The Spirit and the Word
Celebrating the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Text: 2 Timothy 3:10-17
It was November 1559, and the council of the City of Geneva was meeting to deal with a proposal. For all future meetings of the council, a minister from the new Protestant Church would be allowed not only to be present, but also to read the scriptures and open the gathering with prayer. It was one of the most incredible days in John Calvin's life when the vote was in the affirmative - Protestant ministers would be received into the decision-making places of Geneva.
Calvin's great hope, his great prayer, was that the word of God would be heard in three places. First, it would be preached from the pulpits of churches throughout the world and the scriptures would be extemporaneously or exegetically spoken in such a way that people would be able to hear and understand them. His second passion was that this very word of God would be studied in the academy and treated alongside all other subject matter as a source of inquiry, information and passion. His final wish had now been achieved - in the seats of power, the word of God would be read and prayers to the Lord would be given. John Calvin was a happy man!
On Christmas Day of that very same year, the joy got even greater for Calvin for he was made a citizen of the City of Geneva. At the age of 50, he had finally found a home. He had been accepted in a city that he loved and in which he had preached. He had arrived. The word of God was spoken in the council and he was a citizen of Geneva. It was a high point in his life.
But that very Christmas Day, Calvin began to cough. He coughed so violently that blood came up from his lungs. Doctors said that his lungs were “busted,” which was the official diagnosis, but everyone knows that it was really tuberculosis. Four-and-a-half years later, he would die.
On the day that he became a citizen in Geneva, Calvin bled profusely - a symbol of his life - for this was a man who had gone through many struggles, particularly physical struggles, to be able to do what he did. He wrote to some doctors in Montpellier the following, which is taken from a biography by Thea van Halsema.
By companies, by squadrons and in single attacks, the horde of enemies has invaded me. It is 20 years since I have been without a headache. Arthritis and gout crippled my joints, my legs and my arms. Kidney stones too large to be passed caused an agony of knifing pain. My chest felt as if a weight was lying on it, and each breath was an effort.
But, there was no complaint from a man attacked by his army of illnesses. With a wry bit of humour, he wrote Beza, who was out of the city on a trip, “You write me long after midnight while I go to bed at seven, as is my habit. But that is what gouty old men come to.” Calvin was a man who throughout his years had struggled terribly with illnesses of various kinds and now one of them, tuberculosis, was added on Christmas Day. I have often wondered in the light of this staggering number of illness and the fact, as we are going to see, that he was rejected and often thrown out of cities for what he believed, what passion kept John Calvin going. What animated him? What moved him to be one of the greatest fathers of the Church?
To understand his motivation, we need to understand a bit about Calvin. He was born in Noyon, France, 50 miles northeast of Paris, in 1509. It was very evident in his early days that he was a great scholar and by the age of 11, he was convinced to go to Paris to study Latin. He left home and studied various languages. While he was at college, he began reading a new group of writers, particularly a man called Martin Luther, and discovered Luther's new ideas about the Christian faith. He became engaged by them, and as he read the bible in Latin and what Luther was saying, he put the two of them together and found something very powerful and passionate in his heart. His father, seeing that John Calvin was actually moving towards the priesthood and probably to serving the Church because of his newfound passion, decided to convince him otherwise. His father suggested that he study law in Orleans and that in law he would find his vocation. So John Calvin studied law. At the age of 23, he already had his Doctorate of Laws. A brilliant career was before him, but as he continued in the study of law he kept reading many of the reformers. He started to do work on many of the humanist writers and philosophers such as Seneca and was enthralled by their ideas. Likewise, he studied the biblical languages, which again inflamed the passion in his heart that had been set in the early days by reading Luther, and he was amazed at what he was learning.
We do not have a record of when John Calvin came to faith. Unlike Wesley at Aldersgate, we don't have a singular moment when Calvin became a Christian. In the introduction of his commentary on Book of Psalms he wrote, “God subdued me.” Isn't it a wonderful phrase? He felt the power of God touching his life. From that moment on, he decided to associate himself with this new movement that was seeking to reform the Church, was based on the study of scripture, and was knowledgeable of the writings of the humanists.
