Transcript
TORRANCE: And maintained on a double front. A -- against Rome, where the doctrine of the mass was a supreme issue, along with the false notions it involved about -- and continuity in church and ministry, and B -- against the Anabaptists and Sectarians, where the doctrine of infant baptism was the central issue and had to be maintained against
the false notions of discontinuity involved in fanatical teaching about the Spirit. Calvin's teaching on both these fronts is as instructive and important for us as it was in the sixteenth century. It is my firm belief that the witness of the Reformed churches in the world today must be grounded upon a reassessment of that teaching in terms about biblical
and historical status and that it is along this line that we can make our biggest contribution to the ecumenical movement. The recovery of that theological perspective and task is certainly greatly needed in the alliance of the Reformed churches. Here [I'll?] make an addition to the text. A strong alliance theologically rehabilitated could only
contribute toward the aims of the World Council of Churches because the very essence of Reformed theology concerns the unity of the church as the one body of Christ. No stronger emphasis is to be found in the writings of John Calvin and at [nowhere?] are his emotions more deeply stirred than in his constant insistence that the unity of the church is the will of
God and that to seek manifest unity is obedience to the blood of Christ, by whom we are reconciled to God and are [redacted?] into one body. The injection of this Reformed emphasis into the faith and order activities at Lund had succeeded in carrying the ecumenical movement forward in a definite and promising way,
but it is supremely important for the Alliance of Reformed Churches to recover theological depth and unity in order that this may be done effectively. Nothing could be healthier for this alliance than the initiation and carrying through of some theological task through which its own life and purpose could be renewed as
a whole and by means of which it could engage with far greater effect in the ecumenical movement. A task, for example, such as the clarification so much needed today of the doctrine of Holy Baptism or the clarification and the formulation of our Reformed understanding
of the eldership and the diaconate. My duty here today is to speak about the witness of the Reformed churches through doctrine in the context of our main theme. I would like, therefore, to examine more carefully the two main issues in the Calvinistic Reformation, which I have spoken, and then to speak of four ways along which this witness may be enunciated and worked out today
in the world church. The two main issues -- first, all Calvin's teaching and preaching have to do with salvation through union with Christ in His death and resurrection. That is very clear in the institutes in which the [simple?] message is worked out more and more clearly and fully from book to book
and is given its most magnificent form in book four. In the history of theology, Calvin represents the movement to bring the doctrine of the person of Christ into the center. In that he stood consciously in the tradition of Augustine and [Bernard?] in their emphasis upon personal Christological truth, but in Calvin it is more biblical, more dynamic
and eschatological than mystical, and certainly much less individualist than it was in Bernard. Calvin refused to teach the doctrine that the Bride of Christ is the soul of the individual; it's the whole corporate congregation -- the body of Christ. It is around this doctrine of union with Christ, then, that Calvin
deals his doctrine of faith -- of the church as the living body of Christ -- and his doctrine of the Christian life, Baptism, and the Lord's Supper. Apart from union with Christ, Calvin says, all that Christ did for us would be unavailing. Atonement has no place apart from the doctrine of union
with Christ. An examination of the structure of the institute makes it clear that these form the main substance of his theology and that the idea of predestination is not given central place. Predestination comes in as a rule in connection with certain controversies, mainly with [Pistereo?] and [Pigus?], but never as a basic doctrine
in itself, except insofar as Christ is Himself the elect one and the mirror of all election and to that Calvin gives but a small chapter in the Institutes in the heart of his Christology, and perhaps I may say that the best exposition of this I know in Reformed theology is to be found in the collective works of Jonathan Edwards,
in which he gives a remarkable account of the teaching of David Benhard on election as election of the body in Christ the Head of the body. Rather is predestination in Calvin given a place of the circumference of his theology where it acted like a protecting wall for the central emphasis of grace and
