John Calvin's Institutes in a Year

Calvin finishes with penance and turns to extreme unction. A sacrament needs a command of God and a promise of God. Penance has neither. Baptism is already the sacrament of repentance. Sin does not erase it. The sinner is to remember what was promised there.

James told the elders to anoint the sick and pray. The apostles used oil as a sign while the gift of healing was still openly given. That gift was for a time. Oil consecrated for the dying is not the same act, and it does not become a third sacrament because men bow nine times to a dish of chrism.

Today’s Reading John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 19, Sections 17–21

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Calvin finishes with confirmation and turns to penitence. Oil on the forehead cannot outrank water Christ commanded. Antiquity cannot invent a sacrament. Augustine called the laying on of hands prayer, not a third ordinance beside baptism and the Supper.

What Calvin would restore is not their mask of confirmation, but catechizing: a young believer standing before the church and confessing the faith. Then he takes up penance. The early church used a public laying on of hands to restore the penitent. That rite was holy and useful. It was still a human ceremony, not a sacrament of God. The Schoolmen search for a sacrament where God never placed one.

Today’s Reading John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 19, Sections 11–16

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Calvin keeps pressing confirmation. The apostles laid hands on the Samaritans so that visible gifts of the Spirit might be seen. Those signs marked the first preaching of the gospel. They were for a time. They have ceased. To copy the gesture without the gift is, he says, an empty mimicry.

Still more, oil cannot be called the oil of salvation. Baptism already buries us with Christ and clothes us with him. What God promised there must not be stolen and given to chrism. Unction does not finish the Christian. It must not be set above the water Christ commanded.

Today’s Reading John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 19, Sections 6–10

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Today Calvin turns from the two sacraments Christ actually instituted to the five rites later crowded in beside them. The question is not a quarrel over a word. If a sacrament is a visible seal of God’s own promise, then God alone can institute it. Where there is no command and no promise, oil remains oil.

He then takes up confirmation. The ancient church brought baptized children, once grown, to confess the faith with the laying on of hands as a solemn blessing. Calvin would restore that use. What he will not grant is a later sacrament of chrism that claims to confer the Spirit without a word from God.

Today’s Reading John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 19, Sections 1–5

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

Calvin will not spend this last stretch on the traffic, the fees, the private stalls. He wants the mass in its cleanest dress, and still calls it Satan’s strongest engine against the kingdom of Christ—a Helen for whom men commit spiritual whoredom. Then he closes the two sacraments: Baptism once, as entrance; the Supper often, as the family’s food. No third. A sacrament is God’s promise with God’s sign. All the world together cannot invent a pledge of salvation.

Israel had extra figures because the better thing had not yet come. We have Christ. In him the treasures are already hid. To hunger for a new ordinance is to offend the Father who has spoken in the Son in these last days. Human additions dilute the wine. Pomp smothers the word, without which a sacrament is no sacrament. Baptism is barely seen under the ceremony. The Supper was buried when it became the Mass, and at best is hauled out once a year, torn.

### Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 18, Sections 18–20

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

“This is my body.” Luther wrote it on the table at Marburg and would not move. Zwingli would not grant that a true human body can sit in heaven and lie in a thousand pieces of bread. The split was not over the Mass as sacrifice. On that they agreed with Calvin: Christ offered himself once; the Church does not buy God with a new victim.

What Zwingli actually taught is thinner than Luther and thicker than the later slogan “mere memorial.” The bread signifies. The flesh of John 6:63 cannot give life to the soul; the Spirit does. Eating the body is trusting the death. Yet late Zwingli still said there is no Lord’s Supper unless Christ is present—host and feast—eaten sacramentally and spiritually by a believing mind, not carnally in the mouth of the unworthy. The table is the Church’s public pledge and thanksgiving, a wedding ring that seals the union it is not. Calvin kept the finite humanity and tried to restore a real feeding on flesh and blood by the Spirit. That is the map under today’s reading: table, not altar; praise, not propitiation; one priest, not a thousand.

Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 18, Sections 12–17 (with a brief orientation to Zwingli’s eucharistic theology)

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

If each mass is a new redemption, the cross becomes only an example, and we learn to be our own redeemers. The Supper is a gift received with thanks. The mass pretends to pay God a price. Giving is not receiving. The memorial that was to bind one body in Christ is torn into private masses: one man takes what was commanded to be divided, and a crowd present is still no communion if the bread is not broken among the faithful. That is not the Lord’s Supper. It is a false imitation, and then an idol, when the bread is set forth to be adored.

Calvin asks the missal doctors for one syllable of Scripture that founds their priesthood. Obedience is better than sacrifice. No man takes this honor to himself. The Fathers said “sacrifice,” and they meant commemoration of a finished offering, a sacrifice of praise. Augustine will not let a bishop stand as intercessor between God and man. The ancients kept a pious view of the one victim; they still bent too far toward the shadows of the law. Safer for the pious: rest in the simple ordinance of God.

Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 18, Sections 6–11

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

Satan’s thickest darkness over the Supper was not a ceremony gone slightly wrong. It was the belief that the Mass is a work by which the priest offers Christ and men regain the favor of God—for the living and the dead. Calvin will not leave that standing. Christ is priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. Mortal men needed successors because they died. The Immortal needs no vicar at the right hand of the Father. Melchizedek brought bread and wine to tired soldiers, not a prelude to daily immolation. Malachi’s “pure offering in every place” is the spiritual worship of the nations, not a new altar in every parish. A testament is confirmed by one death. Many masses mean many testaments, and many testaments demand many deaths. Calling the offering bloodless does not change what a sacrifice is. And if each mass is a new redemption, the cross becomes only an example, and we learn to be our own redeemers. The Supper is a memorial that sends us back to the one immolation. Faith is to be fixed to that cross.

### Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 18, Sections 1–5

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

Once a year, and that perfunctorily, is not what the Lord instituted. The apostolic church continued in the breaking of bread. Ancient canons treated those who heard the word and then refused the table as disturbers of the Church. Augustine knew places that offered the Supper daily. Chrysostom asked the man who sat at the feast and tasted nothing whether he had not insulted both the meal and the host. One mandated communion a year, Calvin says, is the devil’s invention for a year of sloth. From the same forge came the stolen cup. “Drink ye all of it” is a command, not a private fact for twelve priests. Concomitance cannot glue back what Christ set apart as a double pledge. Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom, Augustine, Gregory, Gelasius, and Cyprian all put the blood at the lips of the people. Five questions remain, and none of them can be evaded by the name of Church.

Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 17, Sections 44–50

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Today’s Readings Podcast Description

The same loaf is life in a believing mouth and poison in an unbelieving one. The defect is not in the food. Swine rush the table without faith or love, and they do not discern the Lord’s body. Then the other trap appears: worthiness defined as a state of grace, and grace defined as a soul without sin. By that rule no man on earth may come. Contrition, confession, and satisfaction cannot buy a seat. The feast is medicine for the sick, comfort for the sinner, bounty for the poor. Bring vileness, that mercy may make you worthy. Faith puts everything in Christ and nothing in us. Charity, even imperfect, is offered that he may increase it. Hands or deacon, leaven or unleavened, red wine or white—these are adiaphora. Weekly celebration with prayer, word, institution, fencing the table, psalm, thanksgiving, and dismissal in peace is not.

### Today’s Readings:

John Calvin — Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 17, Sections 40–43

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