCH REFORMED AND ALWAYS REFORMING As Christians our greatest desire should be to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength; seeking above everything else His kingdom and His righteousness. This, of course, involves all manner of other things, loving God's people and His truth being among the more notable. Here at The Apologetics Group, loving and defending the truth as revealed in the Bible has always been a primary emphasis. So is "understanding the times and what it is the Church should do" (paraphrase of 1 Chronicles 12:32). Through this we have become increasingly convinced that true revival and reformation, while always important, has reached a point of profoundly critical necessity if America is not going to fully apostatize into a modern day Babylon. In that judgment always begins in the house of God (1 Peter 4:17) we believe that Christians must first examine their own hearts, striving to take "every thought captive in obedience to Christ" (2Cor. 10:5) and then find a like-minded community of believers where they can serve, grow and work to fulfill their part of the Great Commission. The purpose of this page is to help facilitate this grand and glorious vision. By God's grace, thousands of people have been brought to faith in Christ through our presentations. Many others have also been introduced to the Reformed faith and the "solas" of the Reformation1 through materials we have either created or have made available through our web store. Some have contacted us about the change in their hearts and thinking and have expressed a desire to find a church that is truly committed to these same truths. If you are a pastor and/or leader2 in such a church and would like to let these people and others know about your congregation, please take a moment to fill out the information form on the "Register Your Church" link above.

ABOUT THE REGISTRY This is a registry of Reformed and "reformational" churches. That means different things to different people. We are not here to "police the purity" of the participating churches' alignment with the distinctives of the Reformed faith. We're not even going to try and enumerate what every one of those distinctives are. We also understand that a lot of churches are in flux; that the winds of the Reformation are beginning to fill their sails but they may not yet be ready, often for good reasons, to hoist the banner of Calvinism and

begin, for example, preaching sermons against dispensationalism. If you are committed to the essentials of the faith as outlined here, we would love for you to participate. So whether yours is a non-denominational, charismatic church "on the road to Geneva" (there are more all the time!) or are a congregation of home-schooling, Sabbath-keeping spiritual descendants of John Knox - we would be honored to help like-minded people connect with your vision and calling. Please take a moment and log into our registry and let the hundreds of thousands of people that visit this web site know about you and your efforts to win the lost, make disciples and extend our Lord's kingdom throughout the earth. The Reformed churches are a group of Christian Protestant denominations formally characterized by a similar Calvinist system of doctrine, historically related to the churches that first arose especially in the Swiss Reformation led by Huldrych Zwingli and soon afterward appeared in nations throughout Western and Central Europe. Each nation in which the Reformed movement was originally established had its own church government. Several of these national churches have expanded to worldwide denominations and most have experienced splits into multiple denominations. Commitment to teaching the original Calvinism usually continues to be reflected in their official definitions of doctrine, but in some cases is no longer necessarily typical of these churches. A 1999 survey found 746 Reformed denominations worldwide.

The Protestant Reformation in Switzerland was promoted initially by Huldrych Zwingli, who gained the support of the magistrate (Mark Reust) and population of Zürich in the 1520s. It led to significant changes in civil life and state matters in Zürich and spread to several other cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy. Seven cantons remained Roman Catholic, though, which led to inter-cantonal wars known as the Wars of Kappel. After the victory of the Catholic cantons in 1531, they proceeded to institute counterreformatory policies in some regions. The schism and distrust between Catholic and Protestant cantons would define their interior politics and paralyse any common foreign policy until well into the eighteenth century. Despite their religious differences, and despite an exclusively Catholic defence alliance of the seven Catholic cantons (Goldener Bund), further major armed conflicts directly between the cantons did not occur. Soldiers from both sides fought in the French Wars of Religion. In the Thirty Years' War, the thirteen cantons managed to maintain their neutrality, partly because all major powers in Europe depended on Swiss mercenaries, and would not let Switzerland fall into the hands of one of their rivals. The Three Leagues (Drei Bünde) of the Grisons, at that time not yet a member of the confederacy, were involved in the war from 1620 on, which led to their loss of the Valtellina from 1623 to 1639.

