The question, for Calvin and for us, is “whether the Christian man, being rightly instructed in the truth of the gospel, offends God or not, by doing as the others do when he is among Papists, by going to Mass and other such ceremonies.”¹ The first part of the question is that of “dissimulation” or “hiding the truth one has within the heart.”² The second part concerns “simulation” or “pretending and faking something that is not so. In short, what lying is in words, simulation is in deeds.”³

This a question because we are not disembodied. We are not Gnostics seeking to overcome the body (contrary to the repeated Romanist criticism of historic, confessional Protestantism). Rather, Calvin recognized that because we are body and soul we must love God with our bodies and our souls. We owe to God a

two-fold honour—namely the spiritual service of the heart, and outward worship—likewise there is, on the contrary, a twofold sort of idolatry. First, when man corrupts and perverts the spiritual service of the only God by a lying fantasy. The other sort is when he transfers to some creature, such as an image, the honour which belongs to God alone.⁴

To those crypto-Calvinists in broad, mega, “evangelical,” congregations which do not offer the “evangel,” and are hardly “congregations” (but rather a collection of “venues”— someone recently asked one of our members which “venue” he attended? Puzzled, this member said, “Well, the worship venue.” “Which one is that? Do they serve coffee? Is there a praise band?” “No,” the member replied, “It’s the whole congregation together, worshiping God, singing psalms, listening to the sermon.” Talk about a clash of paradigms. Our member was mystified by the “venue” question, and the broad evangelical fellow was completely mystified by historic Reformed worship), the question remains. There may not be the memorial, ritual, propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass, but there are “dramas” and there is clowning and narcissism and the trivialization of God and of his Christ so that the service is hardly recognizably “Christian” any longer. Few strangers are in jeopardy of walking into such services and of being confronted by the awful reality of the living God so that they might want to throw themselves to the ground (1 Cor 14:25).

In their own ways the broad “evangelical” seeker service (with all its venues) and the Roman Mass seek to tame God. Since Rome made Jesus so utterly transcendent (because of their Christology and their piety), his place as a truly human Mediator was taken by saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary. By transubstantiation, God the Son becomes manageable. The Mass, confession, and penance are all things that we do. We process in, we adore, we remember, we offer. So too in the evangelical megachurch, we worship, we praise, we experience, we entertain, we choose the venue by which we shall approach God. Different dramas, same story.

The God in Scripture is not manageable. He has a nasty tendency to “break out” against sin or trivialization. The golden calf trivialized God. The golden calf made the people comfortable. It allowed them to approach God on terms that were familiar. The God of history, the God of Scripture, the God who is, however, will not be approached—not that way. He comes to us on his terms and calls us to respond, to come to him, on his terms. There are no venues for approaching God except humble and holy worship in response to his law and his gospel. Calvin understood this and knew that God, the God of Scripture, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

To illustrate and prove the connection between inward and outward piety, between body and soul, Calvin turned to 1 Corinthians 8. When eating food offered to idols leads others to worship the idols, it is obvious that eating the food is not innocent. At stake is the spiritual well-being of “he for whom Christ died.”⁵ The case is even clearer in 1 Corinthians 10. Participating in ritual sacrifices to God makes one a “partaker of the true consecration,”⁶ and participating in sacrifices to idols also makes one a participant in idolatry. The true worship of the true God is exclusive. It is impossible to worship the true God false or to truly worship a false god. “Whoever takes the one, utterly renounces the other.”⁷ That principle of exclusivity alone explains Daniel and his companions. Were it otherwise they would have been able “to escape by this subtlety.”⁸ Indeed, were it otherwise it would have been foolish for them to “expose themselves to death.”⁹ They could have said, “Others will worship the statue, but our spirit shall be lifted up to heaven to worship the living God.”¹⁰ Either they were guilty of “ill considered zeal” or the Nicodemites are wrong.¹¹

