of the most fundamental of Protestant commitments, namely, that Scripture—not tradition, not even the Reformed tradition—is the final rule of faith and practice. I like to say that the whole project is an effort to drag conservative Reformed churches, all kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century, the century of ecclesiology.1 With this little book, unpolished and polemical, narrow and hurried, I hope to drag us all a few more inches.
Page x