Calvin On The Lord’s Supper: Revisiting An Intriguing Diversity, Part 1

By Henri A. G. Blocher

[Henri A. G. Blocher taught Systematic Theology and other subjects at the Faculté Libre de Théologie Evangélique (near Paris) since it was founded in 1965, and he still lectures there occasionally. From 2003 to 2005, he held the Gunther Knoedler chair of Theology at the Wheaton College Graduate School of Biblical and Theological Studies.]

I. Introduction

The 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth has stimulated a comforting profusion of new, and sympathetic, readings of his works. His sacramental theology, however, and especially his view of the Lord’s Supper, has not been the object of much inquiry, even though it was the “hottest” topic among Protestants in his own times and one which consumed a high proportion of his energy. Furthermore, a serious “hermeneutical” divergence has not yet been solved: two rival interpretations hold the field of Calvinian studies. One, which was dominant in the nineteenth century, sees in Calvin a constant opposition to sacramentalism, or, at least, little sympathy for it. The other reading, the majority view in the last six or seven decades, pictures him as a strong sacramentalist, or, at least, a moderate sacramentalist in his own way. Candor acknowledges that both can appeal to significant pieces of evidence; an intriguing diversity obtains among the Reformer’s statements. We may only hope to reach secure conclusions if a review of the data takes into account the full range of Calvin’s teaching through its various genres of utterance and the various stages in the thirty years of his ministry. This I will seek to do in the following.[1]

“Sacramentalism,” “sacramentalist”: many dislike such tags. Provided we clarify and define the meaning, however, they remain the most convenient words, and it would be too cumbersome to attempt to avoid them. “Catholic,” or leaning towards a catholic understanding (“catholicizing”), sometimes replaces “sacramentalist”; undoubtedly, the tendency has been that of the great “Catholic” churches (Eastern and Western); yet, the vehemence of Calvin’s polemics against Rome and against “popish” connections creates an uneasy paradox if we call his doctrine “catholic,” and even Luther’s, to whom the second, sacramentalistic, reading makes Calvin’s close. From the other side, “catholicity,” in the older sense, may be claimed by other traditions, as it is by Baptist theologian Daniel H. Williams. “Symbolist” or “symbolic” was common for the first reading of Calvin’s view (non-sacramentalistic), which locates him not too far from the position called (a bit hastily) “Zwinglian”; but it so happens that more recent Roman Catholic theologians, even of the more traditional line, exalt “symbol,” with the debatable thesis that symbols involve and carry the corresponding reality (I leave aside theologians, such as Louis-Marie Chauvet, who are more critical of tradition). The word is no longer distinctive enough. Choosing “realism” instead of sacramentalism, especially in a eucharistic context, begs the question of what really happens at the Supper; the term suggests that a strictly spiritual presence and efficacy is not truly “real.”[2] We are left with the somewhat unpleasant “sacramentalism.”

How shall we define it? One approximates a workable ascription of meaning if one labels sacramentalism a doctrine that maximizes the role of sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper in this study). If they are considered the means of grace, almost exclusively, at least ordinarily so in the economy of salvation, we stand on sacramentalist territory (N.B.: Roman theology is much more subtle, though the slogan, which John-Paul II authorized, “the Eucharist makes the church,” looks suspiciously like an overestimate of that kind). Conversely, those who minimize or extenuate the role of sacraments, after the model of Quakers, who can leave them aside entirely, deserve the label “anti-sacramentalists.” In the sixteenth century such a leader as Caspar von Schwenckfeld, who advocated instituting a moratorium on the celebration of sacraments in order to cool down the controversies surrounding them, represented the anti-sacramentalist pole (Luther would odiously nickname him Stenckfeld, “stinking field”). Between obvious maximization and minimization, however, the criterion of importance ascribed is not so easy to apply. Who will decide about the proper measure, and therefore about what is “too much” and what is “too little”? Some, for example, will openly disown sacramentalism and yet labor to maintain a firm basis for the role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the economy of grace, an irreducible value for the Christian life and the constitution of the church.[3]

A second trait allows one more precisely to delineate what we may mean by “sacramentalism”: the ascription of a causative function to the rites. In classical Catholic doctrine sacraments are efficacious signs, which confer the grace they represent (the formula significando causant was used). Discerning the presence of this trait is not altogether free of difficulty. Which kind of cause should we think of? The predominant view has been that sacraments are efficient and instrumental causes, but rival views have been defended within Catholic tradition. More awkward: whereas theologians used to highlight the contrast between the function of sign and that of cause (especially against Protestants), leading scholars in today’s Catholic theology make every effort to conjoin and intertwine them. Let us, however, disregard such complexities; grosso modo, the trait can be detected. Sacramentalism may be sufficiently defined as the ascription to the sacraments of a causative role distinct from their operation as signs (“signification” in the active sense), and distinct from the production of effects by the said operation through common human mechanisms. The last clause is important, for causal language may be used when signs, generally, are produced—and this blurs the issue with which we are dealing. If I decipher an informative sign, if I decode its meaning, and one says that the sign “causes” the new knowledge I thus acquire, this remains confined within signification, it has nothing to do with sacramentalistic causality. If the sign announces a coming disaster, and “causes” fear in my soul, this happens through ordinary psychological mechanisms, it has nothing to do with sacramentalistic causality. If sharing in the same sign, for example, around a national flag, “causes” the reinforcement of community bonds, this happens through ordinary anthropological mechanisms, it has nothing to do with sacramentalistic causality.[4] The causality implied in “sacramentalism” presupposes another kind of efficacy, which those who affirm it acknowledge to be a mysterious one, and proceeding from God.

II. The Alternatives: Was Calvin A Sacramentalist Or Not?

The setting of the present exploration in Calvinian hermeneutics and exegesis can be drawn in bold strokes.

1. Divergent Readings

The famous or infamous (depending on what should emerge) title of pioneer of a “sacramentalist” understanding of Calvin probably goes to the American theologian John Williamson Nevin (1803–1886). Scholars in Europe (on the continent) apparently took little notice of his work, but it sparked controversy in the United States and remains a notable reference there.[5] Nevin had been influenced by the conservative Lutheran school of Mercersburg—he had even been attracted, for a time, by Roman Catholicism—and he launched an attack against the then-prevalent interpretation of Calvin, whose defenders were, for instance, the great Charles Hodge of Princeton or the powerful historian of dogma William Cunningham (who deplored some marginal sacramentalistic concessions by Calvin). The second battle, through the twentieth century, turned in favor of Nevin’s seed—though the war is not over! Current accounts insist on Calvin’s opposition to Zwingli (and his symbolist, spiritualist choices) and nearness to Luther (whose sacramentalist commitment, though complex, maybe “dialectical,” cannot be gainsaid). The French historian Emile-G. Léonard, a weighty witness, located Calvin “very close to Luther: so much so that he did not find it difficult to sign the Augsburg Confession and the Wittenberg Concord.”[6] A reference article by Michael S. Horton follows similar lines and summarizes the Reformer’s eucharistic theology using a significantly selected quote: “To deny the real presence of Christ and a true feeding on his body and blood in the Supper ‘is to render this holy sacrament frivolous and useless—an execrable blasphemy unfit to be listened to.’”[7] Heiko A. Oberman thinks he can rely on a few late texts (mainly the 1562 sermons on 2 Samuel) to “Lutheranize” Calvin as very few ever dared to do: Calvin is supposed almost to have taught the manducatio indignorum (even the godless eat Christ’s body).[8] Philippe Janton offers surprising turns of language: “Beyond the original features of Calvin’s eucharistic doctrine, nearer to Luther than to the memorialist position, one must emphasize that by receiving the real presence a believer is united to the divine body. He sacralizes himself by absorbing what is divine.”[9] J. Todd Billings, an expert, is (of course) much more cautious in the expression of his views, but he also sees the Reformer as a “sacramentalist”[10] and speaks insistently of “a symmetry between the gospel promise and the promise of the Supper.”[11] An impressive pleiad!

The advantage of the majority interpretation is far from total, however. Authoritative Calvin scholars still follow another course. In France, François Wendel does not seem to have yielded much ground to its influence.[12] Pierre (Charles) Marcel, who cultivated such an intimate knowledge of the sermons, shows a rather unsacramentalistic Calvin; he heaps up unequivocal quotations to denounce as foreign to Reformed thought a liturgical proposal which embodies the “insights” of the majority reading.[13] Catholic theologian Kilian McDonnell does not minimize the gap between the dogma of his church and Calvin’s doctrine.[14] A significant number of scholars try to travel a midde road (if they deal with the topic), and they add nuances and precautions. One can cite Brian A. Gerrish, with the book that ensured him his academic fame,[15] and the modest and careful researcher from Scotland (Thomas Torrance’s brother-in-law) Ronald S. Wallace.[16]

When competent scholars (all deserve to be so called) stand at such a large distance from one another, it is worth trying to understand why. We shall first glance at possible explanations of the divergences between them, or of the divergences between Calvin’s utterances (which ground those of interpreters), for example, that Calvin’s views changed over time: explanations which, we fear, do not go to the heart of the matter, and which we do not deem sufficient. Then, in a second part, we shall review Calvin’s major theses on the sacraments “in general” (de sacramentis in genere), before scrutinizing, in a third part, his specifically eucharistic teaching. Since writers on both sides can find eloquent statements to write on their banners, we suggest that we should cultivate the widest possible inquiry, in order to set propositions in their various contexts, and observe the Reformer’s balance of emphasis. Since the focus is Calvin’s relation to “sacramentalism,” important facets of his doctrine of the Supper lie beyond the scope of this study, such as the magnificent development on the second and third uses of the sacrament.[17] The aim is to authenticate what Calvin thought—not to promote or refute his claims, not to elaborate a critique, and not to build an alternative eucharistic theology.

2. What May Cause Slips Of Understanding

Whence divergences? One can always imagine causes or roots in interpreters’ minds: every reading is conditioned by personal or community motives, presuppositions, interests, framework, and horizons. Todd Billings’s, for instance, a representative study, is stamped by the ecumenical motive. The new twentieth-century climate in inter-church relations facilitated a wide reception of the more sacramentalist thesis. This obvious fact entails no value-judgment: it does not help to prove or disprove the thesis. Working towards a rapprochement of disunited confessions may have bent the way the Reformer was interpreted, away from his own meaning; but it may also have freed interpreters from reading habits which old polemics had sorely deviated and hardened—anti-Catholic or even anti-Lutheran polemics.[18]

Whatever one should say of such motives, the fact remains that scholars of either persuasion brandish some statements of Calvin’s. Could the cause or the occasion of divergences, of slips of understanding either on the right or on the left, be found in him? Could it be that he maintained both sacramentalism and the opposite of sacramentalism? Probabilities are low that so vigilant and disciplined a mind as his embraced incompatible ideas unaware, but he was not infallible, he was not perfectly immune from inconsistencies. His biographer Emile Doumergue, whose admiration sometimes verged on worship, was bold enough to write: “The most logical of logicians ends up in a bankruptcy of logic. On all issues, his system finally contradicts itself,” and Doumergue acclaims this trait as being faithfulness to the “logic of life.”[19] If one forgets the romantic flavor of such talk (a flavor foreign to Calvin’s style!), if one soberly flattens hyperbolic flights of oratory, one still remembers that Calvin was not afraid of tensions between “truths” he thought were, all, biblical. The phrase was used, and rightly so, to characterize his way of thinking: complexio oppositorum. Calvin accepts and combines antagonisms; he sees them as complementarities; he does not want to dissolve them, as he bows down before the divine majesty. One cannot rule out in advance that he accepted such a tension and antagonism in the doctrine of the Supper. He confessed: “I rather experience than understand it.”[20] This statement does not strictly refer to the Supper but to the mystery which the Supper signifies, our union with Jesus Christ; yet, it does suggest an interval between his intimate apprehension or “sensation” when he shared in the sacrament (a mark left by his Catholic childhood?) and the results he reached in his systematic, theological, work. Nevertheless, the tensions or antagonisms which he certainly sustains in the whole edifice of his doctrine—God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, Christ’s deity and humanity—have a different character and quality than the antithesis of sacramentalism and the critique of sacramentalism. I find it unlikely that he could adopt both these stances at the same time. That Calvin, generally, did not try to solve internal tensions, in trusting submission to Scripture teaching (in his eyes), is not sufficient to explain and justify that there are divergent interpretations of his eucharistic theology.

