Neander refused to adopt the order of the Reformed Church and he would not subscribe to the Heidelberg Catechism. He was censured by the Presbyterium (similar to a presbytery) in October, 1676, and added to the charges concerning his church ministry were accusations regarding his operation of the school. At the school he had developed curriculum and did not seek its approval by the Presbyterium; he rescheduled examinations without approval; and he made repairs on the property without approval. These were the main points against him. So, the Presbyterium presented a declaration to Neander, February 3, 1677, suspending him from directing the school and forbidding him from preaching in the church.

Joachim Neander was born at Bremen, Germany, 1650. His father was a teacher in the local Latin school until he died when Joachim was sixteen years old. After his father’s death, he entered the Reformed University at Bremen to study theology in order to become a minister. At the time, he viewed the ministry as nothing more than a profession that would provide for a good future and job security. However, growing in influence at the time was a movement in Germany called pietism which believed the existing Protestant churches in the land, both Lutheran and Reformed, over emphasized doctrine at the expense of personal experience and practical Christian living.
James I. Good expressed the situation as follows:
Two causes led to the development of Pietism in the Reformed Church in the close of the seventeenth century. The first was a reaction against the dead orthodoxy and formalism that had crept into the Church. The second was the rise of the Cocceianism, or the Federal School of Theology. The two really were one, Cocceianism a reaction against deadness of doctrine, and Pietism a reaction against deadness of life. Through the theological controversies religion had become a matter of the head, rather than of the heart and life (314-315).
Pietism first began among the Lutherans then spread to the Reformed Church. One Sunday in the fall of 1670, Neander went to hear Theodor Untereyck (1635-1693) preach with the intention of making fun of his teaching, however, he instead found himself convicted of his hardness and folly as he came to faith in Christ. After the service he left the church and mentioned to the two friends with him that he had decided to follow Christ. From then on, Neander attended Untereyck’s services and became a follower of his teaching. Neander’s ideas concerning life and the ministry had changed entirely.
The spring of 1671, Neander accepted an offer from some French Reformed (Huguenot) families in Frankfurt to take their five sons about sixty miles south in Germany to the University of Heidelberg. It was not unusual for parents with means to hire someone to oversee their boys and keep them out of trouble while away at college. It was a good opportunity for Neander because he could study according to his own interests as he tutored and chaperoned the boys until they returned to Frankfort in 1673.
Continuing with his pietist interest, the next year Neander participated in private Bible study and prayer meetings in Frankfurt led by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705). Spener opposed what he believed were the rigid organization and doctrinal inflexibility of Lutheranism while he also condemned the lax morality of many clergy. Neander became more deeply associated with the pietist movement and found in Spener the teaching that continued Untereyck’s influences from his past. Joachim Neander’s most significant work during these years in Frankfort was writing hymns. As the pietist movement grew it increasingly included Reformed as well as Lutheran Germans. The Lutherans sang Neander’s hymns in prayer meetings and as pietism came to influence the Reformed they too sang his hymns as they became less committed to Psalmody.
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Calvin is a resource to struggling ministers: he offers them a path forward, not out of their sufferings, but through them with patience. Present evangelical leadership culture tends to assume that unpopular and opposed leaders are either doing something wrong or need to go look for a better position; Calvin assumes they are doing something right and that they need to stay. He is that rare voice that commends patiently staying the faithful, difficult and unpopular course in ministry. Additionally, Calvin commends a much-needed balance between personal tenderness and convictional courage in the way pastors remain faithful. If heeded, Calvin’s admonition to exercise courage but to also be tender with and willing to suffer for one’s people would cure a thousand ministry leadership ills. With the present challenges and looming future evangelical leaders face, Calvin’s balanced counsel to courageously and tenderly stay the suffering course could not come at a better time.

This article examines John Calvin’s theology of pastoral suffering, an overlooked but relevant aspect of his theology for pastors struggling with the trials and difficulties of ministry. Calvin pictured the pastor as the chief agent of edification for God’s people, and therefore, the primary target for the assaults of Satan. Pastors will therefore suffer in the ways that all believers suffer but also suffer peculiarly as pastors–especially from opposition in their churches, criticism, slander, and possibly martyrdom. Calvin encouraged pastors to prepare themselves for sufferings, to set their eyes on Christ, and to patiently and gently deal with those causing their sufferings.

While many pastors might turn to John Calvin for faithful exposition and solid reformed theology, he may be the last resource they consider when the elders are about to vote for their termination or when the all-caps email comes hours after Sunday’s sermon. Even to Calvin’s theological friends and fans, he is often merely a great theologian–most of us do not see him as a resource for the struggles and sufferings of ministry. My purpose in this article is to offer Calvin as a profound resource to those suffering both the mundane and more intense trials of pastoral ministry.