John Calvin became passionate, but the more passionate he became about this new-found view of the faith, the more he and those of a like mind faced rejection. The King of France declared that those who followed the teachings of this man, Luther, and those who subscribed to this new Protestant idea were to be arrested or executed or forced into exile. John Calvin saw no other course of action than flee to the safe bosom of the City of Basel in Switzerland. There, he started to put pen to paper and wrote feverishly. In 1536, he wrote what is one of the greatest pieces of Christian literature, The Institute of the Christian Religion. In this magnificent book, all his knowledge of law and his scholarly ability to understand things in a legal way was brought together with his knowledge of biblical languages and the scriptures and joined with his passion for this newfound movement called Protestantism. Calvin brought them all together to write this masterpiece, one of the most influential of all Christian writings.
But, things were not peaceful for Calvin. He still faced rejection. He travelled around; he moved to Italy, then back again. In 1537, he moved to a city where he felt there was a great passion for the new reformed ideas, the City of Geneva. It was a city that had many, many problems; it was divided, profligate and sinful. Calvin decided to take on a pastorate. In writing about that pastorate, Victor Shepherd wrote a wonderful testimony to the side of Calvin that many people don't know.
In 1537, he was appointed pastor of one of Geneva's churches, and although he was the leading thinker of the Reformation and one of its most prolific writers, he was not a university recluse who was guaranteed solitude for the purpose of researching and writing. Rather, he was a pastor who had to preach every day, visit the ill, bury the dead, adjudicate congregational disputes and counsel parishioners who had sinned notoriously. He could have come to Timothy Eaton for that matter!
John Calvin, then, was a pastor in Geneva. He wasn't just the writer of The Institutes, he was someone who cared for the everyday life of people. The more we read about how he actually carried out that ministry, the more we see the heart of John Calvin, which was a heart for people to know the essence of the faith.
Unfortunately, Calvin was again rejected by Geneva, and had to go to Strasbourg, but eventually came back. When he came back, he started to write his many, many commentaries on the Bible. Just to show you how powerful they are and how even today they are meaningful, my gift from my wife, Marial, on the day of our wedding was a box containing the entire tome of Calvin's commentaries on the bible. Now, there's a woman who knew her man! I have referred to them ever since - they are magnificent.
Poor Calvin continued to be ill and face rejection even for his preaching until 1559, when he became a citizen of his beloved Geneva. But, this man, who died with an unmarked grave, will go down in the annals of church history as someone who placed the Holy Scriptures, the word of God and the person of Jesus above popes, above princes, above philosophers, above politics, above parishes and above even people. John Calvin knew that the word of God was a powerful and efficacious thing, and more than anything, he wanted it to embrace the whole of human life and experience.
That is why I chose this text from 2 Timothy; it talks about the power and authority of the Holy Scriptures. Young Timothy understood, because of Paul's writings to him, that the scriptures were sufficient for the growth and maintenance of the Church. Timothy was facing a movement of deceit, false teachers who were potentially destroying the early Church with their views. Scholars have differing views as to precisely what was wrong, whether it was the movement by the Gnostics or a movement by a syncretistic group within the temples in Judaism. But whatever it was, they were causing the early Church to move away from its belief in what it had received in its doctrine of Christ.
So, young Timothy was given these words by Paul, that all scripture is inspired; it is not something that is to be toyed with, but the product of the work and power of the Holy Spirit. Agreed, in that time and place, the scriptures talked about the law and the prophets. But, as Calvin went on to suggest, it is those scriptures that constituted the foundation of the Early Church's understanding of the God who reveals himself.
In his magnificent commentary on this particular text, Calvin upholds the reverence of scripture. He says that what Paul is advocating here is a reverential approach to it, that it is not to be treated lightly, that it is not to be treated with a lack of respect, but should be looked at diligently. He maintains that the scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit and that it is no good to simply say, “Here are the scriptures at face value,” because the scriptures need to be interpreted by the power of the Holy Spirit in the same way that they were inspired by the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is what Calvin wrote in his commentary on the passage from 2 Timothy:
There is a principle which distinguishes our faith, that we know that God has spoken to us and are fully convinced that the prophets did not speak at their own suggestion but, being organs of the Holy Spirit, they only uttered what they had been commissioned from heaven to declare. Whoever, then, wishes to profit in the scriptures, let him first of all lay down this as a subtle point: That the law and the prophets are not a doctrine delivered according to the will and pleasure of men, but dictated by the Holy Spirit.
You see, Calvin understood that the power of the scriptures is actually wedded to the power of the Holy Spirit, both as the source of inspiration for its writers and the source of living it for those who are believers. Calvin knew that “the elect,” as he called them, those who were faithful, had a different way of reading scripture than those who read it from the outside. He understood that those who read it from the inside read it by faith; they read it through the power of the Holy Spirit. He laughed at those who have silly little discussions - he called it “babbling,” - in which they simply open the text and have useless discussions about what it means. He said that you cannot read the scriptures apart from a prayerful understanding of the Holy Spirit, for it was, indeed, that Spirit that inspired the scriptures in the first place. For Calvin, then, Paul's words to Timothy were absolutely right and sound: All scripture is inspired by the Spirit and this is useful and, in his term, “profitable” for the building up of the Church.
