Beyond Calvin

The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe's Reformed Churches, c. 1540-1620

Graeme Murdock

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

An international community of Reformed churches emerged during the sixteenth century. Although attempts were made by Calvinists to reach agreement over key beliefs, and to establish uniformity in patterns of worship and church government, there were continuing divisions over some ideas and differences between local practices of moral discipline and religious life. However, Reformed intellectuals developed common ideas about rights of resistance against tyrants, communities prayed, fasted and donated money to aid brethren in distress, and many Calvinists across the Continent developed a strong sense of collective identity. Beyond Calvin considers the Reformed churches of Europe in an international and comparative context from around 1540 to 1620. Graeme Murdock:
- Discusses how Calvinism operated as an international movement by looking at links between Reformed churches, communities and states
- Explains what Reformed churches across the Continent stood for
- Focuses on how Calvinists sought to purify the practice of Christian religion, and to renew European politics, society and culture
- Examines both the strengths and limits of the international Reformed community

Chapter 1: Reformed Ideas

Fraternal relations between Europe’s Reformed churches were grounded in broad agreement about the fundamentals of true Christian doctrine. There were strong similarities between the confessions of faith and catechisms which were adopted by different Reformed churches. Many churches also recognised the 1566 Second Helvetic Confession written by Zurich’s Heinrich Bullinger, and used the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism which was composed by Zacharias Ursinus from Breslau in Silesia and by Caspar Olevian from Trier. While it would therefore be incorrect to see John Calvin as the single, authoritative theological voice behind the European Reformed movement, his personal contribution to the emergence and development of Reformed theology was undoubtedly immense. Calvin’s ideas about the nature of God, the Church, salvation and the sacraments spread across the Continent through his published works. These texts included dogmatic works, polemic tracts, Biblical commentaries, and written versions of the sermons which Calvin delivered at Geneva on the books of the Old Testament during weekday services and his exegesis of New Testament passages on Sundays. Calvin’s intellectual authority within the Reformed world rested above all on his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin declared that this book was intended to help readers to understand the Bible correctly by providing them with an orderly ‘sum of religion in all its parts’. The first edition of the Institutes appeared in 1536, it was first published in French in 1541, and Calvin produced a final version of the text in 1559. The Institutes then appeared in 25 different published editions between 1559 and 1578 in Latin, French, and in Dutch, English and German translations. Calvin himself acknowledged that the Institutes was ‘received by almost all godly men with an acclaim which I would never have ventured to hope for’.¹

Both Calvin and other Reformed theologians called for urgent reform of the erroneous doctrine and fraudulent religious practices which they perceived in the Catholic church. Reformed writers rejected alternative reform projects as inadequate or heretical, and condemned the faults of Anabaptists and anti-Trinitarians. A profound gulf also opened between Reformed and Lutheran leaders by the 1550s, and Calvinists pressed forward with their own plans to build a true Church, which was to be cleansed of all idolatry, superstition and false doctrine. This true Church was also a universal Church, and repeated efforts were made to bring uniformity between the statements of faith adopted by different Reformed churches. These efforts to build an international consensus aimed to demonstrate the degree of harmony which existed between the fundamental beliefs of churches across the Continent. However, the lack of much concrete achievement from all the discussions and debates held about doctrinal unity highlights some variety within Reformed thought, diversity in ceremonial practices and forms of church government, and local pride in domestic arrangements.

This chapter will examine the Calvinist agenda for reform of Catholic religious life, then discuss attempts to build international unity between Reformed churches, and highlight key areas of debate within the Reformed camp about the sacrament of Holy Communion and God’s plan for salvation. In the first case, a consensus was reached during the mid-sixteenth century on the question of how the elements of bread and wine in Communion related to Christ’s body and blood. However, Calvin’s ideas about salvation, election and predestination were not only challenged during his lifetime but remained highly controversial into the early seventeenth century. While Calvin was prepared to describe some aspects of God’s plan for salvation as a divine mystery, other writers attempted to resolve any areas of uncertainty. Theodore Beza, and the Italian reformers Peter Martyr Vermigli and Girolamo Zanchi, all attempted to provide more systematic explanations of salvation theology.² Their efforts to support all aspects of Reformed doctrine with logically consistent statements in a coherent structure have been described as a drift back towards scholasticism among Reformed theologians. Later Reformed theology was also marked by greater attention to more speculative questions, particularly relating to the exact order and nature of divine decrees of predestination. However, later Reformed orthodoxy should not be thought of as a distorted version of Calvin’s Bible-based theology, but marked the evolution of a theological tradition. Reformed theology changed over time, partly in response to polemic attacks from other churches, partly in reaction to arguments within the Reformed movement, and partly as a reflection of the pastoral experience of ministers. This chapter will therefore reflect both the shared ideas which united the international Reformed community, but also chart the development of Reformed orthodoxy, and note variations and divisions between different theologians and churches.³

The True Church and False Churches

According to Calvin, ‘the Church universal is a multitude gathered from all nations; it is divided and dispersed in separate places, but it agrees on the one truth of divine doctrine and is bound by the bond of the same religion’.⁴ While the community of those saints whom God would receive into heaven was not visible on earth, reformers identified clear marks by which God’s true Church could be recognised. For Theodore Beza these marks were the true preaching of the Gospel, the right administration of the sacraments, and the application of ecclesiastical discipline.⁵ While the 1559 French Confession of Faith only referred to the preaching of God’s word and proper administration of the sacraments as the marks of the true Church, the 1561 Confession adopted by the Dutch church, and the 1560 Scottish Confession added the third mark of ‘ecclesiastical discipline uprightly ministered’, so that ‘vice is repressed and virtue nourished’.⁶

