Calvin didn’t belong to the first generation of reformers. When Luther preached his ninety-five theses at the church gate at Wittenberg Castle, Calvin was eight years old. When he began his work as a reformer, the First Great Battle of the Reformation had already taken place; Ulrico Zwinglio had already died five years ago; Martin Luther, though only fifty-two years old, was already an old man, ill of health and depressed in spirit; Filipe Melonchton was already showing signs of floating in the early principles of the Reformation. Martin Bucer, at the height of his abilities, worked fruitfully in Strasbourg, fighting large contingents to unite the forces of the Reformation in a common movement for the Gospel.
Calvin looked at Luther with the deepest reverence and happily called himself his disciple. He called him “the illustrious apostle of Christ, by whose work the purity of the gospel has been restored to this age. ” There had been rumors of reform before the Reformation in France as elsewhere. But it was not from the timid biblicism of LeFevre D’Etaples that Calvin received the gospel. Regardless of the means by which the gospel came to him, the source of his inspiration was in Luther. The more specific influences that made him precisely the reformer that he was were received insofar as he received them by human hand, not from Luther, but from Bucero. Martín Bucer did not make him a reformer. He had already fully started his renovations before contacting Bucer. Nor did Bucer give him the particular inclination that characterized his work as a reformer. This inclination was quite evident from the beginning of his reform work. We must recognize Calvin as an individual genius of the first order, who came to a broader and deeper understanding than Bucer himself had come. He had already found his main lines of work and had already suffered in their favor before approaching Bucer. But he found a spirit of genius in Bucer, with many of the same views, and from which he benefited greatly.
- He got from Bucer.
- For example.
- His way of declaring the great doctrine of predestination.
- All the great reformers believed in the doctrine of predestination.
- The Reformation.
- From the theological point of view.
- Was an Augustinian revival.
- His own heart rebelled against the idea of salvation that dominated and cursed the Middle Ages.
- A concept that established in man himself the turning point of his salvation.
- As a common saying goes: do your best and God will hear you.
- To be sure.
- What had to be done was kept to a minimum.
- Although troubled consciences knew there was nothing they could do about it.
- It was expressed as follows: you push the button and God will do the rest.
- But you always had to press the button.
- And that was a button that sinners couldn’t push! Therefore.
- The Middle Ages [that is.
- The Church of Rome] minimized sin.
- They taught that man.
- Without doubt.
- Was a sinner; but that he was not a great sinner.
- He was not so sinful that he could not actively cooperate with all the help that God could give him; that you couldn’t get your own salvation if God only gave you a little help in a timely manner.
It is against all this deadly doctrine of human ability and merit that the Reformation has taken a passionate position. He threw his dart, as Robert Browning says, directly at the head of this lie: it taught original sin and the corruption of the heart of man. Did you teach? And is that the essence of the whole question? salvation only by free grace; free grace, that is, absolutely free mercy from God, given not to those who have earned it, but to those who do not deserve it. Therefore, all the glory of sinful man’s salvation belongs to God, and man has nothing to boast of except God the Savior Himself. And when you teach free grace, absolutely free grace, and you do it constantly, you are for predestination. A grace that is given gratuitously, absolutely gratuitously, beyond all merit, of any kind, depends, of course, entirely on the will of the donor. So all the reformers were ardent in favor of predestination – Luther and Zwingli, and even Melanchthon, before they began to deviate from the purity of the gospel that he first taught so strongly. Did Calvin think that the way Luther and Zwingli taught predestination was a bit? not determined or assertive, right? speculative in form and perhaps thoughtless in expression. He liked the way Bucer put it better; a way of communicating it that says it all and says it all clearly and forcefully (isn’t it God’s saving truth?), but keeps the mind and heart fixed at all times on the glorious fact of what we speak. of the pure will of the merciful Father, who by his free grace saves sinners. Later, like Bucer, Calvin preached common Reformed Augustinianism in a superlatively practical way.
And here we touch on one of his main characteristics as a reformer. Calvin was a distinguished practical reformer. He was the greatest exegete of the time of the Reformation: he was the greatest theologian of the Reformation. And he was the practical genius of the Reformation. We are not saying that he was the practical genius of the Reformation, despite his scholarly commentaries and deep and deeply ingrained theology. It is better to say that it was due in large part to this. Calvin probably never did anything more practical than expounding Scripture every day with deep understanding and a clear, careful honesty of comments where he is second to none. And he certainly never did anything more practical than writing the Institutes of the Christian religion. Publishing this book was like raising the king’s banner in medieval Europe, so that all his subjects could rally around him. This work raised the flag to the top so that all men could see it and approach it. Did it finally provide a platform for Protestants who were attacked everywhere and very easily mistaken for the radicals of the time? the radicals who have undermined the very foundations of the Christian faith, upset the entire fabric of social order, and scandalized the most common dictates of ordinary decency. Its publication encountered a crisis and created an era; it gave new stability to Protestantism and expressed it to the world as a coherent system of grounded truth by which men can live and by which they can die with joy.
