Piety through the Church⤒🔗

Calvin’s view of piety (pietas) doesn’t stand apart from Scripture or from the church. Rather, it is rooted in the Word and nurtured in the church. While breaking with the clericalism and absolutism of Rome, Calvin nonetheless maintains a high view of the church. “If we do not prefer the church to all other objects of our interest, we are unworthy of being counted among her members,” he writes.

Augustine once said, “He cannot have God for his Father who refuses to have the church for his mother.” To that Calvin adds, “For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels.” Apart from the church, there is little hope for forgiveness of sins or salvation, Calvin wrote.

For Calvin, believers are engrafted into Christ and His church, for spiritual growth happens within the church. The church is mother, educator, and nourisher of every believer, for the Holy Spirit acts in her. Believers cultivate piety by the Spirit through the church’s teaching ministry, progressing from spiritual infancy to adolescence to full manhood in Christ. They do not graduate from the church until they die. This lifelong education is offered within an atmosphere of genuine piety in which believers love and care for one another under the headship of Christ. It encourages the growth of one another’s gifts and love, as it is “constrained to borrow from others.”

Growth in piety is impossible apart from the church, for piety is fostered by the communion of saints. Within the church, believers “cleave to each other in the mutual distribution of gifts.” Each member has his own place and gifts to use within the body. Ide­ally, the entire body uses these gifts in symmetry and proportion, ever reforming and growing toward perfection.

Piety of the Word←⤒🔗

The Word of God is central to the development of Christian piety in the believer. Calvin’s relational model explains how.

True religion is a dialogue between God and man. The part of the dialogue that God initiates is revelation. In this, God comes down to meet us, addresses us and makes Himself known to us in the preaching of the Word. The other part of the dialogue is man’s re­sponse to God’s revelation. This response, which includes trust, adoration, and godly fear, is what Calvin calls pietas. The preaching of the Word saves us and preserves us as the Spirit enables us to appropriate the blood of Christ and respond to Him with reverential love. By the Spirit-empowered preaching of men, “the renewal of the saints is accomplished and the body of Christ is edified,” Calvin says.

The preaching of the Word is our spiritual food and our medicine for spiritual health, Calvin says. With the Spirit’s blessing, ministers are spiritual physicians who apply the Word to our souls as earthly physicians apply medi­cine to our bodies. With the Word these spiritual doctors diagnose, prescribe for, and cure spiritual dis­ease in those plagued by sin and death. The preached Word is used as an instrument to heal, cleanse, and make fruitful our disease-prone souls. The Spirit, or the “internal minister,” promotes piety by using the “external minister” to preach the Word. As Calvin says, the external minister “holds forth the vocal word and it is received by the ears,” but the internal minister “truly communicates the thing proclaimed ... that is Christ.”

To promote piety, the Spirit not only uses the gospel to work faith deep within the souls of His elect, as we have already seen, but He also uses the law. The law promotes piety in three ways:

1. It restrains sin and promotes righteousness in the church and society, preventing both from lapsing into chaos.
2. It disciplines, educates, convicts, and drives us outside of ourselves to Jesus Christ, the fulfiller and end of the law. The law cannot lead us to a saving knowledge of God in Christ. Rather, the Holy Spirit uses the law as a mirror to show us our guilt, to shut us off from hope, and to bring us to repentance. It drives us to the spiritual need out of which faith in Christ is born. This convicting use of the law is critical for the believer’s piety, for it prevents the ungodly self-righteousness that is prone to reassert itself even in the holiest of saints
3. It becomes the rule of life for the believer. “What is the rule of life which (God) has given us?” Calvin asks in the Genevan Catechism. The answer: “His law.” Later, Calvin says the law “shows the mark at which we ought to aim, the goal towards which we ought to press, that each of us, according to the measure of grace bestowed upon him, may endeavor to frame his life according to the highest rectitude, and, by constant study, continually advance more and more.”

Calvin writes about the third use of the law in the first edition of his Institutes, stating, “Believers ...  profit by the law because from it they learn more thoroughly each day what the Lord’s will is like ... It is as if some servant, already prepared with complete earnestness of heart to commend himself to his master, must search out and oversee his master’s ways in order to conform and accommodate himself to them. Moreover, however much they may be prompted by the Spirit and eager to obey God, they are still weak in the flesh, and would rather serve sin than God. The law is to this flesh like a whip to an idle and balky ass, to goad, stir, arouse it to work.”

