This article is about how John Calvin saw the office and person of the minister. The author also looks at the preaching of the Word and the relation of minister and laity.

Source: Clarion, 2009. 6 pages.

Calvin and the New Protestant Pastor

As Reformed believers, we are all aware of how Luther’s rediscovery of the biblical doctrines of sola fide and sola gratia overturned centuries of Roman Catholic teaching about how believers were to achieve a right relationship with God. We are also aware of how the refusal of the Roman church to heed Luther’s call to reform ultimately resulted in his break with Rome and the formation of the new Protestant churches. What is perhaps less well known, however, is that, in the wake of that separation from Rome, one of the most immediate and vexing challenges faced by the Reformers of the sixteenth century was the need to articulate a clear vision of what the new Protestant cleric would look like and to communicate that vision to the wider body of Protestant believers.

What needs to be remembered about the early years of the Reformation is that Luther’s teachings about justification by faith alone, when combined with his notions about the “priesthood of believers,” as well as his redefinition of the number and nature of the sacraments, had an impact on more than just the doctrinal life of the church. They also had a profound impact on matters of ecclesiology – that is to say, the way in which the church is both structured and functions as a community of believers. And, at the very heart of those changes, lay a radical redefinition of the place and the function of the clergy within the Christian church.

Changes🔗

To appreciate the depth of that change, we need to understand that, throughout the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic clergy had existed as a separate and elite clerical caste (or, put differently, if less accurately, a separate class) within Western European society. Both the secular clergy (those who served as priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes) and the regular clergy (those who served as monks) had occupied a unique and privileged place within the framework of European social and ecclesiastical life. Their hold on that privileged position was predicated on their possession of a unique and special relationship with God. And, in this respect, it was the possession and distribution of the sacraments (particularly the sacraments of penance and the mass) which elevated the medieval clergy above the ranks of the common believers. Ultimately, it was this exclusive ability to communicate and transubstantiate the Eucharistic elements of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, along with the power to absolve the believer of the guilt and penalty for sin in the confessional, that formed the bedrock of clerical identity and function in the medieval church.

Luther, of course, changed all of this. In the context of the new Protestant faith, no longer was God to be encountered primarily in the mass. Now the believer was to communicate most intimately with God through the Word, in particular, the Word as it was proclaimed from the pulpit during the worship service. It was to be in the proclaimed Word, not the mass, that the crucified Christ was to be met, and the saving power of his sacrifice discovered. Further, no longer were the faithful to seek forgiveness by confessing their sins to and receiving penance and absolution from the members of the Roman Catholic clergy. Now the believer could obtain forgiveness directly from God, through prayer, solely on the basis of Christ’s intercessory work.

All of these changes, then, had an enormous impact on how sixteenth century Protestants understood the need for and function of the clergy within the new Protestant churches. As such, Luther and the other leaders of the early Protestant movement found themselves faced with a lengthy list of questions from the laity about just how exactly they were to understand and interact with this new breed of clergyman. For instance, if all believers were to be priests in their own right and all believers had the ability (even the duty) to read the Word of God themselves, why was there a continued need for any clergy at all? Further, if all believers were to be equal in the sight of God, how then, in the wake of centuries of inequality between the clergy and the laity, were Protestant believers to interact with the new Protestant ministers? Finally, what function would these ministers play in the daily life of the congregation and, perhaps most importantly, what kind of “authority” would they have over the laity? Simply stated, while the need for the existence of the office of minister might be self-evident to Reformed believers today, this was not at all the case for believers in the early years of the Reformation and many questions remained to be answered about this important task in the church.

Further, it soon became clear to Luther and the other Protestant leaders that the consequences of failing to swiftly and fully answer these questions were going to be quite grave. From the outset, Luther’s Roman Catholic opponents had pointed out that rather than producing a homogenous body of orthodox believers, placing the Bible in the hands of common people and combining that with the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was likely to result in heterodoxy on a grand scale as “each man did what was right in his own eyes.” The brutal violence of the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1525 (when the horribly exploited peasants of south-western Germany fused Luther’s teachings about the liberty and equality of the Christian man with their own longstanding social discontent), along with the emergence of the Radical Reformers (sometimes referred to as the Anabaptists) and the spectacular disaster that resulted from their seizure of the city of Münster, proved that these Catholic fears were not entirely unfounded. The leaders of the movement, including Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and Martin Bucer, quickly realized that there was a pressing need for some kind of ruling and interpretive office within the church, some means of promoting and maintaining orthodox belief – in short they were going to need a well defined and organized clergy.

