Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
What animates the confessional Reformed churches is a holistic theology, piety, and practice lived out in the context of congregations and in the life of the broader institutional church. We are animated by a theology that we share with our Reformed forebears, which we have not amputated or substantially revised. We are animated by our commitment to gathering Sabbath by Sabbath with the covenant community to hear the law and the gospel preached, the sacraments administered, and grace and mercy lived out during the week.

Recently, Trevin Wax crystalized the case for preserving the neo-evangelical coalition, which emerged after World War II and in so doing, for Reformed confessionalists, he has also made the case against the neo-evangelical coalition. What is that the coalition and what are its attractions and problems? Let us go back to the Reformation for a moment to set a baseline. As the Luther began to recover Augustine’s doctrines of sin (i.e., total depravity) and grace (sola gratia), Paul’s doctrine of imputation and his definition of faith (sola fide), along with the biblical distinction between law and gospel (with some help from Augustine) and the doctrine of sola Scriptura the Reformation message spread from Wittenberg throughout Europe and the British Isles. In the Reformation an evangelical was one who confessed those truths and others. To be an evangelical was to be about the gospel and a very particular understanding of it but, in the Reformation, the evangelicals were so within increasingly distinct ecclesiastical traditions and confessions. That process of distinction is known to scholars as confessionalism, when it is considered as a bottom-up movement and as confessionalization, when it is considered as a top-down movement. By the 1550s there were two distinct Reformation churches: the Lutherans and the Reformed. They had distinct views of the two natures of Christ, the way Scripture regulates worship, and the sacraments among other things.
The Rise Of Trans-Denominational Movements
There did develop in the seventeenth century a trans-denominational movement centering on religious experience, Pietism. This movement was the seedbed for the modern evangelical and neo-evangelical movements. In the eighteenth century another trans-denominational movement emerged, which was related to the Pietists: the revivalists. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revivals of varying kinds swept across the American Colonies (the First Great Awakening), then Europe to a lesser degree, and again in the USA (i.e.,  the Second Great Awakening) and Europe (e.g., the Réveil).
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even as Pietism and Revivalism producing great fervor and social activity (e.g., poverty relief, anti-slavery movements, temperance movements) the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movements were conquering the universities, the intellectuals, and the elites. By the late nineteenth century most in those sets had accepted the rationalism (the superiority of reason over all other authorities), empiricism (the superiority of sense experience over all other authorities), or romanticism (the superiority of the inner life over all other authorities) and had lost confidence in Scripture and the historic Christian faith. In response the children of Pietism, Revivalism, and those who still affirmed the old Protestant confessions, theology, piety, and practice sought to defend the fundamentals of the historic Christian faith.
By the end of World War II, the West was tired of near constant conflict, whether marital or ecclesiastical and the fundamentalist movement had become increasingly narrow. The great hero of the early fundamentalist movement, J. Gresham Machen, was dead and some of those who had studied with him wanted to retain his high view of Scripture but they also wanted to move on. They wanted to influence the broader culture and to leave behind his commitment to the Westminster Standards and his Presbyterian view of the church and sacraments. Scholars call this movement, led by Carl F. H. Henry, Henry Ockenga, and Bill Graham, among others, neo-evangelicalism. This movement would seek to be both faithful to a small number of core theological commitments and culturally influential. To that end they began to build institutions. They built Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California where they would seek to produce theologically conservative graduates who were solid like Old Westminster (Machen’s school) but not ecclesiastically narrow like Machen nor pugnacious as he was accused of being. They founded a magazine and located it in Washington, D.C. the capitol of the USA and of the world.
