Josh — Safari works I see. Not familiar with Opera or IE. If anyone knows the fix email us at the usual place. I could add it to the list of annual maintainance items if it is easy to test.

Opera >9.0 and IE 8.o don’t display your comment numbers in sequence: every comment is labeled “1.”. Firefox is golden, and I’m not sure about Safari. FYI

Certainly, the expression could be used in the polemic of a specific debate, as an aspect of its rhetoric. The names of two or three 17th century Dutchman have been dredged up, though usually without very much of the context. Kepler (#23) claims the German pietists used it. Though I have not been able to verify this from reading Gawthrop, if they did so use it, it would have been part of their apologetic against the Orthodox party which they believed was dead.

Converting this particular debate rhetoric into a slogan to rally around points to an underlying Manichaeism coupled with skepticism: that adequate truth can never be known and settled. It does not appear to have been so used until liberalism (unless Kepler is right about the pietists).

I think the phrase has some value – in the sense of being continually responding to God’s transforming word. But not in the sense of recruiting the magisterial reformation into any church disagreement.

I haven’t seen the book myself (the only copy in existence that I know of is in the Amsterdam University library), and when I lived in Holland it was not something I was looking into, although it came up recently in work in a completely different context, which is why I have spent some time chasing it down.

But as for context…I suspect (and there is a great deal of evidence for this suspicion) that it originates out of the Federal vs. Puritan controversies of the 1650s and 60s. Koelman (who was of the ‘Puritan’ variety) likely was arguing that the Federal Theology of Johannes Coccejus was a form of heterodoxy (if not outright heresy) that needed “reforming” (read: purging).

Best guess.

Can you tell us some of the context for which he coined the phrase? I’m fantasizing, that rather than it being something like “let’s rethink the Trinity,” the conversation may have been something like:

“Gentlemen, I move that we change the tap in the church basement to Heinekken.”

“Outrageous! We’ve always used Grolsch.”

“Ja, but… ecclesia reformata semper reformanda.”

On a more serious note… has your research uncovered any Lutheran, Roman, or Eastern theologian that would refer to his own church as ecclesia reformata?

The *point* of the phrase (which is properly translated as ‘the church reformed and always reforming’) is that even though there had been a reformation, the church is *always* in danger of straying (and indeed does stray) and thus needs always to be called back to the Word of God. In this sense, ‘church’ does not mean specifically the “Reformed Church” but simply the Church of Christ on Earth.