Ripped Christianity from its Biblical roots? Wouldn’t that be what leaving Christ’s established Church and starting a new one be doing?Calvin is motivated more by hatred than truth.
Sure, hatred of "violence" done to God's Word. That's a good thing. Yes, he and the rest of the Reformers hated the way Catholicism had ripped Christianity from its Biblical roots. I do, too. But Calvin loved his Catholic brethren, and I do, too.
So, you don’t think it detracts from God’s glory to usurp His Church? To speak on matters one has no authority to speak on? To reinterpret Sacred Scripture? To not trust Jesus and His command to listen to His Church?Calvin's hatred is of anything that would detract from God's glory, too.
I am going to post some excerpts from testimony of two guys who both went from Calvin to Catholicism. If you want to read their whole story, it’s very good.
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In particular, as a Protestant, I had always had vague notions that the earliest Christians were essentially the same as Protestants today in theology and style of worship. The Re-“formation� was, I thought, all about re-“forming� Christianity so that it got back to the original Christianity bequeathed to us by Christ, removing from it all the superstitious and silly doctrines and practice imposed upon it in the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church. I soon found that these vague notions I held about the early Church could not have been more erroneous.
As I read these detailed summaries of the beliefs of the Fathers of the Church, I was startled in particular to find in them all the essential elements of contemporary Catholicism in embryonic form. Moreover, this mustard seed of the Catholic Church did not become visible a couple hundred years after Christ, but was present in the earliest recorded Christian writings, some predating or contemporaneous with what we have good reason to believe was the time that the books of the Bible were still being written! In brief, the earliest Church was the Catholic Church.
The area of doctrine that struck me most forcefully was the insistence of the early Fathers (particularly St. Ignatius and St. Polycarp, and even into the period of the apologists Tertullian and St. Irenaeus) on obedience in matters of faith and doctrine to the bishops and the centrality of Tradition (faithfully transmitted to us by the bishops) in the codification of Christian doctrine. Tertullian and Irenaeus were particularly forceful to me in showing that sola Scriptura (as it is understood and firmly believed by central figures in the Protestant Reformation) was a notion foreign to early Christians. Once I saw this in the Fathers, I was shocked to find strong support of it in Scripture.
I was even surprised to find early insistence by some Fathers upon Peter’s primacy as the Prince of the Apostles and the necessary submission to his successor as the chief steward of the authentic Faith. From this source, I thought, all other Catholic doctrines necessarily derive. For even if we saw no other Catholic doctrine present in the early period, save the necessity of believing the faith transmitted by the Pope, that would be sufficient. It is obvious that the popes have preached the Catholic Faith, and thus the Faith the early Christians would have today is authentically found only in the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, we find evidence for a broad range of uniquely Catholic beliefs and practices in the early Church, not just the doctrines involving Tradition and submission to the hierarchy, but my area of interest in philosophy was (and is) epistemology — that is, a study of what we know and how we know it — and seeing this point strongly pushed me toward Catholicism.
Prior to the actual decision to convert, I wanted to make sure I was not being hasty. I began reviewing many of my old theological sources to see if I had forgotten about central objections to Catholicism that I had not been particularly interested in during my youth. For instance, I read a lot of Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion, trying to find some argument against the Catholic Church he was leaving. I also reviewed the works of Van Til, whose apologetic method was supposed to prove the Calvinist form of Christianity distinctly. Both left me very unimpressed. I turned to two Protestant apologetics websites that I had found useful in my youth and, looking over their arguments against Catholicism, I found the websites’ arguments to be easily responded to in light of the research I had done into Catholicism.
When one is convinced, as I was at this time, that one’s salvation is an assured thing as long as one “has faith,� then it is easy to rationalize one’s own particular sins as a necessary and uninteresting consequence of the human condition that should be generally avoided, but not with any urgency. It was not as though, I had thought, my salvation depended upon avoiding sin. It rested instead upon the genuineness of my faith and the sincerity with which I adhered to my Protestant faith. Though the false and dangerous part of this theology did not sink in while I was under my parents’ supervision, I became much more rebellious in college. I began to go to parties often. This seems like a benign part of college life to many, but this was a very bad and dangerous phase of my life that, as sin often does, made me very miserable and blinded me to the specific cause or nature of my suffering.
