John Calvin

John Calvin

In 1544 John Calvin wrote a letter to the Emperor Charles V to be presented at the Imperial Diet at Spires. In that letter he defended the work of Luther and the Reformation and identified a number of corruptions that necessitated reform “without delay.” This was a call for reform in both “doctrine and the Church.”

For Calvin it was not only the doctrines taught in Scripture that he cared about but also the government of the church. Rome had become “a species of foul and insufferable tyranny” led by one man, the pope, and located in one place, Rome. It was this centralisation of the “vaunted power of the Church” that Calvin said was “leading men like sheep to the slaughter.” The apostolic commission to take Christ freely to the nations was replaced by a “tyrant [who] ever so monstrously abused the patience of his subjects as to insist that everything he proclaimed should be received as a message from heaven.” The gospel had lost its simplicity and the worship of God its universal application.

The church was only recognized as it appeared in the external form prescribed by the leadership at Rome. Ironically, the Roman Catholic Church had ceased to be catholic.

Gene Osterhaven wrote:

The Reformation was needed and continues to be needed because of the lack of catholicity in the church. The Reformers’ work was necessary because the church had become too “Roman” in some areas, and too “Greek” in others. The church was no longer “catholic,” or universal, in its breadth, outlook, and teachings, but had become provincial and errant. The Reformers sought to restore it to true catholicity. (The Spirit of the Reformed Tradition, Eerdmans, 1971)

In his reform of the church, Calvin was careful to retain the word Catholic and he was known as “the most catholic of the Fathers of the Church in the Reformation era.” The entire fourth book of his Institutes is a treatment “Of the Holy Catholic Church.” With the pure ministry of the Word and the true celebration of the sacraments, Calvin concluded that “we may safely recognize a church in every society.”

For Calvin, Reformation meant more than theological exactness and purity of worship. To be truly “separated unto the gospel” Calvin and the Reformers realized that they had to step outside the box of cultural and sectarian traditions if the church was going to be recognized “in every society.”

This is an important little phrase—“in every society”—and I have to wonder sometimes if we have followed Calvin’s model for the New Testament Church or have we returned to the provincialism condemned by our Reformed forebears.

We speak today of churches from a particular country or culture—“black,” “Hispanic,” “Dutch,” etc., and we speak of denominations more in terms of little ecclesiastical subcultures. We get comfortable within our own cultural and sectarian mold and often make that the standard for all Christendom. The spirit of the Reformers was the spirit of catholicity, and the spirit of catholicity is the spirit of moderation and accommodation.

I recognize that today’s church is more complex than the church in 1544 and I am not saying we need to abandon denominationalism—that is a subject for another day. What we do need at the very least, however, is to consider the church outside of our own cultural traditions and personal inclinations.

We need to hold the truth resolutely but with a love that will recognize, respect, and rejoice in the catholicity of the church.