Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (107 page)

The man who led Protestantism out of stagnation in the 1550s was an exiled French humanist legal scholar who had wandered Italy and Switzerland and ended up by accident in 1536 on the margins of the Swiss Confederation in the city of Geneva: John Calvin.
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He probably never liked Geneva very much, but he felt that God had sent him there for a purpose, and so he resigned himself to a dour struggle to stay there and lead God's work in the city. After one false start, he was thrown out of Geneva, but that gave him the chance to go to Bucer's Strassburg and see how a Reformation might be put into practice. When the Genevans faced chaos and in desperation called him back, he was ready to build a better Strassburg in Geneva. In a set of
Ecclesiastical Ordinances
which the city authorities ordered Calvin to draft in 1541, he put into practice a scheme to restructure the Church which Bucer had envisaged for Strassburg: a fourfold order, rather than the threefold traditional order of bishop, priest and deacon.
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Bucer had asserted that the New Testament described four functions of ministry, pastors, doctors, elders and deacons. Pastors carried out the general ministry of care of the laity exercised by medieval parish priests and bishops; doctors were responsible for teaching at all levels, up to the most searching scholarly investigations of the Bible. Together, pastors and senior doctors who were obviously close to them in ministry (notably Calvin himself) formed a Company of Pastors. Elders bore the disciplinary work of the Church, leading it alongside the pastors in a Church court called a consistory. It was government by committee; in other contexts, the committees were called presbyteries, so the system is generally labelled presbyterian. Calvin was not particularly worried about the forms that this fourfold system might take, as long as all its functions were properly carried out, but the next generation of 'Calvinists' tended to be more doctrinaire about forms than he was, and tried to copy exactly what had been done in Geneva - developing, for instance, a hostility to the office of bishop which Calvin himself never exhibited, and which other Reformed Churches, such as those of Zurich, Hungary/Transylvania and England/Ireland, did not share (see Plate 14).

It took Calvin years to secure the stability of his Reformation, but the Genevans never dared lose face by throwing him out a second time, and they were also shrewdly aware that he was good for business. He attracted talented foreign exiles to the city (and did his best to ensure that poor exiles were not a burden on city finances), while his writings and those of his friends sold dynamically through much of Europe and were the making of the city's new printing industry.
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In the end, one event which we might regard as tragic made Calvin's name on a European-wide scale. In 1553 he was faced with the arrival in Geneva of a prominent radical intellectual, an exile like himself, Michael Servetus from Spain, on his way to join secret sympathizers in Italy, and appearing with baffling rashness in public in Calvin's city. Servetus, with the Islamic and Jewish heritage of his country in mind, denied that the conventional notion of the Trinity could be found in the Bible; he had already been condemned by a Catholic inquisition as a heretic, with Calvin's connivance. Calvin saw his duty as clear: Servetus must die. So the Genevan city authorities burned Servetus at the stake, though Calvin wanted a more merciful death, such as beheading. Thus Calvin established that Protestants were as determined as Catholics to represent the mainstream traditional Christianity which had culminated in the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
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Consistently with this, from 1536 Calvin published and repeatedly rewrote a textbook of doctrine, the
Institution of the Christian Religion
- commonly known as the
Institutes
.
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This was designed to lay claim to Catholic Christianity for the Reformation: since the Pope obstructed the Reformation, he was Antichrist, and Protestants were the true Catholics. In greatly expanded later editions and the complete rearrangement which Calvin made in 1559 not long before his death, virtually all the original text is still there. The opening sentence was never displaced, though Calvin enlarged its scope from a reference simply to 'sacred [i.e. Christian] doctrine' to all human knowledge; so in the 1559 version it reads, 'Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves'.
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From this premise, Calvin leaps to another assumption fundamental to his book from 1536 onwards: scrutinizing ourselves honestly after contemplating God is bound to shame us. None of our capacities can lift us from this abyss in our fallen state, only an act of free grace from God. This is Augustine restated, the Luther of the
Slavery of the Will
.

