Calvin's Ecclesiology

A Study in the History of Doctrine

Tadataka Maruyama

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467464314
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología sistemática y ética

In this fresh and original monograph on the ecclesiology of John Calvin, Tadataka Maruyama sifts exhaustively through the corpus of Calvin's writings—in both Latin and French—to crystalize the French reformer's conception of the Christian church. After elucidating Calvin's influence from other reformers such as JacquesLefèvre, Guillaume Farel, and Martin Bucer, Maruyama shows how Calvin's ecclesiology evolved throughout his life while remaining firmly rooted in key principles and interests.

Maruyama discerns three phases in Calvin's ecclesiology:

• Catholic ecclesiology—in which Calvin saw the church as a unified and ideal institution situated both above and within history
• Reformed ecclesiology—in which Calvin described the concrete, historical form of the Christian church over against the Catholic Church
• Reformation ecclesiology—in which Calvin came to understand the Christian church as an eschatological reality situated in a broader European context, which Calvin portrayed as the "theater of God's providence"

This trajectory mirrors the way the Protestant Reformation was focused on reforming particular churches while also reimagining the Christian world as a whole. Indeed, as Maruyama thoroughly illustrates, Calvin never lost sight of his original vision of reforming the church of his French homeland even as his work grew into a much larger movement.

Chapter 1

ACADEMIC FORMATION AND CATHOLIC ECCLESIOLOGY

Our first chapter examines Calvin’s academic formation in arts, law, and theology and their relation to his concept of the church. The actual period of our examination spans from 1523, when he matriculated at the University of Paris, to 1535, when he completed his first theological work, the 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion in the city of his exile, Basel. During this period, Calvin studied the basics of arts and theology in Paris and law at the law faculties of Orléans and Bourges, returned to Paris for advanced art studies at the Collège Royal, and experienced a sudden conversion as well as a consequent focusing on biblical and theological studies.

This chapter examines in particular the 1536 Institutes in which, we assume, the basic stratum of Calvin’s ecclesiology, “Catholic ecclesiology,” takes shape. It is generally assumed that any study into his formative period faces considerable difficulties due to the paucity of historical documents and Calvin’s own silence about himself. Only two documents containing some autobiographical recollections are extant and both are works posterior to this period. The one penned closer to this period is his famous Reply to Sadoleto (1539). The other, written in his last years, is the preface to the Psalms Commentary (1557). In both cases, the autobiographical descriptions are said to be brief and rather obscure. Indeed, the Reply to Sadoleto contains a note saying that he would not speak much about himself. Concerning the preface’s descriptions, the biographer Gordon remarks that the descriptions are “utterly devoid of sentimentality.” He also characterizes Calvin in his formative years as an “enigmatic figure.”¹ Keeping these difficulties in mind, in the following three sections we shall examine Calvin’s academic formation, the period from his sudden conversion to his exile in Basel, and the authoring of his first Institutes.

SECTION 1. ACADEMIC FORMATION

The academic formation of the young Calvin from Noyon, the Picardy region of France, took place during his motherland’s turbulent history—a period that historian Salmon generalizes as “society in crisis.” The Concordat of Bologna, signed by King Francis I and Pope Leo X in 1516, signaled the opening of a new age in which the king accelerated his control of French ecclesiastical appointments as well as church hierarchy. By patronizing the humanist studies, Francis promoted a moderate church reform. The papacy, on the other hand, gained the rights of the ecclesiastical benefices, the French Church’s economic foundation. As a result, the French Church was said to have fallen into the most corrupt state in its history.² It is hard to imagine that the sensitive young man’s early formation could escape the reflections of this age. In this section, we shall briefly examine Calvin’s formation in the following four historical stages: Calvin’s college days in Paris, the period of his studies in law, attending lectures at the Collège Royal, and his first publication, a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia.

