Called to Rebuild a Church in Ruins: The Life and Work of John Calvin

John Calvin understood himself to be a junior member of a team of theologians, pastors and teachers who were directly called by God to restore a Church that they thought had had fallen into captivity and ruin under the tyranny of the papacy in Rome. Calvin very much agreed with Luther that the Pope had led the Church into captivity in a way analogous to the captivity of Israel and Judah under the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Much in the way that Second Isaiah was called by God to proclaim forgiveness and release to the captives in Babylon, Calvin saw Luther and others as called by God to proclaim freedom and release from the tyranny of the Pope in Rome. However, Calvin understood his own position to be like Ezra and Nehemiah, who returned from Babylon to find the Temple and all of Jerusalem in ruins. Just as those who returned from Babylon had to rediscover the foundations of the Temple in order to rebuild it, Calvin and his colleagues sought to clear off the foundations of the true worship of God from the rubble left by the papacy, so that the ruined Church could be rebuilt on these foundations.

Calvin knew that he was a latecomer to this work of restoration. The first wave of restoration began with the work of Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus and Jacques Lefevre D’Estaples, who sought to restore the Latin Bible that had been corrupted through ignorance of the Hebrew and Greek languages. Luther, Oecolampadius, Zwingli, Bullinger, Bucer, Farel and Viret had sought to restore the preaching of the Word of God and the proper use of the sacraments. Melanchthon and Sturm had sought to restore the proper method of teaching doctrine. Calvin understood himself to be working with this larger team of reformers in the work of rebuilding the Church, even as he worked tirelessly to restore the true worship of God in the temples of his day, by building up piety and religion on its true foundations: “all we have attempted has been to renew the ancient form of the Church, which, at first sullied and distorted by illiterate men of indifferent character, was afterwards flagitiously mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman Pontiff and his faction.” ¹

Calvin knew that his call to this work of restoration was not the natural outgrowth of his own personal development and training. ² He was born in Noyon, France in 1509 and initially educated in the house of the d’Hangest family. His father worked for the bishop of Noyon, and initially wanted his son to have a career in the Church and so he sent him to the prestigious University of Paris when Calvin was fourteen years old. However, Calvin’s father had a falling out with his bishop that eventually resulted in his excommunication and so Calvin was directed instead to seek a career in law (which at that time was both civic and ecclesiastical), by means of study at Orleans and Bourges. Calvin did attain a degree in law, which was one of the higher faculties along with theology and medicine, but he did not attain a doctorate in theology, nor was he ordained by a bishop, and so he lacked the ordinary qualifications for the work he was later called to do.

However, while he was a student, Calvin became a member of the first restoration movement to sweep Europe, namely the efforts of Valla, Erasmus, d’Estaples and others to restore the study of ancient languages. Calvin fell in love with the study of classical Latin and Greek at the same time that he was studying for his law degree, and may have ruined his health in the process. Calvin’s father died shortly after Calvin attained his law degree, and Calvin took the opportunity to follow his initial calling to restore ancient languages by studying at the newly-founded College of Royal Lecturers, where he encountered the work of the eminent French Hellenist, Guillaume Bude. Calvin sought to become a member of this group of linguists and philologists by publishing his own work of classical interpretation, which was a commentary on Seneca’s treatise On Clemency. In spite of the great erudition that Calvin demonstrated in this commentary, the international community of classical scholars did not welcome Calvin as one of its own. However, the skills of interpretation Calvin learned at this time were indispensible for his later work as an interpreter of Scripture, for he learned from his work on Seneca to reveal the mind of the author of a text by interpreting the text in its historical, linguistic and cultural context. Indeed, Calvin continued to study classical literature throughout his life, for he, like Melanchthon, was convinced that the restoration of the Church depended on the restoration of the study of ancient languages and literature and he would later claim that the Holy Spirit inspired these classical authors to teach the liberal and mechanical arts for the betterment of life in this world.

Some time after the publication of the Seneca commentary, Calvin experienced what he called a “sudden conversion to teachableness,” which marked the beginning of his involvement with the work of restoring the ruined Church. Calvin appears to have been brought to this sudden conversion by his reading of Luther’s treatises from 1520, The Babylonian Captivity of the Christian Church and The Freedom of a Christian. Calvin’s public adherence to Luther’s movement of liberation and restoration led to his exile first from Paris and then from France. It is not clear, however, whether he saw his allegiance to Luther as necessitating a break from the Church of Rome. He clearly saw himself as part of the Catholic reform movement in France (led by d’Estaples) and his best friend during this time, Louis du Tillet, remained a lifelong member of this group. While in exile, Calvin sought to aid the work of restoration by teaching the doctrine of true piety and religion to all of the baptized by means of a catechism he called The Institutes of the Christian Religion, published anonymously in 1536. Calvin thought that he could best contribute to the work of restoration by means of such writing, and did not at all feel called to the public ministry of teaching or the pastorate.

