No doubt in Calvin's time they didn't have the phenomena of church-hopping. However, lest we think he has a merely functional view of the visible church, he says:
...However it may be, where the preaching of the gospel is reverently heard and the sacraments are not neglected there for the time being no deceitful or ambiguous form of the church is seen; and no one is permitted to spurn its authority, flout its warnings, resist its counsels, or make light of its chastisements - much less to desert it and break its unity. For the Lord esteems the communion of his church so highly that he counts as a traitor and apostate from Christianity anyone who arrogantly leaves any Christian society, provided it cherishes the true ministry of Word and sacraments. He so esteems the authority of the church that when it is violated he believes his own diminished. (Institutes IV.1.10)
Arrogantly is the key adverb (ok I admit it, I wrote adjective the first time!), isn't it?
19 comments:
Or is it that he sees any departure from a 'Christian society' that 'cherishes the true ministry of the Word and sacraments' as arrogant?
D.
P.S. "Arrogantly" is an adverb, not an adjective.
P.P.S. Presumably, the opening observation about the lack of "church-hopping" in Calvin's day and the question about arrogance means this is blogging and not quoting, yes?
Ah, got me. Used to be an English teacher an' all.
Yes, this is definitely blogging. I framed the quotation, and invited comment.
BUT: no, I think Calvin would be ok with you changing churches if you moved to another city, for example...
Or, changing churches if the one you were going to expelled you.
Would you use the word Traitor and/or Apostate, MPJ?
Strong.
At the very least, this observation speaks to those who are deeply casual about leaving a church.
What about changing denominations from one gospel preaching denom (more gospel assuming though) to another gospel preaching denom. What if your views on certain theological points are better suited to another denom?
Well, Calvin was quite stern on this. He said Preaching of the Word and Sacraments rightly done were enough: we shouldn't expect perfection or agreement even in doctrine. (of course, you don't have to agree with him!). Check Institutes book 4, chapter 1.
Justin, you have been a pastor in the era of church hopping, and church upgrading and sheep stealing: tough might be good! This is the people of God we are talking about here.
Sounds like Calvin was a bit overbearing and heavy. I would change churches if he was my pastor.
Justin, you have been a pastor in the era of church hopping, and church upgrading and sheep stealing: tough might be good! This is the people of God we are talking about here.
But is this not also the era of niche-churches? A lot churches today have a niche focus which the churches of Calvin's period didn't. And if you out grow the "uni" niche and persist in "hanging around" five years past your used-by-date you start looking like Humbert Humbert.
Maybe if churches weren't divided into "migrant churches" "uni churches" "media churches" "people who like playing active sports churches" etc etc then there would be less need for "worshopping".
I think you're right, Christopher. Perhaps a large part of the problem does lie with the whole niche-church issue/homogeneous unit. It's not very catholic, is it? By that I mean the congregation then isn't particularly universal in the age of its members, or social background, or ethnic background, or whatever.
It seems particularly inappropriate given God's "plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and on earth" (Eph 1.10), reconciling us to himself and us to one another. Jew and Gentile are now one new man in Christ. To take a verse utterly out of context, "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder". We're working against God's purposes if we divide up the body of Christ like that.
The niche church thing causes all sorts of problems. If one is part of only a student church, there's a danger that all the application of God's word will be to the student context, leaving one ill-prepared for the real world.
It also deprives believers of the ministry of other brothers and sistersw who may well be older and wiser.
D.
Michael - I sort of took the need for changing churches because of geographical circumstances for granted.
I think niche churches also help breed the idea that church is suppose to cater my needs.
If there is a special church for lawyers, but I am a mechanic, well that makes me feel a little exclude so I might go and find a church that cares for my needs, or maybe I will start one myself.
Perhaps niche-churches create needs that didn't alreay exist.
Daniel: all I was trying to illustrate was that perhaps there is a non-arrogant leaving of churches...
I don't want to overdo the niche church thing: but we may be in fact adding to the gathering together of the church universal by having congregations that intentionally target different subgroups. In the end, all churches are homogenous unit type churches, but we don't realise it because we don't know who is not there because of a sub-culture we may have developed. We always exclude somebody.
Michael much as I like to hear you raise a defence for the beleagured churchgoer against Calvin's rigour, this will not quite do:
In the end, all churches are homogenous unit type churches, but we don't realise it because we don't know who is not there because of a sub-culture we may have developed.