What about the ordinary, mere Christian? After all, “not everyone can be so steadfast.”¹² Calvin accused those who make such pleas of “seeking cover-ups for our sins.”¹³ They argue that 1 Corinthians 10 was about rank paganism, not about the Roman Mass which, however corrupt, is intended to worship God. It seems to them that “there is not so great a danger in partaking in an idolatry which is cloaked in the name of God.”¹⁴ To which he responded by pointing to the example of the brass serpent (Num 21:8). Here is an example of a “holy sacrament of Jesus Christ” instituted by God that had been corrupted into idolatry.¹⁵ They too “pleaded the fair colours of the name of God.”¹⁶ Then there is the case of the golden calf (Exod 32) which was “designed to represent” God.¹⁷ Nevertheless it was “false and perverse” and idolatry.¹⁸ The same was true of the calves erected by Jeroboam at Bethel and Dan (1 Kgs 12:28). They were dedicated to the worship of God and yet they were idolatrous. The same was true of the temple in Samaria. It was not dedicated to Jupiter, but to God. “I therefore conclude that it is no more permitted to partake in an idolatry which has the name of God imposed upon it, than if it was purely something of the Saracens [i.e., Turks] or pagans.”¹⁹

What Calvin saw, which we in our late modern subjectivist time have difficulty seeing, is that intention is not everything—it does not change the truth, the reality. Christ died for our bodies and our souls and demands that we return to him true, grateful worship, with bodies and souls, inwardly and outwardly. There is more to worship than intention. Actions matter. Location matters. There is an objective reality that cannot be denied. Participating in false worship, however sincerely, is still participating in false worship. It offends God and hurts other Christians. For Calvin it was indefensible on both grounds.

He recognized that difference between some of the biblical narratives and his own time, and yet he also recognized that some of the narratives described situations quite like his. Mutatis mutandis (with the changes having been changed), he moved from the biblical narratives to his own time. If there were difficulties for Calvin, so there are for us. This series is not aimed at Roman Christians who profess the Reformed faith, but to those in nominally evangelical congregations where the preaching of the gospel has been replaced with therapy and the sacraments are absent or corrupt and where the second commandment is not even a distant memory. Yes, these congregations may be nominally Protestant, but how different are they really from those of which Calvin was thinking? The most fundamental issue remains the same: the ostensible good intention of private worship in a corrupt congregation that has rejected reformation is corrupt whatever the private intention of the crypto-Calvinist.

Sometimes it seems as if Calvin were living in our day. Sometimes his criticism of our hypocrisy is so penetrating that it is hard to believe it was written more than four hundred years ago. The next section in his Short Treatise (1543) is a good example. He addressed first those who “care to be perceived as more devout than others” who attend the “daily” Mass.²⁰ “Anyone who has made modest progress in the gospel knows that what the priest does there is sacrilege and abomination.”²¹ For Calvin it was obvious that it was the moral equivalent of prostrating oneself “before an idol.”²² It was sin. It was partaking of the “useless works of darkness” (Eph 5:11). How can one participate in it, pretend “to acknowledge it” then later wash one’s hands of it? Does God see nothing? Here Calvin penetrated the heart: “But they say, ‘We are not the ones who commit the evil. What more can we do, since it is not up to us to correct it?’ I answer that the evil that I reprove in them is that they do not abstain from what they know to be bad.”²³

Subjectivism Is No Refuge

The “parochial Mass” (weekly) is a similar case. The Nicodemite defends himself by arguing that at least there, despite the great corruption, they may participate in the Supper “‘because it is a memorial to us of the Supper of the Lord, we take it thus.’”²⁴ Calvin replied to the crypto-evangelical, “Indeed? Can we thus transform things to our taste, and say that darkness is light?”²⁵ Once more his arrow hit dead center. Ours is an age of extreme subjectivism—the thought and attitude that says that how one experiences something (or someone) is the most important thing. Indeed, in our time, it is widely held that experience determines reality. Of course this is complete rubbish and is easily shown to be so. Try “experiencing” a red light as a green light. Try explaining to the nice police officer that you experienced the light as green and that it was green for you. In response, he will explain that he is writing you a citation for $271 and that the law expects your experience to conform to objective reality henceforth.