adoption or sonship in Christ. In the 1559 edition of The Institutes, it is particularly evident that Calvin relegated predestination to the position of a coronary to his main teaching enshrining the mystery of union with Christ, and he placed it side by side with chapters of eschatology to show that predestination
is that which reaches out in union with Christ to the new heaven and the new earth. Nothing has done more harm to Calvinism than the invention and perpetuation of the myth that Calvin's theology was a severely logical structure. That notion grew up,
as far as I'm aware, on French soil and was perpetuated by the great succession by Calvinist school men on the continent eminently in Holland. Modern research, however, makes it indubitably clear that Calvin's whole theology was formulated in a very definite reaction against the [arid?], logical [schematisms?] into which the doctrines of the church had been thrust
by the frigid doctors of [Sarvam?], as he called them, and that again and again he was content to leave the ends of his theological thinking loose for the precise reason that theology runs out always to the point of wonder where we can only clap our hands on our mouth and remember that we are
humble creatures. The whole inner substance of Calvin's teaching, as he shows, enshrines mystery and resists rationalistic schematization, so that is a great disservice to interpret Calvin as, above all, a logician. That is not to say that his theology is not amazingly consistent,
as it is, but its consistency derives not from formal logic, but from the thoroughness with which he stated his theology in terms of the analogy of Christ. In his [preferatory?] letter to the king of France in the 1559 edition of The Institutes, Calvin pointed out, following the apostle Paul, that Christian theology must
operate with the analogia fidei -- the analogy of faith -- and that when doctrine is tested by this analogy; its victory is secure. By the analogy of faith, Calvin meant both that all doctrine must be based upon the exegetical study of holy Scripture, in which scriptural passages are interpreted in terms of each other and, more basically,
that all doctrines are to be thought out thoroughly in terms of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus, for example, in regard to repentance, which was such a prominent issue at the Reformation, while the Roman school men divided repentance into three parts -- contrition, confession, and satisfaction -- Calvin, following the analogy
of faith in Jesus Christ, showed that repentance has two essential parts, mortification and vivification, as he called it -- dying with Christ and rising again with Christ, corresponding to the death and the resurrection of Christ. It was, [in?] carrying that Christological analogy through all the doctrines of the faith, that Calvin achieved such an astonishing consistency,
but its consistency -- it is consistency determined not by logical relation, nor by some kind of Calvinistic philosophy so called, but by the principle of Christological analogy. That is to say by the doctrine of Christ, crucified and risen, ascended and coming again,
applied to the whole of our life and work and thought. It's just here that the Reformed churches have a witness to give and a contribution to make of great significance to the situation of the world church today in picking up again the Reformed integration of the different doctrines of the faith and in thinking them into each other more thoroughly
than ever before. Take, for example, the relation of the church and ministry to the doctrine of Christ, which so concerns the ecumenical movement. By its very principle of procedure, the Reformed church has refused to divorce the ministry from the articles of saving faith, so that for us the ministry
is a [dei fidei?] concern, I believe, in the Holy Catholic Church. The church and the ministry themselves belong to the articles of saving faith; the doctrine of the church as the body of Christ is part of Christology, so that the ordering of the church as the body of Christ on earth cannot be divorced from the
dogmatic discipline through which the mind of the church grows into mature conformity [to?] the mind of Christ, and it's interesting to note that out of this and [parallel?] Lutheran insistence comes the whole discipline of dogmatics. The Roman Catholic Church never had dogmatics until it copied the churches of the Reformation.
They began the dogmatic discipline by taking it over from the Reformed church and now we have great and amazingly Reformed dogmaticians in the Roman Church, such as Professor Schmaus of Munster. The dogmatic and the ecclesiastical forms of the church, the inner and the outer, so to speak, may well be distinguished, but they are not to be separated.