So, what do we do with the passion of Calvin? What do we learn from the importance of the scriptures today? There are three simple things. First, it is “profitable” for our instruction, nurture and learning. There are many things in life that point us to God. There are many people who refer to God. There are many doctrines of God that you can find espoused on the corner of the Eaton Centre, just as you do in any church, synagogue or parish throughout the world. In fact, I was going through the Eaton Centre last week when a young man handed me a pamphlet. He said, “I wonder if you know anything about God?”
I replied, “Well, I think I do, but there are a lot of people in my congregation who wonder.”
He looked at me, then realized that I am a minister, and said, “Oh, dear!”
I laughed, and asked, “What is it that you have for me?”
He said, “These are my own writings about God and the bible.”
So, I said, “Do I buy this or is it free?”
“I'd rather you buy it,” he said. “But since you are a minister, I will give it to you for free.”
Who can overlook a deal like that? So I took the pamphlet home and read it. It was a personal testimony of this man about God, faith, life and so on. It was charming, winsome and lovely in many ways, but it was just wrong! When I realized what was wrong about it, I realized that my sense of what was right or wrong was really formed by my doctrine of God as it has come to me through the scriptures. What this man was trying to do was to write something apart from the scriptures. Although a worthy exercise, it was one that could easily lead people astray, for his notion of Christ, his notion of grace, truth, judgment, sin and peace was wayward.
There are many well-meaning people, just as there were in the time of Timothy and in the time of John Calvin, who had an understanding, a doctrine of God, but one that is apart from that which is revealed in scripture. That is one of the reasons why I am proud of this congregation, because we have the Bethel Series and the lecture series that look at the scriptures, and the scriptures imbue our pastoral care, our Stephen Ministry and our work with young people. The scriptures, though not always front and centre, are there informing and instructing us in what it is we believe and hope. John Calvin would say,
Keep doing it! Even 500 years after my death, keep doing it! In every age, there will be those who want to instruct you in a path other than that of righteousness and truth. But you, you remain firm in the scriptures as the inspired word of God.
Secondly, the scriptures are there for our correction. They point us in a path; they provide the domain and range of our moral life. They keep us grounded in what God would have us do and be. Our sense of righteousness, of right and wrong, of justice and truth is formed by the scriptures. In a day and age that often does the opposite of what Calvin hoped for the scriptures in Geneva in his time, there is all the more need for those who do believe to have confidence in the scriptures and their inspiration. In no way does this mean that Calvin was some sort of banal fundamentalist. On the contrary, you do not say that of a Doctor of Laws, a man who was as immersed in the scriptures, the biblical word and the knowledge of the languages as Calvin was. Still, he had an unerring conviction that we all need to have our lives brought within line by the power of the scriptures under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Finally, the scriptures are there not only for proof, but also for faith, to lift us up. I must admit, when I first read The Institutes of the Christian Religion, I thought they were somewhat harsh, cold and, at times, even judgemental. Now, I read them knowing what John Calvin was going through physically, let alone how he was persecuted for his beliefs. Reading them with this knowledge brings the faith he speaks about into a different light. It softens and warms it, and it comes across more in the way of Wesley. Still, Calvin was resolute. He understood that the faith was something that had been revealed, something that was passed on from generation to generation in the hope and prayer that people will live in fidelity to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that, through the power and guidance of the Holy Scriptures, people would find a foundation for their lives and for society.
We need to hear John Calvin again. There needs to be a new Reformation in the Church, for too often we have gone with the ebb and flow of whatever idea comes along, rather than earnestly seeking what the scriptures teach us and how they guide and nurture us. That is why I want to leave you, not with my words today, but with the words of John Calvin. If he were before us this morning, he would say, as he did in a letter to King Francis, which is at the beginning of The Institutes:
For what is more consonant with faith than to recognize that we are naked of all virtue in order to be clothed by God? That we are empty of all good to be filled by Him; that we are slaves of sin to be freed by Him; blind, to be illumined by Him; lame to be made straight by Him; weak to be sustained by Him, to take away from us all occasion for glorying, that He alone may stand forth gloriously and that we glory in Him.
Amen.