To The Evangelical Nicodemites (Part Two)

by on August 9, 2024 | Comment

The Cost of Coming Out of the Closet

Calvin was well aware of what he was about to ask of the crypto-Calvinists or secret Calvinists. He wrote letters of comfort to some of them as they languished in dark, rat-infested prisons, awaiting a sham trial and a bloody, fiery death. He also understood that what he was saying was controversial. Some influential Parisian Protestants thought or alleged that he was saying the only way to go to heaven was to be a member of the Genevan church. Of course, he was not saying that at all. Some of Calvin’s critics were misrepresenting his argument in order to discredit it. They were attempting to justify themselves. At the same time, despite their scorn, he was loving them. He was concerned that those Roman Catholics who did not come out of the Roman communion and identify publicly with the evangelical (in the sixteenth-century sense, which today would mean confessional Protestant or as the Synod of Dort put it, those “who profess the Reformed Religion”) church would find themselves in genuine spiritual danger.

This attempt to discredit Calvin was, of course, self-serving, since some of these folk were well placed and would have suffered significant personal setbacks and loss by leaving Rome and uniting with the suffering French Reformed Church. Despite the scorn, Calvin persevered.

However, since our office is to give pure testimony to the truth, I cannot dissemble or draw back from saying what I think of things which are useful to know, even when it is required of me to do so. However, since the whole difficulty stems from our being more interested in remaining in the good graces of the world than in pleasing God, I exhort every believer in the name of the Lord Jesus to compel his affections, in order to make them obedient to the Master’s will.1

He understood that

It is a hard thing to put oneself in danger of losing body and goods, of arousing everyone’s ire against oneself, of being held in contempt and scorned, of leaving the land where one can live comfortably in order to depart for a strange land, like someone lost. Yes, what is the first lesson we must learn in the school of Jesus Christ, but to renounce ourselves?2

In contemporary evangelicalism, words such as “mortification” and “self-denial” are not fashionable. One is much more likely to hear about “self-affirmation” and improving one’s “self-image.” To be sure, as a pastor and as one who grew up in the lower Midwest where everyone is or used to be, as Garrison Keillor says, “a dark Lutheran,” people (even those who are not Lutherans) do suffer real damage to their self-image and there is psychological harm done by sin and by sinners. Nevertheless, the fundamental Christian message is not, “You’re okay, I’m okay,” but “God made us good, we fell, Christ obeyed and died for sinners and was raised on the third day for their justification.” Our self-image rests in the image of God and in his grace in Christ.

For Calvin, denying self and dying to sin (mortification) was of the essence of the Christian life. We do by God’s grace alone. It is a catch-22. The crypto-evangelicals (or today’s crypto-Reformed) are not going to grow as they ought in their present circumstances, but they will not really grow until they leave. They need to leave to grow, but in order to leave they need to trust Christ enough (which implies growth) to leave!

Indeed, no one but Calvin is calling them to identify with Christ, to suffer, to change. Their current congregations and friends are all telling them to stay, that religion is a private matter, an interior matter. But real mortification is interior with exterior consequences. Comfort is borne of security and familiarity, even when that comfort and familiarity are wrongly, even wickedly placed.

Calvin understood:

Now, if there are some who are so weak, that they cannot determine from the word ‘go’ to do what they should, I beseech them at least not to flatter themselves, looking for subterfuges and frivolous excuses to conceal themselves. This is nothing but reckoning without one’s host. Such ways of escape shall not deliver them from God’s judgment.3

He knew whereof he spoke. There was a period of murkiness as he became an evangelical. There must have been a period of transition in Paris, an inward wrestling with whether or when to stop attending Mass. Whether and when to identify with the evangelicals. How? Where? At what cost? His public identification with the evangelical church in Geneva, his virtual imprisonment by Farel, being pressed into service in Geneva against his will, having been unceremoniously dismissed by the city council and then recalled from a much more pleasant place—Calvin only wanted to study and write—these were all crosses he bore. He did it at the expense of his own health, his own happiness, his own peace of mind, against his better judgment and personal inclinations, because his Savior did it for him.