For Calvin this 'double knowledge' (
duplex cognitio
) lay at the heart of Catholic Christianity, and it became his life's work to recall his beloved France to a real version of the Catholic Church. Over time, he came to explain the failures of the Reformation by reference to a doctrine which Luther had also held, but which many of his fellow Lutherans followed Melanchthon in finding difficult and downplayed: God's plan of predestination. After reading Bucer's commentary on Romans of 1536, Calvin discussed this in increasing intricacy in the
Institutes
' enlargements. If salvation was entirely in God's hands, as Luther said, and human works were of no avail, then logically God took decisions on individual salvation without reference to an individual's life-story. God decided to save some and logically also to consign others to damnation. Predestination was thus double. Evidently those who did not listen to and act on the Word were among the damned; that lessened the sense of disappointment that not all heeded the Reformation message. The good news was that the elect of God could not lose their salvation. The doctrine of election became ever more important, and ever more comforting and empowering, to Calvin's followers.

But there was much more to Calvin than expounding predestination. He never received ordination from either old or new Church, but his self-image was as teacher (
Doctor
), and he relentlessly preached and wrote biblical commentary around the ever-growing
Institutes
. Central to his vision of a renewed Catholic Church based on the achievement of the early centuries was the Council of Chalcedon's careful crafting of the 'Chalcedonian Definition'. Christ was one person in two natures inextricably linked - God the Son and so fully part of the Divine Trinity, while at the same time Jesus the human being, born in Palestine. Chalcedon had a particular significance for magisterial Protestants, who saw it as the last general council of the Church to make reliable decisions about doctrine in accordance with the core doctrines proclaimed in scripture - they were all the more inclined to respect the early councils because radicals rejected that legacy (see p. 624). The careful balance of statements within the Chalcedonian Definition, with its emphasis on the indivisibility of the two natures of Christ, gave Calvin a model for a general principle which became very important to him: distinction but not separation (
distinctio sed non separatio
).

This was the perfect model to be used by this theologian so consciously striving for a newly purified and balanced Catholicism for the Western Church. It can be seen, for instance, in Calvin's discussion of the Church - both visible and invisible - or of election - both general for the Church (as it had been for the Children of Israel) and particular for elect individuals (such as great Patriarchs like Abraham). Above all, it structures what Calvin says about the Eucharist. He made a firm distinction between 'reality' and 'sign' which nevertheless would not separate them completely. The old Church betrayed this principle by confusing reality and sign, attributing to the signs of bread and wine worship which was only due to the reality behind them. Luther, Calvin felt, had also wrongly attributed to the signs what was only true of the reality: in particular when Luther asserted that the physical body and blood of Christ were capable of being everywhere (
ubique
) wherever the Eucharist was being celebrated in the world - a Lutheran doctrine called ubiquity, which Calvin devoted a substantial section in the final version of the
Institutes
to ridiculing. He thought on the other hand that Zwingli had separated sign and reality too much, and emphasized that 'in the sacraments the reality is given to us along with the sign'.
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In the Eucharist, God does not come down to us to sit on a table; but through the sign of the breaking of bread and taking of wine, he draws us up to join him in Heaven. It is the idea proclaimed in the ancient exhortation of the Latin Mass, 'Lift up your hearts' (
Sursum corda
).
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Calvin devoted much effort to seeking the middle ground among Protestants, as part of his plan to replace papal Catholicism by something that he saw as being more authentically Catholic. He was saddened by the division between the Swiss and Lutheran loyalists over the Eucharist, which seemed particularly lunatic at the time of Protestant defeats by Charles V in the Schmalkaldic Wars. Working with Heinrich Bullinger, he forged a statement in 1549 which has become known as the
Consensus Tigurinus
('Zurich Agreement').
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With its commitment to creating forms of words which could be understood slightly differently by different people, it represented a rare moment of statesmanship in the sixteenth-century religious divides, and as such, it failed to satisfy Lutherans fiercely guarding Luther's theological legacy: they stuck as strongly as the Pope himself to the proposition that body and blood of Christ were present in the eucharistic bread and wine. As a result, the mid-century attempt to unite Protestantism against the Roman menace only resulted in a deeper divide among Protestants.