All of this changed in 1536, when Calvin sought to travel to Strasbourg to pursue his vocation as an evangelical writer. The war between the Pope and the King of France made it necessary for Calvin and du Tillet to travel through the city of Geneva. Geneva had already broken from the Roman Church by severing all ties with its bishop, under the leadership of Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret, but the condition of the Church in Geneva was very unstable and disorganized when Calvin arrived. Once Farel, who was part of the first wave of reformers (and thus Calvin’s senior), learned that the author of the Institutes was in Geneva, he appealed directly to him to aid the work of reform in the city, and when Calvin demurred, Farel allegedly threatened God’s wrath on Calvin’s work if he abandoned the Church in its time of dire need. Calvin agreed to answer this urgent call, and accepted the vocation first as teacher, and then as pastor, from the City Council of Geneva. Calvin’s willingness to accept an ecclesiastical office from anyone other than a bishop outraged his best friend Louis du Tillet, who left Calvin, returned to France and wrote a series of letters in which he accused his friend of schism from the Catholic Church. Calvin must have taken this criticism to heart, for when he and Farel were expelled from Geneva two years later, Calvin became convinced that he did not have a divine vocation to be a teacher and pastor in the Church. Once he left Geneva, he headed for Strasbourg, which had been his original destination before he was detained in Geneva.

Once he arrived in Strasbourg, he was once again called to the offices of pastor and teacher by the leader of reform in Strasbourg, Martin Bucer. Like Farel, Bucer was an elder member of the restoration movement and so his voice had special weight and authority for Calvin. While in Strasbourg, Calvin learned a great deal from Bucer about the pastorate and about Church organization in general. He also taught in the Strasbourg Academy, led by Johann Sturm, and met Philip Melanchthon, whom he deeply admired for the clarity of his teaching in his Loci communes, and Calvin used this work as the model for his own future revisions of the Institutes. Sturm and Melanchthon were instrumental in teaching Calvin how to be a much more effective teacher, not only of all the baptized, but also those called to be pastors in the renewed Church. Calvin was eventually called back to Geneva in 1541, to be a pastor and teacher there again, and when Calvin returned he promptly put into effect all that he had learned in Strasbourg, in order to bring genuine restoration and order to the Church in Geneva.

Calvin also began to reflect more clearly on the question of the legitimacy of the reform movement of which he was now a part. How could those who had not been called by the Church of Rome go on to lead a movement to rebuild the Church of Rome from the ruins created by the papacy? Calvin saw a precedent for what was happening in his day in the city of Jerusalem right before the exile to Babylon. All of the prophets, kings and priests in Jerusalem were teaching falsehood and were filling the city and Temple with idols. To address this emergency, God directly called prophets like Jeremiah and gave them divine authority to restore the Church of their day by teaching the divinely-revealed Word of God, in spite of the fact that the priests, kings, and other prophets opposed them and saw their calling as illegitimate. Similarly, given the fact that the pope and bishops were all opposed to any call to rebuild the Church, God in Calvin’s day responded to the emergency by calling present-day prophets like Luther, Farel, Bucer, Melanchthon, and Calvin himself, to work on the rebuilding of the ruined Church on the basis of a direct divine commission. “That those who at this time have held forth a torch to us, to enable us, after long wandering, to return to the way, were holy prophets of God, is attested by the noble and truly divine specimen which they gave of their ministry. They would never have been called to do this service to the Church by the wolves who were burning with rage to destroy and devour it. Therefore to cure an incurable evil, especially when the usual remedies failed, God himself behoved to bring assistance by putting forth his own hand.” ³ Even though his best friend had accused him of schism, Calvin was convinced that God had called him to work with others to restore the Catholic Church, most likely through the call of prophets that God had commissioned ahead of him (i.e., Farel and Bucer), even though they could only restore the Church in particular places, like Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Zurich, Basel and Geneva, and not throughout the world. Calvin thought that once Luther and others brought the Word of God to light, there was no time to waste and everyone who had the ability should apply their learning and gifts to build up the ruins of the Church.

