Introduction
To paraphrase the book of Ecclesiastes, of the making of many essays on Calvin’s doctrine of baptism there is no end. The Calvinism Resources Database at the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies in Grand Rapids lists no fewer than 239 journal articles, book chapters, and unpublished papers on this subject from just the past one hundred years—in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Spanish—and these do not include subsections on baptism in longer works on Calvin’s doctrine of the sacraments or on his theology as a whole.1 Of the making of many books on Calvin’s baptismal teaching, however, there is hardly a beginning. A handful of theses and dissertations have appeared,2 but only a part of one of these was ever prepared for further publication, and then only as a journal article and three chapters of a larger work on baptism in the Reformed tradition.3 A full-length monograph devoted exclusively to Calvin’s doctrine of baptism has yet to be published.
This paucity of longer works is somewhat surprising, given that the many shorter studies of Calvin and baptism have often come to different conclusions, especially with regard to his view of baptismal efficacy. Much of the debate has centered on the interpretation of a few puzzling passages in Calvin’s works that appear to teach a form of baptismal regeneration. I myself first became interested in this topic some years ago when I stumbled across Question and Answer 328 in Calvin’s Catechism of the Church of Geneva (1542/1545).4 There the minister asks, “But do you attribute nothing more to the water [of baptism] than that it is only a symbol of washing?” And the child responds, “I think it to be such a symbol that reality is [at the same time] attached to it. For God does not disappoint us when he promises us his gifts. Hence it is certain that pardon of sins and newness of life are offered to us and received by us in baptism.”5
That is just one of what one scholar has called the “tough quotations” in Calvin’s treatment of baptism.6 Among several others are the following: Font of Pardon and New Life. Lyle D. Bierma, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197553879.003.0001.
But we must realize that at whatever time we are baptized, we are once for all washed and purged for our whole life. (Institutes, 1536)7
For as in baptism, God, regenerating us, engrafts us into the society of his church and makes us his own by adoption, so we have said, that [in the Lord’s Supper] he discharges the function of a provident householder in continually supplying to us the food to sustain and preserve us in that life into which he has begotten us by his Word. (Institutes, 1543)8
We assert that the whole guilt of sin is taken away in baptism, so that the remains of sin still existing are not imputed. That this may be more clear, let my readers call to mind that there is a twofold grace in baptism, for therein both remission of sins and regeneration are offered to us. We teach that full remission is made, but that regeneration is only begun and goes on making progress during the whole of life. (Acts of the Council of Trent: With the Antidote, 1547)9
But as baptism is a solid recognition by which God introduces his children into the possession of life, a true and effectual sealing of the promise, a pledge of sacred union with Christ, it is justly said to be the reception and entrance into the Church. And as the instruments of the Holy Spirit are not dead, God truly performs and effects by baptism what he figures. (Second Defence of the Pious and Orthodox Faith concerning the Sacraments, in Answer to the Calumnies of Joachim Westphal, 1556)10
For (as I said before) God performs by the secret power of his Spirit, whatsoever he shows and witnesses to the eye. So then we must ever come to this point, that the sacraments are effectual, and that they are no trifling signs which vanish away in the air, but that the truth is always so matched with them, because God who is faithful, shows that he has not ordained anything in vain. And that is the cause why in baptism we receive truly the forgiveness of sins, we are washed and cleansed with the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are renewed by the operation of his Holy Spirit. And how so? Does a little water have such power when it is cast upon the head of a child? No. But because it is the will of our Lord Jesus Christ that the water should be a visible sign of his blood and of the Holy Ghost. Therefore, baptism has that power, and whatsoever is there set forth to the eye, is forthwith accomplished in very deed. (“Sermon on Deuteronomy 34,” 1556)11
These passages raise a number of questions. Did Calvin intend to teach a kind of baptismal justification and regeneration, that is, did he mean that a baptizand actually receives forgiveness of sins and new life at the time of, and perhaps even by means of, water baptism? Did he understand the external sign of baptism to actually convey the spiritual realities it signifies or only to mirror them? If baptism serves in some way as an instrument of God’s grace, what then are the roles of Scripture, the Holy Spirit, divine election, and faith? How is it that adults who approach the font in faith, and thus presumably already possess the benefits of forgiveness and new life, receive these benefits in baptism? Are such blessings also conferred at the baptism of an infant? Finally, did Calvin’s teaching on baptismal efficacy remain fairly constant throughout his lifetime, or did it undergo significant change over the course of his career? On none of these questions has any scholarly consensus been achieved. Indeed, as the following survey will demonstrate, the scholarship of the past one hundred years has produced at least three basic approaches to Calvin’s understanding of the efficacy of baptism, each with its own variations.