Could the key, then, be found in chronology? Should we differentiate between moments of Calvin’s teaching ministry, and, indeed, contrast them with each other? Such is the main axis of the exceptionally vigorous plea put forward by the Dutch Calvin scholar Wim Janse.[21] In Calvin’s writings he finds no “coherent, and unified doctrine”—Calvin’s views developed and changed and Janse “trace[s] through the years, in order, Zwinglianizing (1536–1537), Lutheranizing (1537–1548), and again spiritualizing tendencies (1549–1550s).”[22] Janse faithfully echoes—with a wealth of remarkable quotes—the accents of Calvin’s sermons on 1 Cor 10–11, which were published in 1558, non-sacramentalist, practically Zwinglian accents.[23] He thinks the theology of those sermons to be deeply divergent from that of the commentary on the same epistle (published in 1546). He brings to the fore many references to highlight the contrast between the two main periods, and Bullinger’s influence seems to be responsible for the (unfortunate) turn which led the Lutheranizing Calvin back to his early Zwinglianizing positions.[24]

Wim Janse’s scheme is a rather complicated one and this does not enhance its a priori likelihood. It hardly fits the all-consuming demands of Calvin’s ministry: he was on public duty from dawn to dusk and into late hours, he had little time and energy left to call into question earlier doctrinal choices. It ill accords with his temperament. Precocious maturity: Thomas Kaufmann underlines “the remarkably self-reliant position on the theology of the Lord’s Supper, that the 26-year-old Calvin, who was working theologically autodidactively, found in Basel.”[25] Continuity through succeeding times: as Philippe Janton observed, very soon “Calvin’s thought had received its rigorous structure, and his theology, which was definitely established since 1539, will undergo almost no alteration in his later works.”[26] This continuity expresses itself with maximum force in this capital fact: the successive editions of the Institutes punctuate Calvin’s life, and the new editions retain nearly everything that previous ones included! Calvin adds and never subtracts. He never seems to recant, to feel the need of self-correction. Despite the importance which the Reformer expressly ascribed to his Institutes, Wim Janse pays little attention to it: his comments even resonate somewhat disdainfully when he makes light of scholars who base their account on that book.[27] One notes that, in his estimate, the 1536–1537 Calvin tended towards Zwinglian views, while Léonard uses the confidence (quoted above, n. 6) about the same period which shows Calvin in those early years being influenced by Luther’s accusations and suspicious of Zwingli’s empty spiritualism.[28]

The decisive test of Janse’s hypothesis about Calvinian mutations in eucharistic theology can only be the examination of the texts themselves: theirs the verdict! If one finds clear-cut and consistent differences according to period, the hypothesis will gain in credibility; if quasi “Zwinglian” utterances appear in the period claimed for a Lutheran orientation, and conversely, the hypothesis shall not stand. We will pore over a goodly number of such utterances farther below. For the time being, two examples will suffice to instill a measure of doubt concerning the validity of the chronological scheme: (1) Janse “credits” Bullinger’s influence with the fact that, in the Zurich Agreement (Consensus Tigurinus, 1549), the difference as to the benefit of grace among those who partake of the sacrament is related to predestination,[29] and (2) in order to heighten the contrast with the preceding period, Janse claims that Calvin’s presentation of the Supper as a mark of our Christian profession and as an exhortation to brotherly behavior, in a sermon published in 1558, was “very unCalvinian.”[30] Were these emphases really new at that (“Zwinglianizing”) time? In his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (from late 1539), Calvin writes about the sacraments: “Though by themselves they profit nothing, yet God has designed them to be the instruments (instrumenta) of his grace; and he effects by the secret grace of his Spirit, that they should not be without benefit in the elect . . . though they are dead and unprofitable symbols to the reprobate.”[31] The first emphasis is therefore genuinely Calvinian long before the Zurich Agreement, already in years Janse calls Lutheranizing ones. No less is the second one: the Short Treatise (on the Supper) (1541) stresses that the sacrament is eminently useful in that it “induces us to render [God] thanks, and, as it were, publicly protests how much we are indebted to him”; it offers us a third advantage “in furnishing a most powerful incitement to live holily, and especially to observe charity and brotherly love toward all.”[32] Such examples, which Janse’s scheme cannot accommodate, leave us little hope of explaining the diversity among Calvin’s statements through chronological partition; we must find another way. As to Oberman’s hypothesis, with Calvin sliding towards Lutheran positions in 1562, it looks most unlikely! In 1562 the sermons which the Reformer recently preached on the Harmony of the Gospels are being published, and they include this passage on Lutherans (who would require of him that he subscribe to the manducatio indignorum):

There are some, today, even among those who are called Christians and will hate the papacy, who do not refrain from making an idol of the bread and the wine: as if our Lord Jesus Christ were enclosed in them; actually, they do wish to enclose him there, after their fancy, and they worship him more grievously [lourdement, maybe “with grosser nonsense”] than Papists have ever done. For the doctrine of Papists is still better than that of these fantastic minds, who are fiercely obstinate.[33]

Essential continuity does not exclude a measure of changes, and Calvin was able progressively to make his own conceptual tools prepared by other Reformers.[34] Adapting to circumstances and opportunities, he could insist on this or that aspect of a complex construction, and partially modify the wording. Wim Janse (among others) cites an interesting difference between the 1536 Institutes and the editions which followed beginning in 1539: in 1536, Calvin denies that the sacraments are instruments to confer to us God’s grace, but he leaves out this sentence from 1539 on,[35] and the category “instrument” becomes one of his favorite ones. However, it would be rash to draw from this move that Calvin’s convictions substantially changed. For Calvin retains in all editions, to the final one, that part of his sentence which denies that the sacraments confer grace.[36] He may have discovered that the notion of an instrument was suitable for the sacrament as a “visible word,” in a non-sacramentalistic sense, and have modified accordingly the expression, but not the true contents, of his doctrine.[37] If continuity is understood with minimum flexibility, such a hypothesis better fits the data than the rival one. The sober course gives privilege to continuity: likely, either Calvin was a sacramentalist all his life, or he never was (after conversion)—and we should interpret the diversity without dividing among periods.

The Calvinian fact that best explains the divergences of interpreters, in the eyes of many, is the diplomatic ambiguity the Reformer cultivated. Preserved Smith, a reputable name in his own time, did not recoil from a brutal judgment: as Bucer’s heir, Calvin tried to reconcile incompatible convictions: “All he could do . . . was to disguise the division of opinion, and produce a nominal unanimity by an ambiguous and incoherent jargon.”[38] Wim Janse, who senses the need to strengthen his evolutionary model by the props of such considerations, does not sound much more sympathetic: Calvin, “being an astute church politician and vulnerable human being” was able to concoct compromises in Bucer’s manner.[39] Wendel himself is ready to admit: “Calvin himself contributed to an ambiguous aspect of his doctrine which his adversaries were not long to exploit.”[40] Billings mentions that the Reformer “speaks differently about the sacraments depending upon his interlocutors.”[41] Two things have been established beyond all possible controversy: first, the preoccupation of Protestant unity was foremost in Calvin’s heart and mind, and in his strategy; second, he was a master of oral and written expression, he knew how flexible, how “elastic,” the linguistic instrument can be, and he was able to play with that flexibility to further the cause he served. Did he resist, then, the temptation to frame such formulations which are agreed upon by both camps, because each can understand them in their own way? He does protest against the charge, which some levelled against him[42]—he appeared to be vulnerable in this respect.

The argument about diplomatic ambiguity, however, is wielded in contrary directions! For those on the left, Calvin would pull to the right in order to woo the right-wing people (but he was not really one of them); for those on the right, Calvin would pull to the left in order to woo the left-wing people (but he was not really one of them). Advocates of the non-sacramentalist Calvin thus explain his “right-wing” (if you will) language: when he stresses sacramental efficacy, denies that the signs be vain and empty, proclaims that their “truth” cannot be separated from the signs and that believers eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ “substantially” when they receive the bread and the wine, he finely calculates his phraseology to appease and win Lutherans. Therefore the Reformers (the magisterial Reformers), complains William Cunningham, did not free themselves totally from Roman ways of talking; in Calvin’s case “there was an additional perverting element—the desire to keep on friendly terms with Luther and his followers, and with that view to approximate as far as he could to their notions of the corporal presence of Christ in the Eucharist.”[43] He only succeeded in doing so superficially, as the words sounded: hence the strict Lutherans’ rage, Joachim Wesphal’s and Tilemann Hesshusen’s angry attacks, since they felt the disparity of convictions and, yet, could not take a grip on Calvin’s slippery formulations! The problem for us, as we try to adjucate between interpretations of Calvin, is that the argument for a sacramentalist Calvin uses the same scheme in reverse: yes, Calvin exploited the flexibility of language; he borrowed “left-wing” accents in order to appease Zwinglians—the alliance with Zurich was indispensable to his strategy. The severe judgments he emitted on Zwingli at times show that he was, at bottom, much closer to Luther, to whom he always paid great honor.

May we start untangling the matter, even before we scrutinize the texts on the sacraments and the Supper? We should first note that Calvin’s aptitudes for diplomatic accommodation were contained within rather narrow limits! His temperament and the (lucid) awareness of his intellectual superiority did not incline him to tolerance for opinions that differed from his. One major dimension of his historical role was his unrelenting battle against would-be “mediators.” He considered them more obnoxious and dangerous than Catholics. He preferred to deal with the “grosser Papists”; he charged the moderate minds who were seeking reconciliation with preparing a “specious pacification”: “they secretly lead us away from the Author of peace, they gloss over the matter by vainly promising peace.”[44] Though he was indebted to Bucer and treasured the bond of friendship between them, Calvin criticized the Strasburger’s tendency to compromise: “in which he falls into sin,” Calvin writes, “in my opinion.”[45] J. V. Pollet clearly perceived that Calvin held to a “more rigid and cautious ideal” than Bucer and was suspicious of excessive irenicism.[46] As for Melanchthon, while having him as an ally was a key element in Calvin’s strategy (these two most learned scholars of the Reformation had had the opportunity of mutual esteem), the latter is so bold as to rebuke the former’s laxness, to remind him of the martyrs’ example and of the apostle’s vehemence against the smallest concession on circumcision![47] Calvin did not adapt his language beyond what was “tolerable”[48] in his estimate, and this estimate remained quite rigorous.

Calvin’s attitude toward the Augsburg Confession offers a remarkable illustration.[49] As quoted above, Emile-G. Léonard insists that Calvin subscribed to it—but this information is rather one-sided. On several occasions the Reformer distances himself from the Lutheran document. He warns the French Protestant leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny against it: “actually, it is so poorly built, so woolly and so obscure that one should not retain it,”[50] and he writes in similar terms to other correspondents.[51] How do we account for the transition from various favorable comments—almost always, to be sure, favorable to the variata version of the Lutheran Confession, as it is called[52]—to such a negative verdict? Danièle Fischer’s explanation is perfectly balanced and convincing:

Melanchthon died in April 1560. From that moment, Calvin feels freer vis-à-vis the Augustana. Now he can say louder and more openly what he refrained earlier from saying, out of respect for his old friend. Now he can use a more incisive tone, his words need no longer be restrained. Now Calvin is truly sincere.[53]

On the sacraments, Calvin’s distance from Lutheran doctrine may hardly be minimized. And from Zwingli’s? It is clear that Calvin, at first, was strongly prejudiced against Zwingli. Emile-G. Léonard recalls Calvin’s confidence: “I read in Luther that Zwinglius and Oecolampadius left nothing in the sacraments but bare and empty figures. I confess that I took such a dislike of their writings that I long refrained from reading them.”[54] Léonard could have quoted two frightening adjectives Calvin used for Zwingli’s thesis, in his letter to Zébédée: “false and pernicious.”[55] But here again, it is not the whole story. Léonard’s quotation, coming from the Second Defense against Joachim Westphal, aims, in Calvin’s argument, at showing that he was not prejudiced against Luther—on the contrary; but he hastens to add that, being provided with more accurate information, he found himself in agreement with “the Doctors of Zurich church.”[56] The letter to Zébédée was written in May 1539, and it is doubtful, on the basis of his own testimony, that Calvin would then have read any significant part of Zwingli’s writings. In the letter itself he acknowledges that there is no asperitas (harshness? something unjust?) in the Swiss Reformer’s doctrine; his critique is not univocal: Zwingli was “too much preoccupied to eliminate the superstition of the carnal presence, and, at the same time, either he reduced to nothing or, at least, he made unclear the true force of the communication.”[57] Fifteen years later, since Zébédée had published that private letter in order to harm Calvin’s reputation, the latter writes to Bullinger that he never had the intention of condemning the whole of Zwingli’s theology of the sacraments, that the thought would never have entered his mind.[58] In 1542 (September 3), Calvin declares to his friend Pierre Viret that he has not (yet) read all Zwingli’s writings, that Zwingli’s first doctrine had looked “profane” in his eyes but that the Zurich Reformer apparently corrected it subsequently: none of us can boast that he fully understands the mystery, and so Calvin gives “permission” to Viret to think of it what he will.[59] This is no clear-cut opposition.

It seems wise, if one wishes to locate Calvin “between” Luther and Zwingli, to take one’s cue from Calvin’s own presentation (in 1541), when he devoted the final pages of his Short Treatise on the Supper to the Luther/Zwingli quarrel.[60] Calvin finds something to blame on both sides (Luther “failed” and so, symmetrically, did Zwingli and Œcolampadius) and, at the same time, he is careful to treat his elders with due deference. If we focus our attention, however, we can perceive that he does not keep to symmetry: Luther “exceeded bounds” and “used hyperbolical forms of speech” (which were massively literal to him, as Calvin did not ignore!), whereas Zwingli and Œcolampadius since “they labored more to pull down what was evil than to build up what was good” only deserve this criticism: “though they did not deny the truth, they did not teach it so clearly as they ought to have done.” Calvin cannot accept Luther’s meaning;[61] he can accept Zwingli’s but he feels the need for further clarification and complements. He was able, finally, to sign a detailed Agreement (the Consensus Tigurinus) with Zwingli’s disciples in Zurich, whereas with the Lutherans, at least of the “genuine” kind (Gnesio-Lutheraner), Westphal, Hesshusen, there remained difficulties.

3. Some Precautions

Such interlocking data should make us wary of letting a preconceived “location” of Calvin orient our reading of his statements (the impression is difficult to dispel that it was the case with Léonard’s). Starting from “Calvin, closer to Luther” runs the risk of injuring impartiality. The sounder method will keep open, as far as possible, the whole gamut of interpretations: it will make room for considering, alongside the meaning that comes first to mind, other meanings which the words could bear: if they sound Zwinglian, is it possible to imagine that they were larded with subtle sacramentalism? If they suggest that a particular sacramental grace is being conferred, is it possible to understand them without this suggestion? In this regard, a rule of language, which Calvin inherited from Saint Augustine (Epistle 98 to Bonifacius §§ 9–10), played an important role: when speaking of the sacraments “the name of the thing signified is transferred to the sign” (Inst. 4.17.23; with reference to Saint Augustine already in 2.11.4, and still 4.17.21.28). When this rule applies, a sentence which looks sacramentalistic, since it ascribes effects of grace to the sign, may just be an example of this characteristic “metonymy”: Calvin really refers the effects to the signified. Using the phrase “body of Christ” to refer to the bread does not imply necessarily a “conversion” (the bread being substantially changed). Another prescription of a wise method would be to give a comparative privilege to the propositions of the Institutes (pace Janse), which our Reformer himself designated as the Reference document,[62] together with his sermons and biblical commentaries, and only second rank importance to what appears in letters and polemic writings—which were more easily influenced by diplomatic concerns, or by fits of passion.

III. Sacraments And Their Efficacy

When Calvin finalizes his “eucharistic” doctrine, he deals with the Lord’s Supper as one species within the genus whose notion is dearest to him: the genus sacraments. He has reconstructed the concept, a legacy of church tradition, to make it fit for baptism and the Supper, the New Covenant sacraments,[63] but he associates to these, as other species under the same category, the Old Covenant “sacraments.” He is interested in circumcision and the Passover, mainly, though he also includes many others, down to the trees of Eden and Noah’s rainbow. Though our focus remains the meaning of the Supper, most precisely the relationship between the sacramental action (opus) at the Lord’s Table and the grace it both signifies and represents, it is proper that our inquiry should ascertain what is valid for the Supper in common with the other species of the same (sacramental) genus. For Calvin, do sacraments in general confer the grace they represent? Do they play the role of “instrumental causes”? If they do, is it an exclusive prerogative, or only unique in degree? Is it ordinary, extraordinary, or merely indirect? We may suppose that the “general” answer will be valid, a fortiori valid, of the Supper. At this stage, indeed, we are to investigate a number of eucharistic passages—leaving aside, momentarily, the specific eucharistic traits they may harbor.