It were indeed most desirable that the dissensions by which the Church is now disturbed should be settled by the authority of a pious Council, but as matters are we cannot yet hope for it. Therefore, since Churches are scattered in a dreadful manner, and no hope of gathering them together appears from man, each cannot do better than hasten to rally around the banner which the Son of God holds out to us. This is not a time to keep waiting for one another. As every one sees the light of Scripture beaming forth, let him instantly follow. In regard to the whole Church, we commend it to the care of its Lord. Meanwhile, let us not be either slothful or secure. Let each do his best. Let us contribute whatever in us is of counsel, learning, and abilities, to build up the ruins of the Church. ⁴

Once back in Geneva, Calvin sought to rebuild the Church by tirelessly and faithfully carrying out his office as teacher and pastor of Geneva. Calvin was convinced that the pope had ruined the Church by taking Scripture away from the baptized, and by having priests, bishops and monks teach whatever fables they wanted to invent, thereby leading the Church into manifest and pervasive idolatry. Calvin saw the offices of teacher and pastor as restoring the Church by restoring the reading of Scripture by all the baptized. Calvin understood the office of teacher to involve building up future pastors of the Church by giving them the kind of teaching that would open up for them the genuine meaning of Scripture. Pastors then teach and apply this meaning to their congregations and guide them in their own reading of Scripture. ⁵

Calvin was convinced that pastors first of all needed to be taught what to look for when they read the whole of the Bible. What are the main themes or topics to which one must attend and to which one ought to refer all that one reads? Calvin set forth this goal, and these topics, in the revised Institutes of 1539, which he revised again in 1543, 1550 and finally in 1559. Once future ministers had mastered the topics of Scripture in the Institutes, Calvin directed them to his commentaries on Scripture, in which he revealed the mind of the author by attending carefully to the context. When Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541, he had only published one commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans. By the time he died in 1564, Calvin had published commentaries on the whole of the New Testament (except 2 and 3 John and Revelation), as well as the first five books of the Old Testament, the Psalms, all of the minor prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and the beginning of Ezekiel, on which he was lecturing when he died. Calvin expected the pastors he taught to preach straight through entire books of Scripture, as he did on Deuteronomy, Job or Galatians, so his commentaries on these books were to help them discern the natural meaning the author had in mind when he wrote, so that this meaning could be taught and especially applied to the congregation.

As pastor, Calvin set forth the topics to be sought in the congregation’s reading of Scripture in the Catechism, which was formulated in a question-and-answer format to accustom believers to inquire into the meaning and basis of their faith. Once the faithful mastered the Catechism, they would be guided in their reading of Scripture by the preaching of their pastor. Calvin’s practice was to take two verses of the book on which he was preaching, and to preach on them for an hour, with an hourglass on the pulpit to keep him honest. Although part of the sermon concerned the natural and genuine meaning of the author, the bulk of it consisted in the application of the passages of Scripture to the lives of the congregation, out of the conviction that we all flee from applying the Word of God to the transformation of our lives. Calvin sought to bring Scripture into the inner thoughts of our hearts, to transform us in the image of God through the renewal of our minds. To reinforce the transforming power of the Word, Calvin instituted the a capella singing of the Psalms in public worship, for he was convinced that the addition of music to the Word had the ability to reach the inmost affections of the heart. However, Calvin did not want his congregation to believe simply on the basis of his authority as pastor, for this is how the papacy came to exercise its tyranny and ruin the Church. Instead, for Calvin, every member of the congregation has both the right and duty to read Scripture for herself, both to confirm or falsify the preaching of the pastor, and to become a teacher to others, especially those in her household.

In order to make sure that Scripture was brought to bear on all aspects of people’s lives, Calvin created the institution of the Consistory, which was made up of the pastors of Geneva as well as elected lay elders (usually members of the City Council). ⁶ The Consistory investigated any alleged violations of the Word of God in Geneva and also helped to alleviate any conflicts that developed between members of the congregation. Unlike the previous practice of penance, in which each member of the congregation confessed in private to his priest, the members of Calvin’s congregation were disciplined by a committee of pastors and lay people and minutes of the meetings were taken to increase accountability. The Consistory reveals just how seriously Calvin took the application of Scripture to the lives of each member of the congregation, for Scripture only attains its goal when each believer applies its meaning to the concrete circumstances of his or her life. The City Council did not initially approve of the independent work of the Consistory, for it thought it had sole authority to discipline and punish the citizens of Geneva. But Calvin eventually won the right of the Consistory to be relatively independent of the Council in the decade before he died. ⁷