Instrumentalist Interpretations
First of all, some Calvin scholars have maintained that the Genevan reformer did teach a doctrine of baptismal forgiveness, regeneration, and union with Christ. Employing labels that Brian Gerrish introduced in the 1960s to distinguish different Eucharistic theologies in the early Reformed confessions, we could call this view “symbolic instrumentalism,” as distinct from “symbolic memorialism” and “symbolic parallelism.”12 “Symbolic memorialism,” which Gerrish traced to the confessional writings of Ulrich Zwingli, understands the Lord’s Supper not as a means by which grace is communicated but as a commemoration of Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross, a sign or symbol of grace received in the past, a pledge of God’s goodwill to reassure our faith, and a public testimony by which the participant identifies with the Christian community.13 “Symbolic parallelism,” which Gerrish ascribed to Heinrich Bullinger, holds to a union of sign and signified in the sacrament, but views the sacramental elements as only an outer testimony, analogy, or parallel to an inner working of God’s grace that may occur simultaneously with the signs but is still independent of them. This view “lacks the use of instrumental expressions; the outward event does not convey or cause or give rise
to the inward event, but merely indicates that it is going on.”14 Finally, “symbolic instrumentalism,” which Gerrish saw reflected in Calvin’s Eucharistic theology, regards the elements of the Lord’s Supper as the very instruments or means through which the grace of the sacrament is communicated. The bread and wine are still symbolic, in that “for Calvin, symbolism is what assures [the believer] that he receives the body of Christ without believing in a localized presence of the body in the elements,”15 but through these signs the very flesh and blood of Christ are offered and received.16 Gerrish applied these distinctions primarily to the Reformed doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, but in support of his claim that for Calvin “it is the nature of sacraments to cause and communicate (apporter et communiquer) what they signify,”17 he quotes the aforementioned Question and Answer 328 from the Catechism of the Church of Geneva, where Calvin states that forgiveness of sins and new life are both offered and received in baptism.18 As in the Lord’s Supper, so also in baptism Christ’s benefits are not just signified but actually conveyed through the elements.19
Sixteen years before Gerrish, François Wendel had proposed a similar interpretation of baptismal efficacy in Calvin as it related to union with Christ.20 Citing the opening lines of Institutes 4.15.6, “Lastly, our faith receives from baptism the advantage of its sure testimony to us that we are not only engrafted into the death and life of Christ, but so united to Christ himself that we become sharers in all his blessings,”21 Wendel concluded that “Calvin seems to be making union with Christ dependent upon reception of baptism.” What puzzled him, however, is that almost everywhere else in Calvin we read that union with Christ begins not at the sacrament of baptism but at the time one comes to faith, independently of the sacrament.22 Not only that, says Wendel, but Calvin suggests elsewhere that sacramental efficacy always presupposes union with Christ because it presupposes faith on the part of the participant. Unfortunately, Wendel brushes off this conundrum with the words “however that may be” and moves on to other things. Nevertheless, he understands Calvin to say, in this passage of the Institutes at least, that one’s union with Christ and the benefits that flow from it begin not when one first believes but when one is baptized, and that this happens not independently of the sacrament but by means of it.23
A scholar in this category who has addressed the kind of questions raised by Wendel is Jack Cottrell. In an essay in 1990, Cottrell points to two sets of what appear to be contradictory passages in Calvin’s writings: first, some “isolated” statements, including some of the puzzling quotations we cited
earlier, where Calvin seems to view baptism as the point at which a penitent sinner first receives forgiveness and new life; and second, another group of passages where Calvin makes very clear that an adult is saved through faith alone prior to baptism.24 To explain this apparent contradiction, Cottrell suggests that for Calvin an adult believer receives salvation through faith before baptism, but these same salvific benefits are offered again in baptism so as to be appropriated with even greater faith and assurance.25 Hence, Cottrell concludes, “Whatever is received in the sacraments is not received as if for the first time; it was already there and is only enlarged upon.”26 Through baptism the believer enjoys an increase both of faith itself and of the salvific gifts that are appropriated by that faith. In other words, for Calvin baptism is an instrument both of assurance and of the grace of forgiveness and new life.
Some who hold to this instrumentalist interpretation have been quick to add that Calvin qualifies such baptismal efficacy in several ways, lest he be misunderstood to imply that baptism is effective in and of itself (ex opere operato) and every time it is administered. A fine example of this more nuanced approach is found in Ronald Wallace’s systematic treatment of Calvin’s doctrine of Word and sacrament in 1953.27 Wallace begins by laying out an array of evidence from Calvin’s works that points to the sacraments as instruments of salvific grace. For Calvin, says Wallace, the sacramental event “is effectual in conveying the very grace depicted in its outward form. What God depicts in the sacraments, therefore, He actually brings to pass through their agency.”28 The sacraments function as “the instruments of a gracious divine action whereby what is represented to us is also presented to us.”29 At the same time, Wallace makes clear that for Calvin the sacraments have no efficacy or validity apart from the Word or promises of God to which they are attached and which must always be proclaimed alongside them.30 Furthermore, they can be effectual only through the concomitant work of God the Holy Spirit, whose grace is not bound to the material elements or human action in the sacraments but who in his sovereign freedom uses such elements and action as means of grace according to his good pleasure.31 Finally, Wallace devotes an entire chapter to baptism and faith, in which he emphasizes that for Calvin baptism has no efficacy if the recipient does not approach the font in faith.32 Baptism can still be a valid offer of grace and retain what Wallace terms a “latent efficacy” even when faith is not present, but the sacrament is actually efficacious only when the baptizand finally believes.33
A couple of recent theologians have followed Wallace’s line of interpretation here but have supplemented or modified it slightly. William Evans and
