SUNDAY SCHOOL: Solus Christus

Welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith. All right, so in our age of padded comforts and pharmaceutical escapism, where death is hidden behind hospital curtains and distractions reign as king, we rarely stare mortality in the face, especially like they did a couple hundred years ago.

Death in the Age of the Black Death and Calvin’s Suffering

But in the 16th century, death was everywhere. The Black Death was especially raging through Europe. And death at that point was a brutal neighbor. Rattled doorknobs at midnights that stole infants from their cradles and carved fresh graves in every village.

For John Calvin, it was a daily companion. He buried his children before they could speak. He nursed his beloved wife until breath faded from her lungs. He endured chronic illness that scraped the marrow from his bones and left him coughing up blood and handkerchiefs.

He preached with kidney stones. He wrote with gout gnawing in his joints. And he led a city with eyes dimmed by migraines and a body hunched over by pain. Yet this man who was frail in body thundered in his theology and he did not retreat.

He clung to the cross of Christ. He clung to Solus Christus, which was not a doctrine of abstraction for him, but he believed in a living Christ. A Christ who was pierced for our transgressions, risen in power, present by the Spirit.

Solus Christus was not a slogan to John Calvin. It was his sanity, it was his solace, and it was his song in the dark. For Calvin, Romans 6 .5 became a lifeline. For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

That is what Calvin believed. And now for a moment, before we get to John Calvin, I'm gonna talk about the biblical doctrine of what Solus Christus is, which means Christ alone. The most offensive doctrine in the universe is not hell.

Christ Alone as the Heartbeat of the Bible

It's Solus Christus. Hell offends our conscience, but Christ alone offends us down to the deepest parts of our ego. It's a declaration that all of our salvation, from its first breath to its final benediction, belongs to Christ and Christ alone.

And this is not just a motto that was carved in the Reformation. It's actually the heartbeat of the entire Bible. It's a death nail to our human pride. It is the glorious gospel that silences every boast, that levels every ladder, and it rips the robes off every heart that is prone towards Pharisaism.

If you bring anything to the table of redemption besides your sin, then you come to Christ not as an orphan needing a father, but as a rival in need of competition. The Bible does not whisper about Solus Christus.

It shouts it. He is the better Adam who passed the test. He is the true Isaac who carried his own wood up the hill. He is the greater Joseph who was betrayed, imprisoned, and exalted to save the world.

He is the true Moses who delivers us from a greater enemy. He is the true David who defeated a greater Goliath. He's the perfect temple, the perfect sacrifice, the perfect priest, the perfect prophet, the perfect king.

Acts 4 .12 says, there is salvation in no one else, for there is no name under heaven given among which men might be saved. There is not many paths that lead to God. There's only one, one door, one lamb, one savior, Jesus.

And that's not an option in a religious buffet. He is the table, he is the host, he is the meal, he is everything. Christ must be everything to you or Christ is nothing to you. John 14 .6 says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father but through me. Not Mary, not Mass, not mortal merit, only the Messiah. He's not your supplement that you take every morning before work. He is your substitute by which you die and through him you now live.

The throne of grace doesn't have armrest and co-mediators. To say Christ alone is to burn every bridge back to your human effort and pride. It is to drive a stake through the heart of self-salvation.

It is to confess that without Christ we have nothing but damnation. And with him we have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, Ephesians 1 .3. Calvin didn't preach a Christ who stands at a distance handing out help to people who just needed a little help to get them going.

He preached a Christ who takes you by the throat and resurrects your soul. A Christ who doesn't just give you life but he becomes your life, Colossians 3 .4. Romans 6 .5, a verse we've already mentioned, for if we become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

Christ alone means this. If he didn't bleed for you, then you're still guilty. If he didn't rise for you, then you're still dead. If he didn't clothe you, you're still naked and ashamed. And if you're not in him, you're still in your father, Adam.

And Adam can't save you, amen?

Amen.

John Calvin said in his Institutes, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him. We obtain this by faith alone. That's in the Institutes. The Christian hope is that we have one high priest and he's not wearing Pharisaical garb and he's not wearing the robes of Rome.

The Christian has one righteousness and it's not stitched together from our quiet times and our tithes. The Christian has one hope in life and in death and it's not our creaturely comforts. It's not our credentials and it's not our confession booths.

We have but one hope and it is all of Christ for all of life. He always lives to make intercession for them, Hebrews 7 .25. He always lives to make intercession for us. We are not saved by faith in our faith.

