Calvin As An Experiential Preacher

By Joel R. Beeke

John Calvin embraced a high view of preaching. He called the preaching office “the most excellent of all things,” commended by God that it might be held in the highest esteem. “There is nothing more notable or glorious in the church than the ministry of the gospel,” he concluded. [1] In commenting on Isaiah 55:11, he says, “The Word goeth out of the mouth of God in such a manner that it likewise goeth out of the mouth of men; for God does not speak openly from heaven but employs men as his instruments.” [2]

Calvin viewed preaching as God’s normal means of salvation and benediction. He said that the Holy Spirit is the “internal minister” who uses the “external minister” in preaching the Word. The external minister “holds forth the vocal word and it is received by the ears,” but the internal minister “truly communicates the thing proclaimed [which] is Christ.” [3] Thus, God Himself speaks through the mouth of His servants by His Spirit. “Wherever the gospel is preached, it is as if God himself came into the midst of us,” Calvin wrote. [4] Preaching is the instrument and the authority that the Spirit uses in His saving work of illuminating, converting, and sealing sinners. “There is…an inward efficacy of the Holy Spirit when he sheds forth his power upon hearers, that they may embrace a discourse [sermon] by faith.” [5]

Calvin taught that the preached Word and the inner testimony of the Spirit should be distinguished but cannot be separated. Word and Spirit are joined together organically; without the Spirit, the preached Word only adds to the condemnation of unbelievers. On the other hand, Calvin admonished the radicals who accented the Spirit at the expense of the Word, saying that only the spirit of Satan separates itself from the Word. [6]

This stress on preaching moved Calvin to be active on several fronts in Geneva. First, he showed his convictions through his own example. Calvin preached from the New Testament on Sunday mornings, the Psalms on Sunday afternoons, and the Old Testament at 6:00 a.m. on one or two weekdays. Following this schedule during his last stay in Geneva from 1541 to 1564, Calvin preached nearly four thousand sermons, more than 170 sermons a year. On his deathbed, he spoke of his preaching as more significant than his writings. [7]

Second, Calvin often preached to his congregation about their responsibility to hear the Word of God aright. He taught his members in what spirit they should come to the sermon, what to listen for in preaching, and what was expected of those who hear. Since, for Calvin, all true preaching is biblical preaching and ministers are to preach only what God commands by opening His Word, people were to test sermons by this criterion. unscriptural sermons were to be rejected; scriptural sermons were to be accepted and obeyed. Calvin’s goal was that the people would grasp the importance of preaching, learn to desire preaching as a supreme blessing, and participate as actively in the sermon as the preacher himself. Their basic attitude should be one of “willingness to obey God completely and with no reserve,” Calvin said. [8]

Calvin was motivated to stress profitable hearing of the Word because he believed that few people hear well. Here is a typical assessment of Calvin: “If the same sermon is preached, say, to a hundred people, twenty receive it with the ready obedience of faith, while the rest hold it valueless, or laugh, or hiss, or loathe it.” [9] I found more than forty similar comments in Calvin’s sermons (especially on Deuteronomy), commentaries (e.g., on Psalm 119:101 and Acts 11:23), and the Institutes (especially 3.21 to 3.24). If profitable hearing was a problem in Calvin’s day, how much more so today, when ministers have to compete for their congregation’s attention with all the mass media that bombard us on a daily basis?

Third, the Genevan system Calvin established emphasized preaching. On Sundays, the Genevan Ordinances stipulated that sermons be preached in each of the three churches at daybreak and again at 9:00 a.m. After the children were catechized at noon, a third sermon was preached in each church at 3:00 p.m. Weekday sermons were also scheduled in the churches on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at varying hours so that they could be heard one after the other. That way people could take in three sermons in one day, if they so desired. By the time Calvin died, there was at least one sermon preached in every church every day of the week.

Calvin’s gifts and high view of preaching both theologically and in practice motivates us to study his sermons. In this article, I want to first briefly define experiential preaching, then step back to look in broad overview at how Calvin preached before focusing more narrowly on the question of how he preached experientially and how such preaching interfaced with corollary doctrines such as assurance of faith, election, and self-examination.

Experiential Preaching Defined

Experiential or experimental preaching addresses the vital matter of how a Christian experiences the truth of Christian doctrine in his life. The term experimental comes from the Latin experimentum, meaning trial. It is derived from the verb experior, meaning to try, prove, or put to the test. That same verb can also mean to find or know by experience, thus leading to the word experientia, meaning knowledge gained by experiment. Calvin used experiential and experimental interchangeably, since both words in biblical preaching indicate the need for measuring experienced knowledge against the touchstone of Scripture.

Experimental preaching stresses the need to know the great truths of the Word of God by experience. A working definition of experimental preaching might be: Experimental preaching seeks to explain in terms of biblical truth how spiritual matters ought to go, how they do go, and what is the goal of the Christian life. It aims to apply divine truth to the whole range of the believer’s personal experience, as well as to his relationships with family, the church, and the world around him.

Experimental preaching is discriminatory preaching. It clearly defines the difference between a Christian and non-Christian, opening the kingdom of heaven to one and shutting it from the other. Discriminatory preaching offers the forgiveness of sins and eternal life to all who embrace Christ as Savior and Lord by true faith, but it also proclaims the wrath of God and His eternal condemnation upon those who are unbelieving, unrepentant, and unconverted. Such preaching teaches that unless our religion is experiential, we will perish—not because experience itself saves, but because the Christ who saves sinners must be experienced personally as the foundation upon which the house of our eternal hope is built (Matt. 7:22-27; 1 Cor. 1:30; 2:2).

Experimental preaching is applicatory. It applies the text to every aspect of a listener’s life, promoting a religion that is truly a power and not mere form (2 Tim. 3:5). Robert Burns defined such religion as “Christianity brought home to men’s business and bosoms” and said the principle on which it rests is “that Christianity should not only be known, and understood, and believed, but also felt, and enjoyed, and practically applied.” [10]

Experiential preaching, then, teaches that the Christian faith must be experienced, tasted, and lived through the saving power of the Holy Spirit. It stresses the knowledge of scriptural truth “which is able to make us wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). Specifically, such preaching teaches that Christ who is the living Word ( John. 1:1) and the very embodiment of the truth must be experientially known and embraced. It proclaims the need for sinners to experience who God is in His Son. As John 17:3 says, “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” The word know in this text, as well as other biblical usages, does not indicate a casual acquaintance, but a deep, abiding relationship. For example, Genesis 4:1 uses the word know to suggest marital intimacy: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain.” Experiential preaching stresses the intimate, personal knowledge of God in Christ.

Such knowledge is never divorced from Scripture. According to Isaiah 8:20, all of our beliefs, including our experiences, must be tested against Holy Scripture. “If I can’t find my experiences back in the Bible, they are not from the Lord but from the devil,” Martin Luther once said. That is really what the word experimental intends to convey. Just as scientific experiment tests a hypothesis against a body of evidence, so experimental preaching involves examining Christian experience in the light of the teaching of the Word of God.

Calvin’s Preaching

Calvin preached serially from various Bible books, striving to clearly show the meaning of a passage and how it should impact the lives of his hearers. Much like a homily in style, his sermons have no divisions or points other than what the text dictates. As Paul Fuhrman writes, “They are properly homilies as in the ancient church: expositions of Bible passages [in] the light of grammar and history, [providing] application to the hearers’ life situations.” [11]

Calvin was a careful exegete, an able expositor, and a faithful applier of the Word. His goals in preaching were to glorify God, to cause believers to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ Jesus, and to unite sinners with Christ, so “that men be reconciled to God by the free remission of sins.” [12] This aim of saving sinners blended seamlessly with his emphasis on scriptural doctrines. He wrote that ministers are “keepers of the truth of God; that is to say, of His precious image, of that which concerneth the majesty of the doctrine of our salvation, and the life of the world.” [13] Calvin frequently admonished ministers to keep this treasure safe by handling the Word of God carefully, always striving for pure, biblical teaching. That did not exclude bringing contemporary events to bear on people’s lives, however. As current events related to the passage being expounded, Calvin felt free to apply his sermon to those events in practical, experiential, and moralistic ways. [14]

The image of the preacher as a teacher moved Calvin to emphasize the importance of careful sermon preparation. How he accomplished that himself with his frequency of preaching and heavy workload remains a mystery, but he obviously studied the text to be expounded with great care and read widely what others had said about it. He preached extemporaneously, relying heavily on his remarkable memory. He often declared that the power of God could best be exhibited in extemporaneous delivery.

That’s why there are no manuscripts of Calvin’s sermons extant. As far as we know, he never wrote out any sermons. The only reason that we have more than two thousand of Calvin’s sermons is that a certain Denis Raguenier took them down in shorthand from 1549 until the scribe’s death in 1560. Apparently, Calvin never intended for them to be published.

The average length of texts covered in each of Calvin’s sermons was four or five verses in the Old Testament and two or three verses in the New Testament. His sermons were fairly short for his day (perhaps due in part to his asthmatic condition), probably averaging thirty-five to forty minutes. He is reported to have spoken “deliberately, often with long pauses to allow people to think,” though others say that he must have spoken rapidly to complete his sermon on time. [15]

Calvin’s style of preaching was plain and clear. In a sermon titled “Pure Preaching of the Word,” Calvin writes, “we must shun all unprofitable babbling, and stay ourselves upon plain teaching, which is forcible.” [16] Rhetoric for its own sake or vain babbling must be shunned, though true eloquence, when subjected to the simplicity of the gospel, is to be coveted. When Joachim Westphal charged Calvin with “babbling” in his sermons, Calvin replied that he stuck to the main point of the text and practiced “cautious brevity.” [17]

Calvin’s sermons abound with application throughout. In some cases, application consumes more time than exposition. Short, pungent applications, sprinkled throughout his sermons, constantly urge, exhort, and invite sinners to act in obedience to God’s Word. “We have not come to the preaching merely to hear what we do not know, but to be incited to do our duty,” Calvin said to his flock.

T.H.L. Parker suggests that Calvin’s sermons follow a certain pattern:

1. Prayer. 

2. Recapitulation of previous sermon. 

3a. Exegesis and exposition of the first point. 

3b. Application of the first point and exhortation to obedience of duty. 

4a. Exegesis and exposition of the second point. 

4b. Application of the second point and exhortation to obedience of duty. 

5. Closing prayer, which contains a brief, implicit summary of the sermon.

John Gerstner points out that, though this was the structural order that Calvin often did follow and probably intended to follow, he frequently departed from it because “he was so eager to get at the application that he often introduced it in the midst of the exposition. In other words, application was the dominant element in the preaching of John Calvin to which all else was subordinated.” [18]

Calvin’s Stress On Piety In Preaching

Calvin understood true religion as fellowship between God and man. The part of the fellowship that moves from God to man Calvin called revelation; the part of the fellowship that moves from man to God, which involves man’s obedient response, he called piety. Such piety functions through God’s grace by faith, and involves such devout acts as childlike trust, humble adoration, godly fear, and undying love. Calvin’s applications in preaching often aimed for exciting these kinds of graces.

