Church Discipline in the Reformation

Leave a comment March 28, 2013 littlejohnwebsite

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that for a brief spell last summer, I was churning out a number of posts related to Reformed views of church discipline in the sixteenth century. Those were, as it were, the scraps on the cutting room floor from an article I was helping my friend Jordan Ballor write for the online journal EGO: European History Online. After nine months of peer review and such, the article is finally up here.

While the topic may sound a bit arcane, it is in fact crucial to understanding the development of Reformed ecclesiology and political theology, topics near and dear to my heart, as they should be near and dear to yours. Although our article is largely encyclopedic in intent (that is to say, to provide a broad overview of the whole topic, rather than advance a particular new argument), we do seek to challenge entrenched misconceptions at a couple points.

First, we argue that it is dangerous to do history too much in hindsight, starting from the fact of later rifts and reading those back into earlier periods. Accordingly, we suggest that the Zurich/Geneva dichotomy (Erastian vs. Calvinist models of church/state relations), a firm fixture of Reformation scholarship, while a clear reality of the post-1570 world, should not be overstated when we are talking about earlier periods. The two models shared a number of key similarities amidst their differences, and neither side (particularly the Zurichers) insisted that theirs was the only right way of doing things. Indeed, there were a number of hybrid forms in other Reformed cities and principalities, which combined elements of each vision. Moreover, inasmuch as there were two models, it is somewhat inaccurate to see the second as the creation of Calvin and Geneva; to a large extent, Calvin developed his approach from those used in Basel and Strasbourg. Read More

Genevan Mythbusters

3 Comments June 25, 2012 littlejohnwebsite

My essay, “Will the Real Geneva Please Stand Up?” is now up over at the Calvinist International, summarizing some of my recent barrage of research into the development of church discipline and ecclesiology in 16th-century Calvinism. In it, I ask how much typical narratives of Calvin’s ecclesiology correspond to what he actually said and did in Geneva. On a conventional narrative,

“We would find Calvin arriving in Geneva and gathering around him a band of like-minded pastors and laymen, with whom, having studied the Scriptures carefully, he drafted a church constitution. This constitution would provide for individual congregations to elect elders for spiritual government and deacons for more temporal needs, and each group of elders would be presided over by a pastor. Together, elders and pastor would oversee the spiritual and moral lives of their congregants, rebuking them and excommunicating them where necessary; deacons, meanwhile, would gather and manage the alms of the congregation for the needs of its members. Elders and pastors from individual congregations would meet together regularly with all the others within the city of Geneva, and this synod would vote on decisions binding on all the individual congregations, and would hear appeals on disciplinary matters. Calvin and his fellow pastors would have made this constitution without consulting the city council, though, in order to keep the peace, they would probably have sought the city council’s blessing, or at least their permission, to carry through this arrangement among such believers in Geneva who wished to participate in this scheme. And here is the key point—they would not have sought to impose this system on the whole populace of Geneva, since the visible church is a gathered congregation of the truly faithful who willingly submit to discipline, not the whole body of merely outward professors of the faith. Any Christians in Geneva who wished to participate in Calvin’s churches would have done so, and Calvin and his fellow pastors would have had no interest in imposing their discipline on those outside this church (though they certainly might have tried to evangelize them and to convince them to join). Those excommunicated from these churches would lose their access to the sacraments and their membership in the spiritual kingdom, but would remain unimpaired citizens of Geneva and members of the society there.”

But what do we actually find? Well, you can go read the rest of the essay to find out.

The Dutch Disciplinarian Deja Vu

Leave a comment June 19, 2012 littlejohnwebsite

Although mainstream Reformation scholarship has long since emerged out of confessionalist provincialism, and started learning to trace developments in the continental Reformation across cultural and political boundaries, cross-pollinating between France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and even Italy and Poland, English Reformation scholarship continues to lag behind the curve. To be sure, the frenetic commerce with continental Protestantism in the reign of Edward VI has received much attention, and the dependence of Elizabethan Puritans on ties with Geneva has been a recurrent theme. Only recently, though, has the dependence of “Anglicans,” or apologists for the Elizabethan establishment, on Continental models received significant attention (notably, for instance, in Torrance Kirby’s The Zurich Connection).

