Transcript
Almighty God, God of the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles and the martyrs, the reformers of the church, God of our fathers, our children, our generations yet unborn, grant us the wisdom and the insight. As we reflect upon the history of our church, we may be directed further in the lives that we lead and in the government and teaching of the church in our own day. As we ask in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. Professor Baybrook has
been presented on the preceding evening as a systematic delusion, indeed as the great eminence of reform theology on the continent, an entirely justified designation. We know, however, that the lectures in this series are in the field of the history of theology. I must say that in my own mind it is this aspect of his work that is always foremost. Many of us have learned already that his book, systematic theology, is at the same time an excellent
handbook for the person interested in the history of the various theological ideas discussed. One finds they are always historic and depth and also in brief comps, usually the best works from the history of Christian doctrine to the soul. Also, he is in the process of preparing a large team of assistants, what will be the definitive volume of the confessions and friezes of the reformed church, together with certain church orders. The last comprehensive collection of this kind
is now 90 years old, and this will be a contribution that will be honored, no doubt, as a monument to the subject matter of the previous confessions. Also, anyone who reads in this area knows that Professor Baybrook has fathered many doctoral dissertations that have enriched our knowledge of the history of Christian thought. So, it is primarily this evening as a historian that we welcome him to Princeton. The topic of his lecture this evening is the unity
of the church, according to Cal. Professor Baybrook. Mr. President, my dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I have to talk about the unity of the church. Catholic theologians are, or better said, well, accustomed to speak about a splitting of the church in the 16th century. For the first, it is to be answered that the Reformation, as a movement, did not aim such a splitting, but indeed it took place. And not only there arose the splitting between the
Roman church and the churches of the Reformation, but also between the latter. The marks are represented by the Diet of Augsburg, 1555, and its religion specification, the end of the Council of Trenn, 1563, and the Lutheran formula of concord by which, definitely, the unity between the Lutheran and the Reformed churches was cut off. The last mark was the Senate of Dort, 1618 to '19, in which the Reformed churches threw away all spiritualist movement, which until then
had partially existed in their area. It is out of doubt that since the Trenn Council, more and more, a second formation of evangelical confessions took place, the term is taken from Isaac August Dörner. For the inner structure of the Protestant churches must be said that, from origin, the movement of Reformation was multiple. Reformation is totally misunderstood if one thinks that there was a Lutheran impulse at the beginning and that all other movements were to be judged
according to the measure of Luther's theology. This was too inordinate in itself for giving such a measure, and Luther has yielded to many people the liberty to think otherwise than he had did himself. His friend Melanchthon was the first example for this, and Martin Luther at Strasbourg, John Brands in Württemberg, Andrew Oseander in Nuremberg, were others. Calvin also seems to have belonged to that people to whom Luther yielded that liberty. Only Zwingli was out of the
debate. The later Lutherans excluded Oseander as well as Calvin and Plesius. They were more Lutheran than Luther himself. But the result, the formula of concord, went out to a movement by which important parts of the Lutheran Church grew strange from originally Lutheranism. Even the city of Nuremberg did not accept the formula. The Scandinavian countries did it no more, and an important number of churches in their way of teaching, such as Hesse, Riemann, a part of Holstein,
a part of the former Lutheran region of the Palatine, went over to the Reformed Church. The concord was rightly called a discord by Hospinian in Zurich. It is true that the inquiries of a new unity in general is due to new splitings. This is the case in regards to the disputations between Roman Catholic theologians as well in regard to Protestant discussions about unity, which from the Lutheran's point of view only could have the result that other
people should adopt the Lutheran conceptions. But, alas, the same must be said about the Senate of Dort, which was designed to integrate original Calvinism as it was understood some time after Calvin's death. Calvin himself had his great period in the years of the Trent Council. He watchfully followed all information he could get about the decisions of the council. And he was, if I see right, the first of the reformers to give a position about the first
decisions. In 1547, he wrote his conception in the book of the Acts of the Senate of Trent in the great edition, Book VII, 371 following. Up to that year, the decisions especially on the Holy Scriptures, the tradition, and the justification had appeared. It is easy to be observed that even these points are central for Calvin's theology. But long before he had become a member of an acting group of Protestant theologians who at one hand had the
