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If John Calvin walked into your church on a Sunday morning,
slightly after worship began, taking a spot in one of the back
pews, you probably would be more than a little surprised.
 It wouldn’t simply be the strange attire — that black robe
with the fur collar and the funny black cap — nor the long,
pointy, odd-looking beard. The back pew? That wouldn’t
surprise you; what would you expect from someone who
helped to make Presbyterians what they are today? What
would surprise you, mostly, would be your guest’s extremely
advanced age. It isn’t every day that a nearly 500-year-old visitor pays a visit — not to mention one rumored to
have died about 444 years ago.
He would no doubt listen and watch the goings-on of
worship with excruciatingly close attention. Here, you
would guess, is someone with a stake in all this. The
air of rapt concentration might elicit some anxiety, with
congregants nodding and whispering to one another, “Yes,
I’m pretty sure it’s him.” (He would know, of course, that
for many, “him” would mean John Knox. He hates that. It
happens all the time. Presbyterians who can’t keep their
Johns straight. Knox, of course, was Scottish. Your visitor
was thoroughly French. He spent a long time serving as
pastor of the church of Geneva, just outside France’s
boundaries. He spent absolutely no time in Scotland. He
wouldn’t be caught dead in a kilt. But we digress.)
You, naturally, would remember your visitor as one of
those revolutionaries of Christian faith of the sixteenth
century who came to be called “reformers.” The
revolutionary task to which he dedicated his life and
ministry was a complete overhauling of Christian practice.
He worked to free the church from its bondage to what
passed for conventional wisdom (also known as the
traditional teaching of the church) so that Christians might
more directly hear God speaking to them through the
Scriptures. This was revolutionary work, because it involved
a radical shift away from a hierarchical model of the church
and a move toward empowering the laity. But it also
placed heavy demands on pastors and laity, because of the
requirement that everyone in the church know the Scriptures
and what they teach and seek to live lives that show the
impact of that knowledge.
What does he think as he observes your congregation?
You look around the sanctuary for clues, trying to see things
as he might. You peruse the order of service. What will
he make of twenty-first-century Presbyterian worship? It appears to emphasize our deep connection with and need for
God and God’s grace in Christ Jesus. Confession of sin and announcement of forgiveness feature prominently, early in
worship. The preaching of the Word occupies a central place.
The conclusion of worship emphasizes our need to respond to
God’s grace with thankful service in the world. All this should
be familiar and reassuring to your guest, whose own worshipleading
modeled exactly this dynamic of the renewal of our
lives for the glory of God and the service of neighbor.
Then your eyes take in the tasteful stained-glass windows.
Well, here we have a minor deviation from your visitor’s prescription for worship space. A spur to idolatry — that’s
how he will see the sequence of images. You will just have
to convince him that these images are not in any
way commanding the congregation’s attention as objects
of worship. They haven’t displaced the preaching of
God’s good news and they aren’t substituting humanly
manufactured images for God’s own message to God’s
people. Good luck with that.
It happens to be confirmation Sunday, and a group of young
people who have completed a yearlong confirmation course
come forward to be recognized by the congregation and
to be received as active members of the church. Is that
a smile creeping across our friend’s face? Education was
something he valued highly. Yet he was critical of Christian
parents whose only concern was that their children “have
some three words of Latin ... and make a fair appearance
toward the world.” The foundation of all learning, he
thought, was to become acquainted with God: “When we
have worked to instruct our children in faith and the right and
pure understanding of God and God’s truth, their life must
necessarily respond.” 1
Do we detect a look of puzzlement on his face as the rite
ends? The children gave brief statements confessing their
faith, but there was no close examination in evidence. No
one seemed to have memorized a catechism, either in whole
or in part. The pastor-teacher of Geneva, who put such
stock in grounding understanding of the faith through rote
memorization of a basic summary of belief, appears more
than a little disappointed! For him, memorization was not an
end in itself, of course. It was a tool in the service of better
understanding what God teaches us in God’s word. Do these
children have an appropriate understanding of God’s word?
Scripture readings and the sermon approach. The furrowed
brow of close and thoughtful concentration on our friend’s
countenance renews your anxiety. You quickly look ahead in the bulletin, giving a slight sigh of relief when you see
that Pastor Martha is preaching today. You’ve heard
occasional sermons from this pulpit that seem to treat
the biblical text almost as an obstacle in the way of the
sermon’s real substance. But you know that you can rely
on Martha for a clear and thoughtful engagement with the
Scriptures. She won’t simply repeat some conventional
wisdom or seek to foist upon the congregation her own
inventive insights. Surely your visitor will appreciate the
seriousness of her attempts to “hear the word of God ...
as the voice of the shepherd” as she preaches. 2 This, after
all, was the only task of the preacher, in his view — to let
God’s word be heard and to have it applied in all its startling
freshness for today’s circumstances.