1. The Primacy Of The Word

Only the deaf do not hear it: the means of grace, for Calvin, is the Word. Critics have often enough derided the “cerebral” type of Reformed piety, churches being transformed into class-rooms! The Epistle to Sadolet recalls a plethora of biblical texts to magnify its preeminence: Apostles and Prophets “always assign the first place to the Word.”[64] In his Catechism (1542, Latin; 1545, French), after he has dealt with eternal life, the knowledge of God our Father and Savior and of Jesus Christ, Calvin anticipates the next question: “How can we attain to such blessedness?” and offers a forthright answer: “For this end God has left us his holy word, for spiritual doctrine is a kind of door by which we enter his heavenly kingdom.”[65] The Short Treatise on the Supper sums it up: “Just as God has placed all fullness of life in Jesus, in order to communicate it to us by his means, so he ordained his word as the instrument by which Jesus Christ, with all his graces, is dispensed to us.”[66] The Commentaries confirm: on Rom 1:16, Calvin writes of the “ministry of the word,” which means “vocal preaching,” that “God thereby puts forth his power to save”;[67] on 2 Cor 5:19, referring to reconciliation, that “a commission has been given to ministers of the gospel to communicate to us this grace”: “It is the part of ministers, therefore, to apply to us, so to speak, the fruit of Christ’s death.” Calvin feels the need of a significant clarification: “Lest, however, any one should dream of a magical application, such as Papists contrive, we must carefully observe what he [Paul] immediately subjoins—that it consists wholly in the preaching of the Gospel.”[68] The sermons do not change the tune; the Sixth Sermon on the Prophecy of Christ (Isa 53) exhorts the hearers to “hold dear” the Word which makes us one with Jesus Christ, for “we are engrafted into his body, we are made his members, and everything he possesses is made ours, is appropriated to us, by the Gospel: this is why St. Paul says that the Gospel is the power of God for salvation unto all believers.”[69] Who can be surprised if the Institutes echoes the theme? God “always represents himself through his Word to those whom he wills to draw to himself,” and he warns: “Take away the Word and no faith will then remain” (Inst. 3.2.6; cf. § 15; 4.1.5 or 4.3.1, etc.).

Those who read Calvin as a “sacramentalist” cannot ignore such an accent, but they argue, as Billings has done, that another accent counterbalances it, an accent on the sacraments, so that we are entitled to speak of “the symmetry of the gospel and the Supper.”[70] On a number of occasions, Calvin does mention the sacraments just after he has extolled the role of the preached Word, and he makes every effort to ward off the charge of minimizing baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In the sixteenth-century context, to incur such a censure, to be assimilated to those “sacramentarians” or “katasacramentarians”[71] whom the powers that be viewed as dangerous anarchists, was politically devastating; yet, this motive does not seem to be the key one: Calvin is sincere when he protests that the sacraments are vitally important to him, and when he defends their role.

May we speak, however, of a symmetry? The picture he draws hardly looks symmetrical. He raises the issue himself: “If the sign is considered separately from the word, which, I ask you, shall we esteem more?”, and his answer is free from all ambiguity: “Obviously, since we see that the sign serves the word, we shall say that it is under the word, and shall relegate it to a lower place” (Inst. 4.16.5). He carefully chooses the term he uses: the sacraments are “appendices” added to the Word of God.[72] The order could not be clearer: “For first, the Lord teaches and instructs us by his Word. Secondly, he confirms it by the sacraments” (Inst. 4.14.8). The Catechism of 1542/1545 does not alter this non-symmetrical pattern: it goes on, after the passage quoted above, answering that “to the preaching of the Word he has added the Sacraments”; “this does not at all prevent God from employing the sacraments as secondary instruments.”[73] Similarly, the Commentary on 2 Cor 5:19 ends with this precision: “I do not, indeed, deny, that the grace of Christ is applied to us in the Sacraments . . . [but] they must be taken in connection with the Gospel, of which they are appendages.”[74]

Against symmetry: the Word’s precedence. “A sacrament is never without a preceding promise [French: Word of God]” (Inst. 4.14.3). The Commentary on Exod 24:5, touching on the nature and use of the sacraments, uses the same verb: “Unless doctrine precedes them to be a connecting link between God and man, they will be empty and delusive [lusoria et evanida] signs, however honorable may be the encomiums passed on them.”[75] And the Word without which there is no true sacrament is not the so-called “consecration” formula recited by priests: we must understand that it is the preached Word, and, as Saint Augustine wrote, “not because it is said, but because it is believed” (Inst. 4.14.4).[76]

Against symmetry: the Word’s sufficiency—for salvation. However vigilant Calvin was (at all times) against any form of contempt or negligence in the matter of sacraments, he never varied on this point: “Assurance of salvation does not depend upon participation in the sacrament, as if justification consisted in it. For we know that justification is lodged in Christ alone, and that it is communicated to us no less by the preaching of the gospel than by the seal [French: testification] of the sacrament, and without the latter can stand unimpaired” (Inst. 4.14.14).[77]

Against symmetry: the assimilation of the sacraments to the Word, or, more accurately, the construction of their concept on the basis of the doctrine of the Word. Calvin takes over Saint Augustine’s essential description of the sacrament “visible word” (verbum visibile; Inst. 4.14.6). He is fond, in this regard, of the mirror metaphor,[78] and of the verb “to represent.”[79] He lays down: “Let it be regarded as a settled principle that the sacraments have the same office as the Word of God: to offer and set forth Christ to us, and in him the treasures of heavenly grace” (Inst. 4.14.17), and therefore “the right administering of the Sacrament cannot stand apart from the Word. For whatever benefit may come to us from the Supper requires the Word” (Inst. 4.17.39). The Commentary on Genesis declares (on Gen 17:9) that “a sacrament is nothing else than a visible word, a sculpture and image of that grace of God, which the word more fully illustrates.”[80]

2. The Reason For Adding The Sacraments

The more fervent the celebration of the (preached) Word and of its sufficiency, the more insistent the question: Why were the sacraments added?[81]

Calvin’s answer shows a remarkable constancy. Already in 1536, the first Institutes sees the addition as helpful in view of “the ignorance of our senses and the weakness of our flesh,” to sustain our faith “so small and weak,” “tossed about and wavering”: “In the sacraments the merciful Lord accommodates Himself to our senses.”[82] The Short Treatise does not speak in a different voice: “For seeing we are so weak . . . the Father of mercy, disdaining not to condescend in this matter to our infirmity, has been pleased to add to his word a visible sign.”[83] The Sermons of the last period still play the familiar tune: “If ours were the Angels’ nature, we would no longer need Sacraments. . . . But, as we can only crawl on the ground, as we are so rude and earthly, we need help.”[84] Calvin’s humbling vocabulary includes the Latin word tarditas,[85] slowness, dullness, lumpishness. The Reformer finds the first reason for adding visible signs in a correlation with his anthropology.

One can sharpen the proposition: he does so in a correlation with the Platonic flavor of his anthropology. “For if we were incorporeal (as Chrysostom says), he would give us these very things naked and incorporeal” (Inst. 4.14.3; the French adds “sensual”); the body is the obstacle: “Shut up as we are in the prison house of our flesh,” we need sacraments (Inst. 4.1.1).[86] Our miserable tarditas proceeds from our bodily condition. Billings, who is aware of the negative import of that correlation for a sacramentalistic reading, tries to compensate with the argument that Adam himself had received sacraments:[87] if Adam benefited from sacraments in his “very good” original condition, we may celebrate the union of flesh and spirit in the communication of grace (as sacramentalism is wont to do). Was Calvin inclined to ratify the thought? It is highly doubtful: Calvin sometimes uses negative language for the Edenic condition itself! Its goodness does not rule out that “man was created weak, frail and liable to fall,” that he was “so created and conditioned, as that he should by his immediate Fall, destroy himself and the whole world.”[88] The origin from the earth is in view, and this is probably one reason why Calvin could only conceive of Adam’s pre-Fall state as being temporary in God’s design, imposed as a test of obedience, to be followed, had the test been successfully passed, by a more heavenly kind of existence. Such evidence does not encourage one to set the highest price on bodily mediation as such.

How do the sacraments succor our weakness? God accommodates himself to our lowliness as he “set[s] before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings,” “by these earthly elements” (Inst. 4.14.3); the Sacraments “have this characteristic over and above the word because they represent them [the promises] for us as a picture from life “ (ibid., § 5); “according to our dull capacity,” the sacrament “represents God’s promises as painted in a picture and sets them before our sight, portrayed graphically and in the manner of images” (ibid., § 6).[89] Such explanations remain entirely within the framework of signification.

3. The Sacrament And Grace Communicated

Even when primacy is assigned to signification, to the “visible word” function, it is still logically possible that another, subordinate but distinct, function is added: that of an “instrumental cause,” by means of which the grace signified would also be conferred. Sacramentalism prefers symmetry, but it may lower its demands and accept a secondary status for the causative role. It is not yet obvious, at this stage of our exploration, that Calvin renounced it. Undoubtedly, a causative role (not a simple corollary of signification, of what is common to sacraments and the preached Word), would provide a fair answer to the nagging question: why have the sacraments been added? Advantages which belong to the visual and tangible mode of signification are not denied, but they are limited and Scripture nowhere dwells on them; they do not furnish a strong rationale for the addition of sacraments. We must face the decisive question: does the sacrament, for Calvin, confer the grace it represents?

He denies it. Some of his statements seem to be exempt of all ambiguity. The sacraments, he writes, “are for us the same thing from God, as messengers of glad tidings or guarantees of the ratification of covenants are from men. They do not bestow any grace of themselves, but announce and tell us, and (as they are guarantees and tokens) ratify among us, those things given us by the divine bounty” (Inst. 4.14.17; the French version differs somewhat, so that the tone sounds even more adverse to sacramentalism: it omits “or guarantees of the ratification of covenants” and “of themselves”; it adds “only” before “announce”). “The Lord was pleased to represent” the spiritual benefits he grants us “by such figures—not because such graces are bound and enclosed in the sacrament so as to be conferred upon us by its power, but only because the Lord by this token attests his will toward us” (Inst. 4.15.14). Calvin dismisses the idea of cause: in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (4:11), the sacrament is “not the cause of righteousness,”[90] or in the commentary on Acts (22:16), when he exegetes a verse which could easily lend itself to a sacramentalistic interpretation. Calvin expressly raises the question which the wording of Acts 22:16 may suggest: “whether baptism is the cause of the purging”; his answer is rather detailed: “This honor cannot be translated unto the sign of water, without doing open injury to Christ and the Holy Ghost,” “we must imagine no other material cause than the blood of Christ, and when we come to the formal cause, the Holy Ghost is the chief. But there is an inferior instrument, and that is the preaching of the word and baptism itself.” He concludes: “So that the washing, spoken of by Luke, doth not note out the cause; but is referred unto the understanding of Paul, who, having received the sign, knew better that his sins were done away.”[91] The sacraments have as their “one function” to represent and guarantee the promises and we must avoid “to admire and proclaim them as causes of our good” (Inst. 4.14.12); if a doctrine “draws the cause of righteousness from the sacraments, it binds men’s pitiable minds (of themselves more than enough inclined to earth) in this superstition, so that they repose in the appearance of a physical thing rather than in God himself” (ibid., § 14); Peter Lombard’s error was precisely that he held the sacraments to be “the causes of righteousness and salvation,” a “deadly and pestilential” notion (ibid., § 16). In his letter (no. 1039) to Bullinger (July 1548), Calvin defends his description of baptism as an instrument of the remission of sins and clarifies his meaning: “But we add at the same time this explanation: the remission comes from the blood of Christ, that no one should ascribe to baptism the cause of one’s salvation.”[92] It is no wonder if the great Catholic scholar Alexandre Ganoczy evokes Calvin’s “rejection, so forceful, of every kind of causality—even instrumental—in his view of the sacraments.”[93]

Other data demonstrate how deep was Calvin’s antipathy for sacramental “causality.” His vehement denunciation of the Catholic teaching on the sacraments—though he was more aware of its subtlety than many Protestant polemicists after him[94]—is focused on the dogma (formally determined at Trent) on grace infallibly conferred if the sacrament is validly administered (ex opere operato) and if the subject opposes no obstacle (obex): “Of certainty, it is diabolical” (Inst. 4.14.14). Even more significant, Calvin, so zealous to claim the support of the ancient church, distances himself here.[95] He also emphasizes that the grace which is signified or represented precedes, in chronological succession and ordinarily so, the use of the sacrament. The exception would be the baptism of infants, but even in this case, Calvin’s comments are complex. Calvin does argue that “infants are baptized unto future repentance and faith [French: pour l’avenir]” and opposes the “deluded notion that the thing ought always to precede the sign in order of time”;[96] but he also stresses the precedence of the reality signified, one part of it: “The children of believers are baptized not in order that they who were previously strangers to the church may then for the first time become children of God, but rather that, because by the blessing of the promise they already belonged to the body of Christ, they are received into the church with this solemn sign” (Inst. 4.15.22). Eating Christ’s flesh is specifically associated with the Lord’s Supper: the topic, therefore, will be addressed farther below, but we may already note, about that eating, a similar statement of anteriority. The Short Treatise (1541, we remember), in the argument against those who abstain because they feel unworthy, highlights the presence in all believers of the reality signified before they partake of the sign: they pray to God as Father, “They will acknowledge that it is presumption to invoke God as our Father, if we are not members of Jesus Christ. This we cannot be, without having the reality and the substance of the Supper accomplished in us. Now if we have the reality, we are by stronger reason capable of receiving the sign.”[97] (Again the sufficiency of the Word.) One “detail” deserves mentioning: Calvin insists on the antithesis which Saint Augustine sets up between the words “sacramental” and “real” (or “true”)—“Let my readers weigh this antithesis between eating sacramentally and in reality”—and he applies “sacramental” to the way in which unbelievers partake of the sacrament, being “deprived of its true and real eating” (Inst. 4.17.34). I am still to meet a sacramentalist inclined to such a use of language!