That project lasted about three decades. The Baby-Boomer children of the neo-evangelical founders were a generation that knew not Machen. They did not see the point of holding on to the historic doctrine of Scripture while jettisoning so much of the rest of Christian history (e.g., the Reformation confessions, churches, and sacramental convictions). This move, symbolized by Fuller’s revision of their view of Scripture (i.e., “limited inerrancy”) provoked the “Battle for the Bible” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, the leading edges of the progressive movement within the neo-evangelical establishment was also pushing the boundaries on the doctrine of God by arguing that God cannot know or control the future. They called themselves “Open Theists.” Others revised the doctrine of the Trinity so argue that the divine unity was more one of society than one of being. There were other revisions such as Daniel Fuller’s proposal that justification is not through faith alone but through faithfulness, which, mutatis mutandis, continues to reverberate in the theology of John Piper, one of the fathers of the so-called Young Restless and Reformed movement. About the same time, in the early 1990s, some of the older neo-evangelicals (e.g., J. I. Packer) along with their more progressive evangelical children sought to negotiate a settlement on the Reformation doctrine of justification in order to facilitate a cultural common cause in the face of an increasingly hostile and post-Christian culture. The late 1990s saw another wave of progressive evangelical movements, now increasingly led by Generation Xers. They called themselves “emergent” and they developed two factions, one slightly more conservative of the past and the other more critical of the past.
The YRR movement, which was stimulated by the theological drift among the evangelical children of the neo-evangelicals, sought to get the old neo-evangelical band back together. This impulse in the 1990s and early 200s produced a flurry of coalitions, e.g., The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, which was a response, c. 1995, to the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” documents and movement. About a decade later we saw the emergence of The Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel, among others.
Read More

Written by R. Scott Clark |
Monday, October 18, 2021
Had we only this one case to which we could point to show the dangers of claims of extra-biblical revelation, it would be enough. Sadly, however, we have hundreds and probably thousands of cases to which we can easily point to show the dangers of claims of continuing revelation.

Introduction
I am catching up Christianity Today‘s podcast series, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. The August 30, 2021 episode, “Questioning the Origin Myth: A Rise and Fall Short Story,” centered around what, in Reformed theology, piety, and practice, we call the internal call to ministry. In our understanding of Scripture and its outworking in the life of the church there are two aspects to the call to ministry, the internal and the external. The former describes that God-given sense within a man that he ought to become a minister of God’s Word, that he ought to become a preacher. The latter refers to the confirmation which comes from the visible church. In Reformed theology, piety, and practice, the two go together. To illustrate this there is an old story that circulates in the Reformed churches about the farmer who, upon looking up in the sky while plowing, sees the letters PC in the sky. He gets off his tractor, goes to the preacher and tells him what he has seen and that he thinks it means, “Preach Christ.” So, as the story goes, the minister tells him to write a sermon and then gives him the pulpit next week. The farmer does as instructed. After his sermon he asked the minister, “Well, what do you think?” The minister replies, “I think PC means Plant Corn.”
I suppose lots of traditions tell this story or they should but for us it means that the confirmation of the visible church is essential. We do not leave a man to decide on his own whether he is called to ministry. Thus, it was interesting to hear Mike Cosper narrate the story around Mark Driscoll’s sense of internal call. Here is a clip.
According to Cosper and others whom he interviewed for this episode, this is the story that Driscoll told over and again. Indeed, Cosper illustrates how often and consistently Driscoll has told the story of his call by playing several clips in succession. The discrepancy between the way Driscoll accounts for his call and the way the Reformed think about the call is notable.
Its Churchlessness
According to Driscoll’s repeated, public testimony he knew with certainty that certain things must happen: he must plant churches, study the Word, marry Grace, and train young men. He knew all this, however, as one of his friends at the time pointed out to him, before he was ever actually involved in a local congregation. This is remarkable. It is consistent with the nature and history of American revivalism going back, in some aspects, to the First Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century and entirely consistent with the theology, piety, and practice of the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.
Often these movements frequently emerged outside the visible church. In this regard Driscoll is a classic American religious entrepreneur. He knew his market (or his marks), his message, and his method before he was ever accountable to a visible church. In Reformed practice, however, that should never be. In our understanding of the Scriptures and the life of the church, a young man usually grows up in a congregation or is at least a part of a congregation long enough for them to begin to see in him a giftedness for ministry. They take an opportunity to test those gifts in various ways. Only after they have had time to get to know him, after he has been catechized, after he has been evaluated do they ordinarily commend him to the church as a candidate for ministry. Then he made a candidate for ministry, i.e., put “under care” of one of the assemblies of the churches (e.g., consistory/session, classis or presbytery) and sent off to seminary to get the eduction a minister ought to have. He should learn the original Biblical languages so that he is not reliant upon English translations, the Old Testament, the New Testament, Biblical Theology, church history and historical theology, systematic theology, the confessions of the churches, and the practice of pastoral ministry. A serious and genuine ministerial education normally takes 3 or 4 years. As part of that process the candidate serves as an intern in a congregation under the supervision of an experienced minister. He is also ordinarily licensed by the churches to exhort in order to serve the churches (by providing pulpit supply) and to gain experience. Only then is he presented to the regional church (presbytery or classis) for examination prior to becoming available for a call.