Calvin makes the teaching, preaching, reading and application of Scripture the centre of his effort to restore the Church. Over against the Roman Church, which had claimed that images are the books of the unlearned, Calvin insists that Scripture is the book of the unlearned and was given to the Church by the Spirit of God to teach all of the faithful what they need to know for the building up of piety and religion. The first thing that Scripture does to build up piety is to reveal the one true God over against all the idols invented by the human imagination. Far from seeing images as the books of the unlearned, Calvin cited Jeremiah and Isaiah to claim that images and idols are the teachers of falsehood, for they erase the difference between the Creator and creation and lead to the worship of the creature instead of the Creator. Calvin thought that one of the primary ways in which Rome had ruined the Church was by filling places of worship with countless images, such as statues, paintings, crosses, crucifixes, stained glass windows and reliquaries, in which the relics of Christ and the saints were venerated. This flood of images invented by the human imagination led to idolatry and superstition, as the baptized were taught to seek the presence and favour of God in images that human beings had created, in direct contradiction of the teaching of Scripture. Once Scripture replaces images as the book of the unlearned, the temples in which God is worshipped need to be purged of all images invented by human beings. Thus Calvin, following Farel before him, sought the removal of all paintings (including frescos), statues, crosses, crucifixes, stained glass and reliquaries from the worship spaces of Geneva so that the teaching, preaching and application of Scripture might take their place for the building up of piety and religion.

However, the removal of the images created by human ingenuity has as its ultimate goal the disclosure of the Creator in the living image of God’s works in creation. ⁸ According to Calvin, God manifests Godself by God’s powers or perfections, such as goodness, wisdom, truth, justice, power and mercy. All of these powers are good things, and by manifesting these powers God reveals Godself to be the author, source and fountain of every good thing. These powers are manifested in everything we see and feel in the universe and in ourselves so that, even were we to be blind, we could still feel the power of life within ourselves, which reveals God to be the fountain of life. The problem is that human beings are blind to these works, so that we do not rightly perceive the powers of God portrayed in them as in a painting. Moreover, our ingratitude leads us to ascribe to the creature the good things that freely flow to us from the Creator. Thus we need the teaching of Scripture to act as our spectacles so that we might rightly discern what has always been right before our eyes, and so that we might be led from the powers we see and feel in the works of God to the fountain of every good thing found in God alone. The feeling or sense of these powers teaches us piety and from piety religion is born. Hence the removal of human images and their replacement by the teaching of Scripture leads us to the works of God in the universe and from them to the powers of God portrayed and represented therein, so that we might feel these powers in ourselves, enjoy their benefits and thereby have piety built up within us.

Scripture continues to build up piety by revealing that God originally created us in the image and likeness of God. Just as the powers of God portray God in the universe, so human beings were created to be the self-representation of God by manifesting God’s goodness, wisdom, power, truth, mercy and justice in themselves. The more we portray the powers of God in ourselves, the closer we draw to God. The goal of our creation is therefore to be united to God, the fountain of every good thing, which would be both our eternal life and our eternal happiness. However, we know from our own experience that there is no direct transition from our enjoyment of the powers of God in this life to eternal life in God, for we now experience death as the rupture between this life and eternal life. We know from the teaching of Scripture that death was not intended to be part of our creation in the image of God and so the stark reality of our death reveals that sin has intervened between our original creation and our present experience. We thus find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of ceaselessly longing for eternal life in union with God, while being unable to satisfy this longing owing to our sin, which leads to our death.

In order to restore us to the goal of our creation, God must again set forth the fountain of every good thing in the works of God, though now in a way that takes from us every evil thing we find in ourselves, including death, in order to bestow on us every good thing we lack, including eternal life. God does this by sending the eternal Son of God to become one of us, so that in him God might take from us all that separates us from God in order to bestow on us all that unites us with God. In the death of Christ, we see the removal of our death by means of the Son of God taking that death upon himself and, in his resurrection and ascension, we see the restoration of the goal of eternal life for all who are members of Christ. Moreover, so that humanity might always have hope in the restoration of all things in Christ, God not only revealed the work of Christ in the Gospel but also represented the work of Christ in the shadows, types and images of the Law of Israel, especially in its priests and the sacrifices they offered for the sins of Israel. Calvin sees this representation of Christ in blood sacrifices as early as the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when Abel offers a blood sacrifice that is accepted by God. However, Calvin thinks that the disclosure of the death of Christ to Israel is also progressive and becomes clearer over time. Thus when God established the tabernacle and the priesthood through Moses and Aaron, the representation of Christ became more fulsome. When Solomon builds the Temple and brings the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies, Christ is even more graphically portrayed, for he will die for the sins of the world in the city of Jerusalem within sight of the Temple. The fact that God commands sacrifice to be offered every day reveals that the one portrayed by sacrifice has not yet arrived. However, by commanding that one atonement for sin be offered once a year by the high priest at Yom Kippur, God reveals to Israel that the sacrifice for sin will take place by means of one death once offered, which will take place in Christ.

