Grand Rapids Calvin Conference: Session Ten

Dr. Derek W. H. Thomas: Calvin on Reforming the Church

Originally from Wales, Derek Thomas is the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi and Editorial Director of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals responsible for the Reformation21 Blog.  After pastoring for 17 years in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Dr. Thomas came to the USA in 1996 where, in addition to his work at the seminary, he serves as the minister of teaching at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.

Revelation 2:1-17

This is a difficult assignment for many reasons, partly because there is so much to say about Calvin and the reform of the church and what that might mean for us today and there is no way of saying any of it without treading on so many sensitive toes. However, our commitment to the Reformation and to the word of God means nothing if we are not committed to the reform of the church. The church in the 21st Century is in need of reformation no matter what branch of the church we may be speaking of.

I have a potpourri of information – not “popery” - of things I want to say. Because this a conference on Calvin I thought I would confine myselfy to “Five Points” (laughter).

Calvin wrote two important treatise’s – one is a tract and one is a treatise. In 1543 he had returned from his exile in Strausborg, an exile which he regarded as Heaven and not as an exile. In 1543 was the infamous Diet of Spires and Calvin writes what is in effect an apologia – a defense of the Reformation: “On the Necessity of the Reformation of the Church.” It answers a fundamental question: “Why is the Reformation necessary?”

Calvin begins that treatise by pointing to two objects as the focus of reformation:

1. Of the mode in which God is duly worshipped – the Reformation is necessary because worship needs to be reformed. God needs to be worshipped in accord with the way in which He has revealed. We live in a world of worship wars, sadly. Nothing divides my class more than worship. Some of the questions that we ask in regards to methods – the how of worship – divides us.

The Reformation is revlevant because it addresses the worship wars. You might have expected the answer to the question to be “justification by faith” or some side swipe against the Pope of Rome, or how a man is made right with God.

2. The source from which salvation is to be obtained. The first thing is worship. The second thing is justfication. For Calvin, if we don’t know how to approach God in worship then everything else falls apart.

Five years later in 1548 Calvin writes a polemical tract: The True Method of Reforming the Church. More akin to what you might have expected. It calls upon the church to reject all popish rites and ceremonies, and all forms not true to Scripture, to reject what Calvin calls the “Nicodemites,” those who are only half-hearted in Reformation. His friend Philiip Melancthon receives a rebuke, urging the church to pursue the path of duty even if it costs you your life. “It is impossible to be reconciled to popery.” Typical tract of the 16th Century with regard to the methodolgy of reforming the church.

How do we address this issue? We could talk about Calvin’s great desire to catechise the church. The people were untaught, uneducated, still attending Catholic masses in their hearts even if they were going into church buildings that called themselves Protestant.

We could talk about the way in which Calvin introduced into Geneva a Friday night meeting of ministers to talk about preaching and doctrince and pastoral issues. It was one of the most important things that Calvin did in the reformation of the church in Geneva. Many of the ministers in Geneva were former Roman Catholics who couldn’t preach out of a paper bag. Calvin dismissed most of them. There was this enormous need for the continuing education of ministers.

We could talk about the academy and the place of the academy.  About 6 years before Calvin died Calvin established tha academy for training men not just for ministry but for education in law and business. Education and teaching is a vital area of the church and the spread of the Reformation. The missionary movement begins with Calvin and Geneva. Hundreds of men sat in the academy in Geneva and then go back to their native lands (i.e., John Knox) and spread the Reformed faith.

The Five Points

1. A Commitment to the Gospel. For Calvin reformation meant a constant commitment to the gospel; to justification by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, the hinge on which the whole gospel turns, Calvin says. In opposition to Roman Catholic theology that saw salvation as piecemeal as a treadmill observing the seven sacraments of the church. Calvin maintained that salvation is to be obtained through self-abandoning faith placed in Christ and in God’s authenticating word, the Scriptures. This gospel emphasizes five solas: faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone. This is Calvin’s gospel. For Calvin that meant emphaszing the doctrine of justification: the OLD perspective on justification, not the new perspective in justification.