Read More

Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
The [Westminster] Divines confessed that inward images are forbidden: they are the root of the external images that are obviously forbidden. The rejection of internal images is a good and necessary consequence of the rejection of external images. The god we fashion in our hearts and minds are just as idolatrous as icons of the Father, the Son incarnate, and the Spirit.

Q. 109. What sins are forbidden in the second commandment?
A. The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counseling, commanding, using, and any wise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself; the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever; all worshiping of it, or God in it or by it; the making of any representation of feigned deities, and all worship of them, or service belonging to them; all superstitious devices, corrupting the worship of God, adding to it, or taking from it, whether invented and taken up of ourselves, or received by tradition from others, though under the title of antiquity, custom, devotion, good intent, or any other pretense whatsoever; simony; sacrilege; all neglect, contempt, hindering, and opposing the worship and ordinances which God hath appointed (Westminster Larger Catechism, 1647
After the fall we humans are all idolaters at heart. By nature, our first instinct is to fashion gods for ourselves with our hands or in our hearts and minds. When the committee that produced the Westminster Larger Catechism got to the exposition of the Ten Commandments they re-articulated the Reformed rule of worship (i.e., the regulative principle of worship): we may worship God only in the way he has authorized. This rule is biblical and connects us to the ancient Christian church. Other traditions (e.g., the Lutherans, Anglicans, and Evangelicals) ask first whether God has prohibited something in worship. We ask whether God has authorized it. These are distinct views with different outcomes and consequences. Thus, following the consensus of the ancient church, which prohibited images of Christ until the iconodules overthrew that consensus in the eighth century, the Reformed churches across Europe and the British Isles removed images of the holy Trinity, including images of God the Son incarnate, from the Reformed churches and forbid their use.
However much even Reformed people continue to chafe under the rule of worship and the ancient iconoclast position, judging by the objections I have heard from seminary students, fellow ministers, and by the correspondence I have received over the years, one phrase in particular troubles critics and even those who would otherwise subscribe the Larger Catechism: the prohibition of mental images: “either inwardly in our mind…”. Is this phrase warranted or is it an example of over-zealous “Puritans” going just a bit too far in their desire to purify the worship of the churches and prosecute sin to the inner reaches of every man?
The English Reformed gathered at Westminster, who commissioned and comprised the committee did not go too far in Q/A 109. Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) agreed with the divines:
The seventh sin is to make physical representations of God in our minds. God reveals Himself to the soul of men as a Spirit, doing so in a manner much more devoid of the physical than can be expressed. When the natural man initially thinks upon God, however, he spoils this initial reflection upon God and changes that which is spiritual into something physical. One will either seek to maintain this physical representation of God, finding delight in creating various representations of God in the mind, or it will be contrary to the will of the person engaged in thought, who wishes to have spiritual thoughts of God but cannot do so—this being caused either externally due to people speaking of God, or due to Satan’s influence upon the imagination. The latter is not the sin of the person, but of Satan; that is, if the person is only passively involved, abhorring this, and laboring to resist it (John 4:24).1
Read More

Written by R. Scott Clark |
Thursday, September 23, 2021
There is such a thing as a message of “cheap grace” and the Dela Cruzes would seem to be the poster children for it. Any preacher who only offers “free salvation” but who omits “take up your cross” as a consequence (not a prior condition) of that grace is a preaching a false, antinomian, Gnostic, therapeutic gospel.