On the same side, the underlying theological motivation: the causal (sacramentalist) interpretation impairs the Soli Deo Gloria. The “injury” which it implies according to the Commentary on Acts 22:16 quoted above, is, in other terms, that “they darken the glory of Christ.” The objection against a high estimate of the sacraments is this: they rob God of his glory and give it to created things. Calvin does not repudiate this objection, but he protests that it does not touch his doctrine, “we place no power in creatures,” and he concludes: “neither ought our confidence to inhere in the sacraments, nor the glory of God be transferred to them” (Inst. 4.14.12). When dealing more particularly with the Supper, the Short Treatise warns that “to wish then to establish such a presence as is to enclose the body within the sign, or to be joined to it locally, is not only a reverie, but a damnable error, derogatory to the glory of Christ.”[98] Again: “Let nothing be withdrawn from Christ’s heavenly glory—as happens when he is brought under the corruptible elements of the world, or bound to any earthly creatures” (Inst. 4.17.19). Calvin’s concern for God’s honor radiates from his christocentrism, and from what may be called his monergism of salvation: if we cling to the outward sign, we “transfer to it the credit for those benefits which are conferred upon us by Christ alone. And they are conferred through the Holy Spirit who makes us partakers in Christ” (Inst. 4.14.16, adding that the outward signs are instruments the Spirit uses; cf. 4.17.12).

Such a teaching, from all periods of Calvin’s ministry, appears to be so clear-cut as to leave no margin for the slightest ambiguity. Et tamen . . . Other statements are not so easy to reconcile with it! Found in all periods as well, they repeat that the sacraments are no vain or vacuous figures, bare or empty signs, that God does operate what he represents in them. They regularly speak of their efficacy, and extol that efficacy. One can cite the “youngest” Calvin in the first Institutes (1536): the sacraments of both Covenants possess “the same spiritual power,” “alike and the same in power and spiritual efficacy” in the 1541 expansion.[99] “By baptism God promises remission of sins, and, without doubt, He offers [slight error: the French means: will keep] this promise to all believers.”[100]We must consider “the Supper like a continual nourishment by which Jesus Christ spiritually feeds his faithful.”[101] In 1537: “Christ offers the communion of his flesh and blood under the symbols of the bread and wine in the most Holy Supper and shows it [exhibit] to all those who celebrate the Supper in conformity [rite] with its legitimate institution.”[102] One perceives little difference in the way the “older” Calvin expresses himself in April 1557, in his letter to Schalling: “I consent to saying [non nego] that the faithful, at the Supper, are truly and substantially fed by Christ’s flesh and blood, if only one defines how this is done by the secret power of the Holy Spirit, so that the flesh and blood of Christ transfuse into us their effect [vim].”[103] He so preaches in those sermons which Janse characterizes as theologically “Zwinglianizing”: “If only the figure were present, it would be rather cold and meagre: but, when God gives us the sign, he conjoins at the same time the power and the substance.”[104] His letter to the Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, in August 1563, sounds similar, and it includes this typical comment: “Since Christ, when he instituted the mystery of the Supper, promised nothing in any deceptive way, did not play with vain phantoms [inanibus spectris], he represented in the outward signs what he was really giving.”[105] The Short Treatise underlines that the eucharistic bread not only represents the body, but presents it to us.[106] Together with the verbs “represent” and “present,” Calvin uses regularly “offer” and “exhibit” (show, demonstrate—the Latin word is not very easy to translate).[107] Seldom, but still a few times, he can accept “to give,” even in the case of unbelievers: “And this is the wholeness of the Sacrament, which the whole world cannot violate: that the flesh and blood of Christ are no less truly given to the unworthy than to God’s elect believers” (Inst. 4.17.33).[108] With remarkable constancy, he stresses that the “thing” (the Augustinian res, the grace which is signified) is conjoined with the sign: he relishes setting this conjunction-in-distinction, via aurea, in opposition to errors on the right and on the left, the errors of those who confuse and of those who separate.[109]

Beyond such frequent ways of speaking, which undeniably represent a whole panel of Calvin’s doctrine, one meets a few exceptional passages, which seem to go still farther. For the sacrament and the grace it represents, Calvin did use the verb to confer, while he had expressly denied it—in flagrante delicto of a formal contradiction, a contradiction in terms. Following Beckmann, Wallace points to one occurrence: a letter to Bullinger defends the use of the verbs “to contain” (contineri gratiam in sacramentis) and “to confer” (gratiam conferre).[110] I have found another instance: in his polemical writing Acts of the Council of Trent, with the antidote (November 1547), in his critique of the fifth canon of the fifth session, Calvin tells his readers that “they must always call to mind that the Sacraments are nothing but instrumental causes of bestowing [conferendae] grace upon us,”[111] words which sound Catholic enough! To these extremely rare expressions, one can associate the answer found in the Catechism to the question: “What more do we obtain from the sacrament [the Supper], or what other benefit does it confer upon us?” It states: “The communion of which I spoke is thereby confirmed and increased, for although Christ is exhibited to us both in baptism and in the gospel, we do not however receive him entire, but in part only.”[112] I know no other example of such a wording.[113] To be sure, we cannot imagine the intolerable thought of our Lord carved into “parts”; “in part” must be the equivalent of an adverb.[114] Even so, however, there is a stark contrast with Calvin’s insistence elsewhere on the sufficiency of the word preached.

The hermeneutical rule formulated by Blaise Pascal—”to understand an author’s meaning one must reconcile all passages that are contrary to one another”[115]—applies to Calvin in two stages: first, one should consider recurring terms and themes, which compose one “panel” of Calvin’s ordinary teaching (how do they agree with the primacy of the Word, with the denial that grace is conferred?); at a second stage, exceptional ways of speaking, such as we just cited, are to be scrutinized.

To offer, exhibit, communicate, even give, with an efficacy tied to the secret power of the Holy Spirit: this is regular language. The most helpful observation is this: Calvin uses the same language for the Word (the Word simply preached). How does Jesus Christ give his body, food for our souls (John 6:51)? “Daily he gives it when by the word of the gospel he offers it for us to partake, inasmuch as it was crucified” (Inst. 4.17.5[116]). “Such, he [the Apostle Paul] tells them [the Galatians], was the clearness of his doctrine, that it was not naked doctrine, but the express, living image of Christ,” demonstrating the efficacy of the Spirit and how all ministers of the gospel must preach and teach.[117] This adjective “naked” or “bare” is characteristic of Calvin’s diction: though it can (rarely) refer to the clarity of revelation, to which we have ready access,[118] it is found for what is being ascribed both to the sacrament and the word of preaching when they are considered apart from the Spirit’s work: “Without the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the [the French version adds: bare] Word can do nothing” (Inst. 3.2.33). The Short Treatise explains: “Jesus Christ is the only food by which our souls are nourished, but as it is distributed to us by the word of the Lord, which he has appointed an instrument for that purpose, that word is also called bread and water.”[119] Calvin expressly draws a parallel between the preaching ministry and the sacrament.[120] Just as the truth of the gospel is not impaired if the hearer does not receive it in faith, or if the preacher is a hypocrite, the sacrament remains valid (but does not bring any benefit of grace) despite the lack of faith (or the fault of the minister).[121] All this agrees with the propositions on the relationship between the sacraments and the Word, and it points to the interpretation which harmonizes Calvin’s statements on both sides: the “efficacy” still belongs to the order of signification. Jesus Christ offers himself, together with the fruit of his work, by means and under the form of the audio-visual, and tangible, and “dramatic,” preaching of the sacraments (visible words) just as he does through preaching in the ordinary sense, “linguistic” preaching.

Two traits, even three, tend to confirm this understanding. Calvin often indicates that the “offer” or “exhibition” and communication are made by means of signs in the sacraments, sub symbolis or figuris, as the offer is made in words (linguistic signs) in ordinary preaching. To quotations already reproduced above, we may add two more, which come from the period 1537–1548. The Short Treatise teaches that “when we see the visible sign we must consider what it represents, and by whom it has been given us. The bread is given us to figure the body of Christ.”[122] The Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians explains: “Hence the bread is Christ’s body, because it assuredly testifies that the body it represents is held forth to us, or because the Lord, by holding out to us that symbol, gives us at the same time his own body.”[123] It is quite natural to understand that the material elements and the ritual acts in the Supper play the same role as the words in the oral delivery of the message: instruments by means of which the Lord signifies and offers his grace, so that this grace is actually given if faith is there to meet the Word, faith wrought by the Spirit. Calvin never identifies the grace signified (res) to the sign (that would be “confusion”); he proclaims that the person who believes receives and enjoys that grace at the same time. If he can even say (very seldom indeed) that the reality (res) is “given” to the reprobate who partake of the sign, he means that it is offered: for he immediately stresses that “it does not reach them [French: it does not enter into them]” and they do not receive it (Inst. 4.17.33).

Readers often meet the second trait, it is most conspicuous: the link between the sign and the effectuation of the spiritual reality it signifies is, for Calvin, God’s truthfulness. Auguste Lecerf had noticed it.[124] The Short Treatise provides one example among many: “If God cannot deceive or lie, it follows that it [the bread, but the original seems rather to mean “he,” God] accomplishes which it signifies. We must then truly receive in the Supper the body and blood of Jesus Christ, since the Lord there represents to us the communion of both.”[125] Truthfulness (Deus verax, non fallax) is an attribute of the word; God tells me through the signs of baptism and the Supper: “If you only believe, you are united with Jesus Christ and all his benefits”—if I believe, God being veracious, it so happens. This word Calvin often calls the “promise,” and one should not mistake his meaning. He does not refer to any promise of a particular functioning of the sign, so that the sacrament would appear suffused with a mysterious causal power.[126] Calvin expressly dispels that misunderstanding: “Those promises by which consecration is accomplished are directed not to the elements themselves but to those who receive them” (Inst. 4.17.39). “Promise” is a quasi synonym for offer (following the etymology: pro-mittere is to pro-pose): “For by so promising he [the Lord] merely means that his mercy is extended [French: exposée] to all, provided they seek after it and implore it” (Inst. 3.24.16).[127]

The third observation links with the first: the Spirit, who generates the believing reception and communicates the promised reality, uses the Word as his instrument to arouse and increase faith.[128] “Instrumentality” is common to sacraments and preaching also. The bread is a “visible word,” and the words are instruments that “confer” grace in the same sense that sacraments may be said to do so: without trespassing the bounds of signification.

Such a reading easily makes room for Calvin’s indications on the advantage that belongs to the sacraments. If he assigns them, unequivocally, only second rank, he also acknowledges in them a “plus,” something they have more than the Word, and which may well explain why they are added to the (preached) Word. In a passage already quoted, he states: the sacraments “have this characteristic over and above the word because they represent them [the promises] for us as a picture from life” (Inst. 4.14.5). This advantage pertains to the “pedagogical” mode of signification; it does not imply another kind of causality. The terms Calvin chooses to define the intention and usefulness of the sacraments, in a most constant fashion, suggest the same thought. The Short Treatise, for instance, explains why the sign was added: “We are so weak that we cannot receive him with true heartfelt trust, when he is presented to us by simple doctrine and preaching,” and so God grants us signs “to confirm and fortify us by delivering us from all doubt and uncertainty”; “we on our part are so rude and gross that we cannot understand the least things of God, it was of importance that we should be given to understand it as far as our capacity could admit”; “Our Lord, therefore, instituted the Supper . . . to give us certainty and assurance . . . that we may entertain a right reliance on salvation.”[129] “It is indeed true that this same grace is offered us by the gospel, yet as in the Supper we have more, ample, certainty, and fuller enjoyment of it, with good cause do we recognize the fruit as coming from it.”[130] The Catechism defines the aim: “to seal [French: imprint] the promises of God on our hearts and thereby better confirm their truth to us,” for, “as we are surrounded with this body of clay, we need figures or mirrors . . . it is our interest to have all our senses exercised in the promises of God, that they may be better confirmed to us.”[131] In the Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians Calvin writes, if, without the Supper, “we were sufficiently mindful of the death of Christ, this help would be unnecessary”; but the Supper is “a kind of memorial” and “it has been appointed for this purpose, that Christ may put us in mind of the benefit of his death, and that we may recognize it before men.”[132] The additional benefit, the “plus,” in sacraments, compared with the preached Word, is understood in all clear cases of the specific “impact” (along anthropological lines) of a visible and tangible expression. It seems appropriate to interpret his unique phrase in the Catechism that contrasts the fullness of the Supper communication and the ex parte, “in part,” of preaching (and baptism),[133] of our human apprehension of the spiritual gift: we are so rude and dull that we only grasp in part the riches of grace that are offered us by the Word (and baptism), whereas in the Supper the vividness of the sign makes possible a wider embrace of faith.[134]

Other exceptional ways of speaking are patient of similar explanations. In his February 1547 letter to Bullinger—a letter which defends, contrary to Calvin’s language elsewhere, that one may say that the sacraments contain and confer the grace they represent—Calvin develops his meaning. “Though I do not concede to you that grace is not contained in the sacraments as far as its dispensation is concerned, I do not mean, when I say it is, that grace be enclosed [inclusa] in them, but we are wont to say that it is in the manner in which Christ is contained in the Gospel.”[135] Bullinger does not accept “confer,” but, Calvin pleads, it is not absurd to describe the sacraments as “helps toward the perception of grace [adiumenta esse ad percipiendam Dei gratiam],” and this is finally what Calvin means; granted, “confer” is a stronger word [durior], but one can “soften it by means of a sound interpretation [sana interpretatione molliatur].”[136] Bullinger rejects “confer” to protect justification by faith alone: “In my judgement,” Calvin replies, “the opposite argument is valid. Seeing that we are justified by faith, grace is conferred by the sacraments, since they are exercises of faith [fidei exercitia] . . . and they make us participants of Christ inasmuch as they promote our faith.”[137] The other passage in which Calvin sees fit to use “confer” in the expression of his own doctrine is less explicit, but the orientation is the same: in his Antidote against the Decrees of Trent, Calvin clarifies his meaning: the sacraments are instruments used to confer grace “only when they are subservient to faith,” and the preceding lines read: “Whatever grace is conferred [French: élargi, ‘donated’] upon us by the Sacraments, is nevertheless to be ascribed to faith.”[138] In his answer to Bullinger’s annotations, in another letter, Calvin explicates his use of the verb to conjoin—to conjoin does not mean to bind (alligari, to bind grace to the sacrament): “I understand that grace is bound to sacraments . . . when people imagine that it is enclosed in them, so that the use of the sacrament always [perpetuo] ensures that grace is received. . . . I acknowledge, indeed, that the grace of God is conjoined with the sacraments, not in time, not locally, but in such a way that each one brings to them the receptacle of faith [vas fidei], to obtain what is there represented.”[139]

A coherent pattern emerges. Calvin exploits fully (he plays to the limits with the “elasticity” of language) what may be said of the instrumentality of the Word, and then he applies it to the sacraments as “visible words,” to ward off the charge that he empties them of their power or “virtue”—a charge, to him, both odious and dangerous indeed. But he yields nothing significant to sacramentalism (in the sense of our definition). How clever! Hence the rage of Lutheran sacramentalists like Joachim Westphal, which we already touched upon. Hence Calvin’s irritation when narrow Zwinglians (like Zébédée), who could easily follow him if they consented to be a little flexible, deprived themselves of a strategically advantageous position.