For Calvin, the goal of the preacher is to promote such piety, even as the preacher himself must remain acutely aware that the listener cannot produce this piety himself. He is only a recipient of such piety by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and not the author of it. Nevertheless, the Spirit accompanies the Word with this divine gift of pious graces.

Calvin’s piety, like his theology, is inseparable from the knowledge of God. The true knowledge of God results in pious activity that stretches its goal beyond personal salvation to embrace the glory of God. Where God’s glory is not served, piety cannot exist. This compels discipline, obedience, and love in every sphere of the believer’s life. For Calvin, the law gives love its mandate and content to act, to obey God out of discipline, and so to live to His glory. Indeed, love is the fulfilling of the law. Thus, for Calvin, true piety was both a vertical (Godward) and horizontal (manward) relationship of love and law.

Grace and law, therefore, are both prominent in Calvin’s theology and preaching. Keeping the law is especially important because of its supreme purpose to lead us to consecrate our entire lives to God. Lionel Greve writes, “Grace has priority in such a way that Calvin’s piety may be considered as a quality of life and response to God’s grace that transcended law but at the same time included it.” Greve goes on to conclude, “Calvin’s piety may be termed ‘transcendent piety.’ It transcends the creature because it is founded in grace but yet includes the creature as he is the subject of faithfulness. He is the subject in such a way that his piety is never primarily for his welfare.… The general movement of Calvin’s piety is always Godward. The benefits of God’s goodness are merely byproducts of the main purpose—glorifying God.” [19]

Calvin’s combined emphases on God’s glory and the believer’s Spirit-worked piety led him to a theology of experience. Experience was a theological and spiritual necessity for him. That is quite understandable, given his accent on the Spirit’s work in the life of the believer—an accent that earned him the title of “the theologian of the Holy Spirit.” So we ought not be surprised that his pneumatological, experiential emphasis of piety also spilled over into his sermons. The question is not whether Calvin was an experiential preacher—that is obvious from his sermons, commentaries, and even in his Institutes; the question is: What role does experience (experientia) play in his theology and preaching?

Calvin And Experience

Calvin values experience so long as it is rooted in Scripture and springs out of the living reality of faith. He repeatedly defines the experience of believers as beyond verbal expression. For example, he writes, “Such, then, is a conviction that requires no reasons, such a knowledge with which the best reason agrees—in which the mind truly reposes, more securely and constantly than in any reasons: such finally, a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself — though my words fall far beneath a just explanation of the matter.” [20] Calvin goes on to say that believers’ recognition of God “consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculations.” But then he hastens to add: “Indeed, with experience as our teacher, we find God just as he declares himself in his Word.” [21]

False experience fabricates a god that does not square with the Scriptures, but true experience always flows out of the truths of Scripture and underscores them. Holy Scripture is consistent with sacred, Spirit-worked experience, since Calvin understands that the Bible is not a book of abstract or scholastic doctrines, but a book of doctrines that is rooted in real, experiential, daily living. Thus, experience plays an important role in Calvin’s exegesis. Willem Balke writes, “Experience can serve as a hermeneutical key in the explanation of the Scriptures. The Bible places us in the center of the struggle of faith, coram Deo, and therefore Calvin can recommend himself as exegete as he does in the introduction to the Commentary on the Psalms (1557) since he has experienced what the Bible testifies.” [22]

Calvin views his multifaceted experiences as a Reformer as an important qualification for exegeting and preaching God’s Word. Though he relates his experiential qualification particularly to the Psalms since the Psalms relate best to the suffering people of God and are, as he calls them, “an anatomy of all parts of the soul,” all of his sermons and commentaries reveal that he believes no book of Scripture can be reduced to mere doctrine.

Though Calvin ascribes a large place to experience in his exegesis and preaching, he understands that experience has significant limitations. When divorced from the Word, experience is altogether unreliable. And it is always incomplete. Calvin concludes that the depths of the human heart, which always remain a focal point for the mystic, is not the way to God. Rather, he agrees with Luther that the only way to God is by Word-centered faith. The believer does not learn to know God’s will from “nuda experientia,” Calvin says, but only through the testimony of Scripture. [23]

If Scripture is not the foundation of our experience of faith, Calvin says we will only be left with vague feelings that have no anchor. True faith, however, anchors itself in the Word. We ought not measure the presence of God in our lives by our experience, for that would soon bring us to despair. “If we should measure out the help of God according to our feelings,” Calvin writes, “our faith would soon waver and we would have no courage or hope.” [24]

Thus, Calvin is careful not to be an experientialist—that is, one who frequently calls attention to his own experiences in a rather mystical manner. He well understands that experience is to be defined by the testimony of the written Word.

