What is the heart of the Reformation?
If we wish to see this fleshed out, we can do no better than to look at John Calvin’s ministry as a preacher. After Calvin came to Geneva in 1536, he looked upon his work in the Swiss city as primarily ‘proclaiming the Word of God’ and ‘instructing believers in wholesome doctrine’. He was, of course, involved in the other aspects of pastoral work, but at the centre of his ministry was the preaching of gospel. By this means, Calvin said time and again, God reveals himself in judgment and mercy, turning hearts to obedience, confirming the faith of believers, building up and purifying the church.
The expository method
Calvin’s method of preaching was expository. Not for him the single text or isolated passage. Rather, he would preach steadily through book after book of the Bible.
On Sundays he always took the New Testament, except for a few Psalms on Sunday afternoons. During the week, it was nearly always the Old Testament. He would begin at the beginning of a book and expound it clause by clause, passage by passage, until he had come to the end. Then he would start on another book.
As Calvin scholar T.H.L. Parker once noted: ‘Those in Geneva who listened Sunday after Sunday, day after day, and did not shut their ears … received a training in Christianity such as had been given to few congregations in Europe since the days of the fathers’.
Denis Raguenier
We owe the sermons that we possess from Calvin to the labours of a French evangelical by the name of Denis Raguenier, who, following an elaborate system of stenography, copied down all that Calvin preached. What a challenge this must have been for Raguenier as he sought to take down all of Calvin’s words with a quill pen!
Initially the sermons were copied into folio volumes and entrusted to the care of the deacons for anyone who wanted to read them. Later some of them were published and others translated, especially into English. A copy of Calvin’s sermons on Ephesians, for instance, was later found at the bedside of John Knox after his death in 1572.
As a result of Raguenier’s labours, there are now, in manuscript or in print, over 2,042 of Calvin’s sermons. An additional 263 have been preserved through other means. In them we hear the authentic tone of the Reformer, speaking a plain, colloquial but metropolitan French, and ranging over, as he spoke, all of the central issues of his day.
‘The pure Word of God’
Now, what was the reason for such monumental preaching?
Well, first of all, there was Calvin’s view of Scripture. When he speaks about the nature of the Bible, his position is unambiguous. The Scriptures, he stated, are ‘the pure Word of God’, ‘free from every stain or defect’, ‘the certain and unerring rule’. For Calvin, the Bible is an unerring, infallible book. It has been said that prior to the 19th century, the church knew nothing of the inerrancy of the Scriptures. That would have been a surprise to men like Calvin who affirmed the concept, though maybe without the term.
In Calvin’s mind, unlike all other texts, these alone are a sure and certain guide for the believer’s life and thinking. Calvin thus was faithful to the Reformation rediscovery of that central biblical principle: sola scriptura. He assumed that Scripture, rightly interpreted, will not be found to make false assertions. This was the basic presupposition of all his exegesis.
Moreover, for Calvin, in the Scriptures God speaks clearly. As he said: ‘the office of preaching is committed to pastors for no other purpose than that God alone may be heard there’. Consequently, as we shall see next month, this meant for Calvin that the whole message of the Bible had to be brought before God’s people and this could be done only in one way: ‘connected exposition’.