Yet Calvinism excused my sin as something God Himself did not see, since, so I believed, the righteousness of Christ had been imputed to me because of my genuine faith, covering over my sins so that He was blind to them, at least insofar as my salvation was concerned. My conscience naturally reproved the guilt of my actions, and yet I found in Reformation theology a rationalization of the guilt that prevented any serious and genuine reformation of my life.
https://chnetwork.org/story/from-calvin ... an-besong/
I was raised a Presbyterian, the Church that prides itself on Calvinist origins, but I didn’t care much about denominations. My Church practiced a pared-down, Bible-focused, born-again spirituality shared by most Evangelicals. I went to a Christian college and then a seminary where I found the same attitude. Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Charismatics worshiped and studied side-by-side, all committed to the Bible but at odds on how to interpret it. But our differences didn’t bother us. Disagreements over sacraments, Church structures, and authority were less important to us than a personal relationship with Christ and fighting the Catholic Church. This is how we understood our common debt to the Reformation.
Strangely, mastering Calvin didn’t lead me anywhere I expected. To begin with, I decided that I really didn’t like Calvin. I found him proud, judgmental and unyielding. But more importantly, I discovered that Calvin upset my Evangelical view of history. I had always assumed a perfect continuity between the Early Church, the Reformation and my Church. The more I studied Calvin, however, the more foreign he seemed, the less like Protestants today. This, in turn, caused me to question the whole Evangelical storyline: Early Church – Reformation – Evangelical Christianity, with one seamless thread running straight from one to the other. But what if Evangelicals really weren’t faithful to Calvin and the Reformation? The seamless thread breaks. And if it could break once, between the Reformation and today, why not sooner, between the Early Church and the Reformation? Was I really sure the thread had held even that far?
Calvin shocked me by rejecting key elements of my Evangelical tradition. Born-again spirituality, private interpretation of Scripture, a broad-minded approach to denominations – Calvin opposed them all. I discovered that his concerns were vastly different, more institutional, even more Catholic. Although he rejected the authority of Rome, there were things about the Catholic faith he never thought about leaving. He took for granted that the Church should have an interpretive authority, a sacramental liturgy and a single, unified faith.
These discoveries faced me with important questions. Why should Calvin treat these “Catholic things� with such seriousness? Was he right in thinking them so important? And if so, was he justified in leaving the Catholic Church? What did these discoveries teach me about Protestantism? How could my Church claim Calvin as a founder, and yet stray so far from his views? Was the whole Protestant way of doing theology doomed to confusion and inconsistency?
Calvin was a second-generation Reformer, twenty-six years younger than Martin Luther (1483-1546). This meant that by the time he encountered the Reformation, it had already split into factions. In Calvin’s native France, there was no royal support for Protestantism and no unified leadership. Lawyers, humanists, intellectuals, artisans and craftsman read Luther’s writings, as well as the Scriptures, and adapted whatever they liked.
His first request to the city council was to impose a common confession of faith (written by Calvin) and to force all citizens to affirm it.
Calvin’s most important contribution to Geneva was the establishment of the Consistory – a sort of ecclesiastical court- to judge the moral and theological purity of his parishioners. He also persuaded the council to enforce a set of “Ecclesiastical Ordinances� that defined the authority of the Church, stated the religious obligations of the laity, and imposed an official liturgy. Church attendance was mandatory. Contradicting the ministers was outlawed as blasphemy. Calvin’s Institutes would eventually be declared official doctrine.
Calvin’s lifelong goal was to gain the right to excommunicate “unworthy� Church members. The city council finally granted this power in 1555 when French immigration and local scandal tipped the electorate in his favor. Calvin wielded it frequently
In 1551, Bolsec, a physician and convert to Protestantism, entered Geneva and attended a lecture on theology. The topic was Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, the teaching that God predetermines the eternal fate of every soul. Bolsec, who believed firmly in “Scripture alone� and “faith alone,� did not like what he heard. He thought it made God into a tyrant. When he stood up to challenge Calvin’s views, he was arrested and imprisoned.