Recent scholarship has retrieved Calvin as a more beleaguered and suffering pastor than the typical portrayals of him as the victorious reformer of Geneva. Elsie McKee has attempted to “reintroduce” pastor John Calvin as “a religious exile whose wife and infant child die prematurely, while he himself suffered increasingly ill health, in a lifelong ministry to other religious refugees, the resident alien-pastor to a people of a beleaguered city-state, precariously situated between large, hungry neighbors.”1 McKee argues that even the most unsympathetic reading of the biographical details of Calvin’s life demonstrates that he was far from a privileged religious dictator and much more than a systematizing theologian who believed in double-predestination and participated in Michael Servetus’ trial. When we consider that Calvin’s ministry was opposed for most of his time in Geneva and that he was not even made a citizen of Geneva until five years before his death, we see that in addition to being a great theologian, Calvin was an opposed pastor who suffered much at the hands of his own people and spent the lion’s share of his ministry not getting his way.
With that in mind, it should be no surprise that Calvin wrote a great deal about the peculiar sufferings that attend pastoral ministry. For Calvin, the pastor was edifier-in-chief—the key agent in God’s work of building up the church. But as edifier-in-chief, the pastor was also sufferer-in-chief because he bore the brunt of Satan’s opposition to the church’s spiritual well-being. What follows is Calvin’s general sketch of the pastor, with a focus on edification as the essential pastoral task. Coupled with this picture is Calvin’s articulation of pastoral ministry as spiritual warfare against Satan, who assaults ministers above and beyond the way he attacks all believers. Finally, I will show the peculiar sufferings Calvin said pastors would bear—opposition from their own people, slander and its resulting public disgrace, and potentially even martyrdom—and the counsel he gave pastors on how to bear these things well. We will see Calvin as a profound resource both for the work of modern pastoral ministry and for various trials that attend ministry.
1. Calvin’s Picture of the Pastor
Calvin described the pastor as the most important officer of the church, a gifted and called man whose Word-centered ministry built up the church. For Calvin, the pastorate was essential for the spiritual health of the church and focused on what he called edification—the spiritual growth and well-being of God’s people.
1.1. Pastors Are Gifted and Called to Edify
With Ephesians 4:1–16 as his key text, Calvin placed the office of pastor within an order of offices with which God gifts the church for its spiritual maturity and growth. There were four post-apostolic offices according to Calvin: doctor, elder, deacon, and pastor.2 Doctors were the teachers of the church who taught the Scriptures and trained other ministers to do so. Elders oversaw the moral and spiritual discipline of the congregation, while deacons cared for the poor. Pastors were charged with preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, and overseeing the spiritual care of a particular congregation.3 These four offices formed the “quadriform ministry, providing a symphony for unity of the church.”4 Important for understanding his view of pastoral suffering is how Calvin focused on the gifts given to pastors for the church’s health. Though the other offices were important, it was the pastor who chiefly pursued and (under God’s blessing) produced the edification of the church.5 Calvin did not ignore the role and gifts of other believers, but he emphasized above all else that it was pastors who built up the church.6
Calvin emphasized that it was God himself who ordained and empowered pastors to build up the church. Commenting on 1 Corinthians 3:1, Calvin said, “‘What else,’ says he, ‘are all ministers appointed for, but to bring you to faith through means of their preaching?’”7 Ministers are sovereignly appointed by God for the faith of God’s people. For Calvin, faith was at the center of Christian experience.8 This faith came by hearing the gospel preached, and since pastors were those chiefly charged with preaching, they were God’s gift to the church—their preaching was the primary means of the church’s good.9 Calvin found this choice of God to use humans in his work to be an occasion for joy and wonder, writing, “Here we have an admirable commendation of the ministry—that while God could accomplish the work entirely himself, he calls us, puny mortals, to be as it were his coadjutors, and makes use of us as instruments.”10 The primary wonder was that God would stoop so low as to use men as his means for building the church. Another wonder from this truth that God works through the preaching and labor of pastors was that he is glorified regardless of the results of a pastor’s preaching. God is honored and pleased by faithful pastoral ministry whether he chooses to save individuals through it or not.11
Calvin regularly articulated the weight of the pastoral calling and argued that men who would take on such a weighty office must be called by God and have this call demonstrated through outward evidence of giftedness for the work. Calvin understood there to be two callings on a pastor’s life: the internal calling and the external calling. In the internal call, a man was conscious before God that he was called by him to preach the gospel; the distinctive feature of the internal call was that it was not and could not be tested by the church.12 On the other hand, the external call could and must be tested by the church in four categories: the giftedness of the candidate, the possession of sound doctrine, a holy life, and necessary ministry skills.13 This conception of the external call demonstrates that Calvin thought it necessary for prospective pastors to be shown able to edify the church in order to be called to edify the church. Regarding ordination, Calvin said, “We must always take care that [prospective pastors] are not unfit for or unequal to the burden imposed upon them; in other words, that they are provided with the means which will be necessary to fulfill their office.”14 The burden of a pastor is to edify God’s church; therefore, prospective pastors must demonstrate the skills necessary for this work before taking it up.