In the last edition of the Institutes (1559), Calvin is more emphatic about how believers profit from the law. First, he says, “Here is the best instrument for them to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord’s will to which they aspire, and to confirm them in the understanding of it.” And second, it causes “frequent meditation upon it to be aroused to obedience, be strengthened in it, and be drawn back from the slippery path of transgression.” In this way the saints must press on, Calvin concludes.

Viewing the law primarily as a guide that encourages the believer to cling to God and obey Him is another instance where Calvin differs from Luther. For Luther, the law is primarily negative. It is closely linked with sin, death, or the devil. Luther’s dominant interest is in the second use of the law, even when he considers the law’s role in sanctification. By contrast, Calvin views the law primarily as a positive expression of the will of God. As Hesselink says, “Calvin’s view could be called Deuteronomic, for to him law and love are not antithetical, but are corre­lates.” For Calvin, the believer follows God’s law, not out of compulsory obedience, but out of grateful obedience. Under the tutelage of the Spirit, the law prompts gratitude in the believer, which leads to loving obedience and aversion to sin. In other words, for Luther, the primary purpose of the law is to help the believer recognize and confront sin. For Calvin, the primary purpose of the law is to direct the believer to serve God out of love.

Piety in the Sacraments←⤒🔗

Calvin defines the sacraments as testimonies “of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him.” The sacraments are “exercises of piety.” The sacraments foster our faith, strengthen it, and help us offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God.

For Calvin, as for Augustine, the sacraments are the visible Word. The preached Word comes through our ears; the visible Word, through our eyes. The sacraments hold forth the same Christ as the preached Word but communicate Him through a different mode. We don’t get a better Christ in the sacraments, but sometimes we get Christ better.

In the sacraments, God accommodates Himself to our weakness, Calvin says. When we hear the Word indiscriminately proclaimed, we may wonder: “Is it truly for me? Does it really reach me?” However, in the sacraments God reaches out and touches us indi­vidually, and says, “Yes, it’s for you. The promise extends to you.” The sacraments thus minister to our weakness by personalizing the promises for those who trust Christ for salvation.

In the sacraments, God comes to His people, encourages them, enables them to know Christ better, builds them up, and nourishes them in Him. Baptism promotes piety as a symbol of how believers are engrafted into Christ, renewed by the Spirit, and adopted into the family of the heavenly Father. Likewise, the Lord’s Supper shows how these adopted children are fed by their loving Father. Calvin loves to refer to the Supper as nourish­ment for the soul.

The signs are bread and wine which represent for us the invisible food that we receive from the flesh and blood of Christ,” he says. “Christ is the only food of our soul, and therefore our heavenly Father invites us to Christ, that refreshed by partaking of him, we may repeatedly gather strength until we shall have reached heavenly immortality.

As believers, we need constant nourishment. We never reach a place where we no longer need to hear the Word, to pray, or to be nurtured by the sacraments. We must constantly grow and develop. As we continue to sin because of our old nature, we are in constant need of forgiveness and grace. So the Supper, along with the preaching of the Word, repeatedly says to us: We need Christ, we need to be renewed in Christ and built up in Him. The sacra­ments promise that Christ is present to receive us, bless us, and renew us.

For Calvin, the word conversion doesn’t just mean the initial act of coming to faith; it also means daily renewal and growth in following Christ. The sacraments lead the way to this daily conversion, Calvin says. They tell us that we need the grace of Christ every day. We must draw strength from Christ, particularly through the body that He sacrificed for us on the cross.

As Calvin writes, “For as the eternal Word of God is the foun­tain of life so his flesh is the chan­nel to pour out to us the life which resides intrinsically in his divinity. For in his flesh was accomplished man’s redemption, in it a sacrifice was offered to atone for sin, and obedience yielded to God to recon­cile him to us. It was also filled with the sanctification of the Holy Spirit. Finally having overcome death he was received into the heavenly glory.”

In other words, the Spirit sanctified Christ’s body, which Christ offered on the cross to atone for sin. That body was raised from the dead and received up into heaven. At every stage of our redemption, Christ’s body is the pathway to God. In the Supper, then, Christ comes to us and says: “My body is still given for you. By faith you may commune with Me and My body and all of its saving benefits.”

Calvin teaches that Christ gives Himself to us in the Supper, not just His benefits, just as He gives us Himself and His benefits in the preaching of the Word. Christ also makes us part of His body as He gives us Himself. Calvin cannot precisely explain how that hap­pens in the Supper, for it is better experienced than explained. How­ever, he does say that Christ does not leave heaven to enter the bread. Rather, in the Holy Supper, we are called to lift up our hearts on high to heaven, where Christ is, and not cling to the external bread and wine.

We are lifted up through the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. As Calvin writes, “Christ, then, is absent from us in respect of his body, but dwelling in us by his Spirit, he raises us to heaven to himself, transfusing into us the vivifying vigor of his flesh just as the rays of the sun invigorate us by its vital warmth.” Partaking the flesh of Christ is a spiritual act rather than a carnal act that involves a “transfusion of substance.”

The sacraments can be seen as ladders by which we climb to heaven. “Because we are unable to fly high enough to draw near to God, he has ordained sacraments for us, like ladders,” Calvin says.

If a man wishes to leap on high, he will break his neck in the attempt, but if he has steps, he will be able to proceed with confidence. So also, if we are to reach our God, we must use the means which he has instituted since he knows what is suitable for us. God has then given us this wonderful support and encouragement and strength in our weakness.

We must never worship the bread because Christ is not in the bread, but we find Christ through the bread, Calvin says. Just as our mouths receive bread to nourish our physical bodies, so our souls, by faith, receive Christ’s body and blood to nourish our spiritual lives.

When we meet Christ in the sacraments, we grow in grace. That’s why they are called means of grace. The sacraments encourage us in our progress toward heaven. They promote confidence in God’s promises through Christ’s “signified and sealed” redemptive death. Since the sacraments are covenants, they contain promises by which “consciences may be roused to an assurance of salvation,” Calvin says. The sacraments offer “peace of conscience” and “a special assur­ance” when the Spirit enables the believer to “see” the Word engraved upon the sacraments.

Finally, the sacraments promote piety by prompting us to thank and praise God for His abundant grace. The sacraments also require us to “attest our piety toward him.” As Calvin says,

The Lord recalls the great bounty of his goodness to our memory and stirs us up to acknowledge it; and at the same time he admonishes us not to be ungrateful for such lav­ish liberality, but rather to pro­claim it with fitting praises and to celebrate (the Lord’s Supper) by giving thanks.

Two things happen in the Supper: the receiving of Christ and the surrender of the believer. The Lord’s Supper is not eucharistic from God’s perspective, Calvin says, for Christ is not offered afresh. Nor is it eucharistic in terms of man’s merit, for we can offer God nothing by way of sacrifice. But it is eucharistic in terms of our thanksgiving. That sacrifice is an indispensable part of the Lord’s Supper which, Calvin says, includes “all the duties of love.” The Eucharist is an agape feast in which communicants cherish each other and testify of the bond that they enjoy with fellow believers in the unity of the body of Christ.

We offer this sacrifice of grati­tude in response to Christ’s sacrifice for us. We surrender our lives in response to the heavenly ban­quet God spreads for us in the Sup­per. By the Spirit’s grace, the Supper enables us as a royal priesthood to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to God.

The Lord’s Supper thus prompts both piety of grace and piety of gratitude, as Brian Gerrish has shown. The Father’s liberality and His children’s grateful response are a recurrent theme in Calvin’s theology. “We should so revere such a father with grateful piety and burning love,” Calvin admonishes us, “to devote ourselves wholly to his obedience and honor him in everything.” The Supper is the liturgical enactment of Calvin’s themes of grace and gratitude, which lie at the heart of his piety.

In the Lord’s Supper, the human and divine elements of Calvin’s piety are held in dynamic tension. In that dynamic interchange, God moves toward the believer while His Spirit consummates the Word-based union. At the same time, the believer moves toward God by contemplating the Savior who refreshes and strengthens him. In this, God is glorified and the believer edified.

Piety in the Psalter←⤒🔗

Calvin views the Psalms as the canonical manual of piety. In the preface to his five-volume commentary on the Psalms — his largest exposition of any Bible book, Calvin writes: “There is no other book in which we are more perfectly taught the right manner of praising God, or in which we are more powerfully stirred up to the performance of this exercise of piety.” Calvin’s preoccupation with the Psalter was motivated by his belief that the Psalms teach and inspire genuine piety the following ways:

