27 The Reformers knew better
The Reformers knew better
Luther, Calvin, and the various Reformers seem to have started so well, how could they so soon turn back. How could they go from such clear understanding of so many Bible truths to denying truths so simple even a child could understand them.
If I might repeat myself, we need to realize that the Reformers never intended to forsake the Catholic religion; they intended to live and die as good Catholics. They certainly had no intention of joining those despisedAnabaptists. They would follow the truth wherever it led them, that is, unless it led them to the Anabaptists. That was the last place they intended to go. As much as they despised the Pope, they did not hate him nearly so much as they hated the Anabaptists.
Those humble, God-fearing saints, worshiping God in their little secluded meeting houses, had what the Reformers claimed to have, and the Reformers hated them for it. As determined as the Reformers were to preach the truth, they did not love the truth enough to follow it to the Lord’s church. Before they would do that, they would preach doctrines they knew to be false.If falsehood was required to promote their agenda, they would preach falsehood. It would take a person naive in the extreme to imagine the Reformers believed some of the things they preached in opposition to the Anabaptists.
They knew their doctrine on baptism was false. First off, the record is clear that Luther and Calvin knew the truth about believer’s baptism by immersion. But they refused to preach it. Space will only allow a very few illustrations.
“Vicecomes, a learned Papist, has left upon record, that Luther, Calvin, and Beza, were adversaries of Infant-baptism; though the Pedobaptists look upon this only as a slander cast upon them. ‘Tis certain that Zwingli, that holy and learned reformer, who flourished about the year 1520, was for some time against it, as he ingenuously confesses in these words...., Wherefore I myself, that I may ingenuously confess the truth, some years ago, being deceived with this error, thought it better that children’s baptism should be delayed till they came to full age; though, (adds he) I never broke forth into that immodesty and importunity, as some now do” ( Crosby, Preface to vol. 1, ppg. xx, xxi).
“Luther has, in several places, fully declared his opinion in this matter: ‘Baptism, saith he, is a Greek word; it may be termed a dipping, when we dip something in water, that it may be wholly covered with water: And although that custom be now altogether abolished among the most part, for neither do they dip the whole children, but only sprinkle them with a little water, they ought altogether nevertheless to be dipped, and presently drawn out again; for the etymology of the word seems to require that....I would have those that are to be baptized, to be altogether dipped into the water, as the word doth sound, and the mystery doth signify” (Crosby, Preface to vol. 1, pg. xxi).
“At length they did agree among themselves, that the judgment of Luther, and of the divines of Wittenburg, should be demanded about this point: Which being done, Luther, did write back to Hamburg, that this sprinkling was an abuse, which they ought to remove. Thus plunging was restored at Hamburgh” (Crosby, Preface to vol. 1, pg xxiii).
Calvin and the various Reformers had much to say about the Bible as the one and only authority in matters of religion, and yet they allowed themselves the liberty to alter, modify, and invent such practices as they thought necessary. They knew the Bible too well to believe God allowed for any change or modification of what he had commanded. And yet that is exactly what they did.
Calvin did not even claim scriptural authority for his form of church government: Calvin’s form of church government at Geneva was neither scriptural nor, in any sense, Christian. He did not have and did not claim scriptural authority for that form of church government.
“The Presbyterian polity, or church government, is imaginarily derived, primarily from the old Jewish Sanhedrims, and secondarily from the Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon Senates; but the best authorities declare that the gradation of Session, Presbytery, Synod and General Assembly was an invention of Calvin himself (his doctrine of the organization of the church and of its relation to the State being the only original feature of his system, says J.R. Green); and the civil government already existing in Geneva and other cities (consisting of four Councils, rising in power one above the other) seems to have suggested the idea to him. In Geneva were the Little Council (or Council of 25), the Council of 60, the Council of 200, and the General Council or General Assembly of Citizens.”
“As for the two permanent Jewish courts called the Lesser and the Greater Sanhedrim, the first of inferior and the second of appellate jurisdiction, they are nowhere mentioned in the Old Testament, but are believed by the most critical scholars to have been derived by the Jews from the Macedonians (or Greeks) about 300 B.C. - the very name, Sanhedrim, being, not a Hebrew, but a Greek word” (Hassell ppg 491,492).
Calvin could not have possibly believed his unscriptural form of government gave him authority to treat the citizens of Geneva the way he did. Having so totally, and so unashamedly, abandoned the Bible as the guide for the government of the church, Calvin and hisconsistoryengaged in the most vicious, and unscriptural, tyranny over the citizens of Geneva.
“Calvin’s Consistory (or Presbytery), composed of six preachers and twelve laymen, of which body he was President, exercised a most stringent, vigilant, inquisitorial supervision, in respect to doctrine, morals and manners, over the entire life of every inhabitant of Geneva; not only excommunicating persons of every age and sex, buthanding them over to the civil authorities to be imprisoned, tortured or put to deathfor heresies, improprieties and immoral-ities.”
“The proceedings of the Consistory were marked by a Dionysian and Draconian severity. ‘The prisons became filled, and the executioner was kept busy. A child was beheaded for striking its father and mother. Another child, sixteen years old, for attempting to strike its mother, was sentenced to death, but, on account of its youth, the sentence was commuted; and having been publicly whipped, with a cord about its neck, it was banished from the city. A woman was chastised with rods for singing secular songs to the melody of the Psalms. A man was imprisoned and banished for reading the writings of the Italian humanist, Poggio. Profanity and drunkenness were severely punished; dancing, and the manufacture or use of cards, or nine-pins, and even looking upon a dance, and giving children the names of Catholic saints, and extravagance or eccentricity of dress, and the dissemination of divergent theological doctrines, brought down upon the delinquent the vengeance of the laws” (Hassell pg 492). To banish a child to the wilderness was tantamount to a death sentence. In those days of such grinding poverty it was difficult for established families to survive. A sixteen year old child turned out into the wilderness without food or shelter, or any way to secure a livelihood, had little or no chance to survive. It is true these sentences were handed down by theConsistory;but Calvin was himself the President. It is hard to imagine they could have done it without his hearty approval. Can you imagine the feelings of those parents, who saw their teenage son banished to what was likely his death by starvation? Can you imagine the feelings of the parents of the child whose head was chopped off at the instruction of Calvin’sConsistory?
It is certainly proper to punish a child who strikes his parents, but there is no way to justify chopping the child’s head off. And it is impossible to justify John Calvin for handing down any such sentence. (He was the head of theconsistory, whose job it was to regulate such cases).
It would be easy to conclude that John Calvin was an unspeakably wicked, and annoyingly self-righteous person, who enjoyed seeing children’s heads chopped off, and having teenagers beaten with a whip and turned out into the wilderness to starve. I am not willing to make any such judgment. I am not his judge; I will leave that to his Maker. But I confess that I am totally at a loss to understand how any preacher of the gospel could advocate such things.
I am not willing to express an opinion as to whether John Calvin was, or was not, a regenerate person. God only knows. But I have no problem with concluding that anybody who imagines there is Bible authority for his conduct is not an especially bright person.
“Christ and His Apostles did not persecute; neither does the true church of Christ. The Protestant persecutions of each other, and of Catholics, and ofAnabaptists, were derived from Rome, and were in direct and horrid contradiction of the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience. Calvin’s condemnation and execution of the almostAnabaptistand the Anti-Trinitarian, Michael Servetus (1553), though then approved by his brother Protestants, is a sad and inefface-able blot upon his character - the bloody deed producing only evil, utterly condemned by the entire spirit of the New Testament, and by every person (not a Roman Catholic) of today” (Hassell pg 492).