1.2. Edification as Pastoral Motivation
Pastors must not only be skilled to edify the church; they must also be motivated solely by this goal. Pastoral motivation was a consistent theme in Calvin’s comments on pastoral ministry; the number of passages in which he speaks of it is remarkable.15 A particularly revealing example is Calvin’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 4:2, which according to Calvin mitigated against any ministers who “have any other object in view than the glory of Christ and the edification of the church.”16 True ministers exclusively desire “from the heart” to serve Christ and advance the kingdom. Otherwise, they are what Augustine called “hirelings,” those teachers that serve a middle place between true shepherds and wicked false teachers.17 Edification to the glory of God is a pastor’s role in the church; it must also be his sole motivation.
1.3. Pastors Edify through Preaching
Pastors edify their people through faithful and wise preaching. For Calvin, “The basic and fundamental character of the pastoral ministry is the proclamation of the gospel, both publicly and privately. In so doing the pastor is exercising the cure of souls.”18 The public preaching of a pastor ought to be faithful to the whole counsel of God, understandable to hearers, and directed at application—in other words, his preaching must be suited for edification. Calvin emphasized wisdom in directing one’s preaching to the most important and useful doctrines, encouraging pastors to focus their preaching on the doctrines and truths that are “chiefly necessary” for their people’s benefit and to “dwell” on these doctrines regularly.19 The manner, content, and frequency of preaching must be aimed at the spiritual benefit of the hearers. Calvin had harsh words for those that would bring irrelevant speculations into the pulpit: “God does not wish to indulge our curiosity, but to instruct us in a useful manner. Away with all speculations, therefore, which produce no edifications!”20 (Today we might hear Calvin say, “Away with your 7-minute sermon illustrations that produce no edifications!”) A pastor must discipline and focus his preaching for the spiritual maturity of his people.
A pastor preaches both publicly and privately. Calvin admonished pastors to not merely engage in edifying public preaching but to also imitate the apostolic model of going “house to house” (Acts 20:20), giving private instruction and admonition to his people.21 Calvin remarked that
Christ hath not appointed pastors upon this condition, that they may only teach the Church in general in the open pulpit; but that they may take charge of every particular sheep, that they may bring back to the sheepfold those which wander and go astray, that they may strengthen those which are discouraged and weak, that they may cure the sick…. Wherefore the negligence of those men is inexcusable, who, having made one sermon, as if they had done their task, live all the rest of their time idly.22
According to Calvin, Scripture’s use of the terms “shepherd” and “overseer” for pastors implied the personal and personalized care for individual people in the congregation. He also reasoned that pastors must admonish and instruct privately because “common doctrine” can “wax cold.”23 This expression means that doctrine preached to all can easily be misunderstood or left unapplied in hearers’ hearts. Therefore, pastors must bring personal admonition and application of the gospel suited to the condition of the individuals he ministers to: the various wandering, discouraged, or sick sheep. As we will see, this call to admonish and instruct people individually is one of the reasons pastors suffer.
1.4. Implications
In a day where pastors are often loaded with administrative tasks and expected to be vision casters/organizational leaders/relational gurus/pundits on every cultural issue, Calvin’s focus on the one main thing ministry is about is a refreshing and much-needed reminder. Pastors are gifted and called by God for one thing: the spiritual maturity of God’s people through the public and private teaching and preaching of the gospel. When pastors give themselves to this one thing, they have the awe-inspiring honor of participating in God’s work and being the instruments of God’s sovereign and efficacious grace. If ministers are to be effective, they must arrange their days, examine their hearts, and give themselves most to this central task God has entrusted to them, whatever the costs may be. As will be shown, Calvin argued the costs would be high.
2. Pastoral Ministry as Spiritual Warfare
In C. S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan describes a good king at war as the one who is the “first in the charge and the last in the retreat.”24 For Calvin, Christians were constantly at war with the spiritual forces of darkness, and pastors were to be the first in the charge and last in the retreat: as the edifiers-in-chief, they were therefore the sufferers-in-chief.