aim to make use of the last occasions of reconciliation with Roman Catholic theologians, and at the other hand strove to a better understanding between the Protestant groups. He was like Martin Buser and as his co-operant an ecumenical theologian because he thought that the Church is one and that it is Catholic. The term of syncretism, which seems to be an invention of Martin Buser, characterizes Calvin as well as Buser himself. He had the opinion that the
Reformation was no decession from the one and Catholic Church, but only its new formation. Neither love nor verity should be violated. But in regard to the Roman Church, Calvin thought that without the violation of verity, the maintaining of unity would not be possible. He, however, has raised the question if all Roman Catholic conception were untrue. And he has taken part of religion discussions in which this question was the hidden or open center. Calvin was an ecumenical
theologian, and he has spent to the task of the reunion of the Church his best force. He became as Karl Holl has said after the death of Luther, the renounced leader of general Protestantism. The image of Calvin, which we win in this context, is very far from the popular image of a man who should have been a fanatic. But it is also by far different from the image of Melanchthon and Buser, the other leaders to a
unity movement. Calvin speaks clearer than his two friends and was not a theologian of compromise, but one of the diagonal, as Joseph Boatiz has said. After having acknowledged that reconciliation with Rome as a charge was impossible, he became the organizer of a contra-reformation, the most dangerous adversary of the pope, the polar systematic of Loïla, who in his youth had frequented the same college with him, the Collège de France in Paris. It may be significating that
in the pre-script to the chapter first of book four of the Introduce, we read, the true charge with which as mother of all the godly we must keep unit, translation of battles, unity. It is true that the charge belongs to the external media, where it helps by which God invites us into the society of Christ and takes us fast in it. It is in accord to this that in the first chapter from 29 sections are
speaking about the unity which we have to hold with the charge. These sections in their majority are taken from the addition of 39. The Strasbourg period of coming. And they are directed against fantastic groups which aimed a perfect charge or the all charge of the perfect. Here we see in the same front as his Strasbourg friend Martin Botho, who even in 39 tried to gain for Hesse what he only by part had reached at Strasbourg, the
integration of the fanatics in the language of that time, the Anabaptists, into the charge. A man who like Calvin demands the unity of individual with the charge, must suppose that the charge itself is one. This unity is not to be found in special facts. Calvin does not know a charge which would have its base in subjective behavior. Therefore, he in the first line finds the unity of the charge, not in empirical facts, but in the unity
of Christ himself. The charge is Catholic because there are not two or three charges without Christ must be accepted. And this cannot be. There exists the law for us that the Son of God cannot more be disunited than the kingdom of heaven. The unity is natural for the charge. It may be dissipated by the disobedience of man, but any dissipation is the renunciation of the charge itself, not only of an attitude of it. But there is
the awful reality of the false charge. Calvin has held the full awfulness of this reality, and he has done his best for finding a way to reconciliation. He participated as the discussions of Hagenau, 1540, Worms, one year after, and Regensburg, 1541, together with Melanchthon and Bootho, as a by far younger theologian. The Diet of Regensburg was so important for him that he, in the year of the Diet itself, edited the acts of this debate. It seemed
that the negotiations were not totally without any success, even in regard to the doctrine of justification. A common opinion was reached. Calvin was very critical against the text, which did not seem him clear enough, but he subscribed to it and defended the article in a letter to Pharrell, w.11, 215. Any possible approach to ecclesiastical peace was of the greatest importance for him and justified even dangerous formulas. It is interesting to see that Luther, from the
beginning, was by far harder than Calvin. His letters, he was hindered from participation because he was not allowed to go to any place out of Saxony, have done their possible to prevent reconciliation. And the decision of the Pope did the same. The negotiation at last had no positive effect. But I think that it is an honor for Calvin to have participated at the experiment which would have led to new conceptions and possibilities. Like the other reforms,
Calvin thought in general that the struggle against false doctrine and life was no discession from the Church unity, but the only right way for maintaining it. Therefore, he avoids, as far as he can, any generalizing manner of speaking. Karl Holl has noted a cautious form of Calvin's expressions, and the historical reminiscences of the chapters 4 following of the Institutes show this in the same way as his critics to the first sessions of the Council of Trent
from 1547. But his cautious style of theological discussion did not hinder him from falling into the rough style of polemics. His treatise about relics from 1545 is up to our days a macabre and also delighting little work, and it is interesting that this small work at Wittenberg published in Jarmon 1557 may very well take its place at the site of Luther's new records from the Rhine 13 years before. But in general, there dominates the honest literature.
