April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
OUR NEIGHBORS' FAITH
John Calvin, reluctant ecumenist
One colleague expressed surprise at the suggestion that Calvin can in any sense be considered a Catholic theologian. After all, here was a man who grew up Catholic, but decisively left the Catholic Church and made no secret of how much he loathed it. (Calvin, a French theologian during the Protestant Reformation, wrote a textbook for Protestant theology that also attacked teachings of the Catholic Church with which he disagreed.)
Yet, by the end of the conference, we were all convinced that things were not that simple.
Someone once said that you can never really leave the Catholic Church. You may walk away from it, but its ethos and ideas will always retain a certain hold on you. I'm not quite sure how true this is in general, but it does seem to be somewhat true in Calvin's case.
To paraphrase Hamlet, Calvin may have been someone who "protested too much," revealing an attachment to Catholic ways of thinking, even as he harshly criticized them. Indeed, one thing I dislike in Calvin is a quality I believe he learned from being a Catholic: a tendency to be a little too sure at times about having the truth, and to assume that everyone else is simply in error.
If Calvin was an ecumenist, he was largely an unconscious and reluctant one. This is not to say that he didn't make some conscious effort at dialogue. Between 1539 and 1541, he participated in a series of colloquies that brought together representatives of the evangelical and Catholic churches for discussions about catholicity. Fellow Calvin scholar Randall Zachman has pointed out that, after these encounters, Calvin made some significant changes in his major work, the "Institutes of the Christian Religion."
The most striking example is that Calvin changed his mind about the Roman Catholic symbol of the laying on of hands in ordination. Having rejected it in the 1536 edition of the "Institutes," he came to acknowledge it as a sacrament in the 1543 edition. Similarly, in 1536 he rejected the Catholic structure of bishops, priests and deacons; but in 1543, he acknowledged that this church order was rooted in God's Word.
Calvin never said that his conversations with the Catholics led him to revise these positions, but the changes suggest that he was, in fact, influenced by them.
Calvin developed some other theological ideas in ways that were very Catholic, even if he was not conscious of the connection. For example, Calvin had a notion of sacramentality - God's visibility in the created world - that was very close to the Catholic understanding of sacramentality, even though he denied most of the Catholic ritual sacraments.
In addition, Calvin conceived of union with Christ as a "mystical" union. While he never spelled out what he meant, his description of that union is very similar to the way mystical union was conceived by medieval Catholic authors like Ss. Bernard of Clairveaux and Francis of Assisi.
Back in the 16th century, Calvin and his Catholic opponents were so busy drawing lines in the sand that they often missed what they had in common. In our own day, we can explore these connections more openly and celebrate the common faith we all share, while committing ourselves to further dialogue about our differences. If Calvin was a reluctant or even unconscious ecumenist, we should be enthusiastic ones.
(Father Tamburello is a professor of religious studies at Siena College in Loudonville and a member of the Catholic delegation of the Reformed-Catholic dialogue in the U.S.) [[In-content Ad]]
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