1. The Early French Reformation

It can be safely assumed that the early French Reformation was one of the chief motifs of which Calvin in his academic formation was keenly conscious. During his university student days (1523–28) as a candidate for ecclesiastical office, France, under the rising influences of national pride and humanism, increasingly recognized the urgency of church reform and witnessed the initial influx of Luther’s and Zwingli’s Evangelical ideas. It is likely that during his law school days (1528–31) the discipline of French jurisprudence experienced an upsurge of reformatory sentiment. Even the humanist studies on which he had concentrated during this period, especially at the Collège Royal, were widely recognized as bearers of reform. Thus, his self-instruction from this background into the field of theology was not an unexpected course. Furthermore, the fruit of his theological studies, the first Institutes, is recognized as the first systematic presentation of Evangelicalism in the French Reformation. The concept of the church in the early French Reformation, however, bore some features uniquely distinct from the Lutheran Reformation that had advanced in the German territories under the Holy Roman Empire and from the reformation of the imperial cities represented by Zwingli’s Zurich, Oecolampadius’s Basel, and Bucer’s Strasbourg. France was a major power located in the center of Europe that confronted the Holy Roman Empire, the papal curia, and the kingdoms of Spain and England. Correspondingly, there was a strong sentiment in the church, based on its catholicity as well as Gallicanism, which promoted the French Church’s autonomy within the family of the Roman Catholic Church.

This sentiment was enhanced by the above-mentioned Concordat of Bologna. On the one hand, the king strengthened his control of the French Church against the papal curia and, on the other hand, the papal curia assured the French Church’s Roman Catholic character as well as its control over the church’s economic resources.³ Even though the Concordat was not the occasion to advance church reform as a national policy, it certainly secured room for the king to promote church reform based on late medieval conciliarism. French kings had historically given support for claiming the national church’s autonomy and for keeping papal dominance over France in check. In addition, Francis’s own patronage of the humanist studies contributed to church reform. In the conciliar tradition, there was a conceptual distinction between the Catholic Church and the Roman Church, with the Roman Church considered as a member of the Catholic church. Similarly, the French Church claimed to be a member of the Catholic church, distinct from the Roman Church. Furthermore, humanist studies under the patronages of the king and his sister, Marguerite, tended to distinguish not only between the Catholic church and the Roman Church, but also between the ancient catholic church and the late medieval Roman Catholic Church, promoting the restoration of the ancient Catholic church’s tradition as a core of church reform. This awareness of the Catholic church tradition was the ideal of French humanism as well as the early French Reformation, and it was assumedly shared by the young Calvin.

The resurging awareness of the church catholic manifested in French humanism is well illustrated by the early work of Lefèvre d’Étaples, Commentaries on the Four Gospels (1522), which appealed for the restoration of the long extant ancient Catholic church.⁴ Out of this humanist tradition led by Erasmus and Lefèvre, there appeared the reform movement that advocated for the restoration of the church catholic, pure gospel proclamation, and the recovery of evangelical worship. Its representative case was the Meaux reformist group led by Cardinal Guillaume Briçonnet and Lefèvre that was extensively involved in the practical reform of Briçonnet’s Meaux bishopric. In fact, Calvin’s university days coincided with this period of church reform at Meaux, a suburb of Paris, from its apex to setback and then disappearance.⁵

In the background of Calvin’s academic formation, however, there were other forces at work around the French reform movement. The Theological Faculty of the University of Paris, popularly known as the Sorbonne, claimed itself to be a main defender of the Roman Catholic Church. On the opposite side, the influence of the Evangelicalism of Luther and Zwingli, which envisioned a reform far more radical than the humanist reform, was beginning to be felt. In the milieu of the threefold conflicting forces, the Paris Theological Faculty took initiatives to suppress the early French Reformation. Its operations were exemplified by the judgment of heresy against Luther (1521), the heresy inquiry in the case of Lefèvre and the Meaux reform (1525), and the judgment of heresy against Erasmus (1527). Its main argument against them asserted that pairing humanist studies and reform would inevitably result in the Lutheran heresy. It often cooperated with the royal judicial system, especially the Parlement of Paris, for that suppression.⁶

In this historical context, we find a polarization within the French reform movement: a moderate position seeking church reform within the framework of the current French Church, and a more radical position advocating a thorough reform of the Church, including the positive evaluation and application of the Evangelical reform of Luther and Zwingli. In our study we shall call these two groups the moderate evangelical humanists and the radical evangelical humanists. If we take the case of the Meaux reform (1521–25) and its associates, for example, Brinçonnet, Lefèvre, and a leading reformist Gérard Roussel, who later became the court preacher of Marguerite and was appointed as Bishop of Oloron, were regarded as the former. Louis de Berquin, who was known both for his translations of Erasmus and Luther and as a satirical author against the Paris Theological Faculty, a Paris Doctor Pierre Caroli, and Guillaume Farel, who was a disciple of Lefèvre and later became the reformer of Neuchâtel, Geneva, and Lausanne in French-speaking Switzerland, were regarded as the latter.⁷

