I was just reading I Corinthians, and came across that sweet little clause from the Apostle in 4:6; you know: “… so that in us you may learn not to exceed what is written,…” Now in context, presumably, the Apostle is making a defense for his Apostleship in contrast to the false teaching and pseudo-Apostles who had crept into the church at Corinth. But there is a great principle here, and one that fits well with what it means to truly work within the ‘spirit’ of the reformed faith (and it is Barth who identifies this distinction of being in the ‘spirit’ of the reformed faith rather than the ‘letter’ which we all know too much of today, esp. in North America); the principle might be: that as Christians we are to sit under, in a ministerial way, (V. a magesterial way pace Luther) Holy writ, and understand our posture, mode, and identity in relation to the dynamic reality that Scripture finds its source and sense from as it breaks off in its reality and power in Jesus Christ. This can often result in confession making, and in the history of the Reformed church, it has. But if Scripture is Christ’s delegate by the Spirit in our lives, then this always remains a dynamic and lively thing; it should never result in the absolutization of set of confessions or catechisms; it should never result in the repristination of a particular period of church history as the golden age, thus producing a golden guild of biblical interpreters. Scripture breaks off, it is not the end, but comes garbed in the ordained language of the end, the Alpha & Omega, Jesus Christ. Karl Barth writes of this reality well, here:

The Reformed confession points beyond itself. Its center of gravity, if not in fact its very content, is not in itself but rather beyond itself. Faith confesses. But it does not confess itself, but what is written. In the Reformed church, confession is in its entirety “testimony” [testificatio], a pointing toward. The object itself is and remains something other, a second thing, something encountered outside oneself. This other issues a demand toward the person, which is a power, a power that is a demand, a humiliation that is a knowing, and a knowing that is a humiliation. One has called the Reformed church the church of the formal principle of the Reformation, the principle of Scripture . . . [Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, 38–9 in Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church, eds. Myk Habets and Bobby Grow, 7.]

For me, personally, I am less interested in making sure everyone knows that I work as a reformed theologian, and instead would rather be known as someone who simply loves Jesus Christ, his word-enriched testimony (i.e. Scripture), his people (the body of Christ), and his people (the World for whom he pledged his life). But the principle is an important one for me; both the Apostle Paul understood its importance (as he applied it in a certain way), as does the Reformed faith (simpliciter), as did Karl Barth (as a Reformed theologian). We work within the bounds of Scripture and its reality, or we work as anonymous Christians (which there is no such thing).