Calvin avoids both experientialism and dry scholasticism. He does not see the Bible as a collection of doctrines, but rather views biblical doctrines as “embedded in the life and faith of the church and of the individual, in the natural habitat of the verification of faith in Christian and ecclesiastical existence.” [25]

Experientia Fide Or Sensus Fide

The experience or sense of faith (experientia fide or sensus fide), according to Calvin, is also inseparable from the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit renews the very core of man. That work involves illumination and sealing; the Spirit’s illumination of the mind and His efficacious work in the heart coalesce. The Spirit’s sealing work certifies the authority of the Word and the reality of the Spirit’s saving work. It promotes confidence in God’s promises of mercy and experience of them. This doctrine, Calvin says, is “not of the tongue, but of life. It is not apprehended by the understanding and memory alone, as other disciplines are, but it is received only when it possesses the whole soul, and finds a seat and resting place in the inmost affection of the heart.” [26]

Such experientia fide is thus not a part of the believer’s own ability, but it is the creative effect of the Spirit who uses the Word. It contains both objective and subjective truth. The Spirit testifies both in the Word of God and in the heart of the believer, and the believer hears and experiences its reality. Through the Spirit’s objective and subjective testimony, the believer is persuaded experientially of the absolute truth of God and of His Word. Being made willing by the powerful operations of the Spirit, the heart, will, and emotions all respond in faith and obedience to the Triune God. Since the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son whose great task it is to lead the believer to Christ, and through Him to the Father, the center of faith’s experience is, as John called it, having “fellowship with the Father and the Son” (1 John 1:3). True experience always leads, then, to true communion and to praxis pietatis.

This is not to say that true experience is always that easily dissected and understood. The experience of faith contains numerous paradoxes. For example, a paradox exists in the life of faith when we are called to believe that God is still with us when we feel that He has deserted us. Or, how can we believe that God is favorably inclined to us when He strips us at times of all consciousness of that favor and seems to providentially postpone fulfilling His merciful promises? [27]

The believer can experience such apparent contradictions on a daily basis, Calvin says. He can feel forsaken of God, even when he knows deep within that he is not (Isa. 49:14 –16). These conflicting experiences transpire within one heart and seem, like hope and fear, to cancel each other out. If fear gets the upper hand, Calvin writes, we ought to simply throw ourselves wholly on the promises of God. [28] Those promises will give us courage to go on in spite of temptations to doubt. Moreover, it is especially when we acknowledge God as present by faith though we cannot see or feel His goodness and power that we truly honor His Lordship and His Word. [29] To believe in God when experience seems to annul His promises takes great faith, but it is precisely this experience of faith that enables believers to remain undisturbed when their entire world seems to be shaken. [30]

Experience And Assurance Of Faith

Calvin’s doctrine of assurance reaffirmed the basic tenets of Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli and disclosed emphases of his own. Like Luther and Zwingli, Calvin says faith is never merely assent (assensus), but involves both knowledge (cognitio) and trust (fiducia). Faith rests firmly upon God’s Word; faith always says amen to the Scriptures. [31] Hence assurance must be sought in the Word and flows out of the Word. [32] Assurance is as inseparable from the Word as sunbeams are from the sun.

Faith and assurance are also inseparable from Christ and the promise of Christ, for the totality of the written Word is the living Word, Jesus Christ, in whom all God’s promises are “yea and amen.” [33] Calvin makes much of the promises of God as the ground of assurance, for these promises are based on the very nature of God, who cannot lie. The promises are fulfilled by Christ; therefore Calvin directs sinners to Christ and to the promises as if they were synonyms. [34] Since faith takes its character from the promise on which it rests, faith takes on the infallible stamp of God’s own Word. Consequently, faith possesses assurance in its own nature. Assurance, certainty, trust: such is the essence of faith.

More specifically, Calvin argues that faith involves something more than objectively believing the promise of God; it involves personal, subjective assurance. In believing God’s promise to sinners, the true believer recognizes and celebrates that God is gracious and benevolent to him in particular. Faith is an assured knowledge “of God’s benevolence toward us...revealed to our minds...sealed upon our hearts.” [35] Calvin writes, “Here, indeed, is the hinge on which faith turns: that we do not regard the promises of mercy that God offers as true only outside ourselves, but not at all in us; rather that we make them ours by inwardly embracing them.” [36]

Thus, as Robert Kendall notes, Calvin repeatedly describes faith as “certainty (certitudino), a firm conviction (solido persuasio), assurance (securitas), firm assurance (solida securitas), and full assurance (plena securitas).” [37] While faith consists of knowledge, it is also marked by heartfelt assurance that is “a sure and secure possession of those things which God has promised us.” [38]

Calvin also emphasizes throughout his commentaries that assurance is integral to faith. [39] In expounding 2 Corinthians 13:5, Calvin even states that those who doubt their union to Christ are reprobates: “[Paul] declares, that all are reprobates, who doubt whether they profess Christ and are a part of His body. Let us, therefore, reckon that alone to be right faith, which leads us to repose in safety in the favour of God, with no wavering opinion, but with a firm and steadfast assurance.”

Throughout his lofty doctrine of faith, however, Calvin repeats these themes: unbelief dies hard; assurance is often contested by doubt; severe temptations, wrestlings, and strife are normative; Satan and the flesh assault faith; trust in God is hedged with fear. [40] Freely Calvin acknowledges that faith is not retained without a severe struggle against unbelief, nor is it left untainted by doubt and anxiety. He writes: “unbelief is, in all men, always mixed with faith…. For unbelief is so deeply rooted in our hearts, and we are so inclined to it, that not without hard struggle is each one able to persuade himself of what all confess with the mouth, namely, that God is faithful. Especially when it comes to reality itself, every man’s wavering uncovers hidden weakness.” [41]

In expounding John 20:3, Calvin seems to contradict his assertion that true believers know themselves to be such when he testifies that the disciples had faith without awareness of it as they approached the empty tomb: “There being so little faith, or rather almost no faith, both in the disciples and in the women, it is astonishing that they had so great zeal; and, indeed, it is not possible that religious feelings led them to seek Christ. Some seed of faith, therefore, remained in their hearts, but quenched for a time, so that they were not aware of having what they had. Thus the Spirit of God often works in the elect in a secret manner.” [42]

This prompts us to ask how Calvin can say that faith is characterized by full assurance, yet still allow for the kind of faith that lacks assurance? The two statements appear antithetical. Assurance is free from doubt, yet not free. It does not hesitate, yet can hesitate. It contains security, but may be beset with anxiety. The faithful have assurance, yet waver and tremble.

