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

For all his emphasis upon the Scriptures, it would be foolish to suppose that Calvin knew nothing outside the scope of the Bible, and he certainly did not think that the Bible comprised a compendium of all available knowledge. He knew classical authors; he had historical awareness; he had a natural theology. But the Bible was where the Gospel was to be found, for in its pages the Word made flesh was made known. Although Calvin lived before the rise of modern biblical criticism and felt able to draw on portions of the Bible without regard to context or to modern considerations of authorship33 (though he was no biblical literalist), I contend that his holding together of Word and Spirit challenges today’s Church. The place of the Bible in the Church is of crucial importance. I well remember going to preach at a particular church during my student days. I was provided with an Order of Worship, one item of which was: ‘Reading from the Bible or other suitable literature.’ I thought then, and I continue to think, that if Christian worship is a primary context for the proclamation of the Gospel then there is no ‘suitable literature’ which is an alternative to Scripture, for the heart of the Gospel is to be distilled from the Bible. But the heart of the Gospel concerns Christ’s saving act, and it is the Gospel of God’s sovereign grace and mercy in redemption which both called out the Church and gave us the New Testament. Our supreme authority is the Gospel, witnessed to in Scripture and brought home to us by the Spirit. On the other side, we witness today a considerable eruption of spirituality, some of it self- serving; some of it amorphous, some of it confessedly, even pugnaciously, non- doctrinal.34 It is not unknown for Christians to claim new revelations of alleged truths which are not only quite unknown to Scripture, but are in opposition to it. It would therefore seem that from the side of both the Bible and the Spirit, Calvin’s challenge to today’s Church to hold Spirit and Word together is a pressing one.35

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Thirdly, Calvin held together the Word and the Church. On the one hand Calvin the preacher had a degree of confidence in the infallibility of his biblical interpretation that I do not think we should nowadays wish to claim. In connection with the doctrine of predestination, as John Leith reminds us,36 he told the Genevan Council in 1659 that ‘I am assured in my conscience that what I have taught and written did not arise out of my own head, but that I received it from God, and I must stand firmly by it, if I am not to be a traitor to the truth.’37 InNinth General Coundl, 77-84; Richard C. Gamble, ‘Calvin as theologian and exegete,’ Calvin Theological Journal, XXIII no. 2, November 1988, 178-194.

33 He thought that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but he denied the Pauline authorship of Hebrews.

34 For further reflections on spirituality see Alan P. F. Sell, Enlightenment, Ecumenism, Evangel, ch. 8.

35 In the heyday of theological liberalism P. T. Forsyth warned of a pitfall in another direction: ‘Detached from the Word, the supernatural action of the Holy Spirit becomes gradually the natural evolution of the human spirit.’ See his Faith, Freedom, and the Future, (1912), London: Independent Press, 1955, 95.

36 J. Leith, ‘Calvin’s theological method,’ in Franklin H. Littell, ed., Reformation Studies. Sixteen Essays in Honor of Roland H. Bainton, Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1962, 113. The two following quotations are drawn from Leith.

37 Corpus Reformatorum, XIV, 382.

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