The church is one spirit and one body with Christ. There is no spiritual unity which is not also a bodily unity, and there is no real bodily unity which is not also a spiritual unity; these two are one because Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh. The Reformed Church, therefore, sought from the very
beginning to allow the dogmatic and ecclesiastical forms of the church to interpenetrate each other in obedience to the Word of God and so to restore the doctrinal and ecclesiastical face of the ancient Catholic Church. In our Reformed church, therefore, we will not have a doctrine of the ministry or of succession that cannot be fully
integrated with the doctrines of the person of Christ or atonement, but on the other hand, we [will?] not have formulations of other doctrines which do not contribute to the growth or edification of the church as the living body of Christ -- to the church as ecclesia semper reformanda in [Christo?] -- the church that is always being reformed according to the Word of God in Christ. That is why in the Reformed
Church, we insist on the closest relation of theology to the life of the church, and Calvin's notion of [discoplena?] is such a teaching and instruction in discipleship in Christ that the daily life of the church is made to reflect the mind of Christ, and that is why the worship and the theology of the Reformed
Church are so clearly and definitely integrated. The greatest doctrinal statements that John Knox has to make are to be found in his prayers. There's not a single prayer of Calvin, to my knowledge, of the hundreds -- [yea?] thousands -- that have been preserved which does not speak of the Christian hope. Now that, as I see it, is our greatest contribution
to the theology of the world church -- the carrying through into the ecumenical situation of the Christological criticism of the doctrines of the church, ministry, and sacraments, in order that, as we seek to come together in Christ, the doctrine of Christ may be allowed to reshape all our churches, so that we may
grow up together into the fullness of Christ. Only as in the World Council of Churches, we are prepared for [this?] strenuous and self-critical task of Reformation together -- the joint criticism of our several traditions, according to the Word of God -- can we come together in such a way as to be the one flock of the one Shepherd.
We, in this alliance, should engage in the World Council of Churches always as the ecclesia semper reformanda in order to let the Word of God speak to us and in order through obedience to this Word of God spoken to us in the brotherhood of the churches to become more and more
reformed by it. Secondly, this has already carried us into the field of the other main contribution of Calvin to the Reformed Churches, about which I would like to speak. The doctrine of the continuity of the church, which was asserted against the Sectarians, mainly over the question of infant baptism. No doctrine is
more important for the church today than the doctrine of Baptism and its significance as carrying incorporation into the body of Christ. Our many divergences in regard to church union, in regard to the problems of marriage and divorce, in regard to the nurture and admonition of the church,
in regard to the question of inter-communion, depend at rock bottom upon the doctrine of Baptism. It's supremely important that the Reformed churches should rediscover the magnitude of Baptism as we find it on the pages of the New Testament and in the early church, where it was called the great mystery of the faith.
There are whole books in the New Testament that haven't a word to say about the Lord's Supper, but a great deal to say about Baptism, and it is only within our baptismal incorporation into the body of Christ that we can speak properly of the Lord's Supper and speak properly [of?] sitting down together as members of that body to feed upon
that body, so that refusal at this point to sit down together at the Lord's Table is, to use Calvin's words, to lacerate the body of Christ. The rediscovery of the meaning of Baptism is, then, the secret of the ecumenical movement. He who takes Holy Baptism seriously can do no other than be reconciled to his brother member in the body for which Christ died and rose again, but here again later Calvinism tended to diverge from its greatest teacher in regard to the notion of the covenant. Like Zwingli and Bullinger, and indeed following them, Calvin also taught that there is but one
covenant, which is the same in substance in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, but not the same in form. By that doctrine, they asserted the continuity of the church in unbroken perpetuity from the beginning of God's dealings with the race, but whereas the covenant -- or federal theology -- tended to
isolate the covenant idea into a historical principle in itself, Calvin refused to think of the covenant except in terms of the kingdom of Christ -- the regnum Christi -- on the one hand and the doctrine of the church as the body of Christ on the other hand, and before both of these
[concepts?], which gave the substance of the churches continuity, the federal idea was given a secondary place. How far removed that is from Calvin's teaching is indicated -- can be indicated simply in this way. In my [own?] editions of the commentaries and sermons of Calvin, I make a detailed index at the back of each volume of every
thought -- main idea -- in them. To every two times that the word covenant is mentioned, the body of Christ is mentioned about 10 times and the kingdom of Christ about 20 times. That shows the vast difference between Calvin's teaching and that of the later federal theologians. The elimination of the regnum Christi -- of the covenant --
of the kingdom of Christ -- from the covenanted idea, or its subordination to the covenant idea, meant the loss of eschatology and the disappearance of emphasis upon the Corpus Christi -- the body of Christ -- from the covenant idea meant the transmutation of the Presbyterian Church into a hardened and, too often,
a legalist institution. God have mercy upon us for that. I believe that the Reformed churches have a notable witness to offer here too, but only if we are prepared here also to be the ecclesia semper reformanda -- the church that is always ready in obedience to the Word of God to call in question the growing legalism