Calvin uses at least four principles to address this complex issue. Each helps make sense of his apparent contradictions.

First, consider Calvin’s need to distinguish between the definition of faith and the reality of the believer’s experience. After explaining faith in the Institutes as embracing “great assurance,” Calvin writes:

Still, someone will say: “Believers experience something far different: In recognizing the grace of God toward themselves they are not only tried by disquiet, which often comes upon them, but they are repeatedly shaken by gravest terrors. For so violent are the temptations that trouble their minds as not to seem quite compatible with that certainty of faith.” Accordingly, we shall have to solve this difficulty if we wish the above-stated doctrine to stand. Surely, while we teach that faith ought to be certain and assured, we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt, or any assurance that is not assailed. [43]

In short, Calvin distinguishes between the ought to of faith and the is of faith in daily life. His definition of faith serves as a recommendation about how believers ought “habitually and properly to think of faith.” [44] Faith should always aim at full assurance, even if it can not reach perfect assurance in experience. In principle, faith gains the victory (1 John 5:4); in practice, it recognizes that it has not yet fully apprehended (Phil. 3:12-13).

Nevertheless, the practice of faith validates faith that trusts in the Word. Calvin is not as interested in experiences as he is in validating Word-grounded faith. Experience confirms faith, Calvin says. Faith “requires full and fixed certainty, such as men are wont to have from things experienced and proved.” [45]

Thus, bare experience (nuda experientia) is not Calvin’s goal, but experience grounded in the Word, flowing out of the fulfillment of the Word. Experimental knowledge of the Word is essential. [46] For Calvin, two kinds of knowledge are needed: knowledge by faith (scientia fidei) that is received from the Word, “though it is not yet fully revealed,” and the knowledge of experience (scientia experentiae) “springing from the fulfilling of the Word.” [47] The Word of God is primary to the former and to the latter, for experience teaches us to know God as He declares Himself to be in His Word. [48] Experience not consonant with Scripture is never an experience of true faith. In short, though the believer’s experience of true faith is far weaker than he desires, there is an essential unity in the Word between faith’s perception (the ought-to dimension of faith) and experience (the is dimension of faith).

The second principle that helps us understand Calvin’s tension in assurance of faith is the principle of flesh versus spirit. Calvin writes:

It is necessary to return to that division of flesh and spirit which we have mentioned elsewhere. It most clearly reveals itself at this point. Therefore the godly heart feels in itself a division because it is partly imbued with sweetness from its recognition of the divine goodness, partly grieves in bitterness from an awareness of its calamity; partly rests upon the promise of the gospel, partly trembles at the evidence of its own iniquity; partly rejoices at the expectation of life, partly shudders at death. This variation arises from imperfection of faith, since in the course of the present life it never goes so well with us that we are wholly cured of the disease of unbelief and entirely filled and possessed by faith. Hence arise those conflicts, when unbelief, which reposes in the remains of the flesh, rises up to attack the faith that has been inwardly conceived. [49]

Like Luther, Calvin sets the “ought to/is” dichotomy against the backdrop of spirit/flesh warfare. [50] Christians experience this spirit/ flesh tension acutely because it is instigated by the Holy Spirit. [51] The paradoxes that permeate experiential faith (e.g., Romans 7:14-25 in the classical Reformed interpretation) find resolution in this tension: “So then with the mind [spirit] I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin” (v. 25).

Calvin sets the sure consolation of the spirit side-by-side with the imperfection of the flesh, for these are what the believer finds within himself. Since the final victory of the spirit over the flesh will only be fulfilled in Christ, the Christian will perpetually struggle in this life. His spirit fills him “with delight in recognizing the divine goodness” even as his flesh activates his natural proneness to unbelief. [52] He is beset with “daily struggles of conscience” as long as the vestiges of the flesh remain. [53] The believer’s “present state is far short of the glory of God’s children,” Calvin writes. “Physically, we are dust and shadow, and death is always before our eyes. We are exposed to a thousand miseries...so that we always find a hell within us.” [54] While still in the flesh, the believer may even be tempted to doubt the whole gospel.

Even as he is tormented with fleshly doubts, the believer’s spirit trusts God’s mercy by invoking Him in prayer and by resting upon Him through the sacraments. By these means, faith gains the upper hand over unbelief. “Faith ultimately triumphs over those difficulties which besiege and...imperil it. [Faith is like] a palm tree [that] strives against every burden and raises itself upward.” [55]

In short, Calvin teaches that from the spirit of the believer rise hope, joy, assurance; from the flesh, fear, doubt, disillusionment. Though spirit and flesh operate simultaneously, imperfection and doubt are integral only to the flesh, not to faith; the works of the flesh often attend faith but do not mix with it. The believer may lose spiritual battles along the pathway of life, but he will not lose the ultimate war against the flesh.