One passage, however, still calls for our scrutiny. Wim Janse draws attention to the Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians and he affirms that “throughout” that work “Calvin declared the reception of Christ’s body conditional upon the taking and eating of the bread: only by participating in the breaking of the bread do we participate in the body. ‘Non aliter habet suum effectum quam si conditio etiam locum habeat.’”[140] If it is to be read in Janse’s way, this proposition expresses undiluted, hard-core, sacramentalism; only the sacrament communicates or confers the grace that is signified, and the sacrament thereby differs from the preached Word; the only hermeneutical task left to do is to reconcile it with the other utterances![141]

Re-reading Calvin’s page, or reading it whole, is enough to dispel the misunderstanding. The topic is not at all a comparison of the sacrament (the Supper) and preaching! Calvin is attacking the Roman mass, in which the faithful “are not invited to the breaking of bread in common,” are sent “away empty from an unmeaning show”: since they stand as mere spectators, the command “Take and eat” is blatantly violated.[142] Papists also reverse the meaning of the sign, “they pervert it to a totally different use”: instead of taking what God offers, they pretend to offer him a sacrifice.[143] This failure to comply with the conditions of the promise makes it impossible for the promise to be fulfilled. The Commentary does not deviate from the line drawn by the multitude of texts.[144]

4. Sacraments As Seals

If we consider the grace which the sacraments signify and “mirror,” the grace of salvation and union with Christ, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are instruments of its communication as visible words, visible words only: Calvin may stress that they do not confer that grace, or he may say, on rare occasions, that they confer it, but his doctrine remains the same, at all periods of the Reformer’s ministry. If he says they “confer,” he makes it clear that they do so as ordinary preaching does, there is no other “causality.” The many quotations we have adduced are evidence enough that such was his constant teaching. This account, however, does not cover the whole of Calvin’s doctrine! He also affirms another function, a second-rank but a more specific function, which we must now examine: sacraments are seals, and as such they confirm and ratify.

We have already encountered those verbs. The function of confirming the promise and gift of grace is partially exercised by the visual advantage of the visible words: the picture-like mode which belongs to sacramental signification compensates for our “dullness,” it impresses more vividly on our minds the truth of God’s offer. We understand better and can appropriate more. Despite the overlap, however, Calvin has in view an operation really distinct from signification and its modes. “Sealing” goes beyond. And the efficacy of which Calvin frequently speaks in this regard—an original feature of his theology of the sacraments—implies something else than signification; it should help to answer the question, “Why add the sacraments to the Word of preaching?” One carefully observes that this second function is not that of confering grace (the grace signified by the signs), and, therefore, does not imply “sacramentalism” as defined above.

Calvin can be quite repetitious! The theme and the metaphor of “seals” (which he can supplement with parallel metaphors) are already there in 1536.[145] The Short Treatise does not forget them: the Lord instituted the Supper “to sign and seal in our consciences the promises contained in his gospel.”[146] Almost at random, one can cite the Commentary on the Epistle to Titus, “baptism se[a]ls to us the salvation obtained by Christ,”[147] or on Isaiah (6:7), “confirmation and proof.”[148] Our infirmitas needed the vividness of the visual mode, but it needed even more this added confirmation. We are weak through the lack of intelligence, but even more through the lack of assurance: “The heart’s distrust is greater then the mind’s blindness” (Inst. 3.2.36), while “the knowledge of faith consists in assurance rather than in comprehension” (Inst. 3.2.14). Our need is most crying in this regard. The sacraments confirm, and so increase faith.[149]

How does Calvin conceive of the said function? He does not bring forward much more than metaphors. He prefers that of seals, since he draws it from Scripture: from Rom 4:11—he does not hesitate to extend to the essential function of all sacraments what the apostle says of circumcision in Abraham’s life (Inst. 4.14.5, and his Commentary in loco). To critics who reproach him with making the sacraments superfluous, since the “whole force rests in the word,” he replies: “To this our answer would be in brief: the seals which are attached to government documents and other public acts are nothing taken by themselves, for they would be attached in vain if the parchment had nothing written on it. Yet, when added to the writing, they do not on that account fail to confirm and seal what is written” (Inst. 4.14.5). He mentions sometimes, to the same effect, “signatures.” He even recalls the role of pagan sacrifices in social relationships: among ancient people “sows are often slain” to ratify contracts and covenants, “apart from any inner or loftier mystery”—similarly, the sacraments “are exercises which make us more certain of the trust-worthiness of God’s Word” (Inst. 4.14.6). Calvin is happy to use the word “pledge” (Inst. 4.14.12, in French gage and méreau, as often elsewhere,[150] pignus in Latin[151]), and the verb “testify,” which denotes both the declarative (promissive, exhibitive) function of the Word and the function of seals: they ratify, authenticate. Rarely, Calvin also uses “earnest” (downpayment): in the Short Treatise the word may apply to the Supper itself or to the spiritual experience of believers;[152] in the Catechism, the physical sign is, as such, “a kind of pledge” of the resurrection of the body, “since the body also shares in the symbol of life.”[153] The effect: the increase and strengthening of the assurance of faith.

But the reader presses the question: How does Calvin conceive of the confirmation and authentication of the promise? How does the sacrament add to the objective certainty? Whence this “surplus-value”? One wishes Calvin had offered a clearer account of his conviction. He affirms it with full rhetoric power; he relies on the persuasion of images and comparisons, but hardly satisfies an analytical mind. The main difficulty confronting Calvin lies in the difference between the human customs to which he refers and the administration of sacraments. If a seal renders a document “authentic,” the reason is that only the author of the document, or the authority who issues it, can produce the seal; if the sacrificial ceremony seals and ratifies contracts, the reason is that the ceremony visibly involves, in the presence of witnesses, those who exchange promises. This does not apply to the Lord in sacramental celebrations. Nothing seems easier than to imitate the administration of the Christian rites. Sects and cults abound which retain the form of baptism and the Supper—where is authentication? Calvin did notice in Scripture the theme of a divine confirmation of the Word: through miracles, which accredit the message by means of a visible expression of a power one can ascribe to God alone.[154] Obviously, he then felt free to extend, without any other argument, this function to baptism and the Supper: “For as Gideon was confirmed by an astonishing miracle, so we are confirmed by Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, though our eyes behold no miracle.”[155] Maybe the marginal consciousness of the unbridged gap between the two cases found a manner of expression when Calvin confessed that he felt more, in the experience of sacraments, than he was able to understand (the French version uses the verb “to feel,” sentir, Inst. 4.17.32).[156]

This lexical choice, of the verb “to feel,” appears to be significant. The language of the sermons further provides helpful hints. In our weakness and rudeness, as our awareness grows of God’s infinite superiority,[157] this quietens our fears, this assures us of God’s goodwill toward us: “We see that we are fed of his hand”—God “has stretched out his hand to make us feel his favor.”[158] As one crushed by the feeling of one’s lowliness and indignity, in the presence of the Most Holy God whose righteous wrath is only too justified, the believer with whom Calvin identifies himself can hardly believe that God should forgive and even grant the believer the title of son or daughter! At this point, the sacrament is added to the preached Word, and adds a reassuring dimension. The contrast between heavenly glory and earthly signs (used against sacramentalism) becomes the ground of assurance—a remarkable reversal! That God should have consented to signify his promises in such poor material elements, that he should have gone down to our miserable level, deeply affects Calvin, it moves him at the core of his inner being: hence a new realization of God’s grace. A new feeling which comforts him, and overcomes the negative feeling of human unworthiness. Yes, God has really willed to cleanse us from all our sins and to make us one with Jesus Christ, since he condescends to touch me by things so far below his majesty, by water and bread adapted to my infirmitas! In this way sacraments seal and confirm.

5. Between Lord And Minister

The assurance and comfort which Calvin feels appear to depend on a privileged nearness: God (or Jesus Christ) is usually the subject of the verbs “represent” and “present” (or “offer”), “signify,” “figure,” and so on—all verbs which normally denote the performance of the outward sign (the “sacrament” in the strict sense in traditional parlance, technically the sacramentum tantum). Is it not, however, the part of the human minister of the sacrament (the faithful cooperating, at least passively), rather than God’s? If we go back to the primary form of the Word of God, we do say that God speaks to us, but we may not say that God preaches (produces the signs).[159] Is God the one who brings forward the “symbols”? What is precisely Calvin’s meaning?

Calvin does not ignore the problem. He tries, as he so often does, to combine complementary truths, truths that may appear antagonistic. He teaches, on the one hand, a rigorous distinction between the work of man and the work of God; he tends toward a parallel presentation. He can even write the adverb separately: “The inner grace of the Spirit, as distinct from the outward ministry, ought to be considered and pondered separately”; we must note that “God accomplishes within what the minister represents and attests by outward action, lest what God claims for himself alone should be turned over to a mortal man” (Inst. 4.14.17). As to baptism, the Commentary on Matt 3:11 makes it clear that “to men has been committed nothing more than the administration of an outward and visible sign: the reality dwells with Christ alone.”[160] This is not rare: “We must beware of ascribing to the sign, or to the minister, what belongs to God alone.”[161] When he fights against the confusion, his eloquence rises to heights of irony: “When I baptize, is it as if I had the Holy Ghost up my sleeve to produce at any time? Or the body and blood of the Lord to offer to whom I please? It would be sheer presumption to seek to attribute to mortal creatures what belongs to Jesus Christ.”[162] Such statements rule out that the work of signification/representation be imputed to God himself.

Yet, at the same time, Calvin—not without precautions and circumlocutions—does suggest a close link with the Lord. If men “are only ministers of the outward sign,” yet, “Christ alone presides” (Inst. 4.15.8). He maintains that “a sacrament must not be judged by the hand of the one by whom it is ministered, but as if it were from the very hand of God, from whom it doubtless has come” (Inst. 4.15.16). The sacrament “has no less efficacy . . . than if it had been given by the hand of the Son of God”;[163] hence, “the very symbol which we receive from a mortal man ought to be viewed by us in the same light as if Christ himself displayed his hand from heaven, and stretched it out to us.”[164] If, as if: these words let slip the sense of a difficulty: Calvin’s thesis, despite his strong conviction, is not so easy to prove.

For Catholic theology, little problem. The prerogatives of the Roman institution extend the Lord’s—whether one speaks of the “Total Christ” (one with the church, his plērōma in the sense of his complement) or of “Incarnation continued”[165] or whether one prefers another, equivalent, phrase—the priest logically stands as “another Christ.”[166] But for the Reformer’s ecclesiology, the picture is somewhat different. Calvin can paint a horrible picture of the church, a prey to disorder and corruption at many a time in history (Inst. 4.1.14 and 18; cf. 4.1.8: “many wolves are within,” as St. Augustine had said). He denounces “those who have only the title and appearance of the church” (Inst. 4.2.3).[167] In a November 1554 letter to the ministers of the Zurich church, he insists that what must be said of the Head, Christ, should not be transferred to the church.[168] When Calvin comments on passages that describe Christ as the Head and the church as the Body, he focuses on the government of the church by Christ alone (he attacks the doctrine of the Pope “vicar of Jesus Christ” to which the Catholic continuity scheme leads quite naturally): all are subject to Christ’s rule.[169] He is less interested in vital continuity. Since ministers, “from the greater to the less,” are so inferior to the Head and King, he adopts the maxim: “We are at liberty to withhold our assent to their doctrine, until they show it is of Christ.”[170] As he sets the roles so neatly apart, Calvin does not make it easy to attribute to the Lord what, strictly, his ministers are doing, the production of figures or signs.

Calvin, as one of the foregoing quotations suggests, would argue that the minister’s mission and mandate make his words and deeds those of the Authority who sent him: the embassy principle. But a mandate requires authentication, an ambassador must have credentials to show: how does this apply to Christian ministers, especially as they administer the sacraments? Calvin probably thinks of the institution of baptism and the Supper: when he instituted the sacraments, the Lord accommodated himself to our weakness and rudeness, and this touches Calvin’s heart, it guarantees to him the Lord’s nearness. When we celebrate the sacraments, however, the relationship with the Lord’s action, in the first century, is a rather indirect one. Two factors may have helped Calvin’s feeling that he could receive the bread as if the Lord was stretching out his hand to tender the morsel to him: an intimately personal factor, the lasting mark left on his soul or subjectivity by the pious impressions of his childhood and younger years; and, then, a more pastoral factor, the high value put on the official ministry, a reverence with pragmatic associations, which he wished to inspire to all, and which was subservient to his concern for right church order.

Whatever the motives and justifications of Calvin’s doctrine of the sacraments as “seals” (which could be more transparent than they are), our inquiry has discovered that it is possible to understand together his various statements on the sacraments, without contradiction and without any demonstrable concession to sacramentalism. Calvin modified his accent according to circumstances, he spoke as a diplomat and statesman, he availed himself masterfully of the plastic or “elastic” character of language, he did not solve all the inner tensions of his theology: but he presented his thought within a coherent framework. He strove to give the sacraments high honor and concrete importance in the life of the church—without making them instrumental causes of grace in any other way than through their function as signs, as visible words.