Julie Roys ran a story yesterday by Sarah Einselen about a new congregation, which apparently opened this summer, in San Diego. Living Faith Church is a small congregation pastored by a husband and wife team, Stephen and Angela Dela Cruz. The salacious part of the story is that she was (is?) a porn star and he is a business coach. They met at the former Bethany University, which closed in 2011, an Assemblies of God related school. Together they claim to run ten multi-million dollar businesses. They do not say of what sort. It is not clear whether Angela Dela Cruz is still active in the porn industry but the two are clearly capitalizing on her past to generate “buzz” and interest in this congregation. One social media ad identifies her as an “adult actress,” which is code for pornstar. Judging by what one can see from videos of the services the porn angle may be generating more outrage than new members. They are clearly meeting in a very small space with relatively few people. What is more impressive, however, is how formulaic everything is. We see three musicians on a platform singing the same awful “praise music” as every other would-be mega-church in America. The messages seem to be firmly in the middle of the American evangelical therapeutic religion. Stephen is the poor-man’s Joel Osteen and he is going to help you live your best life now.
Your Porn Life Now
For the sake of discussion, since they are clearly capitalizing on her life in the porn business, let us presume that the Stephen and Angela believe and are teaching others that a being a Christian and living a judgment-free successful life are entirely compatible.  The congregation’s statement of faith looks as if it were written by students from an AOG “university” circa 2011. Whoever wrote the confession wants to be an orthodox, Arminian, Baptistic, Pentecostal. It has a relatively high view of Scripture:
The Bible is God’s Word to all people. It was written by human authors under the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit. Because it was inspired by God, the Bible is truth without any mixture of error and is completely relevant to our daily lives.
The Holy spirit is said to be given “subsequent to salvation” and the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” is a second blessing. “This immersion into Spirit-led living provides the Christian with the power to live a fruitful, victorious life, understanding of spiritual truth, and boldness in sharing the good news with others. He also gives us spiritual gifts. As Christians, we seek to live under His daily guidance.” If Mrs Dela Cruz is impenitent about her role in the porn industry, a major source of human trafficking and exploitation and a source of spiritual destruction for many, then they are proposing a definition of the victorious higher life hitherto unknown. Without a hint of irony their statement of faith unequivocally affirms the existence of a literal hell. Salvation is said to be by grace but the statement offers nothing on the doctrines of mortification of sin or vivification in the new life.
Therapeutic Gnosticism
If the mainstream of American evangelicalism has become entirely captive to what Christian Smith, in 2009, called “moralistic therapeutic deism” much of the rest of it has become a subsidiary: Gnostic therapeutic pentecostalism. In Deism God is largely absent. In Pentecostalism, especially of the sort being marketed by the Dela Cruzes, God is a cosmic Door Dash driver. This is not old-school Pentecostalism, which was rooted in the Holiness tradition. As Marx materialized Hegel (by turning the dialectical process of history into class warfare) so the real second blessing offered by the likes of Stephen and Angela Dela Cruz is an emotionally satisfying, financially prosperous life now. Joel Osteen has routed the Azusa Street Revival. Like all the other second-rate business coaches in the world they have the secrets to success. Mind you, unlike Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos, they are not actually producing wealth themselves but they will show you how you can do it. Instead of cheesy late-night television commercials they are holding church services with the requisite praise music, which promises to give participants that shot of endorphins followed by a rousing pep talk.
This is fundamentally Gnostic because it offers a perverse salvation through secret knowledge (Gnosis). This, of course, is what the Gnostics offered in the second century. Like the Gnostics, they hijacked Christianity through redefining terms and changing the story dramatically. In Gnosticism the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was rendered a mean, demiurge tied to creation, which was said to be inherently evil. The immaterial, i.e., the spiritual, was said to be good. The key to deliverance from the material world is a secret known only to true Gnostics. They developed an elaborate hierarchy of being and promised to guide followers through the maze. The Jesus of the second-century Gnostic texts is not the Jesus of the Gospels.
Read More

Written by R. Scott Clark |
Friday, September 3, 2021
Ministry is not an exercise of power. It is fundamentally service. It is the opposite of lording it over. The imagery here is not that of glass towers full of the powerful but of the Suffering Servant girding himself with a towel and washing his disciples’ feet (John 13;12).

It is an old habit but on Mondays I often reflect on the nature of pastoral ministry and the challenges pastors face.In truth, Monday is the second day of the week but for pastors everything leads up to the Lord’s Day. All their prayers and preparations have been pointing toward Sundays. For them it is the culmination of the week. On Mondays they naturally reflect on what happened and on how it went.
