John Calvin's name is often associated with predestination and some people even seem to think he invented that doctrine. For others the reformer's name is linked to the doctrines of divine sovereignty, man's total depravity and inability to save himself. What is not generally understood, however, is that Calvin's main contribution to the Reformation was his biblical doctrine of the church.

The Church's Foundation⤒🔗

For Calvin the church is firmly rooted in God's sovereign election. This is the foundation of Calvin's doctrine of the church. From eternity God has chosen in Christ a people unto eternal salvation. In Book III of the Institutes Calvin explains how these chosen ones are brought to faith in Christ by the "secret energy of the Spirit" whereby we are united to Christ by faith so that we come to enjoy Christ and all His benefits. However, in doing so, the Holy Spirit makes use of certain means and here is where the church and its ministry come in. This subject is dealt with extensively in Book IV entitled, The external means or aids by which God invites us into the society of Christ and holds us therein. Although it is by faith in the gospel that Christ becomes ours, Calvin writes,

Due to our ignorance and sloth we need outward helps to beget and increase faith within us, and advance it to its goal ... He instituted pastors and teachers through whose lips he might teach his own ... I shall start, then, with the church, into whose bosom God is pleased to gather his sons ... that they may be guided by her motherly care until they are mature and at last reach the goal of faith ... so that, for those to whom he is Father, the church may also be Mother.

Visible And Invisible Church←⤒🔗

We see that for Calvin the visible church is an indispensable aid to the salvation of God's elect who constitute the invisible church. Not that Calvin sees the visible and invisible church as co-extensive. They are closely re­lated, but they need to be distinguished from each other because not all members of the visible church are members of the invisible church.

According to Calvin, Scripture speaks of the church in two ways. Sometimes the term 'church' refers to the total number of the elect who have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. But the Bible also uses the word 'church' to designate the public assemblies of people who profess to worship God and His Son, Jesus Christ. In this church, Calvin says, "are mingled many hypocrites who have nothing of Christ but the name and outward appearance" (Institutes IV,1,7).

That the visible church is a mixed assembly Calvin bases on the parable of the wheat and tares recorded in Matthew 13:24-30. Following Augustine, Calvin interprets this parable to mean that the church will be made up of true believers and hypocrites who cannot be effectively separated until Judgment Day.

Marks Of The True Visible Church←⤒🔗

Mixed assembly though she may be, this visible church, despite her many weaknesses, is the true church of Christ which all believers should join and never leave, because, Calvin insists, outside her there is no salvation.

This high view of the church raises the question as to which visible church comes closest to the invisible church. This was the question for many reform-minded Christians in Calvin's time. They were convinced that Rome was not their true mother, but how could they be sure which of the alternative churches that had come into being, the Lutheran, Anabaptist and Reformed churches, was her legitimate replacement?

Calvin addressed these concerns in Book IV of his Institutes. Those who were looking for their true mother, he explained, could easily recognize her by two objective criteria: namely the pure and faithful preaching of the Word and the proper administration of the two sacraments Christ has instituted, namely baptism and the Lord's Supper. "From this the face of the church comes forth," Calvin writes, "and becomes visible to our eyes. Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments ad­ministered according to Christ's institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists" (IV.1.9). Later, the Reformed churches added yet a third mark, namely church discipline (see Belgic Confession, Art. 29).

All True Believers Have The Same Mother←⤒🔗

To refer to the church as our 'mother' sounds strange and even wrong to many Christians today. It has a Roman Catholic ring to it. We are used to hearing the Church of Rome described as "Mother Church," but Protestants, generally speaking, seldom make use of this term. Yet for Calvin the word 'mother' was an appropriate word to describe the Church of Christ. He knew full well, of course, that Rome claimed to hold a monopoly on this title. He was convinced, however, that Rome had lost the right to call herself the mother of all believers because she did not fulfill the tasks and responsibilities usually associated with mothers.

Calvin's use of the term 'mother' to describe the church has an ancient precedent. His as­sertion that "You cannot have God as your Father unless you have the church for your Mother" is a direct quote from the early 3rd century bishop Cyprian of Carthage, North Africa. What Cyprian and Calvin meant to say was that God has given us the visible church as our mother to minister His Word and sacraments to us under the direction and influence of the Holy Spirit. Apart from this mother and her nurture and instruction, they said, there is no salvation.

