John Calvin has been referred to by Charles Partee as a ‘confessional theologian,’ meaning that Calvin’s style of theologizing would fit the cadence of Scripture’s narratival flow and offering rather than the systematic’s or analytic’s theological syllogisms and deductions. In his final section of the French version of his Institutes (1541) we can get a sense of how Calvin himself was self-conscious of his disposition as a theological thinker; one for the Church. Even as we are noticing that, what I really want to highlight is the material point Calvin is emphasizing in regard to the reality (or not) of the Christian life.

I will want to agree with Calvin even though it might seem like what he writes militates against certain things I have written over the past many years. When we read along with Calvin you should notice how he emphasizes what being a genuine Christian entails. Some might associate what he is writing with something like John MacArthur’s ‘Lordship salvation,’ but I don’t think those sorts of idiosyncratic trappings (JMac’s) need to attend this discussion. What Calvin is pressing is what I take to be Gospel 101 stuff; that is: that a genuine Christian, one who professes Christ, will seek to live a life of obedience to their Lord, as named. In other words, and Barth agrees with this, the Gospel itself demands obedience to God in Jesus Christ. Not a legalistic obedience, but one birthed as akin to the relationality that we see in a son to his father, or of a daughter to her mother. An obedience that is shaped by a devotio Christi (devotion to Christ), such that one’s passion for Christ, one’s love for Christ compels them unto love and good works (cf. II Cor 5.14). It isn’t that this must be understood as PROVING one’s salvation, but instead we can think of this obedience as the organic flow of the life blood that comes from Immanuel’s veins into ours. When rebellion is present in the professing Christian’s life, as the characteristic, rather than obedience, then it is right to wonder whether or not the professor is an actual possessor of eternal life or not. Surely, it is possible to live in seasons of rebellion towards God, even for the Christian, indeed God is mercifully longsuffering with us all. But the Christian will ultimately be sensitive to the wooing of the Father, and repent; and then repent again, and again.

Calvin writes:

Let those who think that it is only the philosophers who have well and duly discussed moral teaching show me in their books a tradition as good as that which I have just recounted! When they want with all their power to exhort someone to virtue, they adduce nothing else but that we should live as is appropriate for our nature. Scripture leads us to a much better fountain of exhortation when it not only commands us to relate all our life to God who is its author but, after having warned us that we have degenerated from the true origin of our creation, it adds that Christ, reconciling us to God His Father, is given to us as an example of innocence; His image ought to be represented in our life (Rom. 6). Could anything more emphatic or efficacious be said? Particularly, what more could one ask? For if God adopts us as His children on condition that the image of Christ may appear in our life, if we do not devote ourselves to righteousness and holiness we not only abandon our Creator with a very negligent disloyalty, but we also renounce Him as our Savior.[1]

Further:

Here I must address those who, although they have nothing of Christ except the name, nevertheless want to be considered Christians. But how boldly they glory in having His holy name! — since the only person who has any acquaintance with Him is the one who has rightly learned from the word of the gospel. Now St. Paul denies that a person has received right acquaintance and knowledge unless “he has learned to strip off the old person who is depraved with disordered desires, in order to put on Christ” (Eph. 4 [22, 24]). So it is clear that such people falsely claim the knowledge of Christ and greatly insult Him, whatever lovely babble they may have on their lips. For the gospel is not a teaching of the tongue but of life, and it ought not to be grasped only by understanding and in memory like the other disciplines, but it should possess the entire soul and have its seat in the depth of the heart; otherwise it has not been properly accepted. Therefore, either let them cease to boast of being what they are not, to the disgrace of God, or let them show themselves Christ’s disciples.[2]

Some might say this sounds like a latent reference to the so-called practical syllogism, and others as a reference to the latterly developed doctrine of perseverance of the saints; but I don’t think this has to be framed those ways at all.

If someone names the name of Christ, then His life ought to be present at some level in theirs; as theirs. If someone says they love Jesus, but then consciously turn around and rebel against Him[3] as the Word of God, then their love, at best, is suspect, and at worst is absent completely. With much of American evangelicalism clutched in the grasp of moralistic therapeutic deism, or in the image of a different Jesus who looks more like the desires of the professors than the One who came in the womb of Mary, it is likely that many so-called Christians have been duped and deluded into thinking they are something they are not. This is a concerning matter to me, and one that hits close to home. May God have mercy on us all!

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition, trans. by Elsie Anne McKee (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 282-83.

[2] Ibid., 683-84.

[3] When I say ‘rebel’ I mean that the ‘Christian’s’ life becomes characterized by this rebellion. How long this characterization must be present in order to be suspect about someone’s eternal destiny and present relationship with Christ is not up to us to determine; that is Christ’s determination. Nevertheless, we are bound to call each other unto love and good works, and challenge our brothers and sisters to keep pressing into the holiness of Christ, as we see the day approaching. I am not the judge, nor are you, of someone’s eternal destiny; but we are to bear witness to ourselves and others of what the Life of Christ looks like; this is the call we have, to the rebellious and obedient among us.