Background and Bona Fides
Yesterday and this morning I have been thinking about the church-growth movement in light of what the New Testament says (and illustrates) about ministry. When I was first introduced to the church-growth school of thought, in seminary, I reacted against it but after I was called as young seminary graduate, as an assistant pastor, to a small, near-urban congregation nine minutes north of downtown Kansas City, Missouri my new duties required me to give the church-growth school another look. Perhaps I had been too negative toward the church-growth movement? Perhaps I needed to be more open-minded? For most of six years I tried to learn what I could from the movement. I studied and practiced evangelism. We expanded the diaconal ministry per Tim Keller’s Jericho Road. We tried, within our limits, to implement The Phone’s For You (™) to capitalize on “the law of large numbers,” and Evangelism Explosion (™). I became an EE trainer and taught classes to the congregation and to young people who traveled from across the Plains to Kansas City in the summers for two weeks of ministry and fun. The CRC had SWIM. The OPC had SAIL. We called it Project Jericho. We were going to march around the city, as it were, until the walls fell. Weather permitting (and even when it did not) we stood in parking lots and evangelized. We made fliers for the local St Patrick’s Day parade calling attention to St Patrick’s Christian faith. The ink was not set and my tan gloves turned green. We knocked on doors. I preached in the City Mission. We recorded radio programs and commercials. I imitated Denny Prutow’s idea of a telephone answering machine with a gospel message. We advertised the number in the classified ads in the newspaper (the Craig’s List of its day). I recited that phone number so often that, 30 years later, I can still recite it in my sleep. We sent out hundreds of newsletters each month in hopes of connecting with people and attracting new members. We mailed out evangelistic audio cassettes (think podcasts). We held car washes to raise money for the local shelter for unwed mothers (as an alternative to abortion). Some of us picketed the abortion mill in Johnson County, KS and even the local hospital. I pushed to revise the liturgy and the music to make the church more “seeker-sensitive” and “contemporary.” We became a busy church. Like the Apostle Paul, “I am talking like a madman” (2 Cor 11:23; ESV) in order to say that I am not taking potshots from the sidelines. I gave the church-growth program a fair try.
One day, in passing, one of the young people in my congregation said something to me like this, “You spend all your time and energy trying to reach outsiders but you don’t seem to think about us very much.” That stung but she had a point. I worked hard on my sermons, Sunday School lessons, Bible studies, and catechism classes but I was very much oriented to church growth. I was not very much oriented to what I now understand to be be an ordained means of grace approach to ministry.
For all that I learned and tried one aspect of the church-growth movement, perhaps the most fundamental aspect, always made me uneasy and makes me uneasy to this day: the church-growth model was a theology of glory and it turned ministers, who should be theologians of the cross, into theologians of glory. The selling point of the various methods and mentalities was numerical success: look at this congregation.
Read More

John Calvin was a scholar and recipient of the consolation that God gives to his suffering people. For him, consolation was not, as we might think, a second prize, a replacement for what we really want but rather, he thought it as bringing us the most important thing: Christ, his grace, and his mercy.
Wikipedia, that ubiquitous source of unimpeachable scholarship, defines “consolation” as “something of value, when one fails to get something of higher value….” That is precisely the opposite of what John Calvin (1509–64) meant by “consolation.” For Calvin, the consolation that Christ gives to his people, by the gospel, through the Spirit, is not second prize but to be valued above that which we lost. When we consider Calvin, “consolation” might not be the thing we first associate with him. The dominant perception of Calvin in our culture is that of a tyrannical, dyspeptic fellow, who delighted in nothing more than to dispatch a few heretics to the flames before breakfast. That caricature, however, was one drawn by his enemies during his lifetime and sadly, despite the facts, it has stuck for a variety of reasons.
First, the modern picture of Calvin has been skewed badly by the uncritical acceptance by earlier modern historians of partisan caricatures of Calvin and thus, he has been a useful foil for advocates of the modernist religion. Just as the Renaissance scholars juxtaposed themselves as enlightened, in contrast to the allegedly benighted middle ages, so in the various European and British Enlightenments of the 18th and 19th centuries scholars capitalized on sixteenth-century caricatures of Calvin to create a useful whipping boy with which to contrast their own view of the world.
