Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)
2010 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Sell, Alan P. F.: Milyen megoldásra váró feladatok elé állítja Kálvin a 21. századi egyházat?
Calvin's challenges to the twenty-first-century church We call on one God the Father, trusting to the same Mediator; the same Spirit of adoption is the earnest of our future inheritance. Christ has reconciled us all by the same sacrifice. In that righteousness which he has purchased for us, our minds are at peace, and we glory in the same head. It is strange if Christ, whom we preach as our peace, and who, removing the ground of disagreement, appeased to us our Father in heaven, do not also cause us mutually to cultivate brotherly peace on earth.23 Calvin reiterated the point, perhaps most tellingly of all in view of his searing attacks on Roman Catholic teaching and practice, in his reply to Cardinal Sadoleto of 1 September 1589. Against Sadoleto’s view that to separate from fellowship with the Roman Church was to be in revolt against the Church, Calvin argued that the Protestant objective was the reform and restoration of the one Church. His concluding prayer was: The Lord grant, Sadoleto, that you and all your party may at length perceive that the only true bond of ecclesiastical unity consists in this, that Christ the Lord, who has reconciled us to God the Father, gather us out of our present dispersion into the fellowship of his body, that so, through his one Word and Spirit, we may join together with one heart and soul.24 It is clear throughout that although Calvin has an understanding of the invisible Church comprising the great cloud of witnesses, this Church is not in his view a refuge from churchly fellowship with saints on earth who are also sinners. The Gospel is addressed to people here below; the Church is called out in response to the Gospel; and all thus called comprise the one Church of Christ, our prophet, priest and king. Gospel and Church cannot be sundered. II Secondly, Calvin holds together the Holy Spirit and the Word. The mutual relations of Spirit and Word are nowhere more clearly expressed than when Calvin declares that For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.25 Implicit here is what Calvin makes explicit elsewhere, namely, that he is fighting on two fronts. Against Rome with its authoritarian claim he pits God’s Word as the supreme authority for faith and practice. He protests against ‘a most pernicious error [which] widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth 23 Calvin’s Tracts and Treatises, II, 251. 24 Theological Treatises of John Calvin, trans. J. K. S. Reid, London: SCM Press, 1954, 256. 25 J. Calvin, Institutes, I.vii.4. Sárospataki Füzetek 85