Cyprian in his time and Calvin in his, dared to make this strong statement out of concern for the unity of the church. Cyprian and Augustine after him, had to contend with the Donatists who were causing the first major schism in the church. The reformer of Geneva saw Protestantism breaking up into all sorts of sects and cults. This was partly the result of Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers which many wrongly interpreted to mean that everyone was free to exegete Scripture as he or she thought fit. For Calvin the spiritual unity of believers cannot exist without the visible unity of the church. This unity flows directly and logically from Calvin's doctrine of the mystical union between Christ and His people (Calvin's Commentary on Ephesians 5:31). Just as believers are joined to Christ their Head, they are joined to all fellow members of His body. Hence there can only be one church.

Believers in Christ, therefore, should zealously guard and promote the unity of the church. "There is only one bride of Christ," Calvin insists, "and that bride is the entirety of all Christians in this world" (Commentary on Psalm 133:1). "Unity and unanimity," he says, "are necessary when the church wants to persist in this world." In his Commentary on Psalm 47:10, he writes, "the unity of the church consists in the fact that people are wholly prepared to follow the Word of God, so that there is one flock and one pastor."

Since there is only one church, Calvin ar­gues, there is no salvation outside of her. The reason for this is that God has entrusted to her alone the ministry of the Word and the sacraments as means of grace. This strong language was later modified by the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1647 when it stated that outside of the church of Christ there is "no ordinary possibility of salvation." There are exceptions but these only prove the rule that we are dependent upon the church as our mother for the dispensing of all the saving benefits Christ has obtained for believers. Calvin explains the crucial importance of her ministry this way:

Let us learn even from the simple title of 'mother' how useful, indeed how necessary, it is that we should know her. 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 in heaven.
 Matthew 22:30

Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives (Institutes, IV.1.iv).

The logic here is striking. If God is our father through regeneration, the church must be our mother who brings us to birth and nourishes us to spiritual life (Gal. 4:8-22; Heb. 5:13-6:1). The church, as the bride of Christ, Calvin says,

is the womb in which the infertile unbeliever encounters the gospel, is impregnated by the Holy Spirit by the preach­ing of the Word. It is she who nurtures us, feeding us at her breasts with the pure milk of the gospel, later giving us the solid food of sound doctrine and discipleship. She guides us with her long wisdom, taught to her by the Holy Spirit from the Word of God, over long ages of her history — the very wisdom of God in Christ, to whom she submits. And her divine-human Bridegroom cares for her, leading her and loving her, teaching us through his Word and by his Spirit-in her church.

In Galatians 4 the apostle Paul speaks of the church as the Jerusalem above which is free and the mother of all believers (v.26). He compares this heavenly city with the earthly Jerusalem, which, he says, is in bondage with her children. What he means is that only true Christians who are saved by grace are the true and legitimate offspring of their mother, the heavenly Jerusalem, while the others, the Jews who seek to be saved by the works of the law, are the children of their mother, the earthly Jerusalem that was still existing at that time.

The Two ‘Jerusalems’←⤒🔗

In his sermons on Galatians Calvin draws several analogies between these two 'Jerusalems' and the churches of his own time, the church of Rome and the churches of the Reformation. Like the earthly Jerusalem, Rome teaches salvation by works while the Reformed churches, born from the Jerusalem above, proclaim the message of salvation by grace.

The difference between these two churches, both of which claim the honourable title of mother, is enormous. It is crucial, therefore to know which mother has brought us to our spiritual birth. "Wherever we have God's Word preached unto us purely," Calvin writes,

without any mingling, so as there is no corrupting of the Gospel but we be led wholly unto God to seek all our welfare in him, and keep the way which is shown to us, which way is our Lord Jesus Christ, so that we being rid of all pride and high opinion of ourselves, do allow ourselves to be clad with the clothing that is offered us in our Lord Jesus Christ and repose all our glory there, I say when we have the doctrine after that manner: then is it God's house and Sanctuary, then it is the true Church and our mother, and we may be well assured that God also avows and accepts us as his children.
Sermons on Galatians, p. 627

Calvin and the Anabaptists←⤒🔗

Serious as the errors of Rome were, Calvin was no less opposed to the Anabaptists, who in his view, showed disdain for the Word of God and the offices of pastor and teachers, which they claimed they did not need. They would allow that preaching is useful for beginners in the Christian life, but after a few lessons in basic doctrine they went off on their own. Relying on what they believed to be the immediate operations of the Holy Spirit rather than the preaching and teaching of the Spirit-breathed Word by duly ordained ministers, many would end up in the morass of subjectivism and mysticism.

