Reforming Soteriology

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Robert Godfrey is urging us to look back on the work of one of the Protestant Reformers, John Calvin, to recognize the firm foundation on which the Church is built. We're continuing our look together at Calvin's treatise on the necessity of reforming the Church and the ways in which that treatise can help us think about the Church in our time and the needs of the Church in our time. And I said that Calvin argued that there were two elements of the soul of the Church that we needed to really appreciate and get right in terms of the life of the Church. The first is the worship of God, which we talked a little bit about last time, and the second, he said, is our salvation.

The soul of the Church is worship and salvation. And Calvin argued that the Church was doing a terrible job in understanding what the Word of God really teaches about salvation. The first point he makes in that section of the treatise is that the Church is not taking sin seriously enough, that we are not seeing ourselves as sinners in the way that the Bible presents us as sinners, and not seeing the greatness of our sin. Calvin said too often we're very content with a superficial analysis of sinfulness. Stealing, murder, adultery, those are our sins, but those are things that can be sort of more controlled than Calvin says the really profound sins.

Pride, hatred, enmity against others and against God. These are the elements of sin that he says the Church isn't examining, isn't calling on people to examine. And so sin becomes too lightweight in the lives of Christians. And he says the doctrine of original sin is being perverted and not taken seriously enough. And that's a place to pause, I guess, and ask, how often does the Church today talk about original sin? How often do we hear that every person is born in sin, is born alienated from God, is born guilty and corrupt? No, we have a cult of sentimentality about babies, don't we? No, I'm too smart to attack babies.

But babies are as cute as can be. But as Augustine said, their apparent innocence is linked to the weakness of the body, not the purity of the soul. Are we willing to say people are really corrupt? I've said to you before, I can't stand it when politicians say, I believe in the essential goodness of the American people.

I do not believe in the essential goodness of the American people. Now there's a civic responsibility that can be called goodness, and that's okay, but the reality of human evil, the reality of alien nation from God and from one another, we're never really going to make progress if we don't face the problem. And the problem is that we're alienated from God, that we're turned in on ourselves, that we're selfish and self-satisfied. And that reality of sin is something that has to be faced. And Calvin said the Church in his day was not facing it.

And I fear that that's true in our day as well. People don't want to be told that they're miserable sinners. People don't want to be told that they're helpless and lost in sin.

People don't want to be told there's nothing they can do to save themselves. And yet if we don't really see the reality of the problem of sin, we're never going to see the necessity of the salvation provided for us in Jesus Christ. Calvin says we have to see clearly that Christ has done everything for us at our salvation. He has accomplished all the work that needs to be done for us to be saved. And he said the Church in our day doesn't see that clearly either, that Christ has done everything. And I think that is a problem in our day, where, at least in some churches, the subtle or not-so-subtle communication is, Christ has done everything he can do for you, and you've got to do now what remains to be done. Well, I know that's an evangelistic strategy, but it's a fundamental misrepresentation of what the gospel is.

And it's a fundamental shifting of and it's a fundamental shifting of attention from Christ to ourselves. It's up to you. It's up to you. You've heard that crass way of putting it. The devil has voted against you, and Christ has voted for you.

Now you have to cast the deciding ballot. Well, that's just wrong. It's just false.

It's just hopeless. And it deprives Christ of His glory. And one of the things that's intriguing in this section of the treatise is that Calvin stresses that Christ is our only priest. Christ is our only priest. Now, if John—I know him pretty well, so I can just call him John—if John Calvin were here with us today, we might sit him down and say, well, aren't we all priests? And Calvin would certainly agree that Peter clearly teaches that we're all priests in 1 Peter.

But what Calvin is really focusing attention on here is that there is no separate cast or collection of priests who stand between God and man in the New Covenant. There were priests who fulfilled that function in the Old Covenant, weren't there? There was a temple, and a lot of that temple could only be entered by priests. And so you had to allow the priest to stand between you and God. Only the priest could enter the holy place to put the showbread before God, to light the candles before God, and to burn incense at the altar of incense in the holy place. Only the priest could do that. And what Calvin is suddenly saying here is, if Christ is our only priest, which just makes sense, doesn't it? Because the work that has to be done, the priestly work that has to be done of offering a sacrifice, only Christ can do. If Christ is our only priest, what do we need all these other priests for? The church in Calvin's day was full of priests, and priests clearly stood between man and God. Priests in the worship were the ones who could enter through the rail to approach the altar.

The lady, by and large, didn't do that. And the priest's ministry at the altar was essential to salvation. And Calvin here is attacking that whole system of priests standing between God and man, and is saying the only priest between God and man is Christ our Savior.

He's the only sacrifice, and he's the only sacrificer. That's another of the issues that Calvin is implicitly attacking here. The notion that the priest offered Christ as a sacrifice on the altar. That's what the Roman church taught then and teaches now. And what Calvin is saying is that's a distraction from the priesthood of Christ. That's a diminishing of the work of Christ. That's a robbing of Christ of the glory that is due him. And that's why we get distracted from Christ and from his work, because Christ is being replaced, in a sense, by the work of the priest and by the necessity of what the priest is doing.