I am absolutely convinced that at the heart of any view of justification other than the Reformation view lies the damning indictment of works and self-effort. If we are made right with God by joining the community of the faithful, aligning ourselves with the faith and receiving the sacraments – which is what the new perspectives is teaching – that you are justified by joining the church, this is no different than the Roman Catholic view of justification.

If you introduce into the idea of justification that we are credited as believers with righteousness by something that we do, we are altogether lost.

For Calvin this meant addressing the issue of the gospel matrix. We must insure that in no place in our acceptance by God is the inclusion of works. God has set his love upon us from the foundation of the world apart from any consideration of works or merit. God loves us despite our sin and rebellion.

Is this a license to antinomianism? If you have never had that thought you have never understood the doctrine of justification, which is exactly the issue Paul addresses in Romans 5-6. Apart from inerrancy there is no more important issue in the church today than the doctrine of justification. We cannot be unclear in our answer to how a man or a woman is saved.

Some say that the Reformation doctrine of justification applies principles from the 16th Century rather than the 1st Century. I have two minutes before I die, tell me how I can be saved? What must a man do to be saved? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved.” I have heard answers that would take PhD dissertations to unravel.

Calvin’s crucial and important insight into the third use of the law that sanctification is the evidence of our justification, that we are not justified by works. We are justified by faith alone, but that faith is never alone. It is always accompanied by works. We must be clear as to the place of the law in the Christian life and in sanctification. We hear too much of the use of the term “legalism” in a way that is unbiblical and unreformed.

2. A commitment to preaching unto the means of grace. You can’t think about Calvin without thinking of the importance of preaching in the reformation of the church.

Beza tells us what his pattern was – two sermons on Sunday, with catechism in between, every other week preaching  M-F and the next week preaching on Wednesday. In the course of ten days he preached 14 sermons. For every Lord’s Supper, there were ten sermons. If we can have ten times as much preaching as the observance of the Lord’s supper, we have the right balance.

In 1549 Geneva did an important thing, seeing that Calvin’s sermons were not only important for Geneva but for the world. They appointed a stenographer to take down every word of Calvin in shorthand. 2,300 sermons were taken down. We only have 1,500 of them now. 800 were lost in the 19th Century libraries in Europe as they emptied their basements and sold the original manuscripts to buy paper. 66 of 2 Cor, 46 on 1 & 2 Thess, and almost all on the Minor Prophets were all lost. 4 of these sermon manuscripts on Isaiah were sold at Sotheby’s just a few years ago. We have 872 sermons transcribed from French.

Calvin comes back to Geneva from exile in 1542 to the council to deliver some papers, walks from council to Cathedral St Piere and he picks up exactly where he left off three years before. No more profound statement about what ministry is and what reformation means than what Calvin did at that point. He had come to preach the word of God. He could have harangued the people. He could have asked for anything. Instead, he preached the word of God. It was a commitment to continual preaching through books, expositorally through books of the Bible. He believed that the Bible is the word of God, given in its present form by the hand of God. It is a commitment to the truth that the Bible is inspired and inerrant, not just in its general details but in its precise details (nouns, verbs, etc.). You search in vain for padding, for stories, for illustrations in Calvin’s preaching. “What good would it do if we were here half a day and I expounded half a book and without regard to your benefit I had speculated in the air, you would return to your house as you were and this would profane the word of God and it would have no use among us.”

The French of Calvin’s preaching was very simple. He never quotes except from memory. He never quotes from the Institutes. It is direct speech full of interrogatives – engaging the mind of the listener – full of the word of God. It’s not like the preaching of the Puritans. Calvin is committed to exposition, to the Bible, and to the God of the Bible.

On the Lord’s Day he preached on the Gospels. During the week he preached from the OT.

