October 2023 will be the seventieth anniversary of the doctrinal reformation of the Protestant Reformed Churches (PRC), known simply by the year in which it came to a head: 1953. Nineteen fifty-three was a doctrinal controversy in the PRC between two competing covenant views. It was a covenant controversy. The covenant is the doctrinal heritage of the Reformed churches. Always there are two views of the covenant: whether it is strictly unconditional or whether it is in some sense conditional. The covenant controversy that has always been among Reformed churches is simply a variation of the age-old controversy between salvation by man’s works and salvation by God’s grace. The controversy in the PRC broke out in the late forties and early fifties. In 1953 God used faithful ministers of the gospel, especially Herman Hoeksema and George Ophoff, to defend the truth of the covenant of grace as unconditional. It is not an exaggeration to say that that controversy defined the PRC post-1953 for good and evil.

Why is 1953 important and worth remembering? I emphasize that it is worth remembering. There are many in the PRC today, whose history this is, who do not believe that 1953 is worth remembering. There are many in the PRC who hate 1953. Either their families stayed in the PRC out of loyalty to the denomination and not because they believed Hoeksema’s doctrine, or they married into the PRC, or they are Protestant Reformed church members who are the products of their doctrinally indifferent parents who likewise loathed 1953. There are some who will remember 1953 in the same way that the Pharisees remembered the prophets: garnishing their tombs in a showy but empty sign of honoring the prophets, all the while being thankful that they had died.

Nineteen fifty-three is worth remembering because all truly Reformed people love the truth of God’s unconditional covenant, and that controversy was perhaps one of the most important in church history regarding that doctrine. If you love and have as your theology the unconditional covenant of grace, then you probably have 1953 to thank for that.

Nineteen fifty-three is worth remembering for the readers and supporters of Sword and Shield because the controversy about the covenant in 1953 simply could not have taken place apart from a free paper operated by an organization that was free from ecclesiastical control. Much of the significant writing during the controversy was done on the pages of the Standard Bearer. Friend and foe wrote in to the Standard Bearer, and a real battle unfolded on its pages. God used that doctrinal battle in a free paper to deliver the church from false doctrine and to preserve the truth in the churches.

I remember a Protestant Reformed minister who, in defense of keeping controversy off the pages of the Standard Bearer, complained that when the doctrinal issue of 1953 came to the broader assemblies that the issue had already been “cooked and dried,” in his pejorative terminology. That man hated a free paper, and he believed in censorship controlled by the supposed ecclesiastical experts, who also conveniently left the common people out and allowed a select few to control decisions behind the closed doors of the broader assemblies. A free paper allowed the doctrinal issue of 1953 to be aired and led the people along, so that everyone was well informed about what the issue was and where the sides were.

Sword and Shield exists because of that belief regarding a free paper and a free organization by the men who founded the magazine. The PRC hated that. In her effort to throw off the yoke of 1953, she also dispensed with free papers. The Standard Bearer was put into the hands of censors who hated the truth and the heritage of the Standard Bearer. They showed that hatred by their vicious and unbelieving responses to Sword and Shield, which represented a serious threat to their control of information and thus of the direction and outcome of the controversy in the PRC.

One wonders how the issues in the controversy of 2015 to 2021 in the PRC would have turned out had there been such a lively debate and battle in a free paper. But such is foolish thinking. Divisions must happen in order that those who are approved might be made manifest and those in whom God had no pleasure might be cut off. Surely, we can say with the prophet and the apostle, “God’s judgments are unsearchable, and his ways are past finding out.”

Further, 1953 is worth not only remembering but also worth studying and analyzing because the present-day Protestant Reformed denomination is the product of a rejection of 1953. To know Protestant Reformed doctrine, you must know the false doctrine of the heretics of 1953. The Reformed Protestant Churches of today really cannot be understood apart from 1953. God gave to the Reformed Protestant Churches not only 1953 but also an advance in understanding about the truth of the covenant that had not been emphasized as it should have been or had been overlooked or shunted aside in 1953 by those who were intent on bringing that false doctrine back into the Protestant Reformed Churches.

What is the difference between the Protestant Reformed Churches and the Reformed Protestant Churches? This is a question that some ask. Some ask it in unbelief to belittle the reformation of the churches that took place in 2021. Some ask it with a genuine desire to learn what the difference is. To know you must go back to 1953 and examine what Rev. Hubert De Wolf and his followers were really teaching, in their own actual words. Their words are haunting. They sound just like the PRC of today, only the ministers today are more subtle. The devil had learned his lesson, and he was not going to make the same mistake twice.

And so for these reasons and others that I have no space to recount, we remember 1953.

Perhaps God will yet use this issue of Sword and Shield to undo the bewitching spell that has been cast over many; perhaps to give those who have been heretofore cowardly new courage to forsake the lies that they have been taught; perhaps to take away the excuses of others, who have used those excuses to stay in a false church. Apart from these expectations, we hope that God will use this remembrance to give glory to his name and to give encouragement to those who confess the truths that were defended in 1953 and that are the doctrinal heritage of every truly Reformed believer.