The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is a doctrine of Calvinism which deals with the question of the control God exercises over the world. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God "freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass."[1] The second use of the word "predestination" applies this to the salvation, and refers to the belief that God appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation by grace, while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all their sins, even their original sin. The former is called "unconditional election", and the latter "reprobation". In Calvinism, men must be predestined and effectually called (regenerated/born again) unto faith by God before they will even wish to believe or wish to be justified. Predestination is a religious concept, which involves the relationship between God and his creation. The religious character of predestination distinguishes it from other ideas about determinism and free will. Those who believe in predestination, such as John Calvin, believe that before the creation God determined the fate of the universe throughout all of time and space. The Westminster Confession of Faith is a Reformed confession of faith, in the Calvinist theological tradition. Although drawn up by the 1646 Westminster Assembly, largely of the Church of England, it became and remains the 'subordinate standard' of doctrine in the Church of Scotland, and has been influential within Presbyterian churches worldwide. In 1643, the English Parliament called upon "learned, godly and judicious Divines", to meet at Westminster Abbey in order to provide advice on issues of worship, doctrine, government and discipline of the Church of England. Their meetings, over a period of five years, produced the confession of faith, as well as a Larger Catechism and a Shorter Catechism. For more than three centuries, various churches around the world have adopted the confession and the catechisms as their standards of doctrine, subordinate to the Bible. The Westminster Confession of Faith was modified and adopted by Congregationalists in England in the form of the Savoy Declaration (1658). Likewise, the Baptists of England modified the Savoy Declaration to produce the Second London Baptist Confession (1689). English Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists would together (with others) come to be known as Nonconformists, because they did not conform to the Act of Uniformity (1662) establishing the Church of England as the only legally-approved church, though they were in many ways united by their common confessions, built on the Westminster Confession. Original sin[1] is, according to a doctrine proposed in Christian theology, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man.[2] This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a "sin nature", to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt by all humans through collective guilt.[3]

Those who uphold the doctrine look to the teaching of Paul the Apostle in Romans 5:1221 and 1 Corinthians 15:22 for its scriptural base,[2] and see it as perhaps implied in Old Testament passages such as Psalm 51:5 and Psalm 58:3. Some Christians do not accept the doctrine indicated by the terms "original sin" or "ancestral sin", which are not found in the Bible.[4] The doctrine is not found in other religions, such as Judaism,[5] Hinduism[6] and Islam. Roman Catholic teaching regards original sin as the general condition of sinfulness (lack of holiness) into which humans are born, distinct from the actual sins that a person commits. It explicitly states that original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants.[7] The prevailing view also in Eastern Orthodoxy is that man bears no guilt for the sin of Adam. Orthodoxy prefers the term "ancestral sin",[8] which indicates that "original sin is hereditary. It did not remain only Adam and Eve's. As life passes from them to all of their descendants, so does original sin. We all of us participate in original sin because we are all descended from the same forefather, Adam."[9] An important exposition of the belief of Eastern Christians identifies original sin as physical and spiritual death, the spiritual death being the loss of "the grace of God, which quickened (the soul) with the higher and spiritual life".[10] Others see original sin also as the cause of actual sins: "a bad tree bears bad fruit" (Matthew 7:17, NIV), although, in this view, original and actual sin may be difficult to distinguish.[11] Unconditional election is the Calvinist teaching that before God created the world, he chose to save some people according to his own purposes and apart from any conditions related to those persons.[1] Unconditional election is drawn from the doctrines of salvation adopted by Augustine of Hippo, was first codified in the Belgic Confession (1561),[2] reaffirmed in the Canons of Dort (1619),[3] which arose from the Quinquarticular Controversy, and is represented in the various Reformed confessions such as the Westminster Standards (1646).[4] It is one of the five points of Calvinism and is often linked with predestination. Reprobation, in Christian theology, is a corollary to the Calvinistic doctrine of unconditional election which derives that some of mankind (the elect) are predestined by God for salvation. Therefore, the remainder are left to their fallen nature and eventually to eternal damnation. This same state of unbelief is also known as reprobation. In Calvinist terminology, the non-elect are often referred to as the reprobate. Similarly, when a sinner is so hardened as to feel no remorse or misgiving of conscience, it is considered as a sign of reprobation. The English word, reprobate, is from the Latin root probare (English: prove, test), and thus derived from the Latin, reprobatus (reproved, condemned), the opposite of approbatus (commended, approved).