Self-conscious Lutherans increasingly directed Protestantism in Germany and Scandinavia and most German-speaking communities in eastern Europe (see Plate 55). After many internal disputes about who was being most true to Luther's legacy, they sealed the boundaries of Lutheran identity by a Formula of Concord in 1577, confirmed by a Book of Concord in 1580. Its version of Luther's own beliefs was selective, and not unconnected to the unspoken thought about certain key points of theology that if Calvin was for them, developed Lutheranism should be against them, regardless of whether Luther might have concurred with Calvin.
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One carved plaque from a house in Wittenberg, now ruefully exhibited in the museum of Luther's home, bluntly (and indeed ungrammatically) proclaims: GOTTES WORT UND LUTHERS SCHRIFT / IST DAS BABST UND CALVINI GIFT - 'The Word of God and Luther's writing are poison for the Pope and Calvin'. The hatred was not on the whole symmetrical: as time went on, the Reformed sponsored a number of efforts at reunion, galvanized by the increasing effectiveness of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, but the habitual response among Lutherans was offensive and verbose rejection.
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Elsewhere, the powerful prose and driving intellectual energy of Calvin's
Institutes
inspired a variety of Churches who felt that Luther's Reformation had not gone far enough. Other major theologians lined up with Calvin against dogmatic Lutheranism, often regretting the division, but seeing little other option: such figures as the exiled Polish bishop Jan Laski (Johannes a Lasco to Latin-speakers trying to get their tongue round Polish consonants), the one-time star preacher of Italy Peter Martyr Vermigli (see pp. 658-62), or the charismatic wandering Scot John Knox. More cautiously, the older established Swiss Protestant Churches made common cause with Calvin. In the Palatinate, an important principality of the empire whose Elector-Prince Friedrich III came to sympathize with the Reformed cause, an international team of Reformed scholars drew up a catechism (a statement of doctrine for teaching purposes) like the
Consensus Tigurinus
, designed to unite as many Protestants as possible. Known as the Heidelberg Catechism, since Heidelberg was the Elector Palatine's capital and home to the university where it was created, it had wide influence from its publication in 1563.
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Three years later, in 1566, Bullinger drew up a statement, the 'Second Helvetic Confession', with the same agenda of unity, which also won widespread acceptance. Reformed Christianity saved the Reformation from its mid-century phase of hesitation and disappointment. Lutheranism tended to remain frozen in German-speaking and Scandinavian cultures; Reformed Christianity spread through a remarkable variety of language groups and communities, partly because so many of its leading figures had the same experience as Calvin, finding themselves forced to leave their native lands and to proclaim their message in new and alien settings.

REFORMED PROTESTANTS, CONFESSIONALIZATION AND TOLERATION (1560-1660)

During the 1560s Reformed Christianity brought militancy and a rebellious spirit to the magisterial Reformation. Like Luther, Calvin was a theologian of Romans 13.1 - of obedience. Yet as he built his Church in Geneva, he was much more careful than Luther or Zwingli to keep Church structures separate from the existing city authorities. He had a clear vision of God's people making decisions for themselves: his Church had a mind of its own over and against temporal power, just as much as the old Church of the Pope. In Geneva this was not a problem, after Calvin had clawed his way to political dominance, because Church and temporal power were in general agreement, but elsewhere people might take up Calvin's blueprint for Church structures and ignore what the magistrate wanted or ordered. To Calvin's alarm, he found that in the Netherlands, Scotland and France, he had sponsored movements of revolution, people inspired by the thought that they were the elect army of God whose duty was to take on Antichrist.