We need to see ourselves as entirely saved by the grace of Christ, Calvin is saying. We need to come back to Christ. And it's sort of intriguing, isn't it, that that could be controversial, that it could cause a lot of distress for someone to say we need to be more Christ-centered.

And yet, when we look at the church in our day, we could ask, so how goes that? What are churches spending a lot of their time teaching about? Are they focused on Christ? Are they drawing people to Christ? Are they stressing what Christ has done to save sinners?

Are they stressing Christ's sacrifice, Christ's shedding of blood for his people? Is that at the heart of things? Or are churches getting distracted into all sorts of things that may be relatively good in themselves, but aren't all that Christ-centered?

And we have to sort of think about that. You know, we live in a day where families are under attack and a lot of families have fallen apart. And it's not surprising then that the church wants to try to be helpful about that. But when I see the number of preaching series on marriage and how to save a marriage and how to build a good marriage, I think, is that what the church is really called to do? If you're having trouble with your marriage, love one another more.

And now we'll move on. I mean, the message of the church is somewhat limited here. The expertise of the church is somewhat limited here. The focus of the church has to be on how Christ saves sinners. That's the great struggle that we have and the great necessity that we have to look to. And one of the things Calvin says, if we really see our sin and we really see the fullness of what Christ has done to save sinners, the fruit of that in our lives will be humility.

And humility as a fruit in our lives will go a long way to solving a lot of other problems. And this is what Calvin is stressing. Now, you see, he's not getting into endless technical discussions about Christ as prophet, priest, and king, or the imputation of Christ's righteousness. He's not getting into a lot of theological specifics here. He's talking about language that he hopes will connect with lay people who maybe haven't been thinking a lot about these issues. He's hoping that someone will say, that's an interesting point that we ought to talk more about Jesus, that we ought to talk more about Jesus not as an example, but talk about Jesus as a Savior, as a priest, as a sacrifice, as the one who does for us what we can never do for ourselves.

And I think that message is a message we need to hear today. Then he talks about faith. It always intrigues me to read Calvin, think with Calvin about faith, because faith is so important to Calvin.

For Calvin, he always stresses that faith should be firm and confident. And here he's sharply reacting to a lot of what went on in medieval religion. A lot of medieval religion was predicated on the notion that it is good for the people of God to be fearful and doubting. It is good for the people of God to be fearful and doubting. If you're fearful and uncertain about your relationship to God, you'll try harder. That was the common conviction of the medieval church.

You'll try harder. If you're not sure what God really thinks about you, you'll work harder to get him to think well of you. And Calvin is adamant in his writing that this is turning Christian religion on its head.

It's turning a Christian religion on its head. God wants you to be confident that if you are in Christ, you are his child, he loves you, and out of that relationship will flow the life that you ought to live before him. It's not fear and doubt that drives the Christian life. It's confidence and assurance that drives the Christian life, Calvin said. It always amazed me that Calvin has ended up in so many circles with such a bad reputation of being such, you know, a terrible person, a grumpy Gus.

The image of Calvin is someone who is just mean and bad. I'm sure he had his bad days, but his fundamental teaching is that the love of God should just overwhelm us and fill us with confidence in what he's done for us in Jesus Christ. We don't have to be doubtful if we belong to God, but knowing that we belong to God in Christ should lead us then to an eager pursuit of God in worship and living for God in all of our life. And I think Calvin is right theologically, but also psychologically about that. Being a miserable Christian isn't good for you or for anybody else, but being a Christian filled with confidence is what is good and so valuable. Now, if we're using Calvin as a mirror for today, we might ask, so in a lot of conservative Protestant circles, is there a lot of problem with doubt and fear?

And I suspect the answer probably is no. In fact, we may have just the opposite problem, is that people mistake presuming on God for faith and confidence. Now, I don't want to become the gloomy Gus and make you all doubt your salvation, but I think what Calvin would say is, we're not saved by believing we're saved. We're not saved and confident by just assuming that God must love us because we love ourselves so much. Faith is recognizing our need and looking away from ourselves to Christ and really believing what he says to us. And so it is appropriate to ask people, have you really faced your sin? Do you really believe you're a sinner?

Have you really turned to Christ and believe that he alone is hope and salvation? And if you've heard his promise and you believe his promise, then that promise should fill you with confidence in him. And that's what Calvin is trying to stress here, that we have to have a firm confidence in Christ, not either a doubt of Christ on the one hand or a presumption that Christ will of course love us. There's no course in Christianity.

It's personal. It's the relationship that is established between the soul and Christ. It's not the presumption that he's stuck with us.

And that's what is crucial for us. And having laid down then these three sort of key elements of sin, of Christ, of faith, Calvin hardly talks about justification at all. He does say we're justified by mere gratuitous favor. That is, we're justified just by the gracious favor of God, not by any other kind of justice.