What makes Bolsec’s case interesting is that it quickly evolved into a referendum on Church authority and the interpretation of Scripture. Bolsec, just like most Evangelicals today, argued that he was a Christian, that he had the Holy Spirit and that, therefore, he had as much right as Calvin to interpret the Bible. He promised to recant if Calvin would only prove his doctrine from the Scriptures. But Calvin would have none of it. He ridiculed Bolsec as a trouble maker (Bolsec generated a fair amount of public sympathy), rejected his appeal to Scripture, and called on the council to be harsh. He wrote privately to a friend that he wished Bolsec were “rotting in a ditch.�2
While he rejected Rome’s claim to authority, he made striking claims for his own authority. He taught that the “Reformed� pastors were successors to the prophets and apostles, entrusted with the task of authoritative interpretation of the Scriptures
If Calvin’s ideas on Church authority were a surprise to me, his thoughts on the sacraments were shocking. Unlike Evangelicals, who treat the theology of the sacraments as one of the “non-essentials,� Calvin thought they were of the utmost importance.
Calvin understood baptism in much the same way. He never taught the Evangelical doctrine that one is “born again� through personal conversion. Instead, he associated regeneration with baptism and taught that to neglect baptism was to refuse salvation
Studying Calvin raised important questions about my Evangelical identity. How could I reject as unimportant issues that my own founder considered essential? I had blithely and confidently dismissed baptism, Eucharist, and the Church itself as “merely symbolic,� “purely spiritual� or, ultimately, unnecessary. In seminary, too, I found an environment where professors disagreed entirely over these issues and no one cared! With no final court of appeal, we had devolved into a “lowest common denominator� theology.
I realized instead that Calvin was part of the problem. He had insisted on the importance of unity and authority, but had rejected any rational or consistent basis for that authority. He knew that Scripture totallyalone, Scripture interpreted by each individual conscience, was a recipe for disaster. But his own claim to authority was perfectly arbitrary. Whenever he was challenged, he simply appealed to his own conscience, or to his subjective experience, but he denied that right to Bolsec and others. As a result, Calvin became proud and censorious, brutal with his enemies, and intolerant of dissent. In all my reading of Calvin, I don’t recall him ever apologizing for a mistake or admitting an error.
It eventually occurred to me that Calvin’s attitude contrasted sharply with what I had found in the greatest Catholic theologians. Many of them were saints, recognized for their heroic charity and humility. Furthermore, I knew from reading them, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis de Sales, that they denied any personal authority to define doctrine. They deferred willingly, even joyfully, to the authority of Pope and council. They could maintain the biblical ideal of doctrinal unity (1 Corinthians 1:10), without claiming to be the source of that unity.
These saints also challenged the stereotypes about Catholics that I had grown up with. Evangelicals frequently assert that they are the only ones to have “a personal relationship with Christ.� Catholics, with their rituals and institutions, are supposed to be alienated from Christ and Scripture. I found instead men and women who were single-minded in their devotion to Christ and inebriated with His grace.
In the end, I began to see that everything good about Evangelicalism was already present in the Catholic Church – the warmth and devotion of Evangelical spirituality, the love of Scripture and even, to some extent, the Evangelical tolerance for diversity. Catholicism has always tolerated schools of thought, various theologies and different liturgies. But unlike Evangelicalism, the Catholic Church has a logical and consistent way to distinguish the essential from the non-essential. The Church’s Magisterium, established by Christ (Matthew 16:18; Matthew 28:18-20), has provided that source of unity that Calvin sought to replace.
One of the most satisfying things about my discovery of the Catholic Church is that it fully satisfied my desire for historical rootedness.
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/0 ... -catholic/
What do you make of these two men’s personal faith journey? Do you see the problem they both found in accepting John Calvin or any other subsequent “Reformer�?