• As the revelation from God, the Psalms teach us about God. Because they are theological as well as doxological, they are our sung creed.
• They clearly teach our need for God. They tell us who we are and why we need God’s help.
• They offer the divine remedy for our needs. They present Christ in His person, offices, sufferings, death, resurrection, and ascension. They announce the way of salva­tion, proclaiming the blessedness of justification by faith alone and the necessity of sanctification by the Spirit with the Word.
• They demonstrate God’s amazing goodness and invite us to meditate on His grace and mercy. They lead us to repentance and to fear God, to trust in His Word, and to hope in His mercy.
• They teach us to flee to the God of salvation through prayer and show us how to bring our requests to God. They show us how to pray confidently in the midst of adversity.
• They show us the depth of communion we may enjoy with our covenant-keeping God. They show how the living church is God’s bride, God’s children, and God’s flock (Ps. 100:4).
• They provide a vehicle for communal worship. Many use first-person plural pronouns (“we,” “our”) to indicate this communal aspect, but even those with first-person singular pronouns include all those who love the Lord and are committed to Him. They move us to trust and praise God and to love our neighbors. They prompt reliance on God’s promises, zeal for God and His house, and compassion for the suffering.
• They cover the full range of spiritual experience, including faith and unbelief, joy in God and sorrow over sin, divine presence and divine desertion. As Calvin says, they are “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.” We still see our affections and spiritual maladies in the words of the psalmists. When we read about their experiences, we are drawn to self-examination and faith by the grace of the Spirit. The psalms of David, especially, are like a mirror in which we are led to praise God and find rest in His sovereign purposes.

Calvin immersed himself in the Psalms for twenty-five years as a commentator, preacher, biblical scholar and worship leader. Early on, he began work on metrical versions of the Psalms to be used in public worship. On January 16, 1537, shortly after his arrival in Geneva, Calvin asked his council to introduce the singing of Psalms into church worship. He recruited the talents of other men, such as Clement Marot, Louis Bourgeois, and Theodore Beza, to produce the Genevan Psalter. That work would take twenty-five years to com­plete. The first collection (1539) contained eighteen Psalms, six of which Calvin put into verse. The rest were done by the French poet, Marot. An expanded version (1542) containing thirty-five Psalms was next, followed by one of forty-nine Psalms (1543). Calvin wrote the preface to both of those, commending the practice of congregational singing. After Marot’s death in 1544, Calvin encouraged Beza to put the rest of the Psalms into verse. Two years before his death in 1562, Calvin rejoiced to see the first complete edition of the Genevan Psalter.

The Genevan Psalter is furnished with a remarkable collection of 125 melodies, written specifically for the Psalms by outstanding musicians, of whom Louis Bour­geois is the best known. The tunes are melodic, distinctive, and reverent. They clearly express Calvin’s convictions that piety is best pro­moted when priority is given to text over tune, while recognizing that psalms deserve their own music. Since music should help the reception of the Word, Calvin says, it should be “weighty, dignified, majestic, and modest” — fitting attitudes for a sinful creature in the presence of God. This protects the sovereignty of God in worship and offers proper conformity between the believer’s inward disposition and his outward confession.

Psalm-singing is one of the four principle acts of church worship, Calvin believed. It is an extension of prayer. It is also the most significant vocal contribution of peo­ple in the service. Psalms were sung in Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon services. Beginning in 1546, a printed table indicated which Psalms were to be sung on each occasion. Psalters were as­signed to each service according to the texts that were preached. By 1562, three Psalms were sung at each service.

Calvin believed that corporate singing subdued the fallen heart and retrained wayward affections in the way of piety. Like preaching and the sacraments, Psalm-singing disciplines the heart’s affections in the school of faith and lifts the believer to God. Psalm-singing amplifies the effect of the Word upon the heart and multiplies the spiritual energy of the church. “The Psalms can stimulate us to raise our hearts to God and arouse us to an ardor in invoking as well as in exalting with praises the glory of his name,” Calvin wrote. With the Spirit’s direction, Psalm-singing tunes the hearts of believers for glory.

The Genevan Psalter was an integral part of Calvinist worship for centuries. It set the standard for succeeding French Reformed psalm books as well as those in English, Dutch, German, and Hun­garian. As a devotional book, it warmed the hearts of thousands. The people who sang from it, though, understood that its power wasn’t in the book or its words, but in the Spirit who impressed those words on their hearts.

The Genevan Psalter promoted piety by stimulating a spirituality of the Word that was corporate and liturgical, and that broke down the distinction between liturgy and life. The Calvinists freely sang the Psalms not only in their churches, but also in homes and workplaces, on the streets and in the fields. The singing of Psalms became a “means of Huguenot self-identification.” This pious exercise became a cultural emblem. In short, as T. Hartley Hall writes, “In scriptural or metrical versions, the Psalms, together with the stately tunes to which they were early set, are clearly the heart and soul of Reformed piety.”