There could be no compromise between the true Church and the Catholic church, and Reformed writers insisted that individuals could not find salvation in any church where there was false preaching and idolatry. This left no room for so-called Nicodemites, who were denounced by Calvin for privately supporting reform while continuing to attend Catholic services and partaking of the ‘abominable sacrilege’ of the Mass. According to Calvin, such people were involved in a ‘miserable subterfuge’, remained contaminated with idolatry, and should show greater courage in their convictions.⁷ Reformed confessions and catechisms across the Continent taught that Christians could have nothing to do with the Roman church, and should certainly not participate in the Mass. The Heidelberg Catechism described the Catholic Mass as ‘a complete denial of the once for all sacrifice and passion of Jesus Christ (and as such an idolatry to be condemned)’. This absolute condemnation of Catholic ritual, and especially of the idea of transubstantiation of the host during the Mass, was also reflected in more popular language as some Calvinists ridiculed Catholics’ adoration of their ‘god of paste’.⁸

However, the Mass was not the only problem which reformers identified among the practices of Catholic religion. A wide variety of aspects of the ‘new form of worship’ introduced by the Roman church were rejected as entirely false and devices of Satan. The French Confession listed inventions thought up in Rome to deceive Christians which included praying to dead saints, purgatory, pilgrimages, auricular confession, the prohibition on clerical marriage and rules on eating meat.⁹ The Bee-Hive written by Philip Marnix van St Aldegonde, a Brabant noble who had been educated in Geneva, also ridiculed all sorts of Catholic errors. Marnix satirically pretended that his text had been written by a Catholic, who revealed how the personal opinions of Popes were in fact the only basis for Catholic ideas on the Mass, salvation, purgatory, confession, worshipping saints, the use of images in churches and the powers ascribed to priests. In his discussion of the alleged virtues of pilgrimages to holy sites, Marnix’s thinly disguised Catholic writer explained how

a good honest man of Paris, who could have no children by his wife, and in hope of help, did vow diverse pilgrimages: And first he went to seek Saint James of Compostella, and from thence he went to Rome to visit the holy Apostles, Peter and Paul: and then on forward to our holy and blessed lady of Loreto, and from thence to Jerusalem: and last of all, to Saint Catherine of Siena: in fine, so as he was about three years from home: And when he came home again, he found his wife merry, and had in the mean space three pretty children, with help of the good Saints, which he so devoutly had sought.¹⁰

Marnix concluded by describing how Catholic priests were like honeybees, who ‘cease also from work in the winter time, and when it is foul weather’. However, he noted that Catholic honey, shipped to the Netherlands from Spain, was the colour of blood, poisonous, and had recently very much gone out of fashion.¹¹

The tone of much Reformed writing aimed to ridicule Catholic forms of worship, and to expose fraud and corruption in the Catholic church. However, Catholicism was at the same time seen as a well-organised threat to true religion, headed by a Pope commonly identified as a manifestation of Antichrist. These potent fears of an imagined Catholicism staffed by wily, disciplined and ruthless agents did not lessen with physical distance from actual centres of Catholic power. Safe in England in 1598, William Perkins wrote of the risks to delicate Protestant consciences of even travelling through Catholic countries.¹² This pervasive fear of Rome also inspired the 1581 Negative Confession in Scotland. This Confession added to the original church articles of the 1560 Confession with a long list of Catholic errors and false practices. The Negative Confession denounced Papistry, the ‘usurped authority of the Roman Antichrist’ and ‘his five bastard sacraments’. It was hoped that by requiring people to subscribe to this Negative Confession, secret followers of Rome would be unmasked to ensure the safety of both the Reformed church and of Scotland.¹³

Placing trust in the power of material objects rather than in the spiritual power of God was one of the chief charges laid by Calvinists and other reformers against Catholic forms of worship. Hostility towards the traditional forms of devotion offered by believers to images and statues in churches was shared by some humanists and early reformers as well as Zwinglians and Calvinists. Zwingli wrote that

faith is from the invisible God and it tends toward the invisible God, and is something completely apart from all that is sensible. Anything that is body, anything that is of the senses, cannot be an object of faith.¹⁴

Statues and images were also condemned on the grounds that they were greedy recipients of money which ought rather to be donated to the poor who were the true ‘living images of God’.¹⁵ Calvin argued that pictures and statues could not be tolerated in church buildings, although he offered greater latitude for objects of devotion in private homes. For Calvin, God was too glorious and remote from men’s understanding to be depicted in any way which did not lead to idolatry. Calvin wrote that images bore no resemblance to God, held no sacred power, and fostered a false relationship between God and men. Calvin also attacked the physical appearance of some statues, suggesting on one occasion that ‘brothels show harlots clad more virtuously’ than some statues displayed in churches. Calvin also commented that Catholic churches were ‘stuffed with dolls’ and ‘idols of wood and stone’. However, a Catholic visitor to Geneva in 1549 was equally outraged by the abominable state of its ‘synagogues’, in which the altars had been ‘shattered and broken, the images destroyed … the sacred vessels polluted, the holy oil poured out, the precious relics burned … [and] no images of the saints in paradise’.¹⁶

In 1543 Calvin published a devastating critique of the use of relics in Catholic religion, which was soon translated into German, Dutch and English. Calvin listed alleged surviving pieces of the true cross, sufficient he claimed to make a large boat, and enough body parts to make four corpses for each Apostle. Calvin argued against the evident fraudulence of Catholic relics, but also suggested that whether the relics were true or false, the worship of relics remained an execrable idolatry.¹⁷ Guillaume Farel had also argued that Christ must be worshipped in spirit and truth, and that placing crosses, images and paintings in churches was directly contradictory to God’s commands. For Farel, crosses and images led both to idolatry and to superstition, as they were used to try to effect miracles, to bring healing to people and animals, and to combat the effects of...