Rich Lusk recognize both an instrumental efficacy in Calvin’s doctrine of baptism and some of the qualifications to such efficacy that Wallace had identified many years before.34 They make the additional qualification that, in Calvin’s view, God’s use of baptism as an instrument of salvation is grounded in his sovereign decree of election. Baptism objectively offers Christ and his benefits to all who receive it, but it bears fruit only in those whom God has chosen from eternity to believe.35 Moreover, as a proponent of the so-called federal vision movement,36 Lusk stresses that baptismal efficacy in Calvin is rooted in God’s covenantal relationship to humanity. The sacraments are effectual for salvation because God is forever faithful to the promises he has made to his partners in the covenant of grace.37
Parallelist Interpretations
A second group of scholars interpret Calvin’s approach to baptism in a way that sounds closer to what Gerrish termed the “symbolic parallelism” of Heinrich Bullinger. In a 1926 treatise on Calvin’s doctrine of the sacraments, for example, Joachim Beckmann asserted that the essence of a sacrament for Calvin is a divinely established parallelism of heavenly and earthly actions— a clear illustration of the influence of Platonic thought on his theology. The earthly action revolves around the external signs, that is, the material elements and human activity of a sacrament; the corresponding heavenly or internal action is the work of God, by which the substance, power, truth, and grace of the sacrament are made effective. “It almost goes without saying,” Beckmann maintains, “that these two actions are strictly separated [streng geschieden], despite the fact that at the same time they must be joined together in the closest possible way by God’s eternal salvific will.”38 The grace of the sacrament exists outside of and independent of the reception of the signs, by which Calvin means not only that such grace remains in effect after the signs are received but also that it can be present already before their reception, through the appropriation of God’s promises by faith. Indeed, any reception of grace at the ceremony of the sacrament itself presupposes that the participant already possesses such grace to some degree by God’s promise and through faith.39
Beckmann grants that drawing such a sharp line against any magical interpretation of the sacraments leaves Calvin open to the charge that a sacrament is only a bare sign, merely a psychological assurance of a promise and grace
already appropriated by faith. He insists, however, that Calvin steers clear of this danger, too, and that he manages to preserve the grace-bearing character of the sacraments. What is offered and received by faith at the sacraments for Calvin is no different from what is offered and received by faith in the Word alone, namely, union with Christ and his benefits through the operation of the Holy Spirit. The sacraments simply accommodate that Word to our creaturely weaknesses and the full range of our human senses.40 The outer signs or symbols are testimonies, seals, pledges, attestations, and representations of a corresponding divine grace, but any connection between the signs and the signified is possible only because of the will, good pleasure, and dependability of God. It is only in that limited sense that the sacraments can be considered instruments, organs, or vehicles of grace in Calvin.41 What makes a sacrament not just an earthly symbol but an efficacious means of grace is its connection to the Word, the accompanying work of the Holy Spirit, and faith in a God who always keeps his promises.42 Unfortunately, Beckmann does not spend much time applying this analysis to Calvin’s doctrine of baptism, but he seems to espouse a parallelist interpretation of Calvin’s general sacramental theology without discarding instrumental language altogether.
A second example of this parallelist approach is a recent essay on Calvin’s doctrine of baptism by James Cassidy. Cassidy begins by describing baptism in Calvin as what sounds like a means of grace in the strongest of terms: for Calvin baptism is an effectual instrument of grace that communicates and confers the benefits of adoption, regeneration, and washing away of sins that it signifies and seals. Cassidy is quick to point out, however, that this does not happen automatically (ex opere operato), in Calvin’s view, but rather with several qualifications: baptism is a means of grace only for the elect, it confers what it signifies and seals only by the power of the Holy Spirit and only if received in faith, and the grace of baptism is not necessarily tied to the sign. In God’s sovereign freedom, the Holy Spirit may not even confer the grace of baptism at the time the sacrament is administered. Indeed, for Calvin baptism is ordinarily a sign that precedes faith (in infants) or follows faith (in adults), and the Holy Spirit communicates the grace signified by baptism whenever infants come to faith and whenever believers look back at their baptism by faith.43
What then about those passages in Calvin that appear to teach a form of baptismal regeneration? According to Cassidy, Calvin is able to avoid a mechanical view of baptismal efficacy and still hold to a close relationship between the sign and the thing it signifies by speaking at times as if the sign
were the thing signified. Here Calvin is following the pattern of the apostle Paul, whose reference to baptism as “the washing of rebirth” (Titus 3:5), for example, was only sacramental shorthand for baptism as a sign of the washing of rebirth.44
Cassidy then applies this way of interpreting Calvin to what he calls some of the “tough quotations” from Calvin that we cited earlier. When Calvin asserts in the Antidote, for example, that “the whole guilt of sin is taken away in baptism,”45 what he means is that the sign of baptism and the grace it signifies are so closely connected that the attributes of the latter can, in a certain use of sacramental language, be predicated of the former. Nevertheless, the two should not be fully identified or confused with each other, as happens in Roman Catholic doctrine, since baptism is still only a sign and seal of the forgiveness of sins.46 Calvin’s claim in Institutes 4.17.1 that God regenerates us in baptism47 is also only a sacramental way of speaking. God actually regenerates us by means of the Word, “and then we receive the sign of that invisible grace.” Baptism only represents regeneration and our engrafting into the church; it “visibly points to that regeneration given by the Spirit by means of the Word of God.”48 Finally, when Calvin states in his sermon on Deuteronomy 34 that “in baptism we truly receive the forgiveness of sins, we are washed and cleansed with the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, [and] we are renewed by the operation of his Holy Spirit,”49 Cassidy once again understands him to be highlighting the close relationship between sign and signified by predicating of the external sign those characteristics that properly belong to the grace that it signifies. Baptism for Calvin is more than a mere sign. At the same time, however, it is effectual only in its power to signify and only insofar as the sign “accompanies the thing signified when and where the Holy Spirit chooses.”50 Although Cassidy begins his article by claiming that for Calvin baptism is an effectual instrument of grace, his appeal to the language of sacramental predication and representation makes the sacrament sound more like a sign of a parallel grace than a vehicle of that grace itself.