He writes,

Indeed, we see that this has been the beginning and, as it were, the first part of the ruin of those who have become alienated from the grace of God: seeing that it was not safe for them to reveal themselves openly before men as true servants of God, in order to duly honor him, and they wanted to be considered just and above reproach because they polluted themselves in many idolatries.4

This passage from Calvin’s 1543 short treatise against the Nicodemites or the crypto-evangelicals who refused to leave the Roman communion and identify openly with the Reformation cause illustrates two very important Reformed doctrines.

The Cost of Not Coming Out

First, because we do not know the divine decree ahead of time, we must deal with life in the covenant of grace as it unfolds before us. Call this the “Hebrews 6/10” view of the church (i.e., this is the view taken in Hebrews chapters 6 and 10). When people are in the external covenant community, they “taste of the powers of the age to come,” and they “trample underfoot” the covenant when they apostatize (Heb 6:5; 10:29). When they are with us, professing faith, we regard them as believers, as members of Christ according to the judgment of charity. After they have apostatized, however, we realize that, in fact, they were only members externally, that they lacked true faith and genuine union with Christ.

So, for Calvin, it was with the crypto-evangelicals who remained in false churches. He was willing to accept the genuineness of their profession provisionally and to be understanding about the difficulties they faced in leaving their current congregation in order to join a true church. At a certain point, however, the understanding changes. If the profession is never matched by action, a discontinuity arises. They say that they are Protestants (evangelicals), but they continue to worship outwardly like Romanists; they continue to attend mass, they continue to participate in the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ (Session 22, Council of Trent, Canon 3)—which Calvin and all the Protestants regarded as an abomination to God and “an accursed idolatry” (Heidelberg Catechism 80).

Calvin warned of the very real possibility of the “ruin” of the Nicodemites and of their becoming “alienated” from grace. This is a genuine spiritual danger to the Nicodemites or the crypto-evangelicals. This is also a genuine danger to the crypto-Calvinists in the evangelical mega-churches and in other congregations that lack the marks of a true church, in which the crypto-Calvinists find themselves. How long can they sit through therapeutic, moralistic, deistic sermons and worship without doing real harm to themselves? I have had correspondence from people in such circumstances and they testify that they are “dead inside” and that they “dread” going to church. Sometimes they just stop going. After all, if what happens on Sunday morning is a poor imitation of Oprah or George Will, what is the point?

The second truth here, however, is reflected in Calvin’s phrase, “as it were.”5 This is the difference between Calvin’s handling of this problem and the way the so-called, self-described Federal Vision movement handles this same situation. The Federal Vision movement says that every baptized person is, by virtue of his baptism, united to Christ. They reject any distinction between those who are merely outward members of the visible church or of the administration of the covenant of grace, and those who are outward and inward members (Rom 2:28) of the church and the covenant of grace. Because they reject this distinction, they have it that one can be actually united to Christ, elect, regenerate, justified, adopted, etc., and yet still fall away. Their view is formally like the Remonstrants who were rejected at the Synod of Dort.

Calvin and the Reformed churches understood, however, that only those who are actually united to Christ, sola gratia et sola fide (by grace alone and through faith alone) in Christ alone, are actually united to Christ and receive his benefits. This is because Calvin and the Reformed churches made a distinction between the two ways of being in the one covenant of grace. Not everyone who participates in the administration of the covenant of grace is necessarily elect, regenerate, or united to Christ. This is the force Calvin’s little phrase, “as it were.”6 All forms of rationalism, whether Open Theism or the Federal Vision, ignore this “as it were” qualification. The Heidelberg Catechism says, “by his hand, as it were” (emphasis added), signaling that we understand that God, considered apart from the incarnation, does not have a body. We are not Mormons.

When Calvin wrote “as it were,” he recognized the tentative nature of human judgment in this world. He recognized that we are not God and that we do not know things as God knows them.7 We make the best judgments we can and we urge folk to live according to God’s self-disclosure (Deut 29:29) in God’s Word. We do not play “guess the elect.” Christ has a church, and it exists wherever the gospel is preached purely, wherever the sacraments are administered purely, and wherever discipline is administered. From all one can tell, these are not the three marks of most so-called evangelical congregations today. They are marked by programs, power points, and puppets.

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,” 48.
  3. Calvin, 48.
  4. Calvin, 48–49.
  5. Calvin, 48.
  6. Calvin, 48.
  7. Calvin, 48.

©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
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    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 ›

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