Here are a few more notable quotes from Scott M. Manetsch’s book, Calvin’s Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536-1609.
On Church Discipline
Calvin insisted that the power of the keys did not give the church the authority to pronounce damnation or salvation – that decision belonged to God alone. Instead, the church’s discipline was always provisional, intended to rescue the wayward in a spirit of mildness and gentleness. In this way, Calvin averred, reformed excommunication was to be distinguished from the Catholic pronouncement of anathema, for whereas the latter “condemns and consigns a man to eternal destruction,” the former warns the sinner of future condemnation and “calls him back to salvation 188-189.
Calvin, Beza, and their colleagues believed that ministers exercised the power of the keys in three primary ways. First, the spiritual authority to ‘bind and loose’ was exercised in a general way when ministers preached the gospel in their sermons, announcing God’s righteous judgment upon the wicked and God’s promise of salvation to those who turned to Christ in repentance and faith. Second, the power of the keys was employed more particularly when pastors and lay elders conducted annual household visitations to examine the character and doctrine of church members, or when they admonished sinners in private conferences. Finally, ministers and elders employed the power of the keys through the ministry of the Consistory as they confronted people who were guilty of moral failure and excommunicated from the Lord’s Table those who refused to repent of their error. . . . The power of the keys needed to be exercised with wisdom and gentleness, in the hopes of rescuing the sinner. Otherwise discipline might degenerate into ‘spiritual butcher’ 189.
Hour after hour, week by week, Consistory members inquired into the most intimate, the most painful, the most destructive dimensions of their congregants’ lives. The ministers and elders met with people face-to-face; they addressed them by name; they listened at length to their grievances. It was not uncommon for the Consistory to meet with a defendant two, three, or four times before applying the ‘medicine’ of church discipline that fit the individual circumstance. The modern reader may well shudder at the severity with which some defendants were treated, but Geneva’s pastors and elders cannot be accused of being apathetic to the spiritual needs of their flock nor of being naively disengaged from the pervasive injustice, misery, and sin that surrounded them 214.
Pastors and Their Books
The daily lives of Geneva’s ministers were filled with books. Whether serving a parish in the city or countryside, the ministers were members of a literate humanist culture that was shaped by and engaged with the ideas and opinions found on the printed page. For John Calvin, Theodore Beza, Simon Goulart, and their pastoral colleagues, books were friends, conversation partners, sources of wisdom, and models for cultured eloquence 221.
Books served as more than conversation pieces and sources for spiritual edification, however. They were also instruments of persuasion and potent weapons for the confessional battles that shattered Europe in the early modern period 222.
Most, if not all, of Geneva’s pastors owned at least a modest collection of exegetical and theological books that served as a kind of “tool kit” for their daily ministries. Calvin’s personal library has been estimated at three hundred to three hundred fifty volumes; after his death, his heirs sold the majority of the books to Geneva’s magistrates for inclusion in the library of the Academy. Theodore Beza’s library also must have been substantial in that it commanded a sales price of 600 gold crowns shortly before his death – unfortunately most of its contents are not known. Somewhat more can be said about Simon Goulart’s library, which probably numbered more than four hundred volumes. In the final decades of his life, Goulart dispersed half his library, including all his theological books, to his three sons, and then sold-off piecemeal another two hundred “good Greek, Latin, and French books” to pay creditors 222.
Pastors as Authors
The pastors not only collected and censured books; they also wrote them. Calvin’s literary corpus is well known, with around one hundred discrete volumes published from the time he arrived in Geneva in 1536 until his death twenty-eight years later [note: he owned no more than 350 volumes in his personal library, but wrote around 100 books]. During the 1550s, Calvin’s literary output ranged from 100,000 to a remarkable 250,000 published words per year [with no computer or typewriter] 225.
Calvin said, “I get so tired from that endless writing that at times I have a loathing for it, and actually hate writing” 226.
On Pastoral Care
The ministry of the Word thus required more than the public exposition of Scripture; it also entailed the declaration and application of God’s Word to individual women and men, girls and boys, through the sacraments, corrective discipline, catechetical instruction, household visitations, and spiritual counsel and consolation 256.
By the time that students completed their studies . . . at age eleven or twelve, they would have worked through Calvin’s Catechism six or seven times and most would have mastered its doctrinal contents. It is important to note, however, that admission to the Lord’s Table was not tied directly to a child’s level of schooling or age. The Ecclesistical Ordinances made clear that boys and girls were welcomed the Lord’s Supper only after they had reached the age of discretion (around ten years of age) and were able satisfactorily to articulate the basic doctrines of the reformed religion and confess it as their own 270-271.
For Geneva’s ministers, helping men and women grow in Christian understanding was one of the ways that they exercised pastoral care within their parishes. . . . In the minds of Calvin and his colleagues, the future of Geneva’s reformation depended on a godly community of adults and children who shared a common commitment to biblical Christianity. It was their responsibility as spiritual shepherds to instruct God’s flock in Christian truth – and to expel from the sheepfold those who refused to embrace that truth as their own 273.
On Calvin’s taking the Lord’s supper as a serious matter: Calvin even interrupted a communion service to seize a piece of communion bread from a man who had pocketed it rather than eaten it 279.
Calvin and his pastors aimed to visit in the homes of all of their members at least once a year. They would see how well members knew the Catechism, discuss whether they were attending sermons, participating in the Lord’s table, investigated interpersonal conflicts or behavioral problems within the household 282.
During sixteenth and early seventeenth century, it was relatively common for townspeople to hide in their houses or abandon the city when the minister and elder came to visit 282.