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It has been my contention that the identity of Adam, and his role as the physical progenitor of the human race, are not such free or detachable doctrines. The historical reality of Adam is an essential means of preserving a Christian account of sin and evil, a Christian understanding of God, and the rationale for the incarnation, cross, and resurrection. His physical fatherhood of all humankind preserves God’s justice in condemning us in Adam (and, by inference, God’s justice in redeeming us in Christ), and it safeguards the logic of the incarnation. Neither belief can be reinterpreted without the most severe consequences.

Evangelical Christians have generally resisted the demythologization of the Gospels whereby, for example, the resurrection of Jesus is interpreted as a mythical portrayal of the principle of new life. Indeed, they have argued strongly that it’s the very historicity of the resurrection that is so vital. However, when it regards the biblical figures of Adam and Eve, there has been a far greater willingness to interpret them as mythical or symbolic.
The simple aim of this article is to show that, far from being a peripheral matter for fussy literalists, it is biblically and theologically necessary for Christians to believe in Adam as a historical person who fathered the entire human race.
Adam Was a Historical Person
Textual Evidence
The early chapters of Genesis sometimes use the word ’ādām to mean “humankind” (e.g., Gen. 1:26–27), and since there is clearly a literary structure to those chapters, some have seen the figure of Adam as a literary device, rather than a historical individual. Already a question arises: must we choose? Throughout the Bible we see instances of literary devices used to present historical material: think of Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night, or the emphasis in the Gospels on Jesus’s death at the time of the Passover. Most commentators would happily acknowledge that here are literary devices being employed to draw our attention to the theological significance of the historical events being recounted. The “literary” need not exclude the “literal.” 
The next question then must be: does the “literary” exclude the “literal” in the case of Adam? Not according to those other parts of the Bible that refer back to Adam. The genealogies of Genesis 5, 1 Chronicles 1, and Luke 3 all find their first parent in Adam—and while biblical genealogies sometimes omit names for various reasons, they are not known to add fictional or mythological figures. When Jesus taught on marriage in Matthew 19:4–6, and when Jude referred to Adam in Jude 14, they used no caveats or anything to suggest they doubted Adam’s historical reality or thought of him any differently than they did other Old Testament characters. And when Paul spoke of Adam being formed first, and the woman coming from him (1 Cor. 11:8–9; 1 Tim. 2:11–14), he had to be assuming a historical account in Genesis 2. His argument would collapse into nonsense if he meant Adam and Eve were mere mythological symbols of the timeless truth that men preexist women.
Theological Necessity
We can think of these passages as circumstantial evidence that the biblical authors thought of Adam as a real person in history. Circumstantial evidence is useful and important, but we have something more conclusive. The role Adam plays in Paul’s theology makes Adam’s historical reality integral to the basic storyline of the gospel. And if that is the case, then the historicity of Adam cannot be a side issue, but part and parcel of the foundations of Christian belief.
The first exhibit is Romans 5:12–21, where Paul contrasts the sin of “the one man,” Adam, with the righteousness of “the one man,” Christ. Paul is the apostle who felt it necessary to make the apparently minute distinction between a singular “seed” and plural “seeds” (Gal. 3:16), so it’s probably safe to assume he was not being thoughtless, meaning “men” when speaking of “the one man.” Indeed, “the one man” is repeatedly contrasted with the many human beings, and “oneness” underpins Paul’s very argument—which is about the overthrow of the one sin of the one man (Adam) by the one salvation of the one man (Christ).
Throughout the passage, Paul speaks of Adam in the same way he speaks of Christ. (His language of death coming “through” Adam is also similar to how he speaks of blessing coming “through” Abraham in Galatians 3.) He is able to speak of a time before this one man’s trespass, when there was no sin or death, and he is able to speak of a time after it—a period stretching from Adam to Moses. Paul could hardly have been clearer: he supposed Adam was as real and historical a figure as Christ and Moses (and Abraham). Yet it is not just Paul’s language that suggests he believed in a historical Adam; his whole argument depends on it. His logic would fall apart if he was comparing a historical man (Christ) to a mythical or symbolic one (Adam). If Adam and his sin were mere symbols, then there would be no need for a historical atonement; only a mythical atonement would be necessary to undo a mythical fall. With a mythical Adam, then, Christ might as well be—in fact, would do better to be—a mere symbol of divine forgiveness and new life. Instead, though, the story Paul tells is of a historical problem of sin, guilt, and death being introduced into the creation, a problem that required a historical solution.