Third, despite the tensions between definition and experience, spirit and flesh, Calvin maintains that faith and assurance are not so mixed with unbelief that the believer is left with probability rather than certainty. [56] The smallest germ of faith contains assurance in its very essence, even when the believer is not always able to grasp this assurance due to weakness. The Christian may be tossed about with doubt and perplexity, but the seed of faith, implanted by the Spirit, cannot perish. Precisely because it is the Spirit’s seed, faith retains assurance. This assurance increases and decreases in proportion to the rise and decline of faith’s exercises, but the seed of faith can never be destroyed. Calvin says: “The root of faith can never be torn from the godly breast, but clings so fast to the inmost parts that, however faith seems to be shaken or to bend this way or that, its light is never so extinguished or snuffed out that it does not at least lurk as it were beneath the ashes.” [57]

Calvin thus explains “weak assurance in terms of weak faith without thereby weakening the link between faith and assurance.” [58] Assurance is normative but varies in degree and constancy in the believer’s consciousness of it. So, in responding to weak assurance, a pastor should not deny the organic tie between faith and assurance, but should urge the pursuit of stronger faith through the use of the means of grace in dependence upon the Spirit.

Experience, The Trinity, And Election

Through a fourth sweeping principle, namely, a Trinitarian framework for the doctrine of faith and assurance, Calvin spurs the doubt-prone believer onward. As surely as the election of the Father must prevail over the works of Satan, the righteousness of the Son over the sinfulness of the believer, and the assuring witness of the Spirit over the soul’s infirmities—so certainly assured faith shall and must conquer unbelief.

Calvin’s arrangement of Book III of the Institutes reveals the movement of the grace of faith from God to man and man to God. The grace of faith is from the Father, in the Son, and through the Spirit, by which, in turn, the believer is brought into fellowship with the Son by the Spirit, and consequently is reconciled to and walks in fellowship with the Father.

For Calvin, a complex set of factors establishes assurance, not the least of which is the Father’s election and preservation in Christ. Hence he writes that “predestination duly considered does not shake faith, but rather affords the best confirmation of it,” [59] especially when viewed in the context of calling: “The firmness of our election is joined to our calling [and] is another means of establishing our assurance. For all whom [Christ] receives, the Father is said to have entrusted and committed to Him to keep to eternal life.” [60]

Decretal election is a sure foundation for preservation and assurance; it is not coldly causal. Gordon Keddie writes: “Election is never seen, in Calvin, in a purely deterministic light, in which God... is viewed as ‘a frightening idol’ of ‘mechanistic deterministic causality’ and Christian experience is reduced to either cowering passivity or frantic activism, while waiting some ‘revelation’ of God’s hidden decree for one’s self. For Calvin, as indeed in Scripture, election does not threaten, but rather undergirds, the certainty of salvation.” [61]

Such a foundation is possible only in a Christ-centered context; hence Calvin’s constant accent on Christ as the mirror of election “wherein we must, and without self-deception may, contemplate our own election.” [62] Election turns the believer’s eyes from the hopelessness of his inability to meet any conditions of salvation to focus on the hope of Jesus Christ as God’s pledge of undeserved love and mercy. [63]

Through union with Christ, “the assurance of salvation becomes real and effective as the assurance of election.” [64] Christ becomes ours in fulfillment of God’s determination to redeem and resurrect us. Consequently, we ought not to think of Christ as “standing afar off, and not dwelling in us.” [65] Since Christ is for us, to contemplate Him truly is to see Him forming in us what He desires to give us, Himself above all. God has made Himself “little in Christ,” Calvin states, so that we might comprehend and flee to Christ alone who can pacify our consciences. [66] Faith must begin, rest, and end in Christ. “True faith is so contained in Christ, that it neither knows, nor desires to know, anything beyond Him,” Calvin says. [67] Therefore, “we ought not to separate Christ from ourselves or ourselves from Him.” [68]

In this Christological manner, Calvin reduces the distance between God’s objective decree of election from the believer’s subjective lack of assurance that he is elect. For Calvin, election answers, rather than raises the question of assurance. In Christ, the believer sees his election; in the gospel, he hears of his election.

The question remains, however: How do the elect enjoy communion with Christ, and how does that produce assurance? Calvin’s answer is pneumatological: the Holy Spirit applies Christ and His benefits to the hearts and lives of guilty, elect sinners, through which they are assured by saving faith that Christ belongs to them and they to Him. The Holy Spirit especially confirms within them the reliability of God’s promises in Christ. Thus, personal assurance is never divorced from the election of the Father, the redemption of the Son, the application of the Spirit, and the instrumental means of saving faith.

The Holy Spirit has an enormous role in the application of redemption, Calvin says. As personal comforter and seal, the Holy Spirit assures the believer of his gracious adoption: “The Spirit of God gives us such a testimony, that when he is our guide and teacher our spirit is made sure of the adoption of God; for our mind of itself, without the preceding testimony of the Spirit, could not convey to us this assurance.” [69] The Holy Spirit’s work underlies all assurance of salvation without detracting from the role of Christ, for the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ who assures the believer by leading him to Christ and His benefits, and by working out those benefits within him. [70]

Experience And Self-Examination

Nevertheless, Calvin is acutely aware that a person may think that the Father has entrusted him to Christ when such is not the case. It is one thing to underscore Christ’s task in the Trinitarian, salvific economy as the recipient and guardian of the elect; the center, author, and foundation of election; the guarantee, promise, and mirror of the believer’s election and salvation. But it is quite another to know how to inquire about whether a person has been joined to Christ by a true faith. Many appear to be Christ’s who are estranged from Him. Says Calvin: “It daily happens that those who seemed to be Christ’s fall away from him again.... Such persons never cleaved to Christ with the heartfelt trust in which certainty of salvation has, I say, been established for us.” [71]