A couple of parallelist interpretations in the last sixty years have even bordered on what Gerrish called a “symbolic memorialist” approach to Calvin’s doctrine of baptism. In a 1959 dissertation on Calvin’s doctrine of the church, John Burkhart concluded that for Calvin baptism is only “a symbol and example of our cleansing” that assures us of the full forgiveness of our sins through the blood of Christ.51 It also shows us our dying and rising with Christ, a new birth that begins “in approximate coincidence” with the sealing of that benefit in baptism. It may begin at baptism, but it could also
happen before baptism, after baptism (as in the case of an infant), or even without baptism at all (as in the case of the thief on the cross).52 Finally, baptism for Calvin “testifies that we are so united with Christ himself that we are participants in all his benefits.”53 Burkhart still finds an efficacy to baptism in Calvin, but such efficacy is related only to the cognitive effect of the sacrament, that is, its role of providing believers with the knowledge of their salvation, not the salvation itself. Even when a baptized person comes to faith many years after being baptized, the sacrament is efficacious at that time only by its being a “confirmatory testimony” to the Word received in faith; it is in the “remembrance” of our baptism that we experience its power.54
Richard Schlüter was even more adamant that for Calvin baptism is not a means but only a sign of the saving activity of God. According to him, the outer sacramental act and the inner divine activity it signifies are independent events for Calvin, connected only by the work of the Holy Spirit in the faith of the person being baptized. Schlüter acknowledges that Calvin finds an effectual as well as a signifying dimension in baptism, but for Calvin that efficacy is related to the power of baptism to assure and strengthen one’s faith. Forgiveness and new life are represented, promised, and confirmed to us there, thus giving the sacrament primarily a cognitive significance.55
Developmental Interpretations
A third and final group of scholars have examined Calvin’s writings chronologically and noted modifications and development in his sacramental theology over time, depending on the context in which he was working. John Riggs was the first to point modern scholarship in this direction in his doctoral dissertation on the development of Calvin’s baptismal theology (1985) and in a subsequent article (1995) and section of a book (2002) based on his dissertation.56 Riggs lamented the fact that so little work had been done on the context and growth of Calvin’s understanding of baptism, especially since diachronic studies of the baptismal views of other major reformers like Luther and Zwingli had discovered “theological shifts in emphasis depending on historical context.” Riggs pledged to help fill that lacuna by exploring whether there was change and development in the baptismal theology of the Genevan reformer as well.57
According to Riggs, Calvin from the beginning of his ministry sought to bridge the gap between Luther’s understanding of baptism as God’s promise
connected to an external sign and Zwingli’s view of the sacrament as primarily a public pledge or confession of faith on the part of the baptizand. The Zwinglian emphasis was secondary to the Lutheran in the first edition of the Institutes (1536), Riggs claimed, but by 1539 Calvin had had several years of ministerial experience on which to reflect and thus devoted more attention in the second edition of the Institutes to the visible church and to baptism as a public pledge. After three more years of ministry to refugees in Strasbourg and further reading in the church fathers, Calvin gave these ecclesiological aspects even greater prominence in the 1542/1545 Catechism of the Church of Geneva and 1543 Institutes and integrated them more fully with his doctrines of Christ, covenant, election, and sacramental signification. After 1545, however, there was no substantial development in Calvin’s doctrine of baptism, only changes of emphasis and nuance in his treatment of the sacramental sign, faith, and covenant. Throughout the 1550s, for example, Calvin reasserted the importance of the sacraments (baptism in particular) as promises of God that nourish, confirm, and even arouse or create faith.58
Rich Lusk also explored a chronological or developmental approach in an online article in 2002 that included a subsection entitled “Calvin on the Sacraments: Means of Assurance or Means of Salvation?” Lusk defined sacraments in the former sense as “signs of assurance that serve to confirm and strengthen our faith” and through which “God grants certainty to believers.” In the latter sense, they are “genuine instruments of salvation . . . [that] effect what they represent and perform what they picture.”59 Since both strands appear side by side in Calvin’s mature theology in the 1559 Institutes, says Lusk, it is worth asking how they might have been harmonized in Calvin’s own mind. One possibility is that throughout his life Calvin emphasized one or the other, depending on the circumstances, and that the 1559 Institutes bears the marks of some of this earlier history. While in Strasbourg (1538–41), for example, Calvin could not help but be influenced by the “high view of sacramental instrumentality and . . . ambitious ecumenical projects” of his mentor, Martin Bucer. After returning to Geneva, however, his work on the Consensus Tigurinus (Zurich Consensus, 1549) with Heinrich Bullinger and the Reformed church in Zurich led him to put less emphasis on sacramental efficacy. Then in the years following the Zurich Consensus, he stressed once again the salvific action of God in the sacraments in his debates with the Gnesio-Lutheran Joachim Westphal. In the last analysis, however, Lusk does not find this a fully adequate explanation, especially since in the final edition of the Institutes Calvin combines both emphases in a highly nuanced
fashion. Perhaps, Lusk concludes, “The most satisfactory answer is simply to leave the two strands side by side. Calvin does not seem to think they need harmonizing, so why should we? The salvific and assuring functions of the sacraments can simply be combined into an organic whole. Calvin himself does this repeatedly and effortlessly in his baptismal theology [in the 1559 Institutes].”60