of our church courts and their growing bureaucracy and, indeed, the whole concept of practice and procedure. That is to say, of government by historical precedent, rather than by ever fresh obedience to the Word of God. There is a remarkable vision in one of the fathers of the church at the end of the first century
in which he sees a vision of the church as the ecclesia [presbutera?] -- and you may translate that, if you like, as the Presbyterian Church. He sees this church -- this older church -- as an old lady with graying hair and wrinkles on her face, and then as he watches this old lady, he discovers an astonishing
thing happening. Her hair gets whiter and whiter and whiter, but her flesh becomes younger and younger and younger until it is restored to her like the flesh of a virgin or of a little child. The ecclesia presbutera, he says, becomes ecclesia [neotera?]. The Presbyterian Church becomes younger and younger. Let the Roman curch
boast of her antiquity; the church of Jesus Christ rejoices that she ever dies with Christ in order to rise again a new and a young creature, and it's this understanding of the church, in which we carry about the dying of the Lord Jesus that the light also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh, so that if
the outward man perish, the inward man is being renewed day by day, that we need to do into the whole conception of our church government and church courts. We are hamstrung again and again by ancient precedent, and we govern our churches by ancient actions instead of by ever-fresh obedience to the living and alive [Word?] of Christ.
In the ecumenical situation in which we find ourselves, I'm not concerned here so much with church law as with the continuity and ordering of the church as the body of Christ, and here I believe we can do no better than to return to the teaching of Calvin. Like [Bucer?], [Vere?], [Marta?], Knox, and other colleagues in Reform,
Calvin turns for his doctrine of the church and ministry to two prime documents and, characteristically, one is from the New Testament and one from the early fathers. St. Paul's fourth chapter of Ephesians -- (Greek) [de unitate ecclesiae?] -- on the unity of the church. St. Paul gives Calvin his doctrine of the church as the body of Christ,
and of the ministry as the membering of that body under the disposition of the head of the body -- the sole head of that body. [Ansiprian?] -- drawing that out -- gives Calvin his doctrine of the ministry as the corporate Episcopate held in [soledum?] -- held corporately by all alike who are called to the holy ministry,
an Episcopate which involves the parity of all before God, but allows also of what Calvin called political distinctions, and here let me read you a few words from the mature Calvin, commentary on [Numbers three and five?], which he wrote toward the end of his life. "Political distinction [of ranks?]
is not to be repudiated, for natural reason itself dictates this in order to take away confusion, but that which shall have this object in view will be so arranged that it may neither obscure Christ's glory, nor minister to ambition or tyranny, nor prevent all ministers from cultivating mutual fraternity with each other with equal
rights and liberties." Here you have asserted the doctrine of the parity of ministers in the Presbytery and yet it carries with it what Calvin calls political distinctions and that's the point that we need to think through. That's Calvin's teaching; it wasn't the teaching of [Beeser?] and Melville, but it was the teaching of the Reformation, and we need to give that further discussion and sympathetic
understanding in the ecumenical situation today. Now there are [constitutive?] ideas which we must take up and rethink in our present situation. I cannot undertake that fully here, but there are four [lines?] which we may well think about and -- A -- here, in addition to the text -- A -- the doctrine of the Christian hope was
unquestionably one of Calvin's chief concerns, although it is so often misunderstood. Calvin's main teaching can be formulated by saying that eschatology is the application of Christology to the work of the church in history. It was on the ground -- of Christology, for example, that Calvin attacked the [chilias?] --
or the Millenarians because they took such a low view of the glorious majesty of the risen Lord. Consistently, Millenarianism involved an [Ebionite?] heretical doctrine of Christ; let's say, a Judaistic notion of Jesus. Calvin's teaching pivots here, once again, upon the doctrine of union with Christ. Because we are
united to Christ, who is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and through the Spirit participate in the risen humanity of Jesus. Eschatology is essential to our faith; union with Christ means union with Christ who rose again from the dead, who ascended to the right hand of the Father, and who will come again,
and, therefore, union with Christ here and now carries in its heart the outreach of faith toward the resurrection of the dead and the renewal of heaven and earth at the Second Advent of Christ. The crucial issue in Calvin's eschatology is the humanity of this risen Jesus Christ and our actual participation
in his humanity through word and sacrament. Now this is a supremely important question today. In my view, this is the main issue that divides all theologies, strikes across the face of every church, and strikes their theologies apart to the one side or to the other. Are we to take the humanity of the risen Jesus
seriously or not, or are we to teach a docetic view of the risen and ascended Jesus. To demythologize the resurrection of the man Jesus and the ascension of the man Jesus and the advent of Jesus as man, as well as Lord and Savior, is to dehumanize
Christ and to dehumanize the church with His body. That is why the whole movement of demythologization in theology is parallel to the demythologization of humanity that you see in modern art. For example, in Kandinsky or Clay, where they portray a human creature with two eyes staring out into the darkness and the leg and the wiggly lines here and there.
