The Ecclesiological Dimensions of Piety
Piety through the Church
Calvin’s pietas is not independent of Scripture nor the church; rather, it is rooted in the Word and nurtured in the church. While breaking with the clericalism and absolutism of Rome, Calvin nonetheless maintains a high view of the church. “If we do not prefer the church to all other objects of our interest, we are unworthy of being counted among her members,” he writes.
Augustine once said, “He cannot have God for his Father who refuses to have the church for his mother.” To that Calvin adds, “For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels.” Apart from the church, there is little hope for forgiveness of sins or salvation, Calvin wrote. It is always disastrous to leave the church.
For Calvin, believers are engrafted into Christ and His church, because spiritual growth happens within the church. The church is mother, educator, and nourisher of every believer, for the Holy Spirit acts in her. Believers cultivate piety by the Spirit through the church’s teaching ministry, progressing from spiritual infancy to adolescence to full manhood in Christ. They do not graduate from the church until they die. This lifelong education is offered within an atmosphere of genuine piety in which believers love and care for one another under the headship of Christ. It encourages the growth of one another’s gifts and love, as it is “constrained to borrow from others.”
Growth in piety is impossible apart from the church, for piety is fostered by the communion of saints. Within the church, believers “cleave to each other in the mutual distribution of gifts.” Each member has his own place and gifts to use within the body. Ideally, the entire body uses these gifts in symmetry and proportion, ever reforming and growing toward perfection.
Piety of the Word
The Word of God is central to the development of Christian piety in the believer. Calvin’s relational model explains how.
True religion is a dialogue between God and man. The part of the dialogue that God initiates is revelation. In this, God comes down to meet us, addresses us, and makes Himself known to us in the preaching of the Word. The other part of the dialogue is man’s response to God’s revelation. This response, which includes trust, adoration, and godly fear, is what Calvin calls pietas. The preaching of the Word saves us and preserves us as the Spirit enables us to appropriate the blood of Christ and respond to Him with reverential love. By the Spirit-empowered preaching of men, “the renewal of the saints is accomplished and the body of Christ is edified,” Calvin says.
Calvin teaches that the preaching of the Word is our spiritual food and our medicine for spiritual health. With the Spirit’s blessing, ministers are spiritual physicians who apply the Word to our souls as earthly physicians apply medicine to our bodies. Using the Word, these spiritual doctors diagnose, prescribe for, and cure spiritual disease in those plagued by sin and death. The preached Word is used as an instrument to heal, cleanse, and make fruitful our disease-prone souls. The Spirit, or the “internal minister,” promotes piety by using the “external minister” to preach the Word. As Calvin says, the external minister “holds forth the vocal word and it is received by the ears,” but the internal minister “truly communicates the thing proclaimed . . . that is Christ.”
To promote piety, the Spirit not only uses the gospel to work faith deep within the souls of His elect, as we have already seen, but He also uses the law. The law promotes piety in three ways:
1. It restrains sin and promotes righteousness in the church and society,
preventing both from lapsing into chaos.
2. It disciplines, educates, and convicts us, driving us out of ourselves to Jesus Christ, the fulfiller and end of the law. The law cannot lead us to a saving knowledge of God in Christ; rather, the Holy Spirit uses it as a mirror to show us our guilt, shut us off from hope, and bring us to repentance. It drives us to the spiritual need out of which faith in Christ is born. This convicting use of the law is critical for the believer’s piety, for it prevents the ungodly self-righteousness that is prone to reassert itself even in the holiest of saints.
3. It becomes the rule of life for the believer. “What is the rule of life which [God] has given us?” Calvin asks in the Genevan Catechism. The answer: “His law.” Later, Calvin says the law “shows the mark at which we ought to aim, the goal towards which we ought to press, that each of us, according to the measure of grace bestowed upon him, may endeavor to frame his life according to the highest rectitude, and, by constant study, continually advance more and more.”
Calvin writes about the third use of the law in the first edition of his Institutes, stating, “Believers… profit by the law because from it they learn more thoroughly each day what the Lord’s will is like…. It is as if some servant, already prepared with complete earnestness of heart to commend himself to his master, must search out and oversee his master’s ways in order to conform and accommodate himself to them. Moreover, however much they may be prompted by the Spirit and eager to obey God, they are still weak in the flesh, and would rather serve sin than God. The law is to this flesh like a whip to an idle and balky ass, to goad, stir, arouse it to work.”
In the last edition of the Institutes (1559), Calvin is more emphatic about how believers profit from the law. First, he says, “Here is the best instrument for them to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord’s will to which they aspire, and to confirm them in the understanding of it.” And second, it causes “frequent meditation upon it to be aroused to obedience, be strengthened in it, and be drawn back from the slippery path of transgression.” Saints must press on in this, Calvin concludes. “For what would be less lovable than the law if, with importuning and threatening alone, it troubled souls through fear, and distressed them through fright?”
Viewing the law primarily as an encouragement for the believer to cling to God and obey Him is another instance where Calvin differs from Luther. For Luther, the law is primarily negative; it is closely linked with sin, death, or the devil. Luther’s dominant interest is in the second use of the law, even when he considers the law’s role in sanctification. By contrast, Calvin views the law primarily as a positive expression of the will of God. As Hesselink says, “Calvin’s view could be called Deuteronomic, for to him law and love are not antithetical, but are correlates.” The believer follows God’s law not out of compulsory obedience, but out of grateful obedience. Under the tutelage of the Spirit, the law prompts gratitude in the believer, which leads to loving obedience and aversion to sin. In other words, the primary purpose of the law for Luther is to help the believer recognize and confront sin. For Calvin, its primary purpose is to direct the believer to serve God out of love.