Six years later, Wim Janse offered a brief developmental sketch of Calvin’s baptismal teaching as well, but he did not portray the last phase of this development in the same way that Lusk had. In an essay on the polemical exchange on infant baptism between Calvin and Westphal,61 Janse argued that prior to the Zurich Consensus with Bullinger in 1549, Calvin’s sacramental theology had been “very lutherfreundlich [favorable toward Luther],” emphasizing the objective, instrumental, and exhibitive character of the sacrament: sacraments offer and actually confer the salvific benefits they signify.62 In the course of the discussions that led to the Zurich Consensus, however, Calvin sacrificed some of his theological principles for the sake of a churchpolitical compromise, and in so doing he adopted a “Bullingerianizing” position that he continued to defend in the controversy with Westphal in the 1550s. The result was that in the end “[Calvin’s] baptismal theology suffers from a tension between certainty and liberty, between the objectivity of the offer of salvation and the liberty God possesses in his elective grace. Westphal emphasized especially the first aspect, Calvin at the same time the second.”63
Randall Zachman, too, claimed that Calvin’s doctrine of baptism changed over time, but he saw it shift toward a more Roman Catholic view of the sacraments that could have been the result both of Calvin’s participation in several religious colloquies with the Catholics from 1539 to 1541 and of his close association with Bucer and Melanchthon during the same period.64 According to Zachman, in the first (1536) and second (1539) editions of the Institutes as well as in his Catechism of 1537/1538, Calvin understood water baptism not as a means of grace but only as a confirmatory testimony, analogy, and cognitive seal of that grace. “At this point in his career, baptism does not offer what it represents, nor does God act through baptism as through an instrument to effect in us what baptism represents and offers to us.”65
In the years following the colloquies with the Catholics, however, Calvin inserted a new emphasis on the ecclesial and corporate aspects of baptism into the third edition of the Institutes (1543) and the Catechism of the Church of Geneva (1545). He also insisted for the first time that the salvific
benefits signified by water baptism are truly attached to, offered in, and conferred through the sacrament to those who place no obstacle in their way (Catechism of the Church of Geneva, Q/A 328). Calvin continued on this trajectory in his commentary on 1 Corinthians (1546); in the Acts of the Council of Trent: With the Antidote (1547), which for the first time uses the language of “instrument” for baptism; in his commentaries on Galatians and Ephesians (1548), Titus (1550), and 1 Peter (1551); and in the final edition of the Institutes (1559).66 Calvin is careful to point out that baptism is only God’s ordinary instrument of grace (God can still save without it), that the conferral of such grace is ultimately the work of the Holy Spirit, and that baptism is not efficacious without faith and repentance on the part of the baptizand. But, Zachman concludes, Calvin’s view of the sacrament now as truly presenting and offering the reality it symbolizes represents a significant revision of his earlier understanding of baptism as simply a testimony of grace—a modification that may have reflected the impact of his recent dialogues with the Roman Catholics.67
Prospectus
What we have found in this survey of scholarship is that a century of research on Calvin’s doctrine of baptism has reached little consensus on how he understood the efficacy of this sacrament. There is no agreement on whether he viewed baptism as an instrument/means of grace, as a parallel testimony or analogy of grace, or as one or another of these at different points in his lifetime. Even those who have made a case for change and development in his doctrine of baptism have not agreed on the phases of this development. Zachman noted a shift in Calvin in the 1540s from baptism as a confirmatory sign of grace to an actual instrument of grace, but he did not address the question of where the 1549 Consensus Tigurinus fit into this picture. Janse, by contrast, detected a significant new direction in Calvin’s baptismal thinking in the Consensus Tigurinus, where, in his view, the Genevan reformer abandoned his earlier salvific understanding of baptism in favor of a more Bullingerian perspective that he later employed in the exchanges with Westphal. But Janse did not deal with Calvin’s earliest treatment of baptism in the first edition of the Institutes. Riggs was the only one who addressed the entire span of Calvin’s career from 1536 through 1560, but he found the early Calvin moving from a more Lutheran to a more balanced Lutheran-Zwinglian
view of baptism in the years before 1545, with no substantial change thereafter. And not even he examined all of Calvin’s statements on baptism over this span of time.
In light of these disagreements and lacunae in the secondary literature, there is warrant for a monograph on Calvin’s doctrine of baptismal efficacy that engages the whole body of his work over the whole of his career. It is my contention that the best way to construct such a study is with a chronological and contextual analysis of all of Calvin’s major statements on baptism throughout his lifetime—in his commentaries, catechisms, sermons, consensus documents, polemical treatises, and various editions of the Institutes. Riggs, Lusk, Janse, and Zachman have made the first attempts at such an analysis, but their studies were, for the most part, relatively brief, did not cover the full range of Calvin’s writings, and arrived at rather different conclusions.68
The best models of the approach I am proposing are two studies on Calvin’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper by Thomas Davis and Wim Janse, respectively.69 Davis, first of all, challenged the sizable body of literature that examined Calvin’s Eucharistic thought only through the lens of the 1559 Institutes and portrayed his doctrine of the Supper as relatively stable throughout his lifetime. He argued that in the context of Calvin’s ongoing pastoral care, biblical scholarship, and polemical discussions, his teaching on the Lord’s Supper actually underwent a process of change and maturation.70 Tracing this development through the full complement of Calvin’s Eucharistic writings, Davis claimed that Calvin moved from a noninstrumental, and in some ways ambiguous, position on the Lord’s Supper in the 1536 Institutes, to an instrumental view in the years before the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. Calvin then reverted to a more symbolical viewpoint in the Consensus itself before radically reinterpreting the Consensus in the decade following the agreement with Zurich. This journey reached its completion in the 1559 Institutes and two treatises in 1561, in which “Calvin claimed as essential those very elements [e.g., the Eucharist as an instrument of grace, sacramental partaking of the substance of Christ] that he had originally denied.”71 No longer, therefore, should Calvin be considered a man of just a single book (the 1559 Institutes) or a static position on the Eucharist over the course of his life.