Second, enlightened Modernity went to war against Christian theism, against its doctrines of the Trinity, of God as Creator, of Adam as federal head of humanity, of sin, of grace, of salvation through faith in Christ, and of a divinely instituted church. In short, enlightened Modernity rejected the historic catholic faith and Calvin became a symbol of repressive Christian theism. In place of Christianity, Modernity advocated a religion of a unitarian, unknowable God, of human perfectibility, of the universal fatherhood of God, of the universal fraternity of man, and of human autonomy with respect to all external authorities (e.g., Scripture or the church). For Modernity, nothing was more antithetical to the religion of the Enlightenment than the doctrine of unconditional predestination and thus, in the modern period, Calvin became the theologian of the decree from which writers began to draw inferences about what he must have done in Geneva. The one thing every modern, enlightened person thinks he knows about Calvin is that he killed Servetus. Of course the story was much more complicated and most of what people think they know is false.
The result of the modernist, Enlightenment polemic against Calvin has been what P. E. Hughes called a “popular fantasy” of Calvin as the tyrant of Geneva. Consider a January 2009 article in the New York Times Magazine, which discusses the resurgence of aspects of Reformed theology among evangelicals. To buttress the author’s contention that Calvinism is inherently oppressive she appeals to an unhappy episode in Calvin’s life, suggesting, in effect, that Calvin was a tyrant and thus it is not surprising that his modern followers have similar impulses. To be sure Calvin could be severe with enemies and even friends but he was also a theologian of consolation.
Yes, Calvin was a sinner, but he was more a suffering pilgrim in Geneva than he was a conquering, jack-booted tyrant. He endured regular insults that today would drive most ministers from their pulpits. His opponents discharged firearms outside his house. Some named their dogs after him and threatened him. People made rude comments during sermons and when that was forbidden, they made rude noises in their attempt to thwart his preaching. He was summarily and unjustly fired from his position as minister in the church in Geneva because he dared oppose some of the leading families in Geneva. When, three years later, he was called to return, ostensibly for a short period that turned into 23 years, he obeyed more out of duty than joy.
He married Idelette de Bure in 1540. They were married for nine years. In that time she bore him a son, Jacques, who died in infancy, in August of 1542. Idellete herself died in 1549 leaving Calvin a widower. We do not often think of Calvin as a widower and father who lost an infant child, and Calvin did not encourage others to pity him. He recorded very little about his interior, emotional life and there was no sixteenth-century equivalent of Oprah in Geneva. Nevertheless, Idellette’s suffering and death and the loss of his son “left a mark,” as we say. These aspects of Calvin’s life, however, did not make it into the New York Times Magazine.
It is those who know their sins, who know their need for a Savior, who look to Christ for consolation. John Calvin was just such a one. He found comfort in the good news of Christ’s incarnation, obedience, death, resurrection, and ascension, in justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. He found consolation in his union with Christ, in the sacraments, in corporate and private prayer, in friendship, and in the support of fellow ministers in and around Geneva. Calvin was, as Herman Selderhuis has reminded us, a theologian of the cross.
The Calvin of history, however, was, as Bob Godfrey reminds us, a pilgrim and a pastor, who needed and found consolation in the midst of suffering, in Christ and his work for us, through the work of his Spirit in us, and who ministered that comfort to others. In the following parts of this series we will see how he was an exegete, theologian, and pastor of consolation.
I. Calvin’s Exegesis of Consolation (in Paul)
In the first part we saw that Calvin was a pilgrim who himself needed the consolation of the gospel, given by the Spirit, through the ministry of Word, sacrament, and prayer. He was also a careful, thoughtful, and sophisticated reader of texts and principally Scripture. It is well known that Calvin was deeply influenced by Renaissance humanism. We all know about the Renaissance concern to get back to original sources (ad fontes) and to read them in their original context, according to the original intent of the author. A less well-known aspect of the humanism in which Calvin was trained was concern for the well-being of humans as God’s image bearers.