We are not saved by grace through our striving. We are saved by the real Christ in real history who really rose from the grave. Paul says that if he is not raised, then we are most to be pitied. But because he is raised, we have utter assurance.

The doctrine of Solus Christus doesn't end with justification either. It bleeds into every corner of our existence. Christ isn't just our entry into heaven. He's the air conditioning, the architecture, and the king who sits upon the throne of every part of the building that makes up our faith.

From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever and ever, amen, Romans 11 .36. Christ is everything. He's not just a spiritual therapist. He's the alpha and the omega. He's not part of our story.

He is the point, the climax, and the resolution. And because Calvin believed this to the core of his being, it actually became a central feature of his entire ministry. Read the institutes of the Christian religion.

You will see how union with Christ, how Christus, or Solus Christus, is at the heart of almost everything that Calvin said. Other reformers touched on this, but this really marked Calvin's ministry. And it should mark all of our lives as well, that at the center of everything is Christ and Christ alone.

Any questions on the biblical doctrine of Solus Christus? Lena, no, I'm just kidding. All right, let's continue. I wanna now go to the life of Calvin and see how this shaped the theologian that we know today.

Calvin’s Early Life, Conversion, and the First Edition of the Institutes

John Calvin was born into a world trembling on the brink of theological revolution. On July the 10th, 1509, in the cathedral town of Noyon, France. I don't know, maybe someone else can help me with that.

Noyon? Noyon, that sounds French. It sounds pretentious enough to be French. Noyon? I'm a cousin in Noyon? Forgive me. Anyway, he was born in that town. He emerged into a Roman Catholic order that had long substantiated priest for Christ and penance for peace.

His father was a shrewd man with eyes on ecclesiastical favor. At that time, it was a really honorable thing to go into the priesthood. Martin Luther's father wanted the same for him. And John Calvin's father directed him towards the priesthood.

But Providence, silent, sovereign, and unstoppable had other plans for John Calvin. From the start, Calvin was marked by a kind of rare fusion of intellectual fire and disciplined quietude. He studied at the University of Paris, which was a well-to-do school at that time, mastering the liberal arts with a razor-sharp intellect and a hunger for precision.

Before the gospel ever gripped his heart, though, he became a sort of stoic with severity and that sort of discipline gripped his pen. He was curious, but he was also disciplined enough to study for hours and hours and hours on end.

At just 23 years old, Calvin published a commentary called De Clementia, which dazzled the sort of European humanist and intelligentsia that he was surrounded by. He was ascending rapidly in the academic community and he was getting a name for himself, especially in that world.

But he was trending towards Rome and not towards Zion. And then Christ ambushed Calvin. Between 1533 and 1534, through the quiet influence of Reformation writings from Luther and others and from the unrelenting witness of his converted roommate, which you have to think about this, how the Lord works, Calvin being a very disciplined student and his roommate talking to him constantly, interrupting his studies, probably before he was converted, annoyed him.

I can just think about, like, you ever been in a room where you're trying to study and someone just won't be quiet? I was thinking about that today. I was like, wow, the Lord pestered him into heaven.

I don't know the name. But the spirit of God shattered Calvin's pride and subdued his heart. He would later describe this as being brought to a teachable frame, which I think is such a wonderful way of saying that he was converted.

He was brought to a teachable frame. But it wasn't a gentle reformation for him. It was a crucifixion. His old self had to die, just as all of ours had to die as well. From the ruins of that death of Jean Calvin, a new creation arose.

One resolved to declare solus Christus in all of life, with all courage, with all conviction, with all cross-bearing. Almost immediately, the newly awakened Calvin turned his pen against the theological tyranny of Rome.

Now, what's amazing is Calvin's sort of a new believer and he writes his first book called The Institutes of the Christian Religion within a couple years of his conversion. That's amazing. Like, most of us can't even, don't even know that book exists in the first couple years of our conversion, much less being able to write it.

Obviously, it was a smaller volume. He worked on it throughout his entire life and it went through many revisions, but still, in 1536, he released it, which was three years after he was converted. That was a theological lightning bolt that would become one of the Reformation's definitive theological confessions.

His first edition was concise, but it was fierce. It declared with unflinching clarity that salvation is not earned, it is not merited, it is not bought, it is not paid for by priests and through penance and all of those things, but it was received by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

He published it, actually, his first version, under the pseudonym Martinus Lucianus, which was a tip of the hat of Calvin to Martin Luther. He actually didn't want to be named. He wanted to live in a kind of quiet, just no one knowing.