Martha is well into just this sort of homiletic endeavor when
the fact of her gender occurs to you. What can your guest be
thinking! He viewed certain biblical passages as expressing “an inviolable rule” regarding women’s subordination to
men and their exclusion from the church’s ordained ministry.
True, he held that God made exceptions to the rule; and the
prohibition of women teaching was one of those matters
of “indifference” in the ordering of the church. God could
bring about changes in the way the church was ordered,
but our friend seems not to have anticipated such a basic
restructuring of church offices. Perhaps the substance of
the preaching — its clear and vital embodying of God’s
word — will help to convince him that the gender of the
one who serves as God’s instrument in preaching is
indeed a matter of indifference!
The service of worship heads into the home stretch, and
you begin to think all that remains will pretty much pass
muster with your visitor. But you hadn’t foreseen the time
for announcements. You cringe as the casually dressed
man (wearing Birkenstocks and a “Save the Planet” T-shirt)
stands up to announce the vital importance of all church
members attending a rally in support of animal rights. When
he goes on to suggest that God’s call for justice means we
need to take some pretty drastic steps to protect mistreated
animals, you can’t believe it. What is your visitor going to
think of this liberal drivel?
You mutter words of outrage to the professor sitting close
by. He turns around and, with an eyebrow cocked, says,“Well, you know, actually, he said something along these
lines himself. Animals don’t have lawyers, they can’t bring
lawsuits. So God wants us to do our part to make sure
people do right by all creatures.
“Those who fail to care for horse, or cattle, or donkeys, show their own wickedness. If they say, ‘It doesn’t matter to me; it’s just a brute beast,’ the answer is, ‘Well, yes, certainly. But it is also a creature of God!’ Scripture tells us that God’s bounty and mercy extend to every animal of the earth. It doesn’t say this only of humans, whom God created in God’s image; the beasts are definitely also included. But if we have rightness and equity in us, we will show it not only toward our neighbors who are closer to us — our brothers and sisters — but we will show it even to the brute beasts. God, after all, has created and formed them, and God deigns to keep them by his providence, providing them with food, and, in a word, caring for them. 3
“That’s more or less what he said. To the best of my recollection.”
You didn’t realize your visitor had a soft spot for animals, and you say as much to your know-it-all professor friend, who replies, “It wasn’t so much that he had feelings for animals. It was what he found God conveying to us in Scripture that mattered most.”
The final hymn and the benediction find you mulling over all that you’ve considered about this experience of worship, seen from the perspective of your ancient guest. You decide you can’t pass up the opportunity to ask him directly what he thinks of what your congregation is up to, and so you will invite him for a chat at the fellowship hour. When worship concludes you proceed with haste to the rear of the sanctuary.
He’s nowhere to be seen. The report from those sitting nearby is that he politely greeted the pastor (in French, of course) and made a quick exit. You wonder why the old guy would be in such a hurry.
Then you remember. It’s going to be a busy year: lots of celebration, an extraordinary amount of fuss from Reformed Protestants worldwide over the five-hundredth birthday of a formative Reformed theologian-pastor. The poor man — who had no love of public feting or honoring of himself — is going to be much in demand. You hope that at least this short time of worship was a respite for him, and that he found it to be a time of faithfully honoring God, nurturing faithful lives, and building God’s reign in this time and place.
Notes
1. Sermon 4 (August 25, 1555) of the “Sermons on Titus” in Ioannis Calvini
Opera quae supersunt omnia, 59 vols. (Brunswick: Schwetschke,
1863–1900), 54:429.
2. “Responsio ad Sadoleti epistolam” in Ioannis Calvini Opera Selecta,
5 vols. (Monachii in Adeibus: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1926–1952), I: 465.
3. Sermon 142 of the “Sermons on Deuteronomy” in Ioannis Calvini
Opera quae supersunt omnia, 56 vols. (Brunswick: Schwetschke,
1885), 28: 220–221.
Christopher Elwood is the professor of historical theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He is the author of Calvin for Armchair Theologians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), and The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). |
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