Once Christ comes and dies, the entire economy of the law of Israel is both fulfilled and brought to an end. Calvin thought this was graphically revealed when Titus destroyed the Second Temple, for it showed that after the death of Christ there needs to be no more priesthood, no more sacrifice, no more Temple. The entire economy of the Law reveals Christ but, once Christ is revealed, the economy of the Law must come to an end. And it is precisely here that Calvin thought that the Roman Church had done the most damage to the Catholic Church, for its bishops ordained its priests to offer the sacrifice of the Mass on altars throughout Europe in order to make satisfaction for the sins of the living and the dead. This is the greatest idolatry and blasphemy of which Rome is guilty, according to Calvin, for it teaches the baptized to seek every good thing not in the death and resurrection of Christ but in the sacrifices offered by the priests of the Roman Church. “What an insult was offered, when the efficacy of Christ’s death was transferred to a theatrical performance by men—when some priestling, as if he had been the successor of Christ, interposing himself as a Mediator between God and man—when, after destroying the virtue of the only sacrifice, a thousand sacrifices of expiation were daily offered in a single city—when Christ was sacrificed a thousand times a day, as if he had not done enough in once dying for us?” ⁹

The apparent denial of the efficacy of the death of Christ in the repeated sacrifice of the Mass is reinforced in Calvin’s mind by Rome’s teaching on satisfaction for sin. Calvin understood Rome to be teaching that once the baptized committed sin, they could not be forgiven by the sacrifice of Christ unless they were also willing to make satisfaction for sin themselves, initially by prayer, alms and fasting, but later by pilgrimages, relic worship and indulgences, as well as by endowing Masses to be offered. Rome also taught that, even after sin, we still have free choice of will so that we can co-operate with the grace of God in meriting satisfaction for sin. Moreover, the Roman Church insisted that its ability to absolve sin was based on the merits of Christ and all the saints, thereby making Christ not the sole satisfaction for sin but one of a host of those who merit satisfaction. This problem was greatly exacerbated by the Roman practice of invoking the saints, which Calvin saw as indistinguishable from the polytheistic worship of the pagans, for each saint had its own area of expertise, from healing the sick to protecting sailors at sea, thereby leading the faithful away from calling on God in the name of Christ, to calling on an entire patronage system of saints to protect and help them. In sum, Calvin thought that Rome had destroyed the Church by eclipsing Christ with a whole host of patron saints and by teaching the faithful to make satisfaction for their own sin, often by means of the sacrifice of the Mass, which was offered daily by priests on altars throughout the temples of Europe.

In order to rebuild the Church from these ruins, the Gospel needs to be taught anew, which reveals that Christ is the one in whom God has placed every good thing that we lack so that we might turn to him alone and not to an enormous patronage system of saints. Christ’s death is the sole satisfaction for sin, not our own works of alleged satisfaction. In Christ’s death we find the once-for-all sacrifice for sin, which brings to an end the offering of sacrifices by priests. The death of Christ the Priest gives us access to God in prayer, making him our only mediator and intercessor before God. Moreover, anything in the Church that looks or sounds like the Law of Israel must be removed, lest it conceal the grace of God now fully manifested in Christ and clearly offered to the world in the Gospel. Thus, along with the elimination of all human-made images, as already noted, Calvin insisted on the removal of priests, priestly vestments, altars, candles and any language or gesture of sacrifice so that the faithful would place their hope only in the priestly sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The Holy Supper of the Lord, which replaced the Mass, is to be offered in public, and is always to involve the communion of the assembled community, so that it might never be seen again as a sacrifice the priest could offer by himself for the benefit of the living and the dead. Calvin and the Consistory were so adamant to eliminate the cult of the saints that they refused to let Genevans name their baptized infants after saints, insisting they use instead Biblical names, lest the faithful come to see the saint after whom they were named as their particular patron, and not Christ.