I can't think of the word I'm trying to think. Anonymity, thank you. But this wasn't just a treatise, it was a declaration of war, especially at that time. Calvin planned, like I said, to live out his days in quiet exile, perhaps under the tutelage of Martin Bucer, which is where we get the Bucer Presbytery.

It was Martin Bucer who was instrumental in becoming a mentor and a disciple to Calvin, or a discipler. But God had other plans, as we said before. On a journey to Strasbourg, Calvin was rerouted through the city of Geneva, a city that was yearning for the Reformation with unrest, but had no one to lead them.

There he encountered a man named William Farrell, a man of volcanic zeal and desperate hope. And Farrell saw in Calvin the kind of brilliance that they needed in the city of Geneva. And he thundered to Calvin, if Calvin refused to stay and help the city reform, then may God condemn him in his studies.

Or may God condemn his studies. Calvin relented, not trembling at the words of Farrell, but at the God who likely authored them on his lips. And he stayed. Now Geneva was not quite ready for the conviction and for the unrelenting dedication to that conviction that Calvin brought.

They eventually started calling him that Frenchman, because they were annoyed at how insistent he was. And his early attempts to reform Geneva sort of fell flat. He saw that the city was living in unrepentance, so he decided to withhold the table from everyone.

And when he denied communion to the population on Easter Sunday in 1538, this is five years after he's converted, he was expelled within 48 hours of that day. Geneva wanted a pastor who would placate them somewhat and pet them, and that was not John Calvin.

He was exiled again. Calvin found himself back in Strasbourg. There, God gave him a season of peace. He married his wife, Idelette de Bourgh, a widowed mother, and he pastored a congregation of French refugees, a French Calvinist at that time, before they were called Huguenots.

And it was in this season that Calvin began to refine his theology, and he began to write voluminously, and he wrote his very first commentary, which was on the Book of Romans, which is a bold move to begin there.

His theology was not trimmed at this point, but it was tempered. He learned not just to proclaim solus Christus, but to shepherd men to the narrow way. Meanwhile, back in Geneva, chaos was reigning. Roman Catholic bishops had flooded the city and had seduced them with their error, and without Calvin's doctrinal fortitude there, the people began to drift.

And realizing their error, the same council that had exiled him now sent him a letter begging him to return. Calvin agreed, but on one condition, that he would not be seen as a court preacher, but he would return as a pastor of conviction, that he would not have the city basically holding over him the ability to exile him once more, but that he would have the ability to preach as God led him through his heart and through his conviction, and Geneva consented in 1541.

It's now eight years after he was converted. Calvin returned to resume the pulpit with the exact same sermon that he preached, or the very next sermon that he would have preached had he not been exiled, which I think is such a boss move.

From that day forward, Geneva changed, but it wasn't because of Calvin. It was because of Christ, who was being magnified through the ministry of Calvin. Solus Christus became the lifeblood of the city's reformation, and Calvin in that moment, or in that time, he restructured worship, he revitalized church discipline, he restored pastoral care, he instituted catechesis for children and adults, he wrote his own catechism, he reformed the city's doctrine, he reformed the city's politics, education, family, economy were all being brought under the lordship of Christ, and under Calvin, ministry in Geneva was not a sort of cult of personality, it was a triumph of Christ in this city.

It's a high point in church history, what happened in Geneva, and it should be a model for all of us as well. Christ alone was at Calvin's center, not Christ plus tradition, not Christ plus Rome, not Christ plus merit, Christ alone.

Now, Calvin would never leave Geneva again. He preached through many books of the Bible, verse by verse, Sunday by Sunday, shepherding and shaping a generation of believers and sending out missionaries all across Europe.

He trained pastors, he corrected heresies, he wrote constantly until sickness overtook his frail body, and even in death, Calvin's humility prevailed. I think this is a cool feature, I didn't know this.

Calvin insisted on an unmarked grave so that no one would think too highly of him, and that they would only think of Christ. And so, the life and calling of John Calvin was never about John Calvin, it was about Jesus.

And may that be true for each of us as well. What questions do you have before we continue?

Questions on Servetus, Church Discipline, and Calvin’s Legacy

Yes.

I love you, Jackson. He's wanting to know the rest of the story, he missed it. All right, yes sir.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's especially with Severus, the situation with him, which I actually know less about,. Derek, you've read the biography on that part, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, so Calvin gets a bad reputation, especially for this scene. Yeah, could you add some color to that for me?

Yeah.

And I picked that, thank you, Derek, I picked that scene as a sort of a microcosm of it, because people will look at that situation and they'll say he was just a dictator over the city of Geneva, and he ruled it with an iron grip.

