Why review something 32 pages long and 464 years old and available in English for some fifty years? Entitled The Necessity of Reforming the Church, this little winged arrow of a treatise still retains a pugnacious air about it. Conceivably we could make good use of it in a class on the church. If you did, however, you would have a choice to make. You could use it to decry the errors of the medieval church. That would be an easy way to do it. Or, you could actually lift the basic reforming principles out of their sixteenth century context, turn them around, and use them as criteria for measuring our own churches. That would require more fortitude. I cannot help but think, however, that the latter would reflect more of Calvin’s own concern.
When the dissension among these reformers and their churches became more than Emperor Charles V could bear, he decided to do something that would be completely plausible to us. He summoned what we might call a task force. Its mission was to work out a plan for, well, peace, unity, and purity in the church. (What can history teach us?) Would such a plan work? Calvin had his doubts. Not one to leave things with loose ends, however, Calvin dashed off an overnight to Charles V. In it he highlighted two basic areas of concern and skipped most of the smaller ones. We can only imagine what the emperor thought when the post arrived while he was drinking his imperial cup of coffee.
There were basically two ways to approach change in the church then, pretty much as there are today. One was to peer more deeply into the traditional doctrines and rediscover their value. The other was to skip this old approach, put into effect some more progressive ideas from recent scholastic debates, and get on with it. Calvin’s approach as a reformer, interestingly enough for us, was to follow the older pattern. You can see this in the way in which he refers to his predecessors like Bernard, Augustine, etc. Calvin and others like him, to use a metaphor, place some of the major doctrines on the table, gazed down into them through a sort of spiritual loupe and discovered that they are full of light. To push this even further, Calvin spent little time on the semi-precious gems. He went for the significant diamonds, the core realities of the church.
Calvin’s approach is receiving a lot of attention these days. When Richard Lovelace wrote Dynamics of Spiritual Life in 1979 he turned attention to what he called “live orthodoxy.” And then when Thomas C. Oden wrote The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in 2005 he added this mea culpa confession, “Once blown by every wind of doctrine and preoccupied with therapeutic fads amid the spirit of hyper toleration, I became fascinated with the social dynamics of orthodoxy.” (p. 89).
Worship had become for Calvin the area in which the living God directly encountered people and called forth from them the deepest human response possible. It was not a comfort zone. It was a highly dynamic situation, perhaps one difficult for us to imagine today. It was, thus, the context in which God uprooted the familiar and called for complete honesty. It was not show time.
The further Calvin got into this, the more he realized that our words really mattered. They could serve a humble, deeply felt response to God’s own Word or they could be ritualized into what he called in The Institutes “theatrical trifles.” So as he focused on the significance of worship and the reality of our life with Christ, he challenged people then, as he does now, to reconsider what we say when we speak about God.
Calvin’s critique of worship was empowered by his conviction that God’s Word not only dictated the form of worship but that it should remain the driving force in worship. This meant that all concentration should be directed to it. Nothing should be added to services that might distract our attention from the Word.
This would be painful, he understood, because we like to embellish our services with the rituals and the responses that are pleasing to us. Calvin’s question, of course, was whether they were pleasing to God. It was the issue of self-distraction, however, that brought all of this to focus. We try to hide within liturgical responses because we sense that God is not likely to come looking for us there. Nor are our real sins brought to mind in such rites. They are, as Calvin put it, subterfuges in which we distract our minds and hide from God. When this happens, as it frequently does, our liturgical customs themselves become our idols. Our inclination to distract ourselves and our neighbors and to turn as far away as possible from the humbling character of the Word became to Calvin the major source of sickness in the church.
Could this cold-sounding judgment be in fact an accurate assessment of our own practices? One wonders. Calvin certainly had his own firmly held liturgical convictions. Does all of this then imply that Calvin’s own mind held unresolved tensions about such matters? Great minds often do hold complex thoughts and rarely do they become as simple as we would like. It becomes a case of looking carefully at their most penetrating observations.
Calvin’s observations in brief works like this one are valuable because they become more acute. They are not overdeveloped in reaction to the controversies of the time. Thus Calvin’s perception that we hide within our customary worship talk strikes home. Our words are so settling in themselves that we become quite comfortable with them over time. But, Calvin would ask, are they clearing space in our hearts where we are confronted by the Word of God? Do they open or close the doors to deeper realities?
Let’s pause over the near universal Presbyterian response, drawn from Anglo Catholic ways of framing Scripture in its own lockdown, “The Word of the Lord … Thanks be to God.” Reverential and communal, certainly, but does such a rote response acknowledge that august moment in which God’s Spirit drives his truth down into the depths in which our sins are still stored? Words spoken too frequently may provide a barrier that rarely lets either ecstatic joy or the fear of the Lord to have their way with us. Where does deep remorse go, we can ask, when we cap it off too quickly?
Then, as though to reverse directions, Calvin refers to three concepts that we can normally let slide gently through our minds. Calvin’s point seems to be, however, that three ideas like these should not be mere orthodox doctrinal formulas. Only when they become open to us and radiant with new light will we really know what reformation means. So, in the heart of this treatise he places these diamonds: Christ’s power to purify and restore, the significance of prayer, and the cluster of Pauline concepts — propitiation, expiation, and the righteousness of Christ. None of this is added as a kind of theological preamble, as we sometimes see in proposals to reform the church. Calvin urges us to accept it as an experiential reality, thus setting loose a movement that led in time to the great Puritan theologians and preachers. Was Calvin sending in this way a rhetorical signal that reformation involves the recovery of the Biblical salvation vocabulary and the renewal of the experience that it represented? If so, we may not know how to receive it yet.
Calvin, like ourselves in some ways, was only half finished in his reform of the church’s worship. Nevertheless, his treatise helps us to look more thoroughly at the basic issues. He was absolutely right in teaching us that words matter. They open and they close. They become redundant when we are afraid. And then, their most intrinsic value is that they lead into authentic places where our hearts become bound to Christ. Calvin assures us that our reformation is not over yet.
Richard A. Ray is a former pastor, professor, and managing director/editor of John Knox Press. He currently resides in western North Carolina and is general editor of the Kerygma Bible Studies. He has served as a director, and president, of the Board of Directors of The Presbyterian Outlook Foundation.