I am more than happy with stating that a church may be blind to what it is assuming, or who it is excluding. But to say that this makes all churches "homogenous unit type churches" stretches language beyond its usefulness. Isn't that expression a technical term?
Well, yes and no: I hear opponents of HUP churches vigorously defending their traditions and practices as if they were free of cultural distinctivenesses that might deter others from attending. At the vary basic level of using a particular language (unless we all use latin, and that HAS been tried!) you can't utter a word that isn't automatically excluding some from your fellowship. This isn't bad, it is just a fact of life, and it prevents us from believing in the catholicity of our own local expression of church.
Well, no and yes. That a meeting takes place in some language or other seems somewhat trivial. One church I belonged to in Japan (for a time) conducted services in Japanese, but performed concurrent translation into English and Korean: that they bothered with the second of these was itself a rather strong statement of Christian unity, since the low view of each other held by many Japanese and Koreans is notorious. I like to think that I would have heard that message at least, even if I were (say) a Spanish speaker. The Roman Catholic church in Tsukuba held Masses in about seven different languages, while remaining one parish: a different practice, but likewise an effort to be catholic in the small-c sense, and rather at the other end of the scale from the old Latin liturgy.
I find it unsurprising (if a little depressing) that some opponents of the HUP lack insight into the limitations of their own churches as you say, but I would still claim that something distinctive is being said by the HU language. Maybe it's justified or even necessary, but one does feel a tension with the catholic ideal.
You said that all I was trying to illustrate was that perhaps there is a non-arrogant leaving of churches, and when I was young that was a point that some people certainly needed to hear: you could still find layfolk in the suburbs who believed it a traitorous abandonment of one's post to go to church in the neighbouring parish. That was a view on its way out, but I think something was lost in the move towards more commuter- or preference-based groupings. Perhaps the ideal wasn't lost, but some customs that gave it expression were --- and I'm not sure that anything very substantial has been put in their place.
This has been a practical matter for me in the last year, returning to Sydney after a long absence: what, exactly, is one doing when one is church-shopping? I do not after all want to belong to a church which is merely going to give me what I want (shades of Groucho Marx here). But one looks for some things in a church and not others, nonetheless.
True: easier, or clearer cut for Calvin in a non-mobile village based society perhaps, where evryone knows everyone...
And why do we assume that our present social mobility is a good thing? Perhaps our causal assumption that we chase employment (and sacrifice family and friends and church connections) itself needs to be questioned (he asks to the man who has run off to the far side of the world for a qualification, fully aware that I'd like to do the same myself at some stage...)? The gospel message does have a disturbing effect, as missionaries are sent (Go!), but this doesn't seem to be what we're talking about for most people leaving churches for 'geographical' reasons.
Well, I guess, although the mobility isn't just global - it is true even within the one city. Of course, if you and your apocalypticist mates are right we could all be experiencing village life in the near future...
Indeed.
I think that social mobility (our ability to move from village to village) is a good thing, although often entered into for the wrong reasons. It helps to keep the spiritual waters from become stagnant and reduces the rise of cult-like churches.
Surely when communities are in geographical isolation there is an increased possibility for strong personalities to dominate and rule without accountability. I know little about church history but I will cite Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel to support my case.
Or more seriously the rise of cults/sects during the expansion of the US would be due to number of factors but I presume geographical isolation and the corruptible freedom that is offered through it would have helped Joseph Smith, the Christodelphians, JW's and the others to break away from orthodoxy and do their own thing? Yes/no?
So with peak oil there may also be a spike in cultish/secterian activity - presuming communication between villages is also reduced.
Hmm. It is true that church in a small town is a totally different thing from church in an inner city...
The apocalyptic idea of reversion to "villages" seems to me a distraction. The hollowing-out of local communities and universal car ownership (related, of course) is surely implicated in church-going trends over the last decades, more than village/city distinctions, or absolute (in)ability to move. In other words, we maybe don't commit to local churches for the same reasons we don't commit to local stores; and in many cases, we can't; and some of us might want to, supposing we could; and some of that feeling might be more nostalgic than realistic ...
About cults and such: I would have said our current "choice"-ridden society was more conducive to some kinds of extremism, not less. If settled commitment is difficult in general --- the point with which this discussion started --- then strong versions of church-loyalty may end up taking some unhealthy forms. The imperative not-to-abandon a group that really is the church of God in some place, and the "imperative" not-to-abandon some group assembled by preference or affinity within a city, where people travel over distance, are not at all the same thing.
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