Calvin and baptismal grace

The Lutheran Edmund Schlink argues that the Zwinglian emphasis on testimony within the visible church – what he calls the “cognitive significance” of baptism – becomes increasingly central to Calvin’s later sacramentology – so much so that all of Calvin’s other statements about baptismal efficacy “must be interpreted in the light of his statements about the cognitive significance, and not vice versa.” But this claim needs to be reexamined in light of Calvin’s theology of the visible church.

There is no doubt that Calvin would maintain a distinction between, first, those in the visible church who are preserved unto the eschatological-invisible church, and, second, those who ultimately reject the grace offered in baptism, and therefore have the reality of the sign removed. However, this is a far cry from some modern appropriations of Calvin, which attempt to place a chasm between sign and reality even for the believer. Perhaps a better way to read Calvin is through an Augustinian paradigm, similar to what we find throughout Bucer. Calvin’s theology of baptism is determined by a certain teleology of faith. Baptism, the outward sign and the inner reality, inaugurates a call to life-long discipleship. Within the Calvinist framework, there is a trust that the Holy Spirit is working within the faithful to confirm that baptism. This is why the individual believer is called to remember the objective, historical event of baptism for reassurance of faith. This is an anamnesis which the Reformed tradition has lost to a great extent.

For Calvin, in a very key sense, the instrumentality of baptism is foundational to the reassurance of faith. Christopher Elwood goes so far as to call this idea of sacraments as the “instruