Jared Wilson sparked a thought for me with his latest post, which quotes a section of the Westminster Confession. As a pastor ministering in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am in some sense connected to the Westminster standards, and I do appreciate them a great deal—but though I serve a Presbyterian congregation, and though I was baptized in one (Northminster, in San Diego), my home ground within the church universal is the Dutch Reformed stream, and specifically the Reformed Church in America. As such, though I appreciate Westminster, it’s somewhat foreign to me; it’s the RCA’s doctrinal standards that I value most, and especially the one that (as it happens) the PC(USA) also affirms, the Heidelberg Catechism.
As such, I’ve decided I want to blog my way through the Heidelberg, question by question. I don’t know that I’ll get through all 129 questions and answers in 129 days—this isn’t a death march—but I expect I’ll post a Q&A most days. No doubt I’ll comment on some and not on others, and there will probably be more than a few times as well that I’ll quote one of the commentaries I have on the Heidelberg. (There are actually three on my shelves—Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s, the one Donald Bruggink edited, and the one by Zacharius Ursinus, who was one of the Heidelberg’s authors—which I suppose marks me out as the Reformed geek I am; the Kuyvenhoven was a gift from Hap back in college, which I suppose marks her out as perceptive.) One thing I haven’t figured out is how I want to handle the Scriptural footnotes; if I can find a way to include them that doesn’t look irritatingly intrusive to my eye, I will.