What I would like to suggest in this article, however, is that while the recognition of the need for a well defined and organized clergy became clear in the early years of the Protestant movement, it fell to the “second generation” of reformers to provide a sustained and meaningful attempt at answering these difficult questions. And, in this regard, no one did more to set out a vision of the pastoral office than John Calvin. It would be Calvin who most fully set forth a vision of what the new Protestant cleric would like and of what their duties and functions would be within the church; and it was Calvin who most effectively and fully communicated that vision to the wider Protestant world. As such, in the remainder of this article I would like to provide a brief introduction to some of what Calvin had to say about the office and person of the minister.

Pastoral Identity and Function🔗

In the first place, Calvin was very aware that the problem of providing a clear understanding of pastoral identity and function was a living issue in the church of his time. In the fourth book of the final edition of his Institutes (1559), he observed that: “In our time there has been great controversy over the efficacy of the ministry” (4.1.6). He was also aware of the fact that this controversy was fuelled by, on the one hand, those who exaggerated the dignity of the minister “beyond measure” and, on the other hand, those who desired to have no clergy at all and to rely solely on the Holy Spirit for guidance (Institutes, 4.1.6). It is also important to note that the resolution of this issue was so important to Calvin that it was a topic which figured regularly in his preaching. In a sermon on Titus 1:7-9, for instance, Calvin informed his listeners that:

Christians generally ought to understand what is requisite in a good minister.

He expressed his feelings even more strongly in a sermon on Deuteronomy 5:23-27, where he remarked that: “it is imperative to recognize what kinds of prelates and doctors God sends us.” Calvin was deeply aware of the currency of this issue and he laboured in both his scholarly work and in his preaching to inform people about it.

Importance of the Office of Minister🔗

The second thing to note regarding Calvin’s thoughts about the ministry is that it is almost impossible to overstate the importance he assigned to this office in a healthy and well organized church. In many ways, for Calvin, the minister was the “lynch pin” on which the entire functioning and survival of the church depended. This becomes clear as early as 1543 when, in the edition of the Institutes which Calvin published in that year, he compared the ministers to the nervi, that is, the nervous system of the church.1 Perhaps his most famous statement about the importance of the ministry can be found in the final edition of the Institutes, where he wrote:

For neither the light and heat of the sun, nor food and drink are so necessary to nourish and sustain this present life, as the apostolic and pastoral office is necessary to preserve the church on earth (4.3.2).

Why should this be the case? What would motivate Calvin to value office of the minister so highly? To answer this question, we need to understand that Calvin firmly believed in the maxim of the church father Cyprian that the church was the “mother” of all believers and that outside her walls there could be no salvation. Further, Calvin believed that the primary way in which the church “gave birth” to believers was via the preaching of the gospel message. As such, he envisioned the church as the repository of the divine truth of the gospel message and he believed that she had been given this precious treasure not as a “talent” to be buried in the ground, but as a treasure to be worked with so that the gospel might be spread and thereby all of God’s children could be safely gathered into his Fatherly care and protection. Further, he believed that the task of dispensing the gospel message had been divinely assigned to the ministers of the church. Calvin made this clear in his Institutes, where he stated that the “preaching of the heavenly doctrines has been enjoined upon the pastors” (4.1.5). In summary, for Calvin: the church as the mother of believers had the task of proclaiming the gospel message in order to gather in the elect children of God; this was to be accomplished by the proclamation of the gospel message, a task that God had entrusted to the ministers.

Therefore, no ministers meant no preaching; and no preaching meant that no one would be saved; and if no one was saved then the divine decrees and will of God would be thwarted and the sacrifice of Christ would be rendered ineffective.

The preaching of the Word🔗

If the preaching of the Word was so central to both the process of salvation and to the task of the minister, what did Calvin have to say about how the ministers should carry out that all important activity? To begin with, when Calvin spoke of the minister’s work as a preacher, his most ardent and impassioned discussions focused on the need to bring the pure and unexpurgated gospel message. For Calvin, the most serious mistake that a minister could make was to mix the profane with the divine in the preaching. The good and faithful pastor was never to proclaim his own thoughts, beliefs, or ideas from the pulpit, but only to deliver the pure Word of God. In his discussion of this topic, Calvin often employed the two particular metaphors: that of the minister as master builder or of the minister as architect. In either case, he cautioned ministers that if they were to avoid the pitfall of mixing human fancy with divine decrees, they had to take care to stick closely to “plans” they had been given. That plan of course was the revealed will of God in the Bible. In commenting on the activity of the super-apostles in 1 Corinthians, Calvin reflected on how deviation from this plan could cause the entire project to collapse and the souls of the faithful to be placed in jeopardy.

Calvin was not only concerned that the gospel message be brought in purity; he also demanded that it be brought in its entirety. He was very clear that ministers were not to exercise any editorial license when it came to Scripture. They could not, on the basis of their own inclination, or in the face of pressure from either members of their congregations or the civil authorities, edit out of the gospel anything they or anyone found to be unpalatable. Calvin did acknowledge that the proclamation of the complete Word of God was going to cause problems from time to time, insofar as ministers who proclaimed the totality of God’s Word were not always going to be well received. The devil, he said, knowing the importance of preaching to the salvation of souls, would raise up enemies from both inside and outside the church who would resist this kind of preaching.

The preaching was also to be impassioned. Calvin spent time considering not only the content of the preaching, but also its form – the manner in which it was delivered. He began by noting that that the minister had to take care to accommodate himself to the capability of his audience. The wise teacher, he claimed, would pitch his message at a level that was accessible to them – neither reaching too high for them to follow, nor remaining so simplistic that they would not benefit from the message. In this regard, Calvin recommended that ministers begin with first principles and gradually increase the depth and complexity of their preaching as their audience matured.

In connection with this principle of accommodation, Calvin also insisted that the preaching be simple and clear. He had several things in mind here. The preaching was not a place for ministers to involve themselves in highly technical theological debates, or to present matters of strictly academic speculation. Further, the preaching was not an opportunity for ministers to engage in dazzling displays of their oratorical virtuosity. The language and content of the preaching were to be simple, clear, direct, and accessible to the members of the audience. It was the Word itself, and not the knowledge or rhetorical skills of the minister, that was to take centre stage.

All of this, however, should not obscure the fact that, for Calvin, the preaching was to be an intensely passionate affair. Calvin recognized that if the gospel message was to be proclaimed effectively, it would have to reach hearts as well as minds. It would not only have to convey truth, it would have to motivate people to embrace that truth and to live it out. In this respect, Calvin’s humanist training and education played a key role in his understanding of the preaching.

The exact details of this humanist education need not trouble us here, but let me say for the moment that to be a humanist in the sixteenth century, or at least to employ the methods of the humanists, did not mean, as it does today, that one had a belief in the power and potential of man. Rather, to be a humanist meant that one subscribed to specific kind of pedagogy (that is, a specific methodology of learning).

Further, the humanists of the sixteenth century had a great belief in the power of language; they believed that when language was used correctly, when it was passionately employed, that it could do more than simply convey information or truth. They believed that it could also motivate people to shape their lives according to that truth, to live out in real and practical ways the information that they had received from the speaker. Calvin was deeply informed by this belief and it shaped the manner in which he preached personally and the manner in which he advised others to preach. Thus, as one of Calvin’s biographers has pointed out, Calvin aimed to be “hot” not cold in his preaching and he insisted that the cool detachment of scholarship was entirely unsuited to the task of preaching.2

Ministers and the laity🔗

Calvin, then, had established the centrality of the preaching in the process of salvation. He had also called upon the ministers to proclaim the full and pure Word of God, and to do so in a powerful and passionate fashion. As a final note, then, what did he have to say about the relationship between the ministers and the laity? How were they to interact with each other in the course of day to day life?

The best way to describe the manner in which Calvin envisioned this relationship working itself out is to speak about what I have chosen to call a spirit of “mutual teachability.” Now, the concept of teachableness, as it was understood by Calvin, is a complicated one about which historians and theologians have had a great deal of debate. However, without becoming too concerned with that debate at the moment, what can be said about this idea of mutual teachableness at a general level?

In the first place, one of the key metaphors which Calvin used to describe the worship service was to refer to it as the “classroom of God.” Now, as in any classroom, there will be both teachers and students – both with mutual rights and obligations regarding each other. In Calvin’s analogy, the ministers were the teachers and the laity were the students and there were clear guidelines that governed the relationship between them. What were the rights and duties of the ministers as the teachers in God’s classroom? Calvin began by noting that as the “school masters,” it was axiomatic that the ministers be effective teachers who could connect with their students. Further, as we have already noted, as good teachers they were to instruct their students in the complete and pure gospel message. Of tremendous importance, however, was Calvin’s insistence that the ministers remain constant and humble students themselves. They were, he claimed, to set an example for their students by being ever willing to continue learning and to receive instruction themselves. Calvin taught that, even though they were school masters in the house of God, the ministers were to present themselves as those most ready to be taught. As such, they were to readily receive instruction from the Word of God, the doctors of the church, their fellow ministers, and finally, and I think quite notably, from their own students. To support this claim that the ministers had to also be ready to learn from the laity, including the members of their own congregations, Calvin pointed to the willingness of Apollos to receive instruction from Priscilla and Aquilla (Acts 18:26).