Janse, too, stated in no uncertain terms that to speak of “the eucharistic theology of Calvin” is simply a “fiction.”72 Like Davis, he took a developmental approach, in which he added texture and nuance to Davis’s earlier work by offering some of his own observations. Surveying much of Calvin’s
career and theological corpus, Janse saw the Genevan reformer moving in his Eucharistic thought from an early “Zwinglianizing” phase (1536–37) to a “Lutheranizing” period (1537–48), then once again to “spiritualizing tendencies” in the Consensus Tigurinus and its aftermath (1549–50s), and finally back to a more “Luther friendly” tone in the 1560s.73 At every stage, “Calvin not only . . . showed docility, flexibility, and development in thought, but was also able, being an astute church politician and vulnerable human being, to allow himself to be led by a desire for consensus or for dissent.”74 In this respect, Calvin proved himself a true disciple of his mentor, Martin Bucer.75
In the next five chapters of this book, my analysis of Calvin’s doctrine of baptismal efficacy will proceed along a chronological path similar to the one Davis and Janse charted for his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Both of those scholars saw Calvin’s Eucharistic theology as developing through five roughly similar time periods:
Davis 1536 1537–41 1541–4976 1549–57 1559–61
Janse 1536–37 1537–48 1549 1550s 1560s
To determine how closely, if at all, Calvin’s doctrine of baptism mirrored the changes that Davis and Janse found in his teaching on the Lord’s Supper, we, too, will trace Calvin’s treatment of baptismal efficacy through five time periods that approximate the phases delineated in the preceding grid. In chapter 2 (phase 1) we will examine the 1536 Institutes, which laid the foundation and established a baseline for Calvin’s subsequent work on baptism. In chapter 3 (phase 2) we will look at three significant works from the five years comprising Calvin’s first ministry period in Geneva (1536–38) and his subsequent three-year stay in Strasbourg (1538–41): his catechism of 1537/ 1538, the 1539 Institutes, and his commentary on Romans (1540). Chapter 4 (phase 3) covers Calvin’s major writings from his return to Geneva up to the Consensus Tigurinus (1541–48): the Catechism of the Church of Geneva (1542/1545), the baptismal liturgy in the Form of Prayers (1542), the 1543 Institutes, his commentary on 1 Corinthians (1546), the Acts of the Council of Trent: With the Antidote (1547), and his commentary on the epistles to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians (1548). Chapter 5 (phase 4) will focus on the 1549 Consensus Tigurinus itself, and chapter 6 (phase 5) on Calvin’s writings after the Consensus to near the end of his life: his
commentaries on Titus (1550), 1 Peter (1551), Isaiah (1551), and Acts (1552, 1554), his first two treatises on the sacraments from his polemical exchange with Joachim Westphal (1555, 1556), and the 1559 Institutes.
Throughout these five chapters I will argue that in a lifelong attempt to chart a middle course between Roman Catholic and Zwinglian/Anabaptist views of the sacraments, Calvin constructed a doctrine of baptismal efficacy that displayed elements of all three interpretative categories outlined earlier: instrumentalism, parallelism, and development and change. This interpretation falls somewhere between the static view of Calvin’s doctrine of baptism that has dominated so much of past scholarship and the claims of major alterations that a few scholars have put forth more recently. I will show that although there was indeed change and development in Calvin’s understanding of baptismal efficacy, they were changes in emphasis, nuance, and clarity, and not the more dramatic shifts that Janse and Zachman detected in Calvin’s doctrine of baptism or the kind of significant turnabouts that Davis and Janse found in his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.
Once we have explored Calvin’s doctrine of baptismal efficacy in general, we will turn in chapter 7 to his understanding of the efficacy of infant baptism and demonstrate how it was integrated into the rest of his baptismal theology. In chapter 8 we will examine part of Calvin’s historical and theological legacy by situating his teaching on baptismal efficacy in the context of the major Reformed confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 9 will then conclude this study with a summary of its findings.
Notes
1. E.g., Ronald S. Wallace, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament (Tyler, TX: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1982), 175–96; François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 318–39.
2. Jules Martin, “Notion du Baptême dans Calvin: Signification, Efficacité et Conditions” (ThB thesis, Faculté de Théologie Protestante de Montauban, 1894); John Q. Lynch, “The Teaching of John Calvin on Baptism” (MA thesis, St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, 1963); Hugh Reid Montgomery, “Baptism in the Teaching of John Calvin” (STM thesis, Biblical Seminary in New York, 1965); Humbert Matthew Eussen, “John Calvin: The Effects of Baptism” (STL diss., Aquinas Institute of Philosophy and Theology [Dubuque, Iowa], 1967); John W. Riggs, “The Development of Calvin’s Baptismal Theology 1536-1560” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1985); Carol Thorley, “ ‘No Part of Our Salvation Should Be Transferred
to the Sign’: John Calvin’s Understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism in Light of Faith Union with Christ” (ThM thesis, University of Otago [Dunedin, New Zealand], 2005). Riggs (p. 18) states that “the single greatest surprise concerning secondary work on Calvin’s baptismal theology is its paucity.” That is certainly true so far as books, dissertations, and theses are concerned.
3. John W. Riggs, “Emerging Ecclesiology in Calvin’s Baptismal Thought, 1536–1543,” Church History 64 (March 1995): 29–43; Riggs, Baptism in the Reformed Tradition: An Historical and Practical Theology, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 19–70.
4. For my first published reflections on this passage, see Lyle D. Bierma, “Baptism as a Means of Grace in Calvin’s Theology: A Tentative Proposal,” in Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 142–48. As this book will show, I no longer hold to everything I tentatively proposed then.
5. “Q. Verum, annon aliud aquae tribuis, nisi ut ablutionis tantum sit figura? A. Sic figuram esse sentio, ut simul annexa sit veritas. Neque enim, sua nobis dona pollicendo, nos Deus frustratur. Proinde et peccatorum veniam, et vitae novitatem offerri nobis in baptismo, et recipi a nobis certum est” (CO 6:118). I have followed the English translation in Calvin: Theological Treatises, ed. and trans. J. K. S. Reid, vol. 22 of Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 133, but I have altered it slightly based on my own reading of the Latin text. Reid, for example, does not translate the critical word simul (“at the same time”) in the first sentence of the answer. Part of the title of this book (Font of Pardon and New Life) is based on this question and answer.
6. James J. Cassidy, “Calvin on Baptism: Baptismal Regeneration or the Duplex Loquendi Modus?,” in Resurrection and Eschatology: Theology in Service of the Church. Essays in Honor of Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., ed. Lane G. Tipton and Jeffrey C. Waddington (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2008), 546.