Calvin sees it as evidence of God's love for us that He deals with us according to our small capacity. Citing Paul's statement that "we see in part, and know in part and there­fore walk but in faith", he asks,

Where does this faith spring from? How is it nourished and increased? By the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). When we have preaching and are diligent to be edified by it, that is the first point by which and at which our faith begins, and that is the means by which it con­tinues and increases from day to day until it is thoroughly perfected...
 Commentary, 1 Cor. 13:9

Some Applications For Today←⤒🔗

Calvin's doctrine of the church is of great importance for us who live 500 years after his birth at a time very different from his in many ways and yet also bearing many similarities to his day. We may believe that God still has His visible church on earth, a church still identifiable by the marks laid down by Calvin. I trust that all our readers belong to churches that possess these marks.

Calvin, as we saw, was keenly aware of the mixed composition of the visible church. He stressed that we are not members of the church by natural birth but become members of her by a spiritual rebirth. But he also emphasized that when we are reborn to the heavenly life this takes place in no other way than through the ministry of the church (Commentary on Psalm 87:5). "Those who neglect this means (i.e., the ministry of the church) and yet hope to become perfect in Christ are mad," Calvin writes commenting on Ephesians 4:12. "Such are the fanatics, he adds, who invent secret revelations of the Spirit for themselves, and the proud, who think that for them the private reading of the Scriptures is enough, and that they have no need of the common ministry of the Church" (Ibid.).

While Calvin was referring to the radical Anabaptists of his time, I think that some of the dangers he mentions here are still with us today. Not only in Evangelical, but in Re­formed churches as well, there is a tendency to bypass the official ministry of the local church in favour of looking for spiritual food elsewhere. Many get their spiritual highs at conferences where top speakers are featured who dazzle their audiences with their eloquence and wit. I'm not opposed to conferences. I have attended many of them and have benefitted from them. But as Calvin insists, our main spiritual food supply must come from the pastors and teachers God has given to His church. Believers are to be in regular attendance at the local church, even if the preacher is no Spurgeon but a man of average abilities.

Another danger I see in this connection has to do with the way Bible studies are conduct­ed. While I heartily approve of Bible study groups, I am concerned that the Scriptures are sometimes discussed without anyone being present who can speak with some au­thority as to the proper exegesis of Scripture passages. As a result, one hears statements like, "I think this passage means this" or "I feel it means that," or "to me it seems to say something like this," while another one has a totally different view.

Our older readers will remember the time when Bible studies were allowed only if the minister or elder, or at least some knowledgeable church member was present. This was seen by some as too controlling and I thought so myself at that time. But now, with some hindsight and especially after reading Calvin, I wonder if this older approach was so wrong. Closely related to this is the proliferation of Bible study guides that our young people and many older people as well make use of. Some of these studies, I have found, are not sound and far from Reformed.

One mark of the true church is her apostolicity, which means that this church adheres to the doctrines as set forth by the divinely appointed apostles who laid the foundations of the Christian church. This implies that if we wish to be part of this apostolic church, our understanding of Scripture must be in harmony with what the apostles have taught. To say it with one of those apostles, Jude, we are to "earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3).

In other words, understanding "apostolicity" means striving to understand the Word of God and the interpretation of this Word with the help of those who have taught and explained it throughout the history of the church. As Reformed believers this means we should stay with those interpreters who follow the line of Augustine, Calvin and the other reformers and their successors, the Puritans, and those standing in their tradition, Jonathan Edwards, Spurgeon, Hodge, Warfield, Brakel, Bavinck and many others. This is the best way to keep ourselves and our people from falling into subjectivism and relativism. The teaching of the one visible church which displays the three marks of the true church is the standard by which we should measure everything pertaining to doctrine and life.

Let's Appreciate Our 'Mother'←⤒🔗

We have entered another season of intensified church activities with an emphasis on the teaching ministry. Everyone is back from vacation; the pews are filled again. Our pastors are rejuvenated and anxious to preach new series of sermons. Sunday school and catechism classes are beginning again, as have various Bible study groups. Let us count it a great privilege that we have a sound church to go to, a loving mother, who teaches the apostolic truth by pastors called and equipped by God. The same mother who gives us spiritual birth, also lovingly feeds us, first with the milk of the Word and afterwards with more solid food. Again, the same mother who teaches us the truth and nourishes us, also disciplines us when necessary — and all this by means of faithful shepherds appointed by our heavenly Father.

If this is so — and who dares to deny it? — we need to receive these men and listen to them. As Calvin says,

If we desire our salvation, we must learn to be humble learners in receiving the doctrine of the gospel and in hearkening to the pastors that are sent to us, as if Jesus Christ spoke to us himself in his own person, assuring ourselves that he will acknowledge the obedience and submission of our faith when we listen to mortal men to whom he has given that charge.
Sermons on Ephesians, p. 374