Getting field from code
Solved that! I should have gone a bit deeper in the Date source code.

The solution is this line:

$render_field_date = field_view_value('node', $node, 'field_date', $field_date[0], array('type' =&gt; 'date_default', 'settings' =&gt; array('format_type' =&gt; 'medium') ) );