That's the demythologization of humanity, whether it be with logical positivism, which is the demythologization of philosophy, or the teaching of Bultmann, which is the demythologization of theology, it all reaches its crucial rock bottom issue at this point. The main reason why so many people cannot see the importance of eschatology is because they
divorce eschatology from the doctrine of Christ and dehumanize Christ. If He who rose again and ascended to the right hand of God is no longer man -- flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone -- then we are of all men most miserable. We have no hope for humanity. The Christian hope is irreparably bound up with
the fact that Christ is Man at the right hand of God -- Man, as well as Lord and God Himself. If our humanity is not forever joined to God in Christ, but is to be demythologized, then we are faced with no future for humanity, [but inhuman?] elimination. That is why the central
teaching of Calvin on eschatology is bound up with such passages as Colossians one and twenty-seven -- "Christ in you, the hope of glory" -- and Hebrews 6 and 18 following -- "We lay hold upon the hope that is set before us, which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, which entereth into that within
the veil, the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, a high priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek." Because we are united to Jesus -- anchored to Jesus -- who, in our flesh, has risen from the dead and in our flesh lives now on the resurrection side of death and wrath and darkness,
we are eternally anchored to the new humanity and that is our hope. This is the cardinal fact upon which eschatology hinges, but in Calvin's teaching, this stress upon the humanity of Jesus Christ has a double reference, which it is most important for us today to see clearly.
On the one hand, union with Christ in His risen humanity means that we are so anchored already to the new creation -- are so joined to the new humanity -- that our faith, by an inner compulsion of the Spirit, reaches out in hope toward the renewal of humanity. Yes, to the renewal of the whole earth -- of heaven and earth --
but on the other hand, union with the humanity of Christ means that here and now we must live out that humanity from day to day in the midst of the earth. That is why Calvin's sermons are always pressing home to the church. The need to be concerned with [humanite?] in every aspect of its life and work.
One of the most frequent words in all Calvin's sermons is this word humanite -- humanite. Take, for example, that great passage from the fourth book of The Institute, cited the other day by President Mackay, a passage that is word for word the same in 1559 as it was in 1536, which shows how important Calvin held it to be --
Passage in which Calvin insists that it is the duty of the magistrates and of the state to make room for humanity and, by the exercise of justice -- even by the sword -- to maintain freedom for humanity on the earth. That exposition comes after long sections in book four on the holy sacraments, in which Calvin has been expounding the doctrine of union with Christ through Baptism, in which we are incorporated into Christ, and the Lord's Supper, in which we feed upon Christ's risen humanity, or feed, as Calvin puts it so dramatically and so often, upon the vivifying flesh of Jesus. It is the [humanitas?]