Calvin never preached to console his flock into false assurance of salvation. [72] Many scholars minimize Calvin’s emphasis on the need for a subjective, experiential realization of faith and election by referring to Calvin’s practice of approaching his congregation as saved hearers. They misunderstand. Though Calvin practiced what he called “a judgment of charity” (i.e., addressing as saved those church members who maintain a commendable, external lifestyle), we saw that he also frequently asserted that only a minority receive the preached Word with saving faith. He says: “For though all, without exception, to whom God’s Word is preached, are taught, yet scarce one in ten so much as tastes it; yea, scarce one in a hundred profits to the extent of being enabled, thereby, to proceed in a right course to the end.” [73]

For Calvin, much that resembles faith lacks a saving character. He thus speaks of faith that is unformed, implicit, temporary, illusionary, false, a shadow-type, transitory, and under a cloak of hypocrisy. [74] Self-deception is a real possibility, Calvin says. Because the reprobate often feel something much like the faith of the elect, [75] self-examination is essential. He writes: “let us learn to examine ourselves, and to search whether those interior marks by which God distinguishes his children from strangers belong to us, viz., the living root of piety and faith.” [76] Happily, the truly saved are delivered from self-deception through proper examination directed by the Holy Spirit. Calvin says: “In the meantime, the faithful are taught to examine themselves with solicitude and humility, lest carnal security insinuate itself, instead of the assurance of faith.” [77]

Even in self-examination, Calvin emphasizes Christ. He says we must examine ourselves to see if we are placing our trust in Christ alone, for this is the fruit of biblical experience. Anthony lane says that for Calvin self-examination is not so much “Am I trusting in Christ?” as it is “Am I trusting in Christ?” [78] Self-examination must always direct us to Christ and His promise. It must never be done apart from the help of the Holy Spirit, who alone can shed light upon Christ’s saving work in the believer’s soul. Apart from Christ, the Word, and the Spirit, Calvin says, “if you contemplate yourself, that is sure damnation.” [79]