Notes

1. References, generally, will be made to, and quotations taken from, books and articles in their original languages; unless otherwise indicated, English translations are my own. In the case of Calvin’s works, all references have been considered in the original version, Latin or French (since Calvin either translated himself his Latin writings or closely controlled their translation, the French version possesses authentic document value). These are Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia (ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss; 59 vols.; Brunswick, then Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863-1900), abbreviated CO with volume and page number (e.g., 9:118); Recueil des Opuscules, c’est-à-dire Petits Traités de M. Jean Calvin (Geneva: Baptiste Pinereul, 1566), abbreviated Opusc., followed by page number (an opportunity to follow Richard A. Muller’s advice and read older texts in contemporary editions); the 1541 French edition of the Institution de la religion chrétienne (ed. Jacques Pannier; Paris: Société des Belles Lettres, 1938), abbreviated Pannier, with volume and page number; the Commentaires sur le Nouveau Testament (Paris: Meyrueis, 1854), abbreviated CNT, with volume and page number; Albert-Marie Schmidt’s edition of the Petit Traicté de la saincte Cène de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ in Trois Traités (Paris: Je Sers, and Geneva: Labor, 1934), abbreviated Trois Traités, with page number. Unless otherwise indicated, translated quotations from Calvin’s sermons and letters are my own. For other works, I have cited widespread English translations: from Ford Lewis Battles’s version of the 1559/1561 edition of the Institutes, abbreviated Inst., with standard references (book, chapter, paragraph; often appearing in the main body of the text); from the translation of the 1541 Institutes by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), abbreviated McKee, with page number; from the Calvin Translation Society series of Commentaries, whose translators (for those cited) were James Anderson (Psalms), Henry Beveridge (Acts), Charles W. Bingham (Harmony of the Law, Exodus–Deuteronomy), John King (Psalms), John Owen (Romans, Hebrews), John Pringle (1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians), William Pringle (Isaiah, Harmony of the Gospels, John, Galatians, Ephesians, Titus), referenced under the form CTS, volume number if there are several, and page number, with the Bible verse indicated; from the companion series of Tracts, translated and edited by Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet, with volume and page numbers. I have accessed all these through the “Ages digital library” (Ages software, Albany, N.Y.) CD-ROM “The Comprehensive John Calvin Collection.” Unless otherwise indicated, italics are mine; some CTS commentaries have added italics not found in Latin or French, I have suppressed these.
2. One recalls C. S. Lewis’s comment in Miracles, a Preliminary Study (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 95: “If we must have a mental picture to symbolize Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter” (italics Lewis’s).
3. The present writer confesses being in sympathy with such an endeavor.
4. The principle we put forward is clear enough, but discernment in concreto is often a delicate matter. Ordinary mechanisms embrace unconscious forms; buried images, with strong emotional charges, may produce unexpected effects; they play a part in the reactions of the aesthetic sense (one remembers Stendhal’s sickness in Italy, from beholding a particular painting)—spiritual experience often sharpens or kindles the aesthetic sense. We cannot rule out that some believers experience a sacramental efficacy, which they consider divine, by virtue of such mechanisms.
5. Cf. Darryl G. Hart, John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2005).
6. Emile-Guillaume Léonard, La Réformation (vol. 1 of Histoire générale du protestantisme; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 264. On p. 263 he quotes Calvin’s autobiographical statement on the “dislike” of Zwingli which prevented him from even reading the Zurich Reformer; on this more below.
7. “Sacrament,” Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic/London: S.P.C.K., 2005), 710. The quote is from the Short Treatise on the Supper of our Lord (1541), p. 170 in his edition, but 162 (§ 12) in the Beveridge-Bonnet edition mentioned above, Tracts II (French original in Trois Traités, 110).
8. Heiko A. Oberman, “Die ‘Extra’-Dimension in der Theologie Calvins,” in Geist und Geschichte der Reformation (ed. Heinz Liebig and Klaus Scholder; Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 38; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), 338, affirming: “Der Weg ist frei für eine manducatio indignorum” (the argument is found on pp. 332-38). Oberman has to acknowledge (335) that he ascribes to Calvin in his final years positions contrary to those he held previously, and contrary to the positions which all those who later appealed to Calvin’s authority have taught!
9. Philippe Janton, Jean Calvin, ministre de la Parole, 1509-1564 (Histoire; Paris: Cerf, 2008), 139.
10. J. Todd Billings, “John Calvin and the Sacraments: A Contemporary Appraisal,” a paper offered at the International Reformed Theological Institute Conference on Calvin, Aix-en-Provence, July 2009. I had the privilege of listening to him (and to give another paper), and I cite from the manuscript he distributed (pp. 1-17); I do not know whether the text has been published anywhere since.
11. Ibid., 11.
12. François Wendel, Calvin: Sources et évolution de sa pensée religieuse (Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, published by the Faculté de Théologie Protestante de l’Université de Strasbourg 41; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), esp. 256-71. Wendel states precisely that he does not wish to say, “as some historians have done, that Calvin was really a Lutheran in his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, even when he started. Though he was not aware of the fact, he was already treading a path that would lead him very far from Luther’s and his disciples’ preoccupations” (260).
13. Pierre-Charles Marcel, “La communication du Christ avec les siens: La Parole et la Cène,” special issue of RRef 37, no. 145 (1986/1); he denounces, for example, the invocation “Send here your Holy Spirit that we may really receive, in (!) this bread and wine, your presence among us” (58; italics and exclamation mark as in Marcel).
14. Kilian McDonnell, John Calvin, the Church and the Eucharist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), above all the appendix 367-81.
15. Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). Gerrish recalls the controversy sparked by Nevin (pp. 3-6). (On p. 6 he mentions the opposition of Otto Ritschl, one of the finest historians I know, who would conclude that Calvin was essentially faithful “to Zwingli’s symbolism.”)
16. Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1953).
17. Inst. 4.17.37-50.
18. Of course, the said polemics did not wait for post-Calvin times!
19. Emile Doumergue, Le caractère de Calvin (Paris: Editions de Foi & Vie, 1921), 46 and 48 (logic of life).
20. Inst. 4.17.32. The French text is a little more explicit, and could be translated “I feel more of it [j’en sens] through experience than I can understand of it.”
21. Wim Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations,” in Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres. Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research (Appeldoorn, 2006) (ed. Herman J. Selderhuis et al.; Reformed Historical Theology 5; Göttingen: Vandenhœck & Ruprecht, 2008), 37-69.
22. Ibid., 39; cf. almost verbatim repetition in Janse’s conclusion (p. 68), which recommends Thomas J. Davis’s The Clearest Promises of God: The Development of Calvin’s Eucharistic Teaching (New York: AMS Press, 1995). Janse (pp. 65-67) does find a fourth period, 1560-1562, characterized (as was the period 1537-1548) by more sacramentalistic expressions, but he does not so clearly ascribe to Calvin, in those late years, a change in his theological convictions.
23. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 51-53. He deserves congratulations for having taken into account these texts, which many others have neglected. We observe that Janse sometimes brings nuances to his scheme: he acknowledges that one finds in 1546, as well as in 1555 and 1558, a sharp critique of the Catholic view, a denial that the signs be “bare and empty,” and a rejection of Lutheran ubiquity (p. 52, cf. pp. 63-64).
24. Ibid., 41-51.
25. Thomas Kaufmann, “Luther and Calvin—One Reformation,” in Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres, 161 (149-71).
26. Janton, Jean Calvin, ministre de la Parole, 172 (cf. 98: as soon as 1536 “his theology is essentially fixed”).
27. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 37; in particular, he names Kilian McDonnell and François Wendel.
28. See below, n. 54.
29. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 47 (the reference is to CO 9:118-19). Independently from the debate on possible changes in Calvin’s teaching, Janse finely perceives the tension between the sovereign liberty of the divine election and the thesis of a causality belonging to sacramental rites (tending toward the ex opere operato). Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6, remarks that, in the 19th century, the main antithesis was not the antithesis between predestination and free-will, but predestination and sacramentalism (after John Haas’s recension, “Point of Contention: Predestination and American Religion,” Evangelical Studies Bulletin 73 [Winter 2009-2010]: 3).
30. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 51.
31. On Rom 4:11, CTS 127 (CNT 3.73). Calvin added the systematic chapter (ch. 8) on predestination precisely in the 1539/1541 Institutes.
32. Tracts 2:164-65 §§ 18 and 19, cf. 167 § 25 (Trois Traités, 113-14, 117-18).
33. CO 46:97, 8th sermon on the Harmony of the Gospels (Luke 1:36-38).
34. Billings, “John Calvin and the Sacraments,” 6, acknowledges that “identifiably Lutheran, Bucerian, and Zwinglian strands of Calvin’s theology persist in his ‘mature’ eucharistic thought.”
35. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 38-39 (CO 1:115).
36. McKee, 504 (Pannier, 3:214). The 1536 sentence that denies that sacraments are instruments is found in CO 1:115. One should note that Calvin added in 1539 (and later maintained) the lines: “What is a sacrament taken without faith, except the destruction of the church? . . . The one who thinks he can receive from the sacraments a different good than that which he receives by faith as it is presented to him in the word greatly deceives himself. From this also the rest can be inferred: confidence of salvation does not depend on participation in the sacraments, as if righteousness was established there” (McKee, 503 [Pannier, 3:213]). This hardly sounds like a sacramentalistic turn (as Janse posits for 1539-1541).
37. Actually, already in 1536, Calvin ascribes an “instrumental” role to the sacraments: God uses “means and instruments”: “So, as He nourishes our body with bread and other foods, as He lights up the world with the sun, as He heats by the fire, and nevertheless neither bread nor sun nor fire does anything except inasmuch as under such means He pours out His blessings on us, so likewise He feeds and nourishes faith spiritually by the sacraments which have no other office than to represent God’s promises before our eyes,” though “we ought not to admire or glorify them as causes of our good” (McKee, 501, [Pannier, 3:210; CO 1:105 for the 1536 Latin]).
38. Preserved Smith, A Short History of Christian Theophagy (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1922), 191; according to Smith, Calvin was later “to expand his original statements in a vast cloud of words in which it is difficult to detect their meaning and therefore their self-contradictions. In a different sense from that meant by Talleyrand, his language was made to conceal thought” (194). Smith ascribes him a clever “prestidigitation” (196).
39. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 40 (cf. 51); Janse adds that Calvin could also show himself “implacably ruthless if circumstances required.”
40. Wendel, Calvin: Sources et évolution, 261. He reaches the conclusion, “One should not hide that his doctrine leaves many obscurities which a strange exegesis, often, and appeals to mystery cannot perfectly screen from view” (271).
41. Billings, “John Calvin and the Sacraments,” 6.
42. See Letter 2089 to Peter Martyr Vermigli, “Calvinus Vermilio,” dated January 18, 1555, CO 15:386-89. Janton (Jean Calvin, ministre de la Parole, 327 n. 2) quotes from the dedication of the Lectures on the Twelve Minor Prophets, a reply to this criticism. Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek (4 vols.; 2d ed.; Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1908-1911), 4:611, mentions Jan Utenhove’s request to Calvin: could he refrain, on the Lord’s Supper, “from more or less obscure expressions”?
43. William Cunningham, The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation (1862; Students Reformed Theological Library; London: Banner of Truth, 1967), 240. Cunningham, although he writes: “We have no fault to find with the substance of Calvin’s statements in regard to the sacraments in general,” does not take lightly the diplomatic effect; he thinks that Calvin went astray and he even qualifies the matter as “perhaps the greatest blot” on Calvin’s achievements as the church’s doctor.
44. The True Method of Giving Peace to Christendom and Reforming the Church, Tracts 3:221-22 (La vraie façon de réformer l’Eglise chrétienne et appointer les différends qui sont en icelle, in Opusc. 1043; the French version is more vigorous: Calvin speaks of “frank and forthright Papists,” of a concord that “wears a heavy make-up,” of an attempt “to embaboon us”—I found this verb embabouiner also in Montaigne).
45. Letter 171 to Zébédée, “ad Zebedaeum,” who was the pastor of the Reformed church at Orbe (also a Frenchman, he came from Bordeaux), May 19, 1539, CO 10:346: Bucer “tries hard to soften the meaning of Oecolampadius and Zwingli, in eo peccat, fateor.”
46. J. V. Pollet, Martin Bucer: Etudes sur la correspondance avec de nombreux textes inédits (2 vols.; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958-1962), 2:532-33, with a quotation in which Calvin expresses his suspicion that Bucer is dreaming of “a kind of realm half-way between Christ and the pope” (inter Christum et papam . . . medium quoddam regnum); from Correspondance des Réformateurs dans les pays de langue française (9 vols.; ed. A. L. Herminjard; Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1965-1966), 4:no. 347; and another from a letter dated January 12, 1538 (ibid., no. 677).
47. Letter 1381, “Calvinus Melanchthoni,” from the period 1549-1551, CO 13:593-96 (see also letter 2000, from September 1554, CO 15:215-17).
48. That he should write (or dictate) this word is significant, for instance, in his letter 2089 to Vermigli, “Calvinus Vermilio,” CO 15:387: “I grant that this way of speaking [loquendi forma] is tolerable when it is said that the body of Christ is given under the bread, provided one applies to it the light of a sound intelligence which rules out local presence and circumscription and the monstrous idea of omnipresence [ubiquitatis portentum].”
49. The object of Danièle Fischer’s very fine study, “Calvin et la Confession d’Augsbourg,” RRef 36, no. 142 (1985/2): 72-91.