that provides the middle term between the life of the church in its sacramental nourishment and growth on the one hand, and the function of the state on the other hand. The church feeds on Christ and is nourished by Him and grows up through the Word and the ministry of the Word and sacrament into the full
stature of His manhood. It increases in union more and more with His risen humanity, but that church must manifest [His?] humanity upon the earth in day to day living, so that the church that goes frequently to the Lord's Table and is renewed there in the humanity of Christ
must live out that humanity and act according to His humanity in the midst of the inhumanity of this world. It's the business of the state to make room for that increase and growth of humanity through the church, so that the state, as well as the church, has a place in what Calvin calls the
kingdom of Christ, and the doctrine of the state belongs, in Calvin's view, therefore, to eschatology. That is why eschatology is concerned in Calvin not only with the future manifestation of our new humanity in Christ and, indeed, the future unveiling of the new heaven and the new earth, but eschatology by its very nature
injects into the Christian church on earth, and in the midst of history, the imperative and the power to live out that humanity from day to day, and so, as Calvin puts it, to extend among men the kingdom of Christ -- the kingdom of Christ who now rules, as Calvin says, [para humani tatum?] --
through His humanity. That is why the eschatology of the Lord's Prayer, as Calvin points out in a number of passages, has a double reference -- Thy kingdom come and Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. The Christian hope is the only hope for the world because,
and not only because, it tells us that the world is anchored to Christ and will be renewed entirely -- the earth and humanity -- but because here and now through the church, in word and sacrament, that new humanity is already operative among men, and it is only through the operation of that new humanity
that this wild and inhuman world of ours can be saved from its own savagery and be called into the kingdom of peace and love and humanity. Here, then, is the chief point of controversy in the theological world of today, both with the demythologizers on the one hand and with the Millenarians on the other hand.
A weak and docetic view of the humanity of the risen and ascended Jesus -- weakness at this vital point destroys the Christian hope, both for the future and for the present. Let the churches of this alliance learn again the meaning of the Word made flesh and
the resurrection of the body. B -- the doctrine of the ministry -- this is A in your text -- the doctrine of the ministry based upon the Pauline doctrine of the church as the body of Christ is thrown into sharp relief by the attempts being made to get today by some Anglicans
and Lutherans to give their conception of the ministry a doctrinal formulation; [that?], of course, is new to Anglicanism. Sometimes they try to show that the functions exercised by Christ in His ministry are of two kinds -- those which are unique to Him and those which can be passed on. The latest example of this is the book called The Root of the Vine,
published in Uppsala under the editorship of Fridrichsen, and so they think of the ministry of the church as extending certain functions of Jesus and, therefore, a relation of continuation and even of identity between the ministry of the church and the ministry of Christ is proposed. Calvin would have none of that.
He made a distinction between certain unique functions of the apostles as bound up with their part in the New Testament revelation and their part along with the prophets in being the once and for all foundation of the church and other apostolic functions, which were passed on through the laying on of the hands of the Presbytery, but even the apostles could not be
thought of as extending or continuing any of the functions of Christ's ministry. Calvin thought of the matter in quite a different way. The ministry of the church is essentially corporate, in which the church, as Christ's body, participates in Christ's prophetic, priestly, and kingly ministry by serving Him who is the Lord of the
church. Christ exercises His ministry as Prophet, Priest, and King uniquely, incomparably, vicariously in terms of substitution, but the church which is engrafted into Christ as His body participates in His whole ministry in a way appropriate to the church as the Servant [of?] the body,
of which He is the Head and Lord. The church is essentially and only servant, and yet in its servant way, it is given to participate in Christ's prophetic, priestly, and kingly ministry because, through Baptism, the church is inserted into the functioning of His body. Here, then, the Reformed doctrine of the
ministry is, at once, so high that Calvin can speak of the minister as exercising a vicarious work and yet as representing the person of Christ, these are his very words, and yet there is no hint at all of any relation [of?] identity or prolongation between the ministry of the church and that of Christ. The church as the body of Christ is in no
sense an extension of the incarnation, and the ministry of the church is in no sense identical with the ministry of Christ, and that is the point which we have to rethink, and this is the point which the Reformed doctrine of the church, in its high doctrinal Christology, has the only key to unlock
the tangle in the ecumenical movement about church and ministry. See, here too we have a doctrine of the continuity of the ministry as grounded upon the continuous growth of the whole body and of the continuity of the ministry as absolutely essential to that growth. Take away the ministry and the whole church will
collapse, Calvin said, and yet St. Paul, in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, uses two distinct words of the church -- its edification -- [oikodome?] -- and its growth -- [auxasis?]. The ministry is utterly essential to the building up of the church, and it belongs to the [essay?] of the church in history, but it is God
alone who gives the increase, and so the ministry is essentially the scaffolding which God uses, for it is He and He alone that builds the church, He and He alone that shapes the body and gives it growth and [increase?] --