What does being a Christian mean to you?

Tom Boogaart

edited by Bob Terwilliger, spring 2022

One of the matters that has occupied me in retirement is looking back at my Reformed upbringing and sorting through the themes of the tradition. Some of them have sustained me throughout my life but others have clearly not.

It seems to me that we have to do a similar sorting as the Reformed Church in America if we hope to avoid dissolution and play any role in the future of our unstable world. Perhaps my “sorting” will stimulate you in your “sorting,” and we can begin a conversation together about the future of the Reformed Church in America. What follows is the first in a series of reflections. Parts of it were published earlier on-line in the Reformed Journal.

Sophie was born and raised in Quebec. She left the Catholic Church because its worship services were impersonal and it failed to hold abusive priests accountable. Yet she has not left faith behind. She speaks of moments in her life when she feels the presence of God and divine promptings in her heart. She is cautious yet curious about matters of faith. She came into our lives when she married our son Tom.

My wife Judy and I had traveled to Gatineau, Quebec, to help Tom and Sophie refurbish their house. As Sophie and I were painting and chatting she paused with paintbrush in hand and asked, “What does being a Christian mean to you”? It was such a basic question, yet it caught me off-guard.

Being Christian has permeated my life and I often take it for granted. Asking me about Christianity is like asking a fish to describe water. I grew up in a family whose life was caught up in the rhythms of the old Third Reformed Church on the corner of Diamond and Hermitage in the old Brickyard district of Grand Rapids—morning and evening services on Sundays, catechism and prayer meetings on Wednesday evenings, elaborate pageants in the Christmas season ending with a Florida orange and a chocolate bar. I absorbed a Reformed world view and see myself as part of a remnant blowing on the embers of a once blazing fire. I have spent my adult life studying Scripture, writing essays, and training people for ministry. I talk about God all the time, yet all my God-talk can function as a surrogate for faith, the real faith that moves in my heart and carries me moment to moment, day by day.

“What does being a Christian mean to you?”

I realized the gravity of the moment. Sophie was standing at the threshold and knocking on the door. I hesitated. I thought about explaining the essential doctrines that define my faith, but sensed she was more interested in the dynamic of my faith than its content. She wanted to know what animated me as a Christian. Her question demanded that I dive deeper into my heart where the waters were murkier, where there are undercurrents of longing and desire.

What is in the depths of my heart? I reflect on this when I watch my grandchildren grow up full of energy and excitement as they move into ever widening circles of life; when I lay my parents in their graves and dispatch their earthly treasures; when Judy and I take our COVID-walks and witness the decline of flora and fauna in our small patch of the world and hear sounds of lament in the silence of the wooded lakeshore; when I discover that I have an incurable cancer and realize that my appointment with death is coming sooner than I had scheduled in my life planner.

“What does being a Christian mean to you?”

After hesitating for a moment, I answered, “That I am not alone, that in the walk of life I have divine companionship.”

My answer surprised me because it seemed to come unbidden, out of nowhere. The more I pondered this, the more I realized that the longing for divine companionship had been part of me from an early age.  It had been awakened in those rare times when I felt God’s presence in my life and amplified in those times when I felt God’s absence. I realized as well that divine companionship was the central theme of the Heidelberg Catechism that was taught to me as a boy.

We worked our way through the Heidelberg Catechism on Wednesday evenings at Third Reformed Church in preparation for making profession of faith.  I memorized a number of the catechism’s most beloved questions and answers as well as the corresponding passages of Scripture, and complained endlessly about having to do memory work not related to school.

I am so thankful now that our caregivers had the foresight to make us memorize key parts of the catechism. Memorization is a spiritual discipline practiced by believers of old but mostly neglected today. The practice of memorization echoes the practice of hospitality: the constant repetition of the words of the catechism or the words of Scripture prepares a place in the heart and invites these words to reside there. At home in the heart, they meld with your thoughts and shape your behavior.

Olevianus and Ursinus, the primary authors of the catechism, distilled the content of the whole in the very first question and answer. Their focus on a personal relationship to God and their articulation of the triune God’s comforting presence are beautifully and succinctly expressed there, and believers for centuries have cherished and memorized their words:

1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
2. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

As a young person I understood, “not my own, but belong” to mean that I was not “on my own” and therefore not “alone.”

Question and Answer One ends by saying that a sign of my belonging is the presence of the Holy Spirit who assures me of eternal life. I was not sure what eternal life meant, and my mentors were vague about that as well. At the time in a famous interview, Billy Graham said that we would do the things in heaven that we enjoyed on earth, like playing golf. I liked playing golf, but was hoping that life in heaven would be more meaningful than that. The notion of playing golf with Jesus did not move or motivate me. My mentors explained eternal life as a reward for good behavior (quasi-Arminian) or a gift coming to me after I died (quasi-Reformed). Both explanations downplayed the significance of God’s active presence in the world and God’s love for its manifold forms of life, and both invited me to adopt an otherworldly focus.

I was never much moved by either notion of an afterlife even as a young person. I felt that this otherworldly focus ran against the grain of the catechism and the Reformed tradition as a whole. Question and Answer One suggested that divine companionship was heaven on earth. The reference to “eternal life” was the catechism’s way of emphasizing that the “comforter” in my heart was instilling in me the steadfast love of God, a love that was irresistible and eternal, and that the good work that my savior had begun in me would be brought to completion.

The Heidelberg Catechism’s theme of “belonging” or divine companionship is one the themes in the Reformed tradition that has sustained me throughout my life.

Tom received his A.B. from Calvin College (now University), his M.Div. from Western Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen. He taught at Central College, and spent a year at the University of Exeter in England on a Leverhulme Fellowship. He then taught at Western Theological Seminary and was named the Dennis and Betty Voskuil Professor Emeritus of Old Testament. Tom and Judy live in Holland, MI. tomb@westernsem.edu