7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1536 Edition, rev. ed., trans. and annot. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 95.
8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., vols. 20–21 of Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster), 2:1360 (4.17.1). This is Battles’s English translation of the 1559 Institutes, but, using a simple critical apparatus, he identifies which parts of the 1559 text first appeared in the 1536, 1539, 1543, and 1550 editions.
9. John Calvin, Acts of the Council of Trent: With the Antidote, in John Calvin, Calvin’s Tracts, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 3 (1844; reprint, Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 85–86.
10. John Calvin, Second Defence of the Pious and Orthodox Faith concerning the Sacraments, in Answer to the Calumnies of Joachim Westphal, in Calvin’s Tracts, 2:339.
11. John Calvin, The Sermons of M. John Calvin upon the Fifth Book of Moses called Deuteronomie, trans. Arthur Golding (1583; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 1244. I have modernized some of the language and spelling of this translation.
12. Brian A. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality: The Lord’s Supper in the Reformed Confessions,” in The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 118–30. This is a reprint of an essay first published in Theology Today 23 (1966–67): 224–43. See also Jan Rohls, Reformed Confessions: Theology from Zurich to Barmen, trans. John Hoffmeyer, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 181–85; and Paul Rorem, “The Consensus Tigurinus (1549): Did Calvin Compromise?,” in Calvinus Sacrae Scripturae Professor: Calvin as Confessor of Holy Scripture, ed. Wilhelm H. Neuser (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 90.
13. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality,” 118–21.
14. Ibid., 124.
15. Ibid., 122.
16. Ibid., 123.
17. Ibid., 122. Gerrish’s French phrase is from Calvin’s 1562 “Confession de Foy au Nom des Eglises Reformees de France pour Presenter a L’empereur et aux Estats D’Allemagne,” in CO 9:764. The full quotation reads as follows: “Ainsi nous croyons que les Sacremens, combien qu’ils soient administrez par gens meschans et indignes, retiennent tousiours leur nature, pour apporter et communiquer vrayement à ceux qui les reçoyvent ce qui est là signifié.”
18. See n. 4.
19. Gerrish, “Sign and Reality,” 122, 128. Some years later, Gerrish did acknowledge that this represented “a somewhat different variety of sacramental theory than we find in the 1536 Institutes,” where Calvin’s emphasis is on sacramental “verification of a gift already given,” not “the actual giving of a present gift.” Brian A. Gerrish, “Children of Grace,” in Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 114.
20. Wendel, Calvin, 321. This work first appeared in French in 1950.
21. Calvin, Institutes (1559), 2:1307. Actually, Calvin had included this line in the Institutes as far back as the first edition in 1536 (Calvin, Institutes [1536], 98).
22. Later in the book, Wendel raises a similar question with respect to Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper: “But this union with Christ, as we have seen, is given us from the very moment when we are incorporated in Christ by faith; it therefore does not originate in the Supper. . . . Prior to the Supper, and surviving it, union with Christ subsists therefore beyond the Supper itself and is always independent of it; since, according to Calvin, we may attain to it by other means, such as preaching, the reading of the Bible, or prayer. But here we are obliged to ask ourselves, what exactly does the Supper give us that we cannot obtain otherwise?” Calvin: Origins and Development, 353.
23. Cf. also Wilhelm Niesel, The Theology of Calvin, trans. Harold Knight (1956; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 220: “Calvin mentions three gifts which are imparted to us in baptism: forgiveness of our sins, our dying and rising again with Christ, and our communion with the Lord Himself; but the first two of these gifts depend wholly upon the third.”
24. Jack W. Cottrell, “Baptism according to the Reformed Tradition,” in Baptism and the Remission of Sins, ed. David W. Fletcher (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1990), 69–70.
25. Ibid., 70.
26. Ibid., 71.
27. See n. 1. For a more recent example of this approach, see Russell Haitch, “John Calvin: Baptism Is Sign and Seal,” in From Exorcism to Ecstasy: Eight Views of Baptism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 93–111.
28. Wallace, Word and Sacrament, 159.
29. Ibid., 160.
30. Ibid., 135.
31. Ibid., 169–71.
32. Cf. Walter Kreck, “Die Lehre von der Taufe bei Calvin,” Evangelische Theologie 6 (1948): 247: “Die Zueignung des in Christus erworbenen Heils geschieht durch den heiligen Geist, der durch das Wort den Glauben wirkt. Die Taufe gehört in diesen Kreis hinein als bekräftigendes Siegel, d. h. sie ist nicht zu lösen von Wort, Geist, und Glauben.”
33. Wallace, Word and Sacrament, 184–86. On this distinction between validity and efficacy in Calvin’s sacramental doctrine, see also John Ernest Burkhart, “Kingdom, Church, and Baptism: The Significance of the Doctrine of the Church in the Theology of John Calvin” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1959), 180–82, 201–4.
34. William B. Evans, “‘Really Exhibited and Conferred . . . in His Appointed Time’: Baptism and the New Reformed Sacramentalism,” Presbyterian: Covenant Seminary Review 31/2 (Fall 2005): 72–88, here 78–80; Rich Lusk, “Paedobaptism and Baptismal Efficacy: Historic Trends and Current Controversies,” in The Federal Vision, ed. Steve Wilkins and Duane Garner (Monroe, LA: Athanasius Press, 2004), 89–91; Lusk, “Baptismal Efficacy and Baptismal Latency: A Sacramental Dialogue,” Presbyterian: Covenant Seminary Review 32/1 (Spring 2006): 18–37, here 19–20. Lusk refers to all six of the “tough quotations” from Calvin’s works that I cited earlier.