50. Letter 3530 dated September 24, 1561, CO 18:733 (in Jules Bonnet, ed., Lettres de Jean Calvin, recueilles pour la première fois et publiées d’après les manuscrits originaux: Lettres françaises [2 vols.; Paris: Meyrueis, 1854], 2:428).
51. Letter 3950 to the Prince de Condé, CO 20:14 (Bonnet, Lettres, 2:512), it “is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring”; letter 3513 to Théodore de Bèze [Beza], dated September 10, 1561, during the Poissy Colloquium), CO 18:683-84; letter to the Wesel French church, in which he exhorts the refugees to refuse the Augsburg Confession which authorities wish to impose: “To disclose to you frankly the heart of the matter, I will say trenchantly that agreeing with the document as it is means renouncing obliquely the truth of God”; the article on the Lord’s Supper, especially, calls for correction (in Bonnet, Lettres, 2:486).
52. In 1540, Melanchthon had modified the text of the Confession: instead of saying the body and blood of Christ distributed, the “Variata” (i.e., modified) says exhibited, a word beloved of Calvin.
53. Fischer, “Calvin et la Confession d’Augsbourg,” 88.
54. Léonard, La Réformation, 263. Léonard gives no reference; the sentence is found in English in Tracts 2:236 (in French, Seconde Défense de la sainte et droite foi en la matière des Sacrements, contre les calomnies de Joachim Westphal [Opusc. 1503]). In his Treatise of Scandals, Calvin confesses that the eucharistic quarrel of Luther and the Swiss had disturbed him personally (in Trois Traités, 245; Opusc. 1193).
55. CO 10:346.
56. Tracts 2:237, 257, 285 (“This passage Westphal endeavors to blacken”; the French is more vivid, Opusc. 1504, 1522, 1547: “Westphal apporte là son charbon pour obscurcir, voire du tout noircir et falsifier le passage”).
57. CO 10:346: aut simul disiecerit aut certe obscuravit. The interesting point about the judgment is that it allows, even at this stage of Calvin’s relationship with Zwingli’s doctrine, the possibility (in Calvin’s eyes) of a less objectionable weakness.
58. Letter 2187, dated April 20, 1555, CO 15:573.
59. Letter 421, CO 11:438.
60. Tracts 2:182-86 §§ 53-60 (Trois Traités, 138-41).
61. Old Luther seems to have appreciated what he had read of Calvin, but how did he understand him? A story which could be called a Lutheran hadith, tells that Luther said so to Christoph Pezel, one of the students of his circle who was his confidant on that occasion. Is this testimony trustworthy? Richard Stauffer mentions it but only speaks in the conditional mode (“Calvin et la catholicité évangélique,” RTP 115 [1983]: 141-42). The younger Calvin must have impressed Luther favorably since one of Luther’s letters to Bucer, dated October 14, 1539, asks Bucer to convey Luther’s greetings to Johannes Sturm and Jean Calvin, “whose small books I have read with distinct pleasure (quorum libellos cum singulari voluptate legi),” as quoted (Latin) by Pollet, Martin Bucer, 1:159 (letter 3324, vol. 8 of the Briefe, Weimar Ausgabe of Luther’s Werke, 569-70). Kaufman, “Luther and Calvin—One Reformation,” 163, issues a warning: “One ought not to take this friendly signal for more than it is worth, for, in his table-talk about the same time, Luther complained that Calvin conceals his opinion on the Supper: ‘one should not read too much the books of these people!’” (quoting from vol. 5 of the Tischreden Weimar Ausgabe, no. 5303 [dated October 19, 1540], 5119-21). Kaufmann, “Luther and Calvin—One Reformation,” 163-64, also mentions that Luther’s last statement on Calvin (c. 1545) is rather negative; according to Melanchthon, Luther withdrew his earlier appreciation when he read the Epistle to Sadolet (CO 10/2:432) a second time.
62. Janton, Jean Calvin, ministre de la Parole, 303, cites Calvin’s letter 3083 from July 1559, in which he describes the Institutes as “the book which, among my works, surpasses all others and occupies the most remarkable rank.”
63. Calvin would have been ready to add the ordination of elders through the laying on of hands but did not take the next, decisive step; he explains, Inst. 4.19.28: “As far as the true office of presbyter is concerned, which is recommended to us by Christ’s lips, I willingly accord that place to it. For in it there is a ceremony, first taken from Scripture, then one that Paul testifies not to be empty and superfluous, but a faithful token of spiritual grace. However, I have not put it as number three among the sacraments because it is not ordinary or common with all believers, but is a special rite for a particular office.” Cf. 4.3.16, for the meaning of the rite.
64. Tracts 1:100 (Opusc. 152).
65. Tracts 1:80 (45th Sunday, Opusc. 230). The Catechism continues: “Q.—Where are we to seek this word? A.—In the Holy Scriptures, in which it is contained,” and it emphasizes the importance of doctrine and the authority of the pastors who teach it.
66. Tracts 2:157 § 4 (Trois Traités, 105).
67. CTS 46 (CNT 3:22).
68. CTS 122 (CNT 3:577).
69. I am quoting from the magnificent, small-sized, volume Plusieurs Sermons de Iehan Calvin (Geneva: Conrad Badius, 1558) 647; (685 pages, the printing was completed on July 14). The same sermons are also found in CO 35.
70. Billings, “John Calvin and the Sacraments,” 13.
71. In his Last Admonition . . . to Joachim Westphal, Tracts 2:432 (Dernier Avertissement . . . à Joachim Westphal, Opusc. 1678), Calvin protests against the label sacramentarian used to characterize (stigmatize) him and his doctrine. The word did not bear the neutral sense it has today (relative to sacraments), but implied the charge that the theological opponents were destroying the value and truth of the sacraments, sometimes with the prefix kata added, to make the charge more explicit.
72. French: “appendances,” which may be slightly stronger (cf. Inst. 4.14.3).
73. Tracts 2:82 (46th Sunday, Opusc. 231). The French word (1541) for “secondary” is inférieurs.
74. CTS 123 (CNT 3:578; the French adds “also” in the first part of the sentence). Cf. CTS 123 (CNT 3:327), on 1 Cor 4:1: since the sacraments are “appendages” of the mysteries communicated by the Word, the ministers in charge of preaching are “authorized stewards of them.”
75. CO 25:75.
76. Calvin borrows the phrase from Augustine, Tract. Ev. Jo. 80; in the Short Treatise (Tracts 2:179 § 48/Trois Traités, 133) he uses the same reference but with “is heard [or ‘listened to’ or ‘understood’(?)]” instead of “is believed”; CO 5:454, mentions that Nicolas des Gallars, who made the Latin translation, cites Augustine’s statement with intelligitur. Marc Vial, Jean Calvin: Introduction à sa pensée théologique (Geneva: Musée International de la Réforme/Labor & Fides, 2008), 145, though his account is globally fine, stumbles on the “word” which, being joined to the rite, makes it into a sacrament (he writes: “that is, the words of institution,” precisely the understanding which Calvin rejects in our passage).
77. As already pointed to, this sentence was added in the 1539-1541 editions, Janse’s time for a sacramentalistic turn.
78. Short Treatise, Tracts 2:159 § 8 (Trois Traités, 107); Inst. 4.14.3.6, etc.).
79. Short Treatise, Tracts 2:158 § 5 (Trois Traités, 106), and passim.
80. CTS 316 (CO 23:239-40). Actually John King mistranslates the Latin original, vel sculptura et effigies gratiae Dei quae verbum illustrat, which means: “a sculpture and image of God’s grace which better illustrates the word” (quae is nominative; the verb is singular because “sculpture and image” is understood as a hendiadys).
81. Wendel, Calvin: Sources et évolution, 270, candidly raises the issue: “One must ask, then, what precisely the Supper contributes which we cannot get elsewhere? Does the Supper, in those conditions, retain its raison d’être alongside the preaching of the Word? The problem lies at the heart of the sacramental notion which the Reformers elaborated.”
82. McKee, 495 (Pannier, 3:199-200).
83. Tracts 2:158 § 5 (Trois Traités, 105-6).
84. 17th Sermon on 1 Cor 10-11, CO 49:793; cf. 798: “we are so weak in faith and rude”; 802: “because of the rudeness which is ours”; (already mentioned in the 1st sermon, 585, etc.).
85. CO 2:945, Latin text of the Inst. 4.14.6.
86. In the Institutes only, I found the following passages in which the body is compared to a prison cell: 1.15.2; 2.7.13; 3.2.19; 3.3.20; 3.9.4; 4.1.1; 4.15.11 and 12; 4.16.19. The thought already emerges in De psychopannychia, Opusc. 23, or in the Commentary on the Book of Psalms, on Ps 103:14-16, CTS 289. Richard Stauffer observes that the sermons refrain from using this simile (Dieu, la création et la Providence dans la prédication de Calvin [Basler und Berner Studien zur historischen und systematischen Theologie 33; Bern: Peter Lang], 1978), 206; the sermons, however, are far from valuing bodiliness!
87. Billings, “John Calvin and the Sacraments,” 10.
88. John Calvin, A Defence of the Secret Providence of God (trans. Henry Cole; London: Sovereign Grace Union, 1927), 273-74 (Réponse aux calomnies . . . touchant la providence secrète de Dieu, “créé et infirme et prompt à révoltement,” in Opusc. 1784; infirmus, et ad defectionem flexibilis, CO 9:291; the English translation tends to soften Calvin’s expression). I dealt with this aspect of Calvin’s doctrine in my “Calvin’s Theological Anthropology,” in John Calvin and Evangelical Theology: Legacy and Prospect (ed. Sung Wook Chung; Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009), 75-78.
89. Billings, “John Calvin and the Sacraments,” 13, suggests that the Supper, according to the last passage, is an icon of the gospel—without making it explicit, Billings insinuates that Calvin positively alludes to the sacramental views of Eastern Orthodoxy. The basis is the Greek adverb which Calvin has introduced in his Latin text, eikotôs in the first editions (as I was able to check) and later eikonikôs. Yet the presence of such an adverb is not enough to warrant the idea of a reference to the theology of icons, of which there is not the slightest trace in the context, and Calvin translated into French au vif (“graphically,” “from life”). The sermon preached on March 26, 1559, on Matt 28:1-10, just to add one example among many, underlines that we receive the substance of Jesus Christ by means of the gospel and of faith, but that the Lord, “considering our weakness and dullness,” has added the Supper “and shows himself there as our Head as in a painting from life” (Psalmpredigten, Passions-, Oster-, und Pfingstpredigten [vol. 7 of Supplementa Calviniana; ed. Erwin Mülhaupt; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchnener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1981], 90).
90. CTS 126 (CNT 3:72). This commentary, the first one (1539), was written at the time of Janse’s supposed turn toward sacramentalism.
91. CTS 711-12 (CNT 2:878).
92. CO 12:728. The Commentary on 1 Cor 12:13 also rejects the idea that baptism is a “cause” (the word is used in French), CTS 341 (CNT 3:452), as does that on Mark 16:16, CTS (Harmony of the Gospels) 3:303 (CNT 1:759): baptism “is not added to faith, as if it were the half of the cause of our salvation, but as a testimony.”
93. Alexandre Ganoczy, Calvin, théologien de l’église et du ministère (Unam Sanctam 48; Paris: Cerf, 1964), 120 (Ganoczy notes, p. 121, a dialectical tension).
94. Ganoczy (ibid., 121 n. 262) underlines that the Council of Trent did not use causa in its canons on the sacraments, as Hugh of Saint-Victor had started to do (in the 12th century). According to Ganoczy: “Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent Fathers tried to make a synthesis of the causal aspect (‘continetur’) and the dynamic aspect (‘confertur’).”
95. Inst. 4.14.17: “We must beware lest we be led into a similar error through what was written a little too extravagantly by the ancients to enhance the dignity of the sacraments. That is, to think that a hidden power is joined and fastened to the sacraments by which they of themselves confer the grace of the Holy Spirit upon us, as wine is given in a cup, while the only function divinely imparted to them is to attest and ratify for us God’s good will toward us”; 4.14.26: “Perhaps those immoderate praises of the sacraments which we read in ancient writers concerning our signs have deceived these miserable Sophists [the contemporary Roman Catholic theologians and late Scholastics]. Such as Augustine’s statement: ‘The sacraments of the old law only promised the Savior; but ours give salvation.’”
96. Inst. 4.16.20 and 21, faith, likely, being not yet given (§ 19: “I would not rashly affirm that they are endowed with the same faith as we experience in ourselves, or have entirely the same knowledge of faith—this I prefer to leave undetermined”).
97. Tracts 2:170 § 30 (Trois Traités, 121).
98. Tracts 2:176 § 41 (Trois Traités, 129).
99. CO 1:105, eadem virtute spirituali, and McKee, 509 (Pannier, 3:222).
100. McKee, 518 (Pannier, 3:238; CO 1:115).
101. McKee, 580 (Pannier, 4:66; CO 1:138). As soon as the Inst. of 1536 (“Zwinglianizing” period in Janse’s scheme), one encounters the typical phrase “to be shown truly and efficaciously” (CO 1:123: vere et efficaciter exhiberi).
102. Confessio fidei de Eucharistia, CO 9:712.
103. Letter 2607, CO 16:429; he adds this important comment, 430: “I use the word efficacy with this intention in mind: not to confuse what we must keep distinct, but in order to rule out the transfusion of substance. I say that we feed [pasci] efficaciously on the substance of the body and blood of Christ, because Christ, by the wondrous and incomprehensible power of his Spirit, produces this effect [efficit] that we be one with him: that his flesh vivify us: that his life penetrate into our souls.”
104. 2d sermon on 1 Cor 10-11, CO 49:593-94.
105. Letter 3986, CO 20:73. Let us add one more quotation from a sermon, the 54th sermon on the Harmony of the Gospels,CO 46:679: “Jesus, indeed, does not bring forward here vain figures, to give us fun, as if a farce was being played on the stage. . . . He accomplishes (I say) what he promises and shows us.”
106. Tracts 2:162 § 15 (Trois Traités, 111). The spiritual mystery of our union with Christ “is therefore figured to us by visible signs, according as our weakness requires, in such manner, nevertheless, that it is not a bare figure but is combined with the reality and substance,” hence the transfer of the name “body” to the bread.
107. One example rarely quoted: the Commentary on Isa 6:7, CO 36:133.
108. Stauffer, “Calvin et la catholicité évangélique,” 4, mentions (following W. Nijenhuis) that Calvin agreed to sign the Augsburg Confession in its primitive version (1530), which uses “distribute” for the body and blood of Christ (as already mentioned, Melanchthon in 1540 replaced “distribute” by “exhibit”). In his letter 3140 to Bullinger (December 1559), Calvin tells of another word changed: he says he obtained from Melanchthon that he should take out the adverb realiter, CO 17:689.
109. Short Treatise, Tracts 2:162-63 § 15 (Trois Traités, 111-12); Commentary on 1 Cor 10:3, CTS 268 (CNT 3:409): “Papists confound the reality and the sign; profane men, as, for example, Svenckfeldius, and the like, separate the signs from the realities. Let us maintain a middle course”; Inst. 4.17.5: “Now here we ought to guard against two faults. First, we should not, by too little regard for the signs, divorce them from their mysteries, to which they are so to speak attached. Secondly, we should not, by extolling them immoderately, seem to obscure somewhat the mysteries themselves.” One could multiply quotations.
110. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 164 n. 3; quoting letter 880, CO 12:483, from February 1547 (by the way, it does not suggest that Calvin was “diplomatically” yielding to Bullinger).