What is fascinating here is that, in the crypto-evangelicals, Calvin faced the very same subjectivism that dominates American religion and particularly the religion of American “evangelicals,” including that of our “crypto-Calvinists” who make the very same argument in defense of their remaining in the mega-church, multi-venue worship services. Since they receive the service in a certain way, it is that way to them.

Calvin was not having any of it:

I ask you, what similarity is there between the holy sacrament instituted by the Lord Jesus, and this mixture made up of all sorts of garbage? First, do they think it’s nothing that the Mass is accounted a sacrifice, whereby God is appeased not only concerning the living, but also concerning the dead? Is it nothing that the canon, which is the main substance of the Mass, is full of abominable blasphemies? Again, is it nothing that the prayer is made for the souls in purgatory, which we know to be utterly superstitious? However, were there only the diabolical delusion of sacrificing Jesus Christ to God, so that such a work could be a satisfaction and payment for the living and the dead, is this not altogether a patent renunciation of his death and passion, which is nullified if one does not recognize it as a unique and perpetual sacrifice? Is it not a direct corruption of his sacred Supper? Certainly these to such execrable pollutions cannot be separated from the Mass anymore than heat can be separated from fire.²⁶

The objective facts of the Roman Mass are too plain to be denied. Our experience does not create or norm reality. God spoke creation into existence. Certainly, we do experience reality, but our experience of it is not normative. We cannot transform, as if by fiat, sins into righteousness, whether those sins be part of the parochial Mass or the “evangelical” skit. Are puppets, Play-Doh, and PowerPoint really any better than the sorts of things about which Calvin complained concerning the Roman Mass?

Finally, we should not miss the obvious tension that now exists between Calvin’s (and that of Reformed orthodoxy) understanding of the Roman Mass and the understanding which is being promoted in certain borderline Reformed communions.²⁷ They cannot both be right. Either the Roman Mass includes an ostensible memorial, propitiatory, sacrifice, or it does not. The Council of Trent, Session 22, in 1562 declared that the Eucharist is a propitiatory sacrifice. It condemned anyone who denied that doctrine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) perpetuates that dogma. That is what Calvin, who was raised in the Roman Communion, was taught, and that is the view he rejected as completely inimical to biblical doctrine of the Supper. The Heidelberg Catechism rejected the same doctrine in question 80. The Reformed did not misrepresent the Roman doctrine and practice. As with the doctrine of justification, it seems that their desire to be ecumenical has caused our friends to attempt to transform (to use Calvin’s word) certain unpleasant realities in the Roman doctrine and practice in order to justify their ecumenism.

Notes

1. John Calvin, “A Short Treatise Setting Forth What the Faithful Man Must Do When He is Among the Papists and Knows the Truth of the Gospel,” in Come Out From Among Them: ‘Anti-Nicodemite’ Writings of John Calvin, trans. Seth Skolnitsky (Dallas: Protestant Heritage Press, 2001), 45–95.
2. Calvin, “A Short Treatise,” 54.
3. Calvin, 54.
4. Calvin, 54.
5. Calvin, 57.
6. Calvin, 57.
7. Calvin, 57.
8. Calvin, 57.
9. Calvin, 57.
10. Calvin, 58.
11. Calvin, 58.
12. Calvin, 58.
13. Calvin, 58.
14. Calvin, 58.
15. Calvin, 59.
16. Calvin, 59.
17. Calvin, 59.
18. Calvin, 59.
19. Calvin, 60.
20. Calvin, 62.
21. Calvin, 62.
22. Calvin, 62.
23. Calvin, 62.
24. Calvin, 63.
25. Calvin, 63.
26. Calvin, 63.
27. For more on this, see R. Scott Clark, Recovering the Reformed Confession (Phillipsburg NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 1–2, 169.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Editor’s Note: This essay was first published serially in 2009 and appears here slightly revised.

You can find the whole series here.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

  More by R. Scott Clark ›