35. Evans, “Really Exhibited and Conferred,” 80, 82–83; Lusk, “Baptismal Efficacy and Baptismal Latency,” 21–22. According to Evans, however, “Divine sovereignty functions quite differently in the baptismal context for Lusk than for Calvin or [the] Westminster [Standards].” “Calvin, Baptism, and Latent Efficacy Again: A Reply to Rich Lusk,” Presbyterian: Covenant Seminary Review 32/1 (Spring 2006): 38–45, here 39. Cf. also J. van Genderen, “De Doop bij Calvijn,” in Rondom de Doopvont, ed. W. van ‘t Spijker et al. (Goudriaan: De Groot, 1983), 274: “Ook in de leer van de sacramenten komt uit, dat Calvijn beleed dat ons heil afhangt van de verkiezende genade van God. Zoals hij zeggen kan, dat alleen de gelovigen het ontvangen, kan hij ook zeggen, dat alleen de utiverkorenen het ontvangen.”
36. This is a cluster of Presbyterian and Reformed pastors and theologians in the United States that has arisen over the past decade with the goal of (re)awakening interest in a covenantal (“federal”) perspective on theology and the church. See Wilkins and Garner, The Federal Vision
37. Lusk, “Paedobaptism,” 91.
38. “Es braucht kaum gesagt zu werden, daß diese beiden Actiones streng geschieden sind, trotzdem sie zugleich durch Gottes ewigen Heilswillen aufs engste verbunden
sein müssen.” Joachim Beckmann, Vom Sakrament bei Calvin: Die Sakramentslehre Calvins in ihren Beziehungen zu Augustin (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926), 35.
39. Ibid., 55.
40. Ibid., 55–63.
41. “Auf der einen Seite steht das symbolum mit seinem geheimnisvollen Gehalt als testimonium, sigillum, pignus, als testificatio, repraesentatio—und weil es Gottes symbolum ist, entspricht ihr eine exhibitio, eine himmlische veritas, denn Gott is der Wahrhaftige, und was er zusagt, das hält er gewiβ. Aber wirklich nur von Gott aus, nach seinem Willen und Wohlgefallen, ist es solches Symbol, nur insofern ist es instrumentum, organum, vehiculum gratiae.” Ibid., 35.
42. “Daß das Sakrament tatsächlich dem Wort gleichgeordnetes Gnadenmittel und nicht nur ein irdisches Symbol ist, sondern daß der irdischen Handlung eine göttliche (nicht psychologische, von den Symbolen ausgehende) Geisteswirkung entspricht, findet bei Calvin letzlich keine andre Begründung als im Glauben an die Veracitas Dei.” Ibid., 61.
43. Cassidy, “Calvin on Baptism,” 539–43.
44. Ibid., 544–46.
45. See n. 6.
46. Cassidy, “Calvin on Baptism,” 546–49.
47. See n. 10.
48. Cassidy, “Calvin on Baptism,” 550.
49. See n. 8.
50. Cassidy, “Calvin on Baptism,” 550–52 (emphasis added).
51. Burkhart, “Kingdom, Church, and Baptism,” 190–92.
52. Ibid., 192–93.
53. Ibid., 193–94.
54. Ibid., 203–4. See also pp. 207–8.
55. Richard Schlüter, “Das sakramentale Taufverständnis bei Calvin,” in Karl Barths Tauflehre: Ein interkonfessionelles Gespräch (Paderborn: Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1973), 150, 152–53.
56. See nn. 2 and 3.
57. Riggs, “Emerging Ecclesiology,” 29.
58. Riggs, Baptism in the Reformed Tradition, 41–60.
59. Rich Lusk, “Calvin on Baptism, Penance, and Absolution,” Theologia (2002), accessed November 5, 2019, http://www.hornes.org/theologia/rich-lusk/ calvin-on-baptism-penance-absolution.
60. Ibid.
61. Wim Janse, “The Controversy between Westphal and Calvin on Infant Baptism, 1555–1556,” Perichoresis 6/1 (2008): 3–43.
62. Ibid., 16–17.
63. Ibid., 3, 15, 31.
64. Randall C. Zachman, “Revising the Reform: What Calvin Learned from Dialogue with the Roman Catholics,” in John Calvin and Roman Catholicism: Critique, Engagement, Then and Now, ed. Randall C. Zachman (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 168.
65. Ibid., 169–70.
66. For Zachman’s interpretation of Calvin’s statements on baptism from his Ephesians commentary through the 1559 Institutes, see Randall C. Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 328–30.
67. Zachman, “Revising the Reform,” 169–72.
68. Elsie McKee, in her monumental The Pastoral Ministry and Worship in Calvin’s Geneva (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2016), also provides a brief overview of the development of Calvin’s doctrine of baptism (pp. 395–407), but because the main purpose of her study “is to examine the relationship between Calvin’s teaching and Geneva’s worship practice” (p. 394), she does not devote much attention to the stages of development in his baptismal thought. She does maintain, however, that by 1539 Calvin had backed away from an explicit denial of baptism as an instrument of grace (pp. 398–99, 405–6).
69. Thomas J. Davis, The Clearest Promises of God: The Development of Calvin’s Eucharistic Teaching, AMS Studies in Religious Tradition 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1995); Wim Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology: Three Dogma-Historical Observations,” in Selderhuis, Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpres, 37–69.
70. See especially Davis, Clearest Promises of God, 1–8, 86.
71. Ibid., 212.
72. Janse, “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology,” 37.
73. Ibid., 39–40.
74. Ibid., 40.
75. Ibid., 51–67.
76. Davis deals with the 1549 Consensus Tigurinus early in his book and out of chronological sequence so that it can “serve as a hermeneutical device to pose questions of Calvin’s work prior to the Consensus and to set the stage to examine his teaching after the Consensus.” Clearest Promises of God, 7.