The theological polemics, which Calvin uses, are spanned into the frame of the doctrine of the two signs of the true Church. We have already spoken about them. The right preaching of the Word and the true administration of the sacraments. Where these signs or notes are no more to be seen, but where the sum of necessary doctrine is in vast, and the use of sacraments has broken down, there the decay of the Church is the consequence. Or,
in other terms, as the doctrine of the prophets and apostles, according to which the faithful have to found exclusively their salvation, is the fundament of the Church, the building cannot be maintained if this fundament is drawn up. Institutes 4, 2, 1. The Church only is living out of the Word, and therefore no Church is there where it is not subjected to and ruled by the Word. These arguments constantly come back, and the principle evidently has more
of white than any abuses may have. He says that it is not for him a pleasure to enumerate abuses. Immediate discussions about the problem, if the Reformation had been a split in the universal Church, are the letter to Francis I, which makes an introduction to the Institutes, and the letter to the Cardinal James Saddlewit, who in the absence of Calvin had tried to tell the people of Geneva that they had followed a movement of splitting. In
the later script, he presents an evangelical Christian who justifies himself towards God about that reproach. Is it a decession from the Church if anyone, where all soldiers leave their place, rises the sign of the chief and calls them back to their stations? Is it a decession if anyone is in struggle against the primores ecclesiastes, the fast men of the Church, regarding that Christ himself has spoken about the wolves which would come over his Church? No, says
the Christian. I know well that if I was eager in uniting thy Church, only the bound of concord was thy verity. Yes, he, the Christian, would have given his hat to be cut off, if by that the peace in the Church would have been restored, if he had had the conviction that he had given alarm for nothing. So, in the great edition, Tome 5, 409, following. The unity of church for Calvin is, as we saw, a
subject of belief, but it must be the true Church, which should have its unity. In his letter to Francis first, Calvin also discusses the reproach that either the Church must have been dead for a long time, or that the evangelicals were struggling against the Church. Calvin's answer? No, the Church has lived, and it will live as long as Christ reigns at the right side of the Father. But the adversaries have the opinion that the form of
the Church forever is inside or visible, while it does have exterior splendour or apparent form, but needs the two signs mentioned above. In the Old Testament, he finds arguments that then the Church nearly in its total had dwindled without being nothing. The Lord always has His paper conserved in spite of all dissipation and in spite of all struggle with error. In these words, Calvin expresses that the Church is not dependent upon any visible form, upon any
human activity, but that it is forever to be remembered to its origins. Ecclesia reformata, simple reformata, the reformed Church is forever to be reformed. A word which perhaps has its origin by bitter. On the fundamentals of these ideas, Calvin has acted in practice. He never has denied that even in the Church of the Pope, God had left some traces, vestiglia, or relics of the true Church. Baptists is common to all Churches. It is according to Calvin
not to be denied that in the Pope's Church there are Churches and remain. They are real, but the real and lawful constitution has fallen off. In other words, there are communities, but there is not the one Church. Of course, Calvin concedes that single believers are to be found in the framework of the Roman Church. But, at the other hand, it is the duty of any believer or community where the pure evangelist has been hired to struggle
against poverty. Calvin's struggle has its direction, especially in France against the Nicodemites, who, spiritualists as they were, gave themselves content to be followers of the pure doctrine without any exterior witness. Calvin has had nearly no success in his struggle against poverty. Reconciliation was more and more impossible. He thought as a Catholic, and the term of Catholic Church has never disappeared in his doctrine, but he found the Catholic Church only in the Protestant Churches. The more he