2. Paris University Days

The historical certainty concerning Calvin’s life in this period is limited to a few facts. A fourteen-year-old youth matriculated at the Collège de la Marche in 1523, moved to the prestigious Collège de Montaigu within a few months, and, after four years of study there, graduated with a degree (licencié en arts) in 1528. From this inadequate picture, researchers have advanced ratiocinations concerning his academic formation as well as his personal profile by using his own later recollections, secondary materials, and contextual evidence. In our study, however, from our interest in the formation of his ecclesiology, we shall selectively focus on the following three points.

(i) The first point is to acknowledge that Calvin’s basic education in the arts can well be understood within the scheme of its opposition to the University’s Theological Faculty. In the history of medieval university education, Renaissance humanism arose as a reforming force out of the basic study of the humanities, and its influences had later permeated the professional studies of theology, law, and medicine. Calvin’s days at the university witnessed the increasing conflict between the reform ideas of humanists and the Theological Faculty, which was alarmed by their influence. In Paris, in August 1523, the month of Calvin’s matriculation, for example, an Augustinian monk was burned to death for the charge of Lutheran heresy, and royal intervention forced the release of Berquin, a reformer who had been imprisoned by the collusion of the Faculty and the Parlement of Paris.⁸ In rejoicing over Berquin’s release, the university students staged a comedy, “La Farce des théologastres,” which was considered to be patterned after Berquin’s condemned satire against the Faculty. The play’s plot satirized the Faculty by calling it the Sorbonne and set the reformist group of Luther and the French humanists over against the Faculty.⁹ If these events symbolized Calvin’s initiation into university life, the expulsion of Erasmus’s humanistic work, Colloquies, from the entire university curriculum in 1528, orchestrated by Noёl Beda, syndic of the Faculty, certainly marked an epilogue for Calvin’s university days.¹⁰

Among humanist influences that had assumedly touched Calvin in this period, we may count two cases as historically more verifiable: the basic instructions in grammar and rhetoric received at La Marche from Mathurin Cordier, to whom Calvin later dedicated his Commentary on the First Thessalonians (1550), and his friendship with humanist reformist and his elder cousin, Pierre Robert Olivétan, whose French translation of the Bible afforded an occasion for Calvin to write two prefaces in 1535. Among other humanist influences, Calvin researchers have advanced ratiocinations of a few notable cases: the late medieval lay reform movement, Devotio Moderna, which appealed to returning to the Bible and Augustine and was said to be influential at Montaigu in Calvin’s time; the characteristically anti-Pelagian Scotism; the Neo-Augustinianism of John Major (Mair), a philosopher from Scotland and a leading professor at Montaigu (1525–31). However, the overall picture is that Calvin was predominantly influenced by humanism, the trend of the times, and that the humanist trend can be understood in sharp opposition to the Paris Theological Faculty.¹¹

(ii) The second point concerns Calvin’s studies at the Collège de Montaigu where he had spent his life from 14 to 18 years of age. Montaigu was known for being a prestigious Collège during this period. Its reputation was largely due to the educational reforms of Jean Standonck, its rector at the end of the previous century, as well as to Noёl Beda, rector at the turn of the century, who was known for rigorous studies and strict observance of the rules. Incidentally, there were several Montaigu residents who later became famous: Erasmus had a short stay a few years ahead of Calvin. François Rabelais and Ignatius Loyola, a founder of the Jesuit Order, also roughly coincided with Calvin’s time.

On the other hand, the reputation of Montaigu definitely did not rest on its humanist studies but on its role as a preparatory school for candidates to the ecclesiastical offices. In fact, many candidates resided there and upon their graduation advanced to theological studies. Due to this close affiliation with the Theological Faculty, Montaigu was also known for its spirit of defending the church establishment and their conservatism was prevalent. For example, “La Farce des théologastres” satirized Montaigu as an accomplice of the Collège de Sorbonne where the theological courses were concentrated. John Major, Montaigu’s philosopher and professor in the Theological Faculty, criticized the human...