Conclusion

Calvin was an experiential theologian and preacher who strove to balance how spiritual matters should go in the Christian life, how they do go, and what their end goal is. He hedged himself in from excesses by confining himself to the limits of Scripture and by always tying the Spirit’s experiential work to Scripture. At the same time, he used experiential preaching as a way to minister to the needs of believers and as a discriminatory tool for unbelievers. Above all, all his experiential emphases strove to lead the believer to end in glorifying the Trinity through Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. Institutes of the Christian Religion [hereafter Inst.], ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles [hereafter: Inst.] (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 4.3.3.
2. Commentary on Isaiah, 4:172.
3. Tracts and Treatises, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 1:173.
4. Commentary on Synoptic Gospels, 3:129.
5. Commentary on Ezekiel, 1:61.
6. Willem Balke, “Het Pietisme in Oostfriesland,” Theologia Reformata 21 (1978):320-27.
7. William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29.
8. Leroy Nixon, John Calvin: Expository Preacher (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), 65.
9. Inst. 3.24.12.
10. Works of Thomas Halyburton (London: Thomas Tegg, 1835), xiv–xv.
11. Paul T. Fuhrmann, “Calvin, Expositor of Scripture,” Interpretation 6, 2 (Apr 1952):191.
12. Commentary (on John 20:23).
13. The Mystery of Godliness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), 122.
14. A. Mitchell Hunter, “Calvin as a Preacher,” Expository Times 30, 12 (Sept 1919):563.
15. Philip Vollmer, John Calvin: Theologian, Preacher, Educator, Statesman (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1909), 124; George Johnson, “Calvinism and Preaching,” Evangelical Quarterly 4, 3 ( July 1932):249.
16. Mystery of Godliness, 55.
17. John C. Bowman, “Calvin as a Preacher,” Reformed Church Review 56 (1909):251-52.
18. John H. Gerstner, “Calvin’s Two-Voice Theory of Preaching,” Reformed Review 13, 2 (1959): 22.
19. Lionel Greve, “Freedom and Discipline in the Theology of John Calvin, William Perkins, and John Wesley: An Examination of the Origin and Nature of Pietism” (Ph.D. dissertation, Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1976), 149.
20. Inst. 1.7.5.
21. Inst. 1.10.2.
22. Willem Balke, “The Word of God and Experientia according to Calvin,” in Calvinus Ecclesiae Doctor, ed. W. H. Neuser (Kampen: Kok, 1978), 22. Much of what I write in this and the following subheading is a summary and fine-tuning of Balke’s helpful effort to grapple with Calvin’s understanding of experience in the life of the believer.
23. Opera quae supersunt omnia [hereafter, CO], ed. Guilielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss, vols. 29-87 in Corpus Reformatorum (Brunsvigae: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863-1900), 31, 424.
24. CO, 31, 103.
25. Balke, “The Word of God and Experientia according to Calvin,” 22.
26. Inst. 3.6.4.
27. CO, 31, 344.
28. CO, 31, 548.
29. CO, 31, 525.
30. CO, 31, 703; 32:194. This section is largely a revision of my Quest for Full Assurance of Faith: The Legacy of Calvin and His Successors (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1999), 37-65.
31. Commentary (on John 3:33; Ps. 43:3). Cf. K. Exalto, De Zekerheid des Geloofs bij Calvijn (Apeldoorn: Willem de Zwijgerstichting, 1978), p. 24. Edward Dowey mistakenly dichotomizes the Scriptures and assurance when he asserts that the center of Calvin’s doctrine of faith is assurance rather than the authority of the Scriptures. For Calvin, the separation of the Word of God from assurance is unthinkable (The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology [New York: Columbia university Press, 1965], 182).
32. Commentary (on Matt. 8:13; John 4:22).
33. Commentary (on Gen. 15:6; Luke 2:21).
34. Inst. 3.2.32; Commentary (on Rom. 4:3, 18; Heb. 11:7, 11).
35. Inst. 3.2.7, emphasis mine.
36. Inst. 3.2.16; cf. 3.2.42.
37. Robert T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (New York: Oxford university Press, 1979), 19; cf. Inst. 3.2.6, 3.2.16, 3.2.22.
38. Inst. 3.2.41; 3.2.14.
39. Commentary (on Acts 2:29 and 1 Cor. 2:12).
40. Inst. 3.2.7; Commentary (on Matt. 8:25; Luke 2:40).
41. Inst. 3.2.4, 3.2.15.
42. Cf. Inst. 3.2.12, emphasis mine.
43. Cf. Inst. 3.2.16 –17, emphasis mine.
44. Paul Helm, Calvin and the Calvinists (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), 26.
45. Inst. 3.2.15.
46. Inst. 1.7.5.
47. Cf. Charles Partee, “Calvin and Experience,” Scottish Journal of Theology 26 (1973):169-81; W. Balke, “The Word of God and Experientia according to Calvin,” 23ff.
48. Inst. 1.10.2.
49. Inst. 3.2.18.
50. Cf. C. A. Hall, With the Spirit’s Sword: The Drama of Spiritual Warfare in the Theology of John Calvin (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1970).
51. Cf. Victor A. Shepherd, The Nature and Function of Saving Faith in the Theology of John Calvin (Macon, Ga.: Mercer university Press, 1983), 24 – 28.
52. Inst. 3.2.18, 3.2.20.
53. Commentary (on John 13:9).
54. Commentary (on 1 John 3:2).
55. Inst. 3.2.17.
56. Cf. Cornelis Graafland, De Zekerheid van het geloof: Een onderzoek naar de geloof-beschouwing van enige vertegenwoordigers van reformatie en nadere reformatie (Wageningen: H. Veenman & Zonen, 1961), 31n.
57. Inst. 3.2.21.
58. A. N. S. Lane, “The Quest for the Historical Calvin,” Evangelical Quarterly 55 (1983):103.
59. Inst. 3.24.9.
60. Inst. 3.24.6.
61. Gordon J. Keddie, “‘Unfallible Certenty of the Pardon of Sinne and life Everlasting’: The Doctrine of Assurance in the Theology of William Perkins,” Evangelical Quarterly 48 (1976):231; cf. G. C. Berkouwer, Divine Election, trans. Hugo Bekker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 10ff.
62. Inst. 3.24.5; cf. John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1973), 47; idem, Sermons from Job (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), 41ff.; CO 8:318-21; 9:757.
63. Inst. 3.24.6; William H. Chalker, “Calvin and Some Seventeenth Century English Calvinists” (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke, 1961), 66.
64. Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, trans. Harold Knight (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 196. Cf. Inst. 3.1.1; Shepherd, Faith in the Theology of John Calvin, 51.
65. Inst. 3.2.24.
66. Commentary (on 1 Pet. 1:20).
67. Commentary (on Eph. 4:13).
68. Inst. 3.2.24.
69. Commentary (on Rom. 8:16). Cf. Commentary (on 2 Cor. 1:21– 22). Cf. Inst. 3.2.11, 34, 41; Commentary (on John 7:37-39; Acts 2:4; 3:8; 5:32; 13:48; 16:14; 23:11; Rom. 8:15-17; 1 Cor. 2:10-13; Gal. 3:2, 4:6; Eph. 1:13-14, 4:30); Tracts and Treatises, 3:253ff.; J. K. Parratt, “The Witness of the Holy Spirit: Calvin, the Puritans and St. Paul,” Evangelical Quarterly 41 (1969):161-68.
70. Inst. 3.2.34.
71. Inst. 3.24.7.
72. Cf. Cornelis Graafland, “‘Waarheid in het Binnenste’: Geloofszekerheid bij Calvijn en de Nadere Reformatie,” in Een Vaste Burcht, ed. K. Exalto (Kampen: Kok, 1989), 65-67.
73. Commentary (on Psa. 119:101). More than thirty times in his Commentary (e.g., Acts 11:23 and Psa. 15:1) and nine times within the scope of Inst. 3.21– 24, Calvin refers to the fewness of those who possess vital faith.
74. Inst. 3.2.3, 5, 10-11. For Calvin on temporary faith, see David Foxgrover, “‘Temporary Faith’ and the Certainty of Salvation,” Calvin Theological Journal 15 (1980):220-32; A. N. S. Lane, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Assurance,” Vox Evangelica 11 (1979):45-46; Exalto, De Zekerheid des Geloofs bij Calvijn, 15-20, 27-30.
75. Inst. 3.2.11.
76. Commentary (on Ezek. 13:9). David Foxgrover shows that Calvin relates the need for self-examination to a great variety of topics: knowledge of God and ourselves, judgment, repentance, confession, affliction, the Lord’s Supper, providence, duty, and the kingdom of God, etc. (“John Calvin’s understanding of Conscience,” [Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont, 1978], 312ff.). Cf. J. P. Pelkonen, “The Teaching of John Calvin on the Nature and Function of the Conscience,” Lutheran Quarterly 21 (1969):24-88.
77. Inst. 3.2.7.
78. Lane, “Calvin‘s Doctrine of Assurance,” 47.
79. Inst. 3.2.24.