However, it was not only in achievements like these that Calvin’s practical genius became apparent. He conditioned all his work as a reformer and gave it his specificity. What he set out to do from the beginning was to organize and discipline Protestantism. Organization and discipline are the elements that distinguish an army from a crowd. In fact, Calvin found Protestantism like a mob and turned it into an army. This was his great achievement, the specific task entrusted to him by the reformists. Luther neither tried nor wanted to organize Protestants. He said that preaching the gospel was enough and that everyone would take care. However, that was not enough and everything else would not fix itself. Calvin, joining the Reform movement later, when there was confusion, realized that this was not enough. It may have been in your French blood; It could come from your legal education; it may have belonged to your individual genius. But when he arrived in Geneva as a young man of twenty-seven, he already came with his program of organization and discipline, and with an indomitable will to put it into practice. The Genoese did not want it. They kicked him out. He lived and worked for three good years in Strasbourg. So the Genoese brought him back. And he returned with the same program of organization and discipline, and with the same uncompromising will to put it into practice. It took fourteen years to do it, but it did. And the result was that Geneva became not only the wonder of the world, but fortunately the model of the reformed world; And because of his role model, in the true sense of the word, he is his savior and, with him, the savior, as the European Mark Pattison puts it.
We must bear in mind that the organization and discipline that Calvin introduced in Geneva was the organization and discipline of the church, not the city. The so-called “blue laws”? We’ve heard so much about it, Calvin didn’t introduce them to Geneva. He found them there. They were a heritage from the Middle Ages and were common in Geneva and all similar cities. These were civil ordinances, and Calvin, as a reformer, had nothing to do with them except how a good citizen does the part of the citizen to reduce them to rational and ethical coherence. What he introduced in Geneva was clearly the organization and discipline of the Church. The prevailing view among Protestants was that the function of the church was to preach the gospel and administer the sacraments, leaving the civil authorities to deal with crimes entirely. Calvin could not understand this point of view. The Church must not only preach the gospel, he said, but it must ensure that the gospel is lived among those who invent it. The only instrument by which this duty can be fulfilled is discipline. Spiritual discipline, of course; because the church is a spiritual body. Only spiritual sanctions can be imposed, resulting in exclusion from Church ordinances or excommunication. The real conflict in Geneva revolved around protecting the Lord’s Supper from unworthy participants. By establishing this ecclesial discipline in Geneva, Calvin signaled a rift between Church and State, the ultimate effect of which made him the father of the principle of a free Church in a free State.
The purification of the Church, of course, had its effect on the State. The yeast will leave the dough in which it is placed. A holy church tends to promote moral community, and it was not uncommon for Calvin to preach that among Christian duties is the duty of good citizenship. And, as a byproduct of Calvin’s work, Geneva became a remarkable moral community: the lavish laws became, unlike those of many around, solid and solid, and their execution became fair and honest. John Knox testifies to the result: “In other places I confess that Christ is preached, but customs and religion are so sincerely reformed that I have not seen anywhere else. ” And, from Geneva, the leaven spread and, by spreading, put moral health and vigor into the blood of the reformed world. It is not a coincidence that Lutheranism did not spread beyond the borders of Germany, except in northern Scandinavia. The vigor of Protestantism that he knew how to live by, that fought for its own ideals until its own death, found its expression in the Reformed churches. They paid the price of the battle. And so, looking at the map, you see the Reformed churches that surround the Lutheran churches with a protective wall. “Ask yourself,” says Dr. A. Kuyper, “what would have happened to Europe and America if the star of Calvinism had not suddenly appeared on the horizon of Western Europe in the 16th century? ? Would the great development of nations, as we see in Europe and America, have simply been avoided? The question remains forever whether the spirit of the Leipzig Provisional could have succeeded, through Romanized Protestantism, in returning Northern Europe to the influence of the old hierarchy. Professor Fruin rightly points out: “In Switzerland, France, Holland, Scotland and England, and where Protestantism needed to protect itself with the sword, it was Calvinism that won. victory thanks to her ”.
Luther directed the attack on the trenches; Calvin consolidated the victories. As far as we can see (we are talking about the human aspect), in the absence of both, today there would be no Protestantism.