Most remarkably, the developments in England’s closest continental neighbor, the Netherlands, have received scarcely a syllable’s mention in the voluminous scholarship on debates between the Puritans, pressing for a further reformation modeled on Genevan polity, and Anglicans, defending a magisterial reformed Church under royal administration and with less rigorous discipline. This despite the documented close connections between both Puritans and conformist apologists with people and places on the other side of the Channel. And the parallels, as it turns out, are uncanny—the appeals to Zurich vs. Geneva, the debates over excommunication, the emergent Calvinist concept of the church as an autonomous spiritual kingdom (along semi-Anabaptistic lines), gathered out of and separate from the broader professing Christian community, the accusations by their opponents that their discipline constituted a new popery, etc.

I excerpt some passages from Alastair Duke’s fascinating essay, “The Ambivalent Face of Calvinism in the Netherlands, 1561-1618,” that describe some of the Dutch debates in the 1560s-1580s, exactly contemporaneous with the English debates:

“To the Erastians among the civil authorities the Reformed church no longer had any need of consistories now that it lived under a Christian magistracy. Caspar Coolhaes, a minister at Leiden between 1574 and 1582, supported this opinion. In a treatise written in 1582 he argued ‘wherever the Christian magistracy discharges the office of guardian towards the church . . . there is no need for any consistory’ and he pointed to the example of the church at Zurich. In the early seventeenth century Cornelis Pietersz Hooft complained that the contemporary Calvinist ministers had failed to distinguish between the circumsntaces ‘of a church which is under the protection of a Christian magistracy and one which is under the cross.’

But when Hooft wrote of a Christian magistracy he was, at least as far as his opponents were concerned, merely begging the question. In 1607 a minister in a synod at Delft declared that he would not acknowledge the civil powers as ‘Christian’ until they had expelled from the country everyone who refused to join the Reformed church! An uncharacteristically extreme statement, no doubt, but it demonstrates the problem contemporaries had in reaching a consensus on the qualities expected of a Christian magistracy. The Calvinists had their own definitions. The authors of the Netherlands Confession of Faith laid on the magistrates the responsibility for the uprooting of all idolatry and false religion ‘so that the kingdom of Antichrist may be overthrown and the kingdom of Christ Jesus advanced.’ The problems for the Reformed were twofold. Could magistrates, who themselves declined to submit to the Reformed discipline, fuflil such a charge? And secondly, should the Christian discipline be maintained, even where a Christian magistracy occurred? . . .

“Petrus Dathenus, who was noted for his Calvinist fervour, confessed in a letter too Bullinger in 1570 that it would be unrealistic to expect the same strict discipline in a territorial church, such as was then being established int he Palatinate, as could be maintained in Geneva or in the Dutch stranger-church at London. As a minister who would be required to answer before the Lord for those committed to his care, he was satisfied if he could clearly distinguish his flock and if the sacraments could be protected against open profanation. . . .

[Many Dutch Calvinists, however,] would not surrender consistorial discipline. Admission to the Lord’s Supper was to remain carefully supervised to ensure that those who sat at the Table ate ‘worthily’. That was only possible with consistorial discipline: in the absence of discipline the Lord’s Supper could not take place. . . . the fundamental distinction between ‘the children of God’ and ‘the children of the world’ did not change [with the emergence of a Christian magistracy], for that was quintessential to Dutch Calvinism. Ranged on the other side in this debate about the nature of the church were those for whom the Reformation had, above all else, put an end to the tyranny of penance, which had brought despair to sinners, and restored evangelical liberty.”
“In the Low Countries the Calvinists were accused by other evangelicals of forging a ‘new monkery’ and of setting up ‘the Genevan inquisition’, on account of the strict discipline which surrounded the Lord’s Supper. To Duifhuis, for whom church orders belonged to the category of matters indifferent, any other sort of discipline than that exercised by the magistrates represented a ‘tyrannizing over consciences, and a remnant of the Popish yoke’ . . . These critics of the Calvinists wanted a comprehensive church. In the church orders drafted by the States of Holland in 1576 and 1591 the Lord’s Table would have been opened to all who wished to come.”

“With some, especially among the magistrates, there was a natural desire to retain control of the new church, but one may also detect an irritation at the refusal of the Reformed churches to fulfill the part of a comprehensive church to which all patriotic Dutchmen might belong. From the standpoint of the civil powers the Calvinists’ separation of society into two camps was very inconvenient. No wonder some magistrates, notably at Leiden, looked enviously on the Reformed church at Zurich, where discipline remained unambiguously in the hands of the lay powers and where consistories were unknown.
But the Calvinists were not convinced. They believed themselves to belong to a people whom it had pleased God to call forth from the nations. That they found themselves, at least for a time, in a small minority caused them no surprise. After all, as their confession of faith declared, the Church might appear to the world to be ‘very small’, as in the time of Ahab, yet even then the Lord had reservers to Himself seven thousand, who had not bowed down to Baal.”

A Kind Word or Two for Disciplinarianism

Leave a comment June 18, 2012 littlejohnwebsite

In two very interesting essays on Calvinist church discipline, Robert Kingdon suggests some qualifications to traditional narratives. First, although in England at least, presbyterian church discipline proved so threatening to the jurisdiction of the magistracy, Kingdon doesn’t think it was always seen so. In “Social Control and Political Control in Calvin’s Geneva,” Kingdon argues that as a matter of fact, so successful was Calvin’s consistory in achieving social cohesion and control in Geneva that it may have been the source of envy by some other magistracies, which were eager above all in that period for an effective way of achieving an orderly, moral populace. The adoption of Calvinist discipline in the Palatinate, over Erastian, he suggests, may paradoxically have been due to the magistrate’s decision that the former was actually a better political tool. (Of course, what’s interesting in this whole argument is Kingdon’s realization that ecclesiastical discipline, even in Geneva, was more an extension of civic order than a “government of the spiritual kingdom.”)

In his second essay, “Calvinist Discipline in the Old World and the New,” however, Kingdon asks us to learn to see this “social control” in positive terms, not merely negative. Sure, the Genevan Consistory and its offspring were capable of authoritarian overreaches, but in fact, the vast majority of cases the consistory involved itself in were interventions on behalf of the exploited, rather than mere busybody meddling. And even a controlling morality police, he points out, is not without real social blessings. Calvinist discipline, he argues, actually worked:

“It did strengthen family ties. It did reduce immorality. For example, in every community with a substantial Calvinist presence for which we have adequate records, we can demonstrate that the rate of illegitimate births dropped sharply to very low levels, among the lowest ever recorded in history.”

Announcing The Calvinist International

14 Comments March 19, 2012 littlejohnwebsite

It is with immense pleasure that I can announce the launch of The Calvinist International, “A Forum for Reformed Irenicism.” Created and piloted by my friends Steven Wedgeworth and Peter Escalante promises to provide a much-needed bridge between the world of academic theology and the ordinary educated Reformed Christian, while avoiding the chaotic and ill-informed polemics that so often characterize Reformed blogdom. It aims to be robustly Reformed, academically rigorous, and authentically irenic, a job description for which I can think of few people better suited than Steven and Peter.

Their vision is ambitious and exciting:

Consistent with the original wisdom of the Reformers and their best heirs, the irenic way we follow here is wholeheartedly biblical and evangelical in theology, rigorously perennial in philosophy, catholic in scope, and pacific in spirit.

In this manner, we will consider the first things of religion, politics, philosophy, learning, and the arts. In a time of crisis and confusion in commonwealth, churches, and academy, we aim to reexamine and renew for our day the archai, the first foundational elements, of the discarded image of Christendom.

Not only will we get to hear their own contributions on a regular basis, but they hope to provide a hub to help network the contributions of like-minded folks around the web. So head on over there, subscribe to their feed, and start checking in regularly. Their first post outlines the theological method and approach they intend to follow, one in which they seek to follow in the footsteps of great Reformed irenicists of previous centuries, and they have also posted, as their first in-depth essay, “A Compound Person,” a fantastic defense of the orthodoxy of Reformed Christology, against Bruce McCormack and other less responsible detractors.