recognized his duty in working to a better unity in that Church, he was, as it has been often said, a theologian of the Protestant Union. The fundament for his activity in this area must be examined. It seems to consist in two conceptions. First, Calvin makes a difference or distinction between the universal Church and the local one. They both are visible, and they both are the Church. But the universal Church holds, in spite of its local dispersion,
the consents into one godly doctrine and is bound by the band of the same religion. The local Churches are town for town or village for village dispersed in regard to human necessity, institutions for one, nine. The peace between the local Churches is best maintained if only the signs are regarded, the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments. They cannot remain without any fruit. It scarcely may be doubted that these words are related to
the Augsburg Confession to which Calvin subscribed at Strasbourg in 1539, when it was not yet alterated. The emphasis is given to the local Churches, and it is to be seen that between one and another there may be a difference in doctrine if it is not fundamental. A very interesting example in Calvin's relation is Sebastian Castello, about 1545. Wachs 11, 674. Calvin enumerates the differences between the Geneva ministers and the famous humanist, Sebastian Castello. He was especially
Calvin's adversary in the question of the sense of the Song of Solomon. Calvin interpreted it as a prophetic work, which in the last line allowed to learn important things about the relation between Christ and the Church, while Sebastian Castello thought that it is a secular law of song. The second difference is coming from the other side, in relation to the explication of what means Christ's ascension to hell. Castello had the opinion that the term of the
credo means a real ascension to a real hell, while Calvin thinks it to be the utmost enduring of God's absence and angel. Castello's opinion in general also is that of Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Betzer. Calvin does not take hell for local, but for the loss of divine grace and charity in the lines of St. Augustine. This explication takes its issue from Augustine Carrere de Haute and is represented in the Middle Ages by the mystics, Luther also has
preferred this idea, but not in clear decision. Now Calvin enumerates the dissenting points, as we have seen, takes the credo as a short and simple sum of Christianity, and then declares that in Geneva no church will be condemnated, which gives an other interpretation than in the city at the Lake Lehmann, but that there could be the sorrow that an honest inconvenience would arise in case of different explication. The idea of Calvin is that local churches without
essential damage may have or suffer different doctrines within the frame of the general confession. The liberty of interpretation is in this frame not limited. Church unity suffers a differentiated form of teaching. Calvin's own behavior corresponded to this meaning. He, for instance, very well knew that Luther and Maumillanchthon taught about several subjects not like him, but he never as regarded them as heretics. In the struggle which he had with Jerome Bolzac, who denied his doctrine of predestination,
the latter appealed to Melanchthon and to his grand mark, the Lothi, which Calvin himself had edited in French, 1546, according to the original text of '45. Calvin was not silent about his differences with his friend at Wittenberg, but his interest in the case of Bolzac was that in the one community there was no diversity in doctrine. And it could be possible. He yielded that Protestant communities had, in several points, different doctrines. Yes, he contributed to make
known their opinions, but he fought against any dissipation of a local community by different doctrine. He was strong at his place, but he was generous in regard to other places, if only the fundament of faith was resolved. It is interesting to see how he quotes his contemporaneous When he is polemic against Luther, Melanchthon, Boussa, or others, he, in theological scriptures, never minds their names. He says some are meaning, some have the opinion, etc. The real adversaries
are called by name. He knows to make a difference between the interior Protestant discussion and the polemics against others. The background steadily is that differences are to be suffered within the frame of common Protestant doctrine, but that no difference can be in the local community. It should be seen that this is an ecumenical view, but in the interior circle of Protestant movement. The first principle has been explicated. The distinction between local and Protestant universal charge. Liberty