111. CO 7:494.
112. Tracts 2:88, 52d Sunday (CO 6:126, for the Latin version).
113. The language that comes nearest to it clearly refers to human subjectivity or psychology: “The sacraments, therefore, are exercises which make us more certain of the trustworthiness of God’s Word” (Inst. 4.14.6).
114. Cicero, according to my dictionaries, uses ex parte in the following ways: maxima ex parte, most often; omni ex parte, in every regard; ex aliqua parte, on the other side, from another point of view.
115. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 684 in Brunschvicg’s edition, 257 in Lafuma’s.
116. The sentence was introduced in 1539 (as indicated in Pannier, 4:11).
117. CTS 66 on Gal 3:1 (CNT 3:691). On efficacy, the same language used for the sacraments is found for the Word in the Commentary on Rom 11:14, CTS 330 (CNT 3:201).
118. Commentary on 1 Cor 13:12, CTS 362 (CNT 3:464): “For we have in the word (in so far as it is expedient for us) a naked and open revelation of God, and it has nothing intricate in it.”
119. Tracts 2:158 § 5 (Trois Traités, 105). Calvin goes on to say that the same applies to the Supper; “distributed” is also used, Tracts 2:162 § 14.
120. CTS, on 1 Cor 3:7, 106 (CNT 3:316-17).
121. For instance, Inst. 4.14.16; 4.15.17 (“Even if all men are liars and faithless, still God does not cease to be trustworthy. Even if all men are lost, Christ remains salvation”) and 33 (recalling the parable of the Sower).
122. Tracts 2:163 § 16 (Trois Traités, 112).
123. On 1 Cor 11:24, CTS 319-20 (CNT 3:439).
124. Auguste Lecerf, “L’élection et le sacrement,” in Etudes calvinistes (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1949), 40.
125. Tracts 2:163 § 16 (Trois Traités, 112). On that page (as he does elsewhere) Calvin affirms, for believers exclusively, a relationship of similarity between the partaking of the sign and the partaking of the res/grace (as . . . so) and of concomitancy (the substance is conjoined); he does not go farther, and does not assign causality to the sign.
126. Regarding the use of “mystery,” a clarification may be helpful. Calvin sometimes applies the word to the sacrament, but what is the exact import: is it a legacy of tradition? the usual sacramental metonymy? something else? In most occurrences, however, the mystery is not of the Supper as such, but is the mystery of our union to Jesus Christ, as attested in Eph 5:29-30 (cf. CTS 127 [CNT 3:824]), the mystery which the Supper represents and ratifies (on ratification or confirmation, more below). It so happens that some scholars make an illegitimate transfer at this point. So Ronald Wallace (whose personal remembrance I cherish), in Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 220-21, appeals to Inst. 4.17.7 and 24, but Calvin comments on our union with Christ, that union which we also enjoy, according to his exegesis of John 6, apart from the Supper. Wallace also affirms that “at the heart of the sacrament Calvin freely recognizes that there takes place a miracle” (Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 219) and he refers to the Commentary on Matt 28:2, CO 45:795; neither the French text, CNT 1:732, nor the Latin one, mentions the sacraments (the word is not found, nor “baptism” nor “Supper,” only externis notis et symbolis may bring the thought to mind); the Commentary on Isa 7:12, CTS 209 (CO 36:153), says of baptism and the Supper that they comprise no miracle (at least for human sense, for the Spirit works mirabiliter).
127. Henry Strohl, Luther, sa vie et sa pensée (2d ed.; Strasburg: Oberlin, 1953), 205 n. 1, indicates that such is Luther’s own meaning: “One should always translate ‘promissio’ as ‘offer’, for in German Luther says ‘Zusage’.” Pace Wilhelm H. Neuser, “Calvins Verständnis der Heiligen Schrift,” in Calvinus Sacrae Scripturae Professor. Calvin as Confessor of Holy Scripture (ed. Wilhelm H. Neuser; International Congress on Calvin Research 1990; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 44.
128. The stress in Calvin and the Reformed bears on the work of the Spirit “with the Word,” cum verbo, whereas Lutherans emphasize “through the Word,” per verbum, but these accents are not mutually exclusive. Cf. Calvin’s Commentary on Rom 10:17, CTS 311-12 (CNT 3:189).
129. Tracts 2:158 § 5 (Trois Traités, 106).
130. Tracts 2:160 § 10 (Trois Traités, 108).
131. Tracts 2:82-83, 46th Sunday (the French version, Opusc. 231).
132. CTS 321 on 11:24 and 324 on 11:26 (CNT 3:440 and 442). We select such statements, which evidence predominantly psychological-epistemological-pedagogical interests, from the period Janse labels “Lutheranizing.” Janse in his essay (“Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 55), esteems that Calvin in this Commentary “distanced himself . . . from the noetic interpretation of the commemoratio”; I see nothing that would warrant such a conclusion; the argument he brings forward (on p. 56) is the affirmation of Christ’s presence in Calvin’s comments on 11:25 (actually on 11:24, in fine, CO 49:489), but this spiritual presence does not alter the ordinary sense of commemoration: “Christ is absent from it in the sense in which the Supper is a commemoration. For Christ is not visibly present as the symbols are which excite our remembrance by representing him,” CTS 322 (CNT 3:441).
133. Catechism, Tracts 2:88 as quoted above, 52d Sunday (Opusc. 235).
134. So Marcel understands, La communication du Christ, 29-30 (with a development in three points). The psycho-pedagogical advantage of figurative language stands out, for instance, from the Commentary on John 6:35 and the symbol of “bread,” CTS 219 (CNT 2:129): “This figure is better adapted to teach ignorant persons than a simple style. . . . For when we learn that Christ is the bread by which our souls must be fed, this penetrates more deeply into our hearts than if Christ simply said that he is our life.”
135. Letter 880, CO 12:484. He immediately adds that Christ is “exhibited” to us by the gospel.
136. Ibid., 483.
137. Ibid.; Bullinger will then ask: “By themselves?” and Calvin answer: “Never! But inasmuch as they are subservient to faith . . .”
138. Tracts 3:157, on Canon 4 (Opusc. 987; CO 7:494, quum fidei serviunt).
139. CO 7:701, also quoted and translated into French by Ganoczy, Calvin, théologien de l’église et du ministère, 124 (Ganoczy perfectly gets the meaning).
140. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 58, quoting from CO 49:485. In the French version, the proposition reads, the first words included (also quoted by Janse in Latin, n. 112): “The promise is annexed to the command [eat and drink] as a condition: hence, it does not produce its effect, if the condition is not fulfilled.”
141. This very same Commentary included. On 1 Cor 5:8, Calvin emphasizes that we feed continually on our paschal Lamb, and does not once mention the Supper, CTS 156 (CNT 3:345): “He was sacrificed once, and on this condition, that the efficacy of this one oblation should be everlasting. What remains now is, that we eat, not once a year, but continually”; he calls the Passover a “sacrament” of the Christ who was to come, and denounces “the sacrilege of the papal mass,” but does not say a word of the Lord’s Supper, does not avail himself of the opportunity of introducing it as the instrument by which we feed on Christ—the whole emphasis falls on the fulfillment of the OT type in Christ.
142. On 1 Cor 11:24, CTS 316 (CNT 3:437). The French diction of the passage is still more colorful.
143. CTS 318 (CNT 3:438).
144. What follows, on 11:25, CTS 326 (CNT 3:441), is worth quoting, on the name covenant used for sacraments: “This will be of no small importance for understanding the nature of the sacraments, for if they are covenants, then they contain promises, by which consciences may be roused to an assurance of salvation. Hence it follows that they are not merely outward signs of profession before men, but are inwardly, too, helps to faith.” The reference is regularly to conscience and faith.
145. CO 1:102, 107, 108 (sigilla, quibus promissiones Dei obsignantur). McKee, 498 (Pannier, 3:199, 204).
146. Tracts 2:158 § 6 (Trois Traités, 106).
147. On Titus 3:5, CTS 49 (CNT 4:340).
148. CTS 183 (CO 36:133).
149. Calvin admonishes believers who think their faith is strong enough to enable them to do without the sacraments: “Better for them to pray with the apostles that the Lord increase their faith than confidently to pretend such perfection of faith as no one of the children of men ever attain or ever will attain in this life” (Inst. 4.14.7).
150. E.g., 2d sermon on 1 Cor 10-11, CO 49:597, 598; 18th sermon, CO 49:804 (a pledge that Christ “daily communicates himself to us”).
151. CO 6:130 (corresponding to Tracts 2:90); in French only témoignage.
152. Tracts 2:158 § 6 (Trois Traités, 106).
153. The Latin text reads: quasi dato pignore, confirmetur. Concerning the relationship with the future resurrection, Wendel, Calvin: Sources et évolution, 269, quotes from the Last Admonition to Joachim Westphal (CO 9:208; Opusc. 1649; translated in Tracts 2:398): “We must be one with him not only in soul but in flesh,” a statement which he interprets as tending toward sacramentalism and considers “hard to reconcile” with other propositions (268). The whole passage may be quoted at length (the point in debate is St. Cyprian’s position): “That our flesh is refreshed by that spiritual meat and drink I deny not. For we have communion with Christ in the hope of a blessed resurrection, and therefore we must be one with him not only in soul but in flesh; just as each of us in respect of the flesh is said to be a member of Christ, and the body of each a temple of the Holy Spirit,” but (as St. Cyprian discerned) “our connection with him neither mingles persons nor unites substances, but associates affections and confederates wills.” Calvin’s intention does not seem to affirm a real transformation of our bodies in the present age (“a frail tabernacle, which will be in a short time reduced to nothing,” on Phil 3:21, CTS 94 (CNT 4:47), nor to bind our resurrection hope to physical participation in the eucharistic rite, but to remind his readers that God’s promise also refers to the body, as it also calls to a bodily behavior which corresponds to grace received (sanctification); cf. Inst. 3.25.7-8, Commentary on 1 Cor 6:15, CTS 179 (CNT 3:359), and the Brève instruction chrétienne, adapted by Pierre Courthial, RRef 8, no. 30 (1957/2): 70. Of this truth, the bodily character of the sacraments is a sign. To go back to the Catechism answer, Calvin is careful not to say that our body now shares in (eternal) life, but “in the symbol of life.” Cf. a similar thought in the Inst. 4.17.32. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 157, underlines the reference to the body, as sacramentalists are inclined to do, but he notes that Calvin thinks of a “spiritual connection.”
154. E.g., on Matt 24:23, CTS (Harmony), 3:106 (CNT 1:610); on Heb 2:4, CTS 48 (CNT 4:377); on Isa 7:10, CTS 1:206 (CO 36:151; also cited by Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 74).
155. On Isa 7:12, CTS 1:209 (CO 36:153; also cited by Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 74).
156. Strictly speaking, Calvin’s statement or confession refers not to the sacrament itself, but to our union with Jesus Christ effected by the Holy Spirit, which is conjoined with the Supper if faith is there but is not bound to it (as shown above). When he amalgamates miracles and sacraments, Calvin noticeably moves to the theme of the hidden miracle-mystery which God operates when believers receive the sacraments (the theme facilitates bringing together miracles and sacraments). The gap, however, remains unbridged, for “miracle” does not mean the same thing: the supernatural work of our union with Christ is the fulfillment of the promise made to faith, not a seal added to authenticate the Word.
157. Calvin repeats: “We must always consider the long distance which is between us and God,” Congrégation sur la divinité du Seigneur Jésus Christ (1 Jn 1:1-5), in the small volume published by Conrad Badius in 1558, p. 13 (I numbered the pages in that first sermon), as translated by Leroy Nixon, Sermons on the Deity of Christ, CTS 15.
158. 1st sermon on 1 Cor 10-11, CO 49:585. Cf. 12th sermon on Eph 2:11-13, CO 51:391, Calvin similarly says: “When our Lord Jesus declares that he gives us his body and blood as if from hand to hand [comme de main en main] . . .”
159. Once, however, Calvin ventures the thought that, through his ministers, Jesus Christ himself is preaching: 14th sermon on Eph 2:16-19, CO 51:413.
160. CTS (Harmony), 1:177 (CNT 1:111).
161. On Eph 5:26, CTS 123 (CNT 4:822).
162. 2d sermon on the Ascension, CO 48:600 (in Badius’s edition, 325), as quoted in English translation in Wallace, Calvins’s Doctrine of Word and Sacrament, 172.
163. On John 4:2, CTS 124 (CNT 2:69).
164. CTS 125 (CNT 2:70).
165. Many contemporary theologians distance themselves from the theme and thesis, and seek for nuances, but the view does seem to correspond to the deeper logic of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. The Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, which enjoys high prestige among all, states, after mentioning the Incarnation: Quod salutis divinum mysterium nobis revelatur et continuatur in Ecclesia (which divine mystery of salvation is revealed to us and continued in the church).
166. E.g., in the encyclical letter Ad catholici sacerdotii from Pius XI (1935), alter est Christus, no. 2275 in my edition (31st) of Denzinger’s Enchiridion symbolorum (ed. H. Denzinger and K. Rahner). The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1548, cites the encyclical from Pius XII, Mediator Dei [et hominum] (1947), which says of the priest that he acts virtute ac persona ipsius Christi (by the power of Christ and in his very “person,” that is, his role, name, status).
167. We read the principle at the beginning of Inst. 4 (1.11): “In order that the title ‘church’ may not deceive us, every congregation that claims the name ‘church’ must be tested by the standard as by a touchstone.” Calvin must strike a fine balance. On the one hand, against Anabaptists and the perfectionist stance he ascribes to them, he emphasizes the blots and wrinkles of the church in its present state (for instance, Inst. 4.8.11-12); on the other hand, he devotes one chapter to the critique of the Roman church as a false church: Catholic polemic writers “put a foul harlot in place of Christ’s sacred bride” (Inst. 4.2.3; the French adds “they use the title church as make-up for their synagogue”). But he, then, grants to the Roman Catholic church “traces of the church” surviving, “vestiges” left, some “portion” (§ 11), and finally concedes: “We by no means deny that the churches under his [the Pope’s] tyranny remain churches” (§ 12).
168. Letter 2042, CO 12:306, discussing a passage from St. Augustine (maybe an interpolated one).
169. On Eph 1:22-23, CTS 26 (CNT 3:765-66), he is careful to rule out what some would wrongly draw from 1 Cor 12:12, the idea that Christ would not be complete without the church (in his Commentary of this last verse, CTS 341 [CNT 3:451], he is too brief for a clear conclusion); on Eph 4:15, CTS 92 (CNT 3:803), “no man is excepted, all are enjoined to be subject, and take their own places in the body” under the Head; on Col 1:18, CTS 19-20 (CNT 4:67); cf. on Heb 3:3, CTS 69 (CNT 4:390): “all ought to be brought down to their own state because they ought to be in subjection to the head and that Christ alone is exempt from this submission, because he is the head.”
170. On 1 Cor 3:22, CTS 121 (CNT 3:326).