In his 1539 commentary on Romans we get a picture of how he understood Paul’s doctrine of paraklesis (consolation or comfort). Commenting on Romans 15:4, on the phrase, “through the patience and the consolation of the Scriptures we might have hope,” he recognized that the noun paraklesis might be translated a couple of different ways. He wrote:
The word consolation some render exhortation; and of this I do not disapprove, only that consolation is more suitable to patience, for this arises from it; because then only we are prepared to bear adversities with patience, when God blends them with consolation.
There were two reasons for not translating “paraklesis” as “exhortation,” the first is because “consolation” or “comfort” fit the context better, but the second reason is pastoral, because it is better pastoral theology. One of the chief purposes of Scripture is to “to raise up those who are prepared by patience, and strengthened by consolations, to the hope of eternal life, and to keep them in the contemplation of it.” He made the same choice in his interpretation of paraklesis in his 1548 commentary on Philippians 2:1.
No Pauline epistle focuses more on consolation than 2 Corinthians. In his 1546 commentary on 2 Corinthians Calvin had opportunity to consider the biblical doctrine of consolation at length. On 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, “The God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our tribulation.” Calvin argued that Paul was able to endure “his tribulations with fortitude and alacrity” because of the “support derived from his consolation….” The source of our consolation is the “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” who is the source of blessings, “for where Christ is not, there the beneficence of God is not.”
On verse 4, he noted that the consolation that Paul had received was not for his own benefit but for that of the Corinthians, because “whatever favors God conferred upon him, were not given for his own sake merely, but in order that he might have more in his power for helping others. And, unquestionably, when the Lord confers upon us any favor, he in a manner invites us by his example to be generous to our neighbors.” This he said is particularly true for pastors.
In his comment on 2 Corinthians 2:15 he argued that the comfort spoken of there should not be taken “actively” but “passively,” to mean “that God multiplied his consolations according to the measure of his tribulations.” The troubles of this life are “common to good and bad alike,” but when they happen to “the wicked” there is nothing redemptive in them. When they happen to believers, those Christians “are conformed to Christ, and bear about with them in their body his dying, that the life of Christ may one day be manifested in them.” Because our sufferings are in union with Christ, part of our identity with his sufferings, we are “sustained by the consolations of Christ, so as to prevent him from being overwhelmed with calamities.”
The ground of comfort is extrinsic, it is the promise of God in Christ. It has subjective consequences, however, just as the afflictions of which Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 1:6 refers to our personal experience of misery. Comfort or consolation is the antidote, as it were, for our experience of being “pressed down with anxiety from a feeling of misery.” Consolation refers to the lightening of the mind of grief.
For Calvin, Paul’s sufferings and experience of consolation “flowed out to the whole Church” and served as an encouragement to them that, “inasmuch as they concluded, that God who had sustained and refreshed him in his emergency, would, in like manner, not be wanting to them.” Paul’s sufferings were for the salvation of the Corinthians, not that they were “expiations or sacrifices for sins, but as edifying them by confirming them.” Salvation and comfort were joined “with the view of pointing out the way in which their salvation was to be accomplished.”
Why does God permit us to suffer? On 2 Corinthians 1:9 Calvin argued that we don’t appreciate how “how displeasing to God confidence in ourselves must be” so that, as a corrective, “it is necessary that we should be condemned to death.” The good news is that “God raises the dead. As we must first die, in order that, renouncing confidence in ourselves….” We must begin with despair, but “with the view of placing our hope in God.” He returned to that theme on 2 Corinthians 7:6. The Lord “comforts the lowly.” “Hence a most profitable doctrine may be inferred—that the more we have been afflicted, so much the greater consolation has been prepared for us by God.”
Though he is often pictured as a systematic theologian and though most people give most of their attention to Calvin’s Institutes, in fact Calvin was a preacher and a student of Scripture. His Institutes were harvested out of his biblical commentaries and preaching. So, his conception of the necessity, nature, and source of consolation, for the Christian, was shaped by the way he encountered the biblical teaching about consolation and particularly from his work in the Pauline epistles.
II. His Theology of Consolation (1559 Institutes)
In the previous installment we looked at the way Calvin read Paul’s epistles and how he drew from them a doctrine of consolation, of God’s presence with his people in Christ, by the Spirit, in the gospel, in the sacraments, and in prayer. In this (third) part of this series we consider Calvin as a theologian of consolation.
Read More