in universalism except uniformity in the local church. The second principle of Calvin is constituted by the idea of fundamental doctrine, which is needed for church unity. Anyone who knows the ecumenical discussions in our century is also knowing this problem within the first article of the World Council of Churches, alterated or not, has found its expression. Unity of churches cannot be without a declaration about what church is. The author claims from the Orient, therefore, are to be
understood. Calvin, who in his frame was an ecumenical theologian, was of the opinion that for the unity of churches, not the equality of the single expressions was needed, but a common assertion to that doctrines which were necessary and therefore must be fixed and undoubted. I have to say. On the other hand, there are others, other articles, which between the churches may be different, but do not disturb the unity of the faith. Institution 4.1.12. He
may say that the doctrine of the ancient Italian Matteo Gribaldi was of that kind that it disturbed the essential of the faith. Work 16, 465. On the other hand, Calvin declares in his second book against the Lutheran theologian Joachim Westphal that in Geneva and Hamburg there was a unity about the chief chapters. In regards to Geneva, he can say that in a period when he was banned from the city and when the struggles were hard enough,
that there were no impure dogmas and relics of time of ignorance, but that it was the most necessary question of the doctrine by which the church is founded had its loyal place. As he does not deny this, he declares himself to be against the separation of whom he pretended to be his disciples, the Guilherme in Geneva. And he repeals, as he says, to the chief chapters of Christian religion. It cannot be out of doubt that Calvin
represents the doctrine of the fundamental articles of faith. It has been explicated by his disciple Francis de Jaune, Junius, as it was prepared by some expressions which we find in Erasmus and Busa. In some works, the idea of the fundamental articles of faith is presented as a work of a Lutheran theologian called Nicolaus Junius, who speaks about the fundamental dissents between Lutheran and Calvinist theology. But Junius has not invented neither the term nor the idea of
fundamental articles. His theology of the fundamental dissents between evangelical Lutheran and Calvinistic or reformed 1626 is a later product and not the best of polemic theology. Calvin and before him Busa and Erasmus had used the term in an ironic sense. It is interesting that in German Lutheran theology, the person of Junius took over an ironic term to a polemic one. The origin of the term is, in the case abstracted from Calvin, to be sought in Busa,
later in Parios and on Francis de Jaune. The tendency was never, was ever to find up the substance of Christendom, the essential of Christendom, and to integrate the different doctrines into it. The disciples of Calvin were the propagators of the unity of the church. But as clear Calvin has found it, his endeavor for church unity upon the idea of the fundamentals, as little has he defined in which points such fundamentals should consist. In the scripture against
Westphalia he enumerates that they are about the unique God, he is very about the religious cult, about the corruption of mankind, about the salvation out of grace and so on. But it is interesting that in this uncomplete enumeration, all points are failing who were in struggle between Lutherans and Calvinists in that time. Calvin only will say in which he sees the fundamentals and they are unavoidable. In the institutes only few examples are named. One day Christ
is God and God's son and our certification consists in God's miracle and so on, he writes. 4.1.12. Evidently the whole of the common doctrine of the Reformation is intended, but it is not enumerated. But we continually have to meditate that a quantity of doctrines would destroy any use of the fundamental articles. But a short record is necessary about the role of the so-called apostolic symbol. In the letter about Castelho the symbol is called
Bravis et simplex christianismi summa, short and simple, son of Christendom, Otto Ritschel, son of Albrecht Ritschel. He has observed that the symbol at many places is highly esteemed by Calvin. In this regard Calvin's opinion is in accord with that of Melanchthon. The national makes evident that the Reformed orthodoxy has followed this way. As in the Reformed churches the mass was abolished, the symbolum nicenum, which belonged to the mass, had lost its use in the service, while