In his first sermon on the Book of Job Calvin said, “It is a great thing to be subject to the majesty of God.”

3. A commitment to worship. Typical worship in Geneva (late 1540s, early 1550s). Reformation has come 20 years earlier. Many of the worshippers would now nothing about Protestant worship, except that they are not Catholic anymore. In the Consitory – a group of ministers and laypeople – met to engage in issues of church discipline. In the minutes appears the charge of “babbling.” A lady would be in church and in the middle of the service she sat muttering, talking to herself or to God, but not listening anymore to the sermon or enaging with others. In a typical medieval mass, before the Reformation, what would you have done? The mass was all said in Latin. Hardly anyone understood Latin. It was said in the Basilicaian fashion with the backs of the priest to the congregation, so they couldn’t hear, with terrible acoustics, with an echo, and certain locations where it was impossible to hear. So you drift to what you did in the medieval mass, where it was a drama you didn’t participate in. So you “babbled,” you said the Hail Mary. These people were brought before the Consitory to be confronted with their behavior.

The greatest change in worship that the Reformation brought was worship was something every did. It was said in your own language. You took part in it. You sang the Psalms sung to Genevan “jigs” composed especially for the worship of God.

Let me say as a caveat here, there are some in our circles who are rightly concerned about worship – the modalities of worship. Scripture reading and prayer have almost entirely disappeared from our worship. Some think that the answer to that is a return to “maximal liturgy.” That what we need is liturgy and lots of it. I do not believe that’s where Calvin, or the Reformation on the whole, is. Reformation does not come from a return to maximal liturgy. What we do must be done because their is a reason for it.

Calvin believed in the regulative principle of worship precisely the way it is defined in the Westminister Confession. That God is to be worshipped in accord with the principles He himself has laid down. I disagree with J. I. Packer when he says that regulative worship is an invention of the Puritans. We lift up our hearts to commune with the body of Christ that sits at the right hand of God by the secret power of the Holy Spirit.

Of what did Calvin’s liturgy consist? You preach the Bible. You read the Bible. You pray the Bible. You sing the Bible. And you see the Bible in the Sacraments. It is Bible-centered, Word-centered from beginning to end. It would be hugely profitable for us to have a look at Calvin’s liturgy. Reform and Revival do not come from liturgy.

4. Commitment to the Church. “He who has God as his father has the church as his mother.” That sounds Catholic, I thought the first time I had heard it. This is in fact a statement of Cyrian, the importance of the church as the mother of believers, the corporate diminsion of the church.

Calvin can be surprisingly accom0dating. Calvin’s 1555 letter to the English exiles about the Anglican exiles about inconsistencies in liturgy.

The way we exercise the Lord’s supper today promotes isolationism: the germophobia of our age has promoted this. It undermines what Paul is syaing about the one cup and the one loaf we break, and the symbolism of the oneness of the unity of the body of Christ, we have wholly given in to 21st Century individualism. The answer to a lot of our psychological ills lies in the community we share in the body of Christ. The young, restless, and reformed need to see this. We must stress in practical ways the importance of the unity of the body of Christ.

Discipline as a mark of the church. Calvin seems not to emphasize discipline. However, for Calvin, discipline was a subcategory of preaching.

5. Commitment to Piety. Summa Pietas, the sub-title of one of the first editions of the Institutes, not necessarily by way of contrast to Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Summa Pietas was a sum of how theology impacts the heart and the life. A pure and true zeal which loves God altogther as father. Calvin is talking to some women, a letter to some women facing martydom in Paris and it is summarized in this point: there is no more powerful preaching, conveying of the truth of the gospel, than your commitment and zeal even to death.

That’s what reformed meant for Calvin: being so in love with God and Jesus Christ that it’s everything. It’s not a hobby. It’s my life. Everything.  My all in all. Islam produces people who areprepared to kill. Christianity produces people who are prepared to die. That’s Calvin: that we are so in love with Jesus Christ that we are ready to die.