We're justified just by the gracious favor of God, not by anything we bring to God. He then goes on though to talk about some of the evils under the matter of salvation that exist in the church in his time. He mentions three evils in particular. The first is the evil of believing in free will.

Now that's kind of interesting, isn't it? Many of us are well enough trained by R.C. Sproul to know that we don't believe in free will. But how many of us are bold enough to say the doctrine of free will is just an evil, is something that needs immediately to be reformed in the life of the church? That free will is a danger to the gospel and to the life of God's people. That's what John Calvin is saying. That's what Martin Luther would have said, did say.

Here's where we have to ask about boldness and about action and about confronting error. One of the developments, I think, of American Christianity in the 19th and 20th century is conservative Protestants became so concerned about evangelism, very good concern, that they were willing to make all sorts of compromises so Protestants could cooperate. So free will adherents and free will critics will put that division aside so we can do evangelism together. And I think John Calvin would say, ultimately, you can't do that. The issue of free will is so serious, so fundamental, because if you claim you have a free will, then you haven't been affected by sin in your will, have you? You haven't really embraced a serious doctrine of sin if you're left with a free will. The Scripture says your will is in bondage to sin.

You are dead in your trespasses and sin. Dead people don't have a free will. Calvin would say, I think, scratching his head, scratching his head, it's not that complicated. Calvin might even say, what's wrong with you people? The dead don't have free will.

They can't help themselves. And then he goes on to say that the other great error is to think that we're justified by our own works or by our own merit. And Calvin pauses then and says, now I'm not saying that among those who are Christians, there are not good works. And then he quotes Luther. He quotes Luther about five or six times in this treatise. And he does that very deliberately because Luther's still alive.

Most of those at the Diet thought of themselves as Lutherans, and he wants to be making the point that we Protestants are standing together here. And Luther says, of course there will be works in the life of a Christian. But Luther goes on to say those works will always need to be forgiven because they're always going to be somewhat contaminated by sin. And those works will never be pure enough to merit anything from God. They're the gift of God. They're not the earning power of the Christian, but there will be works in the life of the Christian. But they're not meritorious.

They don't earn something. And there's where Calvin and Luther agreed. Again, I think maybe if we're trying to learn from this treatise, we should learn, as most of us already have, to appreciate Luther. Luther was a great man and a great teacher, and his works are well worth reading all the time. He's always challenging.

He's always insightful. But what Calvin is stressing is that on the essence of the gospel, Luther got it right. Luther saw the nature of justification in Christ alone, through grace alone, by faith alone.

These great themes hit by Luther are things that need to resonate again today. It's not us who are the crucial factor in salvation. It's God who's the crucial factor in salvation. That's why the Reformed, more than the Lutherans, elaborated the doctrine of predestination. Luther actually taught predestination very clearly but didn't spend as much time on it as the later Reformed will do. But the reason the Reformed spend more time on predestination is because it was all the more attacked. And the great purpose of defending predestination, again, is not an end in itself, but to preserve the reality that we don't have free will and that Christ has done it all and that His Holy Spirit must enliven us according to His eternal purpose.

So it's not that we're just, you know, fascinated by these weird subjects. It's that predestination really is foundational to protect the work of Christ, to protect our lostness in sin as a doctrine, and to protect the reality of the work of the Holy Spirit to bring us to faith. And so Calvin is raising this great issue of salvation as one of the topics on which he is concentrating, part of the very soul of the church, so that we'll see our need and we'll see the fullness of Christ's provision for that need. And then next time we'll come back and look at the body of the church and begin with the subject of the sacraments. The message of sin and salvation, critical elements of the church. Dr. W. Robert Godfrey has called us to examine our own churches. What do we emphasize, and is it biblical? It's healthy for us to do that, and we'll continue Dr. Godfrey's series through the rest of the week here on Renewing Your Mind. In six lessons, he reminds us of John Calvin's thoughts on why the church needs to be Reformed. The entire series addresses penetrating questions for all Christians today. This week is your first opportunity to request the series, and we'll be glad to send you the DVD when you give a donation of any amount.

You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. This series also underscores why we believe it's so important to study church history. And with that in mind, let me also recommend Dr. Stephen Nichols' podcast, Five Minutes in Church History. Dr. Nichols leads us back in time to take a look at the people, events, and places that have shaped Christianity.

You can browse the archives at fiveminutesinchurchhistory.com. Well, today we talked about sin and salvation. Tomorrow, Dr. Godfrey will address another important aspect of the life and ministry of the church, the sacraments. How important are sacraments to us as Bible-believing Protestants today? Because we would all agree, I think, that there are two sacraments, that Christ did establish baptism and did establish the Lord's Supper. So what do they mean? How important are they? We hope you'll join us Wednesday for Renewing Your Mind. We hope you'll join us Wednesday for Renewing Your Mind.