What were the responsibilities of the students, that is the laity, in the classroom of God? Calvin began by commenting on the attitude with which the laity ought to approach the worship service. They were to arrive eager and ready to listen to the Word of God. Calvin also cautioned the laity that, as in any classroom, students who showed themselves to be inattentive or disruptive pupils should be prepared to be rebuked and called to account by their teacher. Further, in a manner similar to his demand that the ministers not pollute God’s Word with the introduction of human teachings or fancies, Calvin insisted that the laity also divest themselves of any preconceived notions of their own. They were to attend the proclamation of Word not as those who had already determined in their own mind what was right and wrong, but as those ready to learn directly from the Word what they ought to believe and how they ought to live. In this respect they were to receive the preaching is if it was God Himself speaking directly to them. This did not mean, however, that the members of the congregation were to receive what was delivered to them from the pulpit passively or uncritically. Calvin insisted that that the laity be active and involved listeners, listeners who evaluated the preaching against the yardstick of God’s Word. In this, Calvin promised believers that they would not be left on their own, but that they would be aided by the labours of the Holy Spirit Who would bear witness to the Truth in their hearts.

This was to be the relationship between pastor and layman. A relationship in which each was prepared to learn from the other at the appointed time and in which both were aided by the Spirit in presenting and submitting to the Word of God. Each party was to hold the other to the standard of God’s Word and to call the other to account if there was any deviation in either life or conduct. This was the mutually teachable state in which the ministers as shepherds and the laity as sheep were to exist.

Conclusion🔗

Much more could be said about Calvin’s understanding of who the minster was and how he was to function in the community. Calvin’s understanding of the relationship between the ministers and the earlier offices of apostles and prophets could be examined.

We could speak of the kind of character traits and abilities that Calvin believed were requisite in those who held the office of pastor. We could also talk about how Calvin believed that the ministers of the Word were to interact with each other. At this juncture, however, I would like to conclude by considering what we as present day Reformed believers could learn from what has been presented above.

In the first place, if we consider the central role that Calvin gives to the preaching in bringing about the salvation of God’s elect, perhaps we should ask ourselves if, as churches, we are doing enough to ensure that our ministers have the time and focus they need to research and write their weekly sermons. Given that the proclaimed Word of God is the manner in which He has chosen to break hearts, to change lives, to instruct us as if it was with his own voice, can we afford as believers to let our ministers become distracted from this central task upon which our salvation and growth as believers so deeply depends? Instead, ought we not to ensure, particularly those amongst us who are elders, that our ministers have ample (and dare I say uninterrupted) time for study and reflection?

Secondly, there is a challenge here to the laity to renew our commitment to come to the worship services ready and eager to listen to the Word of God. And that means properly preparing to be good and critical listeners. As part of this process, it is crucial that, already outside of the worship services, we need to be people who daily live in the Word. How else are we going to be able to recognize whether the message we hear from the pulpit is in accordance with God’s will unless we are deeply and intimately familiar with that will? There is an added responsibility here that falls upon the elders of our churches to be especially watchful in this regard. It is their task to ensure that the congregation is being fully and effectively fed. They will have to pay extra attention to not only the content of the sermon, but also to manner in which the sermons are delivered. They will have to determine if the Word is being effectively conveyed to the congregation and if the sheep are receiving that Word and working with it. To that end, elders ought to familiarize themselves, at least to some extent, about how a “good” sermon is to be written, organized, and delivered. Only then will they be able to effectively assist the ministers with meaningful sermon critiques and reviews.

In line with this challenge to be good and engaged listeners, there is also the challenge to be listeners who continue to mature in their knowledge and ability. Paul warned of the dangers of believers not being weaned from the milk of the gospel and advancing to eat more solid food. Calvin echoed this warning when he advised the ministers to “pitch” their sermons at a level which their congregations could handle. However, he also urged ministers to “raise the bar,” so to speak, as their audiences matured. Are we as congregations seeking to grow in our ability to listen and to learn? Are we providing our ministers with an audience that is gradually able to handle increased depth and complexity in the preaching? If not, perhaps we need to think about what we should be doing to change this state of affairs.

Finally, there is also a challenge in what Calvin had to say about the minister’s task to seek after passionate preaching. Now I don’t want to suggest to you that Calvin would have gone all “Southern Baptist” here and started calling out from the pulpit for a Hallelujah in the house! Calvin was above all a man who sought to respect the holiness of God and the sanctity of worship – he placed a remarkable premium on the concept of decency and good order. However, I think that if he were here today he would tell us that the dichotomy which Reformed believers have sometimes drawn between good, doctrinal preaching and animated and passionate preaching is a false one. I think that he would tell us that the best preaching combines both of these qualities and that preachers should be called upon not only to convey the truth of gospel, but to also embody in their preaching the emotion and joy of living within the comfort of that gospel.

Endnotes🔗

  1. ^ Cornelis Augustijn, “Calvin in Strasbourg,” in: Calvinus Sacrae Scripturae Professor, ed. Wilhelm Neuser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 172.
  2. ^ William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 114, 116, 125-126.

Add new comment

(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.