In conjunction with the Mass, Calvin thought that Rome created the greatest idolatry by means of its teaching of transubstantiation, which taught the baptized to seek the substance of the body and blood of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine in the Supper. Since the body and blood of Christ are united to the soul of Christ, and Christ is united in an hypostatic union with the eternal Son of God, this meant that the reserved eucharistic host could—and indeed must—be worshipped and adored as the second person of the Trinity, thereby ascribing divine honors on bread and wine. The adoration of the host could take place where it was reserved in the Tabernacle behind the altar, and especially in the Corpus Christi celebration, during which the reserved host was processed around the city for the blessing of the whole community. This was the consummate form of idolatry for Calvin, as it dragged Christ down to earth, so that he could be worshipped here, and subjected him to the corruptible elements of bread and wine thereby denying his glorious body which is now free from corruption. The Church could only be restored when this teaching was eliminated, along with tabernacles and any idea that the bread and wine can be appropriately venerated. Calvin found the idolatry associated with transubstantiation to be so abhorrent that he forbad the faithful even to enter Roman churches in which the reserved host was adored as divine, or to participate in any way in the Corpus Christi celebrations. The ramifications of this position were extreme, as refusal to attend Mass, or to participate as a household in Corpus Christi, exposed one to the authorities as an evangelical heretic, which would mean at the least the loss of all property in exile from one’s homeland and at worst arrest, torture and death. ¹⁰

However, Calvin’s denial of transubstantiation does not mean that the body and blood of Christ is not truly exhibited and offered in the Holy Supper of the Lord. Even though Calvin agreed with Zwingli that the body and blood of Christ are only truly present in heaven, to be sought there by faith, he also agreed with Luther that Christ offers us his body and blood by means of the symbols of bread and wine, and uses these as instruments by which to feed the faithful on his body and blood. ¹¹ At the centre of the restored Supper is Calvin’s appeal to what he thought was a straightforward analogy: when the faithful eat and drink the bread and wine to the nourishment and refreshment of their bodies, they should realize that Christ is thereby feeding and refreshing their souls with his own body and blood. The body and blood are not to be sought in the bread and wine, but are rather to be sought in heaven. But neither are the body and blood to be divorced from the bread and wine, for the bread and wine both represent and offer the body and blood of Christ and the Holy Spirit unites believers on earth with the body and blood of Christ in heaven. By taking this position, Calvin thought that he was uniting the best of Zwingli’s position—that the body and blood of Christ are to be sought in heaven, not on earth—with the best of Luther’s position—that the bread and wine are not naked signs but truly offer what they represent. Calvin was actually able to come to an agreement on the basis of this position with the heirs of Zwingli in Zurich, especially Heinrich Bullinger, but this agreement was vehemently attacked by the followers of Luther and led to the division of the reform movement that lasted into the twentieth century. This rejection by the followers of Luther was quite painful to Calvin, since he understood himself to be called to the prophetic restoration of the Church that God had begun with the work of Luther and others.

The restoration of the Word and worship of God in the Church only attains its proper goal in the reformation of the lives of believers and it was here that Calvin thought the reform movement faced its greatest challenge and frustration, exposing it to the criticism of both Roman and Anabaptist teachers. The contemplation and enjoyment of the living image of God in the universe should lead us to be transformed into the image we contemplate, so that our lives exhibit God’s goodness, wisdom, and power. The proclamation of the Gospel, including the celebration of the sacraments, set before us the living image of God in Christ, which should transform those who contemplate it into its image, so that we die to sin in his death and live to God in his resurrection. The singing of the Psalms in worship, and the reading of Scripture at home, should transform the thoughts and affections of our hearts and draw us into deeper intimacy with God and greater love for one another. The Consistory in particular, and pastoral visitation in general, should bring the teaching of Scripture concretely to bear on the lives of the faithful, so that they can be encouraged and exhorted to bring their lives into greater conformity to the will of God. But in spite of all of his efforts, Calvin thought that this work of restoration had yet really to begin. It is one thing to rebuild the public worship, preaching and sacraments of the Church. It is quite another to reform our lives. In this sense, the Pietists may have been the genuine heirs of Calvin. For they agreed with him that the work of reformation has to attend directly to the concrete lives of believers and no longer primarily to the doctrine, preaching, sacraments and worship of the Church.