To remove that historical problem of Adam’s sin wouldn’t just remove the rationale for the historical solution of the cross and resurrection; it would transform Paul’s gospel beyond all recognition. Where did sin and evil come from? If they were not the result of one man’s act of disobedience, there seem to be only two options: either sin was there beforehand and evil is an integral part of God’s creation, or sin is an individualistic thing, brought into the world almost ex nihilo by each person. The former is blatantly non-Christian in its monist or dualist denial of a good Creator and his good creation; the latter looks like Pelagianism, with good individuals becoming sinful by copying Adam (and, presumably, becoming righteous by copying Christ).
The second exhibit that testifies to the foundational significance of a historical Adam to Paul’s theology is 1 Corinthians 15:21–22 and 45–49. Again, Paul unpacks a tight parallel between the first man, Adam, through whom came death, and the second or last man, Christ, through whom comes new life. Again, Adam is spoken of in the same way as Christ. Again, Adam is seen as the origin of death, as Christ is the origin of life.
At this point in 1 Corinthians, Paul is at the apex of a long argument dealing with problems the Corinthian Christians had with the body. As the ultimate answer to their pastoral problems, Paul set out to give them confidence in the reality of their future bodily resurrection by demonstrating the historical fact of Jesus’s bodily resurrection. The historical reality of Jesus’s resurrection is the linchpin of his response. That being the case, it would be the height of rhetorical folly for Paul to draw a parallel between Adam and Christ if he thought Adam was mythical. For if the two could be parallel, then Christ’s resurrection could also be construed mythically—and Paul’s whole letter would lose its point, purpose, and punch.
If I have accurately represented Paul’s theology in these passages, then it is simply impossible to remove a historical Adam from Paul’s gospel and leave it intact. To do so would fatally dehistoricize it, forcing a different account of the origin of evil requiring an altogether different means of salvation.
Is There a Third Way?
Denis Alexander has proposed—substantially elaborating on a theory put forward by John Stott (Understanding the Bible, 49)—that there is a way of avoiding the sharp dichotomy between the traditional view of a historical Adam and the view that such a position is now scientifically untenable (Alexander, chs. 9–10). That is, while we should definitely see Adam as a historical figure, we need not believe he was the first human. According to Alexander’s preferred model, anatomically modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, with language in place by 50,000 years ago. Then, around 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, God chose a couple of Neolithic farmers, and to them revealed himself for the first time. Thus he constituted Homo divinus, the first humans to know him and be spiritually alive. 
It is an ingenious synthesis, to be sure, deftly sidestepping the theological chasm opened by denials of a historical Adam. But it has created for itself profound new problems. The first is raised by the question of what to make of Adam’s contemporaries, those anatomically modern humans who, Alexander says, had already been populating the world for tens of thousands of years. He wisely maneuvers away from understanding them as anything less than fully human, emphatically affirming that “the whole of humankind without any exception is made in God’s image, including certainly all the other millions of people alive in the world in Neolithic times” (238). To have stated otherwise would have landed him in a particularly unpleasant quagmire: the aboriginal population of Australia, who, according to Alexander, had already been living there for 40,000 years before Adam and Eve were born, would otherwise be relegated to the status of non-human animals. And presumably the parents of Adam and Eve, also being non-human animals, would then—along with the Australian aborigines—be a legitimate food source for a hungry Homo divinus.
In avoiding all that, Alexander’s proposal founders on, if anything, even more hazardous terrain. The crucial move is made when he explains what exactly set Adam and Eve apart from their contemporaries. When they were born, he suggests, there was already a vast Neolithic population to be found in God’s image. What then happened to set Adam and Eve apart as Homo divinus was simply that “through God’s revelation to Adam and Eve . . . the understanding of what that image actually meant, in practice, was made apparent to them” (238). It was not, then, that Adam and Eve were now freshly created in God’s image; they had already been born in God’s image, children of a long line of bearers of God’s image. The difference was that they now understood what this meant (a personal relationship with God).
The first problem with this is biblical. In Genesis 1 and 2, it is quite specifically Adam and Eve who are created in God’s image (the event of Gen. 1:27 being presented afresh in Gen. 2:18–25). It is not just that some beings were created in God’s image, and that this could later be realized by a couple of their descendants. Quite the opposite: Genesis 2:7 seems to be an example of the text going out of its way to emphasize a direct, special creative act to bring the man Adam into being. That problem might be considered surmountable, but it has created a second theological problem that seems insurmountable. It is that, if humans were already in the image of God before Adam and Eve, then we are left with one of two scenarios.
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