the apostolic symbol, which since the Middle Ages had its place in the preaching service, was conserved. From there it is in special wise evidence that some Reformed churches conceive themselves as those in which their unity with the ancient church is conserved. In the Anglican church the Reformed 39 articles don't pretend a great importance, but unity with the ancient church is the more emphasized. The University of Heidelberg at the times of Reformation had for its norm not
the Heidelberg Catechism, but the Scripture and the ancient symbols. The Reformed forms of confession are in the Reformed churches of other importance than in the Ruthen. The cause is, at one hand, the Reformed tendency to prove any church declaration or statement by the Scriptures. On the other hand, it is the idea of the unity of any true church with the ancient one. Calvinism, as we already saw, strongly Catholic, more than Lutheranism. Even a Swinglian church, that
of Zurich, has in its liturgy of 1675 a prayer in which God is prayed that we and thy whole Reformed evangelical, rightly Catholic, church may be one in thee. And an apology of the Reformed church and the Appalachinite reproaches to the Ruthen that they have shamefully abandoned the title of Catholics to the Romans. The fate of the fundamental articles, especially Hans Leube, has shown was unfortunate. The struggle went about the question if in the case of
Ruthen the time was not taken too broad, including then all controversy positions, or if it, in the case of the Reformed, was to be taken too narrow, excluding then the articles of controversy. Unity had not been won by this theological aspect. In this view it is important to see that Calvin, influenced by Erasmus and Busa, has introduced this idea without knowing what effect there would come forth, but in the passionate endeavor for church unity and before
all, that he has avoided an enumeration which claimed to be complete. Any complete enumeration would have changed faith into the exception of a certain central doctrine, and would have endowed the fact that faith in any case is personal belief in Jesus Christ. A doctrine in this case would have taken the place which only belongs to Christ himself and to the living Scriptures' witness. Calvin himself has lived one great failure of his endeavor for unity. His working
for this unity had a most interesting aim in Zurich. He did not like Zwingli, whose books he knew only by part, but he was a friend of Zwingli's follower, the Zurich Heinrich Bullinger. It was not to be wondered that he sought for a way to come to an accord with Zurich in the doctrine of the Holy Supper. And after difficult negotiations, in this only case he was successful. The document for this success is the Consensus Tigurinus,
the Consensus of Zurich, or with Zurich. Calvin tried to gain the accord with Bern, but the city showed itself very resistant, regarded the first design to be too Zwinglian. Calvin won the accord with Bullinger to a second form, which was appreciated by Bern. So the Consensus had the chance to become an accord of the Swiss churches. But even this greatest success of Calvin's endeavor was his greatest failure. For from the Consensus Tigurinus arose the second struggle
about the Lord's Supper. The German Lutherans, up to then, had regarded Calvin as a light, if not as one of themselves. Now they brought forth the idea that also he was a sacramentarian like the theologians of Zurich. Joachim Westphal from Hamburg opened the struggle. His book entitled Farago was the first to remove the spirits. Calvin hesitated to give an answer. At last he responded. And it sounds like a review to all we regarded when he writes,
For fifteen years I have tried in good truth as far as the faithful confession of verity allowed to accommodate my wise of teaching to a peaceful discord. And now the obstrusive manner of that Westphal takes me into the hateful struggle. Mark 16, 429. The theologian of unity and union was forced to give answer to a man who stands by far lo him, because communities were in danger, especially the refugee community which John Alasko had founded in
London, and which after the death of Edward VI was driven out from England, and could not find an asylum in Lutheran territories because it was regarded as sacramentarian. Calvin in his repeated answers to Westphal has first regarded the two communities which were in danger, but his strategic aim has not been reached. For the future he was in the view of the Lutherans a sacramentarian. The endeavor of his friend and follower Theodor de Beel, which were accommodated
to Lutheran positions more than possible, were of no more success. So he formed there and remained sacramentarians. They all were regarded by a Lutheran theologian as such, and no interpretations have alterated the fact which was set up by the arising Lutheran orthodoxy.