And yet, he did warn Servetus?

Yeah.

Oh, he did warn Servetus not to come, he did tell him what was gonna happen. So, I think that Calvin, actually, if you read his writings, are some of the most pastoral, some of the most warm, some of the most devotional.

I was surprised, actually, by that, because when I first started reading Calvin's commentaries, his reputation is this theological giant who sat in an ivory tower, but he reads like a pastor. I don't think anyone, really, would struggle reading his commentaries.

His commentaries are just very warm, filled with prayer, filled with rich devotion with Christ. The Christian Institute's a little more heady and a little more high, but, yeah, it's an unfortunate legacy, because that's just not who he was.

And Servetus came back into Geneva.

To undermine the work of Calvin.

He had been there once, then he was ejected.

Yeah.

He came back again to undermine his work. And also, people don't realize, Calvin was so successful because he had a lot of pastors that were fully behind him, that embraced the Reformation teachings. So, they were very much behind him in teaching and preaching, supporting him, which is a huge thing.

Right.

It wasn't just him alone, as his isolated leader, you know.

Right.

And that's why we say it wasn't a cult of personality movement. Also, too, and Ken, I'll get to you. Also, too, we tend to not think really highly of church discipline these days. We look at church discipline as the church must have done something wrong, that how dare they?

And the person who undergoes church discipline looks at it not as being severed from Christ, but I'll just go to the next church down the street. So, in that sense, our society is pretty flippant when it comes to holiness, and pretty flippant when it comes to church discipline.

In Calvin's day, if you were excommunicated, it meant that you were cut off from the grace of Christ that was administered through the church. And I think we ought to get back to having that high view.

And I hope to the Lord that we do, because the accusation comes from a culture that's flippant when it comes to holiness and when it comes to things. So Calvin's severity might offend people, but his conviction to follow Christ alone through scripture alone is actually right and good.

So, if he's a tyrant, we all should be.

Right?

Right.

In that period of time, there was a heightened awareness, so much different than today, you know? And because of that heightened awareness of God, a heretic was a person who was undermining the things of God, you know?

Right.

That was taken very seriously, even by the secular society, you know?

Right.

And the penalty was usually death.

Right.

We've become spiritually diabetic from all of the sweetness of his grace. And they had the black death that could have taken them at any moment, so they had a heightened awareness of their mortality. I think that, in some ways, we are not functioning very well under blessing.

And we pray, obviously, that we would repent from that. But the Lord has every tool at his disposal, even consequences and punishment and all those things, so.

We're like Israel of old. We think all these blessings are from our Lord.

Right.

Great intellect and learning.

Random question.

Let me get Ken first, because I've skipped him twice now.

If I'm not mistaken, didn't Calvin argue for a more merciful end for Sardinus?

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the case. Yes, ma 'am. Instead of him being executed, instead of him being executed, he argued for, I think, a more merciful sentence, which wouldn't have included execution.

But I'm, that's a part of Calvin's life that I'm not as familiar with, so I don't, I don't.

I believe Sardinus was also burned as a stake.

Yeah.

So maybe.

Oh, okay. Okay, okay.

I think Calvin wanted him to be hanged.

Sardinus was gonna be hanged by somebody. Yeah, six or half dozen.

Yeah, that's good.

That's helpful. And your second.

Oh, did he preach in the center of his town or did he have a church in the center? Calvin?

I don't think the church was in the center of the town, but I don't know.

Geneva had like three different churches.

Yeah.

Where they took him preaching.

Yeah, I'm not actually sure. It would make sense that it would be if there were a single church, because that was the practice for a long time, especially even here in New England, but I'm not sure. All right.

Calvin’s Ministry, Union with Christ, and the Sufficiency of Christ

Let's continue. We'll talk about his legacy, and then we will pray and we'll conclude. John Calvin didn't merely preach solus Christus. He bled it. He buried it. He put it, or he built his entire existence upon it.

Christ alone was not a garnish on his theological plate. It was the whole meal for Calvin. It was the feast and all of its fullness. What thundered from Calvin's pulpit wasn't a new system. It was just the ancient gospel that was reclaimed, reforged, and reignited in his day.

This is what John Calvin said. All that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him. We obtain this by faith. I read that quote earlier, but I love it. For Calvin, union in Christ was not an ivory tower speculation.

It was the furnace where pastors were forged. It was the spine of every sermon. It was the marrow of the entire Christian life. Every doctrine that he wrote with his pen bent back towards this one. Unless we be joined to Christ, unless we be engrafted into his life, death, and resurrection then we are nothing but dead men walking.

We are not justified. We are not adopted, and we are not saved. He preached that Christ must be made ours, that his righteousness must clothe us, Galatians 3 .27, that his spirit must indwell us, Romans 8 .9, that his cross must crush our sin, Galatians 2 .20, that his resurrection must animate our hope, Romans 6 .5, that his ascension must secure our prayers, that his reign must govern our lives.

You hear the pronoun at the beginning of every single one of those things. Every doctrine redounds to the glory of Christ. It's his justification for us. It's his sanctification of us. It's his adoption of us.

All of it belongs to him. That's why the very first thing that Jesus said when he was raised was all authority in heaven and earth belonged to me. So therefore every good thing from God is given through Christ, because of Christ, for the glory of Christ.

Calvin's legacy in that sense was not his institutes, although it was his most famous book. It's not his commentaries, as incredible as it was that he wrote as many commentaries at the level that he did for as long as he did.

It even wasn't Geneva and all of the things that happened in that city. Calvin's legacy is that he found everything connected to solus Christus, in Christ alone, applied by the Spirit, received by faith, and to the glory of God.

He took union with Christ out of the academy and he planted it into the pew and he wrote in such a way, as I said before, that even the common man could understand it and be changed by it. Calvin basically could whisper the same message that he thundered for decades, that Christ is enough.

The sufficiency of Christ. Christ was enough when the plague stalked the people. Christ was enough when his wife died in his own arms. Christ was enough when he buried his children. Christ was enough when Geneva mocked him, expelled him, and begged for him to return.

Christ was enough when his kidneys failed and his pen fell limp. Christ was still enough when he took his final breath. It wasn't just his theology, it was the heartbeat of his entire life. And so, as we conclude with Calvin today, I want that to be our legacy.

We've heard the term Calvinism. I think Calvin would be annoyed by that, that an entire system of doctrine bears his name. He didn't even want his name on his own headstone. He wanted everything to be pointed towards Jesus Christ.

Every aspect of our life. And I pray that for us as well, that we would be captivated by that, and that everything, whether we eat, whether we drink, and everything that we do, it would all be pointed at Christ for the glory of God.

Amen?

Amen.

Any questions before we close? I didn't write it down. Sometime after 41. No, no, he was pretty young, actually. Which is actually, even, it makes it remarkable how much he wrote.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, he wrote, he was 60 years old? That's what I thought, yeah.

Yeah.

Which is still amazing, at what are we doing.

With our life? Yeah, yes.

So I have the institutes on CDs, so I listen to it, usually when I think about it. But I was listening to it the other day, and I realized, he had this incredible awareness of the incredible wickedness of the human heart.

He expounded upon that continually, especially exposing a lot of the stuff going on with the Catholic Church, which is why a lot of the negative press on him comes from Catholic theologians or historians, who are very secular.

Yeah.

Or humanists, who think that the human heart is much better than Calvin Paine said it.

This is what Spurgeon said about it, which is, the longer I live, the clearer does it appear that John Calvin's system is the nearest to perfection. It's from Spurgeon, you know?

I don't think, as far as a man goes, outside of scripture, I don't think that we have one in church history who is as clear-headed and precise as John Calvin. I remember I heard John Piper once say, he's not in the same conversation as Calvin.

But I remember hearing John Piper say that he decided that he could not be a master of everything when he was in seminary, so he was gonna be a master of a person, and that was Jonathan Edwards for him, and he became obsessed with Jonathan Edwards.

But I think to myself, if you only had one option in all of church history, pick Calvin. Read his stuff, read his writings, you won't go wrong. He is not perfect by no means, but he was a gift from God to the church.

He took what Luther put out, and he clarified it, corrected it, and made it sing, in a sense.

Calvin is a disciple.

Yeah.

That was the word, you know?

Yeah, obviously, God inscripturated the word through Paul, and he didn't do that through Calvin, but Calvin was definitely a gift to the church, for sure. Yeah, and the best part about Calvin is that he points past himself to Jesus and to the scriptures, and may that be true for all of us.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for today, and we thank you that we were just able to basically glance at the life of your servant Calvin, and to look at the doctrine that he really ought to be known for, which is solus Christus.

Lord, help us to make everything in our life about Christ. Help Jesus to be at the center of everything, and help us never to look at ourselves, or to try to magnify our own platform, or influence, or any of that, but to always point to Jesus, always point to Christ in everything that we do.

Lord, we love you, and we thank you, and we praise you in Christ's name. Amen.

Amen.