Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)

2010 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Sell, Alan P. F.: Milyen megoldásra váró feladatok elé állítja Kálvin a 21. századi egyházat?

Sell, Alan P. F.

deed, he thought that his possession of ‘infallible truth’ justified his punishment of heretics, whereas the Roman Church had no tight to punish heretics because it did not have the truth and might therefore punish the innocent.38 By the same token, Calvin did not expect adverse criticism of his sermons by members of his congregation, and he insisted that church members be obedient to their pastors. On the other hand, he wished to return to the people the Bible, that ‘greatest treasure’, of which he believed they had been robbed by the ‘great men’ who kept it in their own libraries.39 Indeed, his primary objective in writing his Institutes was to encourage those who were competent ‘to help simple folk ... and as it were to lend them a hand, in order to guide them and help them to find the sum of what God meant to teach us in his Word.’40 Nor are church members to be passive recipients of instruction only: ‘Every member of the church is charged with the responsibility of public edification according to the measure of his grace, provided he perform it decently and in order.’41 Furthermore, according to the Genevan Catechism, church members need to be able to distinguish between faithful pastors and ‘seductive and false prophets, who abandon the purity of the Gospel and deviate to their own inventions’; these, ‘like ravening wolves, ought to be hunted and ejected from the people of God.’42 Although it was by no means a complete description of Geneva in Calvin’s day ( and some recipients of Calvin’s discipline would have demurred), John Knox was no entirely unjustified in claiming that ‘This place is the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.’43

In all of this there resides a challenge from Calvin to today’s Church. In many mainline Western churches the twentieth century saw a considerable decline in the edification of the saints. Bible study meetings became fewer in number, volumes of sermons by princes of the pulpit decreased in number as their authors vanished from the scene, and the weekly and monthly papers read by the generality of Christians in many cases carried reduced biblical and theological content. All of this, notwithstanding more than a century of required religious education in Britain’s state schools, has left us with a constituency which has imperfect grasp of the contents of the Bible, and which has received much less help than might have been expected as to the nature and composition of the Bible as such. We shall never know how many people have quiedy drifted away from the churches because they received no help in moving from a pre-critical, even an infantile, understanding of certain Bible stories to a mature approach which did not jar against the knowledge they obtained in other fields of enquiry.44 It even seems to have been the policy of

38 Ibid., XXVII, 253.

39 Ibid, IX, 831.

40 Idem, Institutes, 6.

41 Ibid, IV.i.12.

42 The Geneva Confession (1537), in Theological Treatises of]ohn Calvin, 32.

43 J. Knox, Letter to Anne Locke, 1556, in Susan M. Felch, ‘Deir Sister: The letters of John Knox to Anne Vaughan Lok,’ 'Renaissance and Reformation, XIX no. 4, 1995, 53.

44 See further, Alan P. F. Sell, 'Nonconformist Theology in the Twentieth Century, Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2006, 164-5. When in pastoral charge I found that what some might have thought of as the most unlikely people became enthused by the detective work involved in Pentateuchal criticism and the synoptic problem. It is never wise to patronize the

88 SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK