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| Joachim Westphal |
Calvin’s Doctrine
To understand the crypto-Calvinist (secret Calvinist) Lutherans, we need to examine the teachings of John Calvin about the Means of Grace. Not surprisingly, some of the most revealing statements come from his polemic,
Against Westphal, named for the Lutheran Joachim Westphal (1510-1574) who taunted Calvin for some time to bring out his actual views.370 The cryptoCalvinists of today loudly moan about “Christian-bashing”— a term they adapted from homosexual activists—when someone asks for doctrinal clarity. It is easy to see from
Against Westphal that polemical literature is beneficial in distinguishing between sound and false doctrine.371 Schaff said this about Westphal’s doctrinal publications: “The controversy of Westphal against Calvin and the subsequent overthrow of Melanchthonianism completed and consolidated the separation of the two Confessions.” Calvin called Westphal “a mad dog.”372
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John Calvin, Against Joachim Westphal: "The nature of baptism or the Supper must not be tied down to an instant of time. God, whenever He sees fit, fulfills and exhibits in immediate effect that which he figures in the Sacrament. But no necessity must be imagined so as to prevent His grace from sometimes preceding, sometimes following, the use of the sign."373
~Benjamin Charles Milner, Jr., Calvin's Doctrine of the Church, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970, p. 121.
There Must Be Divisions
KJV 1 Corinthians 11:18 For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it. 19 For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.
It was good for Westphal to annoy Calvin and even better for Calvin to answer Westphal honestly. Similarly, when it was rumored that Luther had given up his Biblical views about the Lord’s Supper, he responded with his Brief Confession on the Lord’s Supper, another superb document. Today, the massive doctrinal indifference in the Lutheran Church is a direct result of people studiously avoiding all doctrinal conflict. We lose our spiritual muscle tone through lack of effort just as we lose normal muscle tone from inactivity. The inactive person loses not only the ability to exert himself but also the will to try. Lutherans have become so lazy and inert that they would rather suffer from false teachers, soul murderers and wife murderers, than object to the most obnoxious heresies in their midst. Pastors fear for their tiny pensions, but not for their sheep being attacked by wolves. Synodical professors quake at the thought of returning to the parish, so they promote Reformed doctrine and methods in the name of making their institutions strong, though they are dying.
To understand the secret Calvinists, let us look first at Calvin’s openly taught doctrine. Calvin wrote well and published his errors over a long span of time. He continued to revise and expand his Institutes of the Christian Religion and completed a commentary of every book of the Bible. Sadly, his Biblical commentaries are bought and used by many Lutheran pastors today. This tragedy was encouraged by the Biblical inerrancy wars of the early 1900s. Once Lutherans began to be assaulted by highly educated proponents of Biblical error and contradiction, they turned to highly disciplined Calvinist scholars who had already been through the same trials. Lutherans did not stop to think that Calvinistic rationalism brought Unitarian doctrine to the Presbyterians earlier, while Lutheran doctrine repelled it. Therefore, Lutherans turned to Calvinists as allies against the common enemy of doubt.374 But using human reason to cure the problem of doubt is akin to drinking brine to slake one’s thirst.
Calvin’s rationalism can be summarized by four foundational errors:
A. Enthusiasm—Separating the Holy Spirit from the Word.
B. Extra-calvinisticum—Denying that the finite can contain the infinite.
C. Double predestination—Teaching that all people are either predestined to damnation or predestined to salvation, God’s “horrible decree,” before or after the fall of Adam. Calvinists are divided on the timing of the decree, which is unrecorded in the Scriptures.
D. Law/Gospel confusion.
Enthusiasm
Calvin’s Enthusiasm and its effect upon Lutheran doctrine are reason enough for writing this book and listing so many citations on the subject. Calvin, like Zwingli, scornfully rejected the Biblical doctrine that the Holy Spirit is always at work in the Word and never works apart from the Word (Isaiah 55:8-10). Calvin replaced the Biblical teaching of the efficacious Word and Sacraments with his peculiar notion of the Sovereign Holy Spirit working independently of the Means of Grace, either before or after or not at all! The Calvinists are never completely consistent about this, because they believe in preaching, teaching, and publishing. But they take care to deny the efficacy of the Word at every chance, as did their most famous modern church father Karl Barth (1886-1968).
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"The means of grace are thus limited for Barth. The preacher descending from the pulpit can never quote Luther and say with joyful assurance that he has preached the Word of God. Of course, he can hope and pray; but he can never know whether the Holy Spirit has accompanied the preached Word, and hence whether his words were the Word of God. To know this, or even to wish to know it, would be a presumptuous encroachment of man upon the sovereign freedom of God."
~Hermann Sasse, Here We Stand, trans. Theodore G. Tappert, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1946, p. 161.
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"The Sacraments are not mere symbolic expressions by which faith is strengthened (Calvin), nor are they mere acts of confession of faith (notae professionis, Zwingli), but are effective means by which God sows faith in the hearts of men."
~Walter G. Tillmanns, "Means of Grace: Use of," The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, 3 vols., Julius Bodensieck, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1965, II, p. 1506.
Barth, the official theologian of Fuller Seminary, was an apostate who rejected the doctrines of the Christian faith while making a tidy profit from his publication efforts, aided by his mistress, Charlotte Kirschbaum.375 He moved her into his house over the strenuous objections of his wife
[GJ -like Bishop Stephan, Walther's idol] and also lived with Charlotte in a mountain cabin every summer. Barth is the epitome of the Church Growth expert: unfaithful to God, unfaithful in marriage, treacherous, vain, boastful, and eager to impose silence on his critics. After opposing the Nazis from the safety of Switzerland during WWII, Barth betrayed his loyal followers in Eastern Europe and told them to submit to the authority of the Communists. He and his lovely assistant, Charlotte, had been reds all along, as the historical documents show.376
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"When intent upon establishing their peculiar tenets, Calvin and Zwingli likewise preferred rational argumentation to the plain proofs of Holy Writ. Their interpretation of the words of the Sacrament is but one glaring instance; but there are many more. The schools and the denominations which they founded became infected with this same disease of theology."
~Martin S. Sommer, Concordia Pulpit for 1932, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1931, p. iii.
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~John Calvin, Commentaries, Amos 8:11-12: "...we are touched with some desire for strong doctrine, it evidently appears that there is some piety in us; we are not destitute of the Spirit of God, although destitute of the outward means."~ Benjamin Milner, Calvin's Doctrine of the Church, Heicko A.Oberman, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970, p. 109. CO, XLIII, 153.
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“Wherefore, with regard to the increase and confirmation of faith, I would remind the reader (though I think I have already expressed it in unambiguous terms), that in assigning this office to the Sacraments, it is not as if I thought that there is a kind of secret efficacy perpetually inherent in them, by which they can of themselves promote or strengthen faith, but because our Lord has instituted them for the express purpose of helping to establish and increase our faith. The Sacraments duly perform their office only when accompanied by the Spirit, the internal Master, whose energy alone penetrates the heart, stirs up the affections, and procures access for the Sacraments into our souls. If He is wanting, the Sacraments can avail us no more than the sun shining on the eyeballs of the blind, or sounds uttered in the ears of the deaf. Wherefore, in distributing between the Spirit and the Sacraments, I ascribe the whole energy to Him, and leave only a ministry to them; this ministry, without the agency of the Spirit, is empty and frivolous, but when He acts within, and exerts His power, it is replete with energy. ...then, it follows, both that the Sacraments do not avail one iota without the energy of the Holy Spirit; and that yet in hearts previously taught by that preceptor, there is nothing to prevent the Sacraments from strengthening and increasing faith.”
~John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 volumes, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, I, p. 497. Also cited in Benjamin Charles Milner, Jr., Calvin's Doctrine of the Church, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970, p. 119. Institutes. IV.xiv.9.
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“We must not suppose that there is some latent virtue inherent in the Sacraments by which they, in themselves, confer the gifts of the Holy Spirit upon us, in the same way in which wine is drunk out of a cup, since the only office divinely assigned them is to attest and ratify the benevolence of the Lord towards us; and they avail no farther than accompanied by the Holy Spirit to open our minds and hearts, and make us capable of receiving this testimony, in which various distinguished graces are clearly manifested… They [the Sacraments] do not of themselves bestow any grace, but they announce and manifest it, and, like earnests and badges, give a ratification of the gifts which the divine liberality has bestowed upon us.”
~John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 volumes, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, I, p. 503. Institutes, IV, XIV, 17.
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“But assuming that the body and blood of Christ are attached to the bread and wine, then the one must necessarily be dissevered from the other. For the bread is given separately from the cup, so the body, united to the bread, must be separated from the blood, included in the cup.”
~John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 volumes, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1970, I, p. 570. Institutes, IV, XVII, 18.
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John Calvin, Institutes IV.xvii.19: "We must establish such a presence of Christ in the supper as may neither fasten Him to the element of bread, not enclose Him in bread, not circumscribe Him in any way (all of which clearly derogate from His heavenly glory)...."
~Benjamin Charles Milner, Jr., Calvin's Doctrine of the Church, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970, p. 128.
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John Calvin, True Method of Reforming the Church: "
The offspring of believers are born holy, because their children, while yet in the womb, before they breathe the vital air, have been adopted into the covenant of eternal life."
~Benjamin Charles Milner, Jr., Calvin's Doctrine of the Church, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970, p. 123.
GJ - That sounds like the Preuss quote that Robert Preus loved so much, cited with slavering approval by Cascione and McCain, Ft. Whine graduates.
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"To remain properly humble while firmly rejecting all erroneous teachings regarding the means of grace, we should remind ourselves how even Christians who teach and, as a rule, also believe, the correct doctrine of the means of grace, in their personal practice very often lose sight of the means of grace. This is done whenever they base the certainty of grace, or of the forgiveness of sin, on their feeling of grace or the gratia infusa, instead of on God's promise in the objective means of grace. All of us are by nature 'enthusiasts.'"
~Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols., trans., Walter W. F. Albrecht, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953, III, p. 131.
Extra-Calvinisticum
The haughty spirit that denies the efficacy of the Word will also invent new doctrines. One is called the extra-calvinisticum, Calvin’s assertion that the finite cannot contain the infinite: finitum non capas infiniti. In other words, the finite forms of bread and wine cannot hold the infinite, the body of Christ. The same declaration makes the two natures, human and divine, united in the one person, Christ, impossible. In fact, both Zwingli and Calvin had serious problems with Christology. Their rationalistic denials of what Christ has clearly promised in the Word and Sacraments led to the Unitarianism (Socinianism) of their later disciples.
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"...it is exceedingly difficult to prevent this low view from running out into Socinianism, as, indeed, it actually has run in Calvinistic lands, so that it became a proverb, often met with in the older theological writers—'A young Calvinist, an old Socinian.' This peril is confessed and mourned over by great Calvinistic divines. New England is an illustration of it on an immense scale, in our own land."
~Charles P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology, Philadelphia: The United Lutheran Publication House, 1871, p. 489.
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Double Predestination, Limited Atonement, Arminianism
Theological discussions often begin with Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, which was published in his first edition of the Institutes and every edition thereafter. Double predestination is really secondary to Enthusiasm in harmfulness. However, one can hardly untangle the chaos created by one conflict after another in opposition to the Scriptures. Double predestination teaches that God decreed a minority saved and a majority damned before the creation of the world or perhaps after the fall of Adam. Associated with double predestination is the concept that Christ died only for the elect and not for the sins of the world, a teaching which is called the limited Atonement. Anyone who dwells on the core of Calvin’s teaching and applies it consistently must wonder why he would listen to the Word, which is dead, or receive the Sacraments, which are dead, when the Holy Spirit will work before or after the Means of Grace, but not necessarily through them. A Calvinist must either be proud and secure, since he is taught “once saved, always saved,” or he is anxious and fearful that he has been predestined for damnation. The comictragic novels of Peter DeVries, such as Slouching Toward Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb, catch this spirit of Grand Rapids Calvinism.
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"As a matter of fact, however, also in the doctrine of predestination Zwingli and Calvin were just as far and as fundamentally apart from Luther as their entire rationalistic theology differed from the simple and implicit Scripturalism of Luther. Frank truly says that the agreement between Luther's doctrine and that of Zwingli and Calvin is 'only specious, nur scheinbar.' (1, 118.) Tschackert remarks: 'Whoever [among the theologians before the Formula of Concord] was acquainted with the facts could not but see that in this doctrine [of predestination] there was a far-reaching difference between the Lutheran and the Calvinistic theology.' (559.) F. Pieper declares that Luther and Calvin agree only in certain expressions, but differ entirely as to substance. (Dogmatics, III, 554.)"
~F. Bente, Concordia Triglotta, Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Concordia Publishing House, 1921, p. 209.
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"Calvin and his adherents boldly rejected the universality of God's grace, of Christ's redemption, and of the Spirit's efficacious operation through the means of grace, and taught that, in the last analysis, also the eternal doom of the damned was solely due to an absolute decree of divine reprobation (in their estimation the logical complement of election), and this at the very time when they pretended adherence to the Augsburg Confession and were making heavy inroads into Lutheran territory with their doctrine concerning the Lord's Supper and the person of Christ,—which in itself was sufficient reason for a public discussion and determined resentment of their absolute predestinarianism."
~F. Bente, Concordia Triglotta, Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Concordia Publishing House, 1921, p. 195f.
