Calvin on the Papacy

Oh, man, it's time to lay the smack down.

That's right, today's blog entry from my reading of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion comes after having read chapters IV - VIII in Book IV. Basically all of these chapters (and a few chapters after these) unify around one central theme: the corruption of the papacy.

The whole work up until now has been pretty sharp in its criticism of numerous theological beliefs and religious practices (not all of which come from the Roman Catholics). Yet this part of the Institutes is by far the most polemical. Why don't we just review some of the chapter titles?

• Chapter V: The Ancient Form of Government Was Completely Overthrown by the Tyranny of the Papacy
• Chapter VII: The Origin and Growth of the Roman Papacy Until It Raised Itself to Such a Height that the Freedom of the Church Was Oppressed, and All Restraint Overthrown
• Chapter VIII: The Power of the Church with Respect to Articles of Faith; and How in the Papacy, with Unbridled License, the Church Has Been Led to Corrupt All Purity of Doctrine

I think it should be pretty easy to get Calvin's central point.

How have I been confronting this, as a modern reader? Generally speaking, the way Calvin deals with theological controversy has made me uncomfortable. It's hard in my context to think in such black and white terms about the "papists."

And yet, this section of the book has honestly been profoundly eye-opening. It's quite astonishing to read someone with first-hand experience of that time talk about the corruption of the papacy. Chapter V, in particular, reviews some unbelievably corrupt practices in the church: lawsuits over pastoral ordination, "beneficed" and hired priests, bishops who did nothing for their parishes but collected money from them, priests engaged in all kinds of immoral behavior--my favorite part was about children being appointed as bishops! For all the theological points that the Reformers were eager to make, I wonder if anything close to the Reformation would have ever occurred had it not been for the sheer corruption of the church at that time?

It sounds as if even most Catholics of our day will admit that what was going on back then was an abomination, so perhaps this is nothing new. But I did learn a lot more than this. Calvin develops a pretty deep historical argument in defense of a Reformed view of church government, as well as an impressive amount of historical evidence that originally the bishop of Rome had nothing like his current place in the Roman Catholic Church. I have heard a lot of Catholic and even Eastern Orthodox apologists talk as if Protestants think the church was just corrupt from the time of Constantine until finally the Reformation came along. That's certainly not a fair reading of Calvin.

Although I don't have time to list the relevant quotes from this chapters, Calvin's view of the early church is nuanced and respectful. It is accurate to say that he finds much of the church in decline from around the 6th century onward, but he also finds that corruption crept in slowly, rather than immediately. I think an interesting aspect of his argument to consider is his treatment of Leo I and Gregory I. He uses the words of both of these figures at times to defend his argument against the papacy (see, e.g., Ch. VII Sec. 4). Yet at other times he highlights their weaknesses; I believe at one point he calls Leo a man of "ambition." It is clear in my mind that Calvin had a very nuanced view of all these early Christian leaders. You can see his theology at work here: we are all corrupt to some degree or another, and are continually depending on God's grace to sanctify us. It should be no surprise that this goes for leaders as well.

Chapter VIII is where the theological battleground is still present today. The Roman Catholic Church, as I understand it, would still more or less claim that the Church has some degree or other of infallibility--that is, the Tradition (with a capital "T") of the Church is sacred and without error. To this Calvin responds that the Church is only infallible insofar as it perseveres in its charge to uphold the Word of God. It is the "pillar and ground of the truth" in the sense that it is called to preserve the truth of Scripture--in a sense he is saying that the Bible is the truth, and the Church is its pillar and ground. For Calvin, any proclamation that comes from outside of Scripture can't be authoritative.

Essentially Calvin's doctrine of individual sanctification applies to the Church, as well. The Church is constantly bearing corruption, and must constantly seek God's grace to heal it. There is nothing truly infallible about the Church itself. To be honest, this is something I agree with perhaps more than anything else in all of Calvin. This is why I am a Protestant--the Church is simply not infallible.

There is one comment that comes in Section 15 of Chapter VIII that I found particularly interesting:

And I should not seem too quarrelsome because I insist so strongly that the church is not permitted to coin any new doctrine, that is, to teach and put forward as an oracle something more than the Lord has revealed in his Word. For sensible men see how perilous it is if men once be given such authority. They also see how great a window is opened to the quips and cavils of the impious if we say that what men have decided is to be taken as an oracle among Christians.

What if we view the political trend toward constitutional government in light of this sentiment? The written word is often the source of freedom for people. Indeed, that has always been the case in the United States, where our rights as citizens are enshrined in a written document that transcends the will of politicians. (We can only hope that these rights will continue to be enforced.)

For Protestants, the Bible functioned as a source of freedom long before the U.S. Constitution was written. What was written could not be annulled by power structures created by mere human beings. There is certainly something liberating about having the written word transcending human tradition. I have written at other times about the problems lurking underneath this freedom, but I have to say that at Calvin's moment in history, it makes sense that he clung to the supremacy of the written Scriptures over the tradition of the Catholic Church.

Interesting and provocative stuff. I think next time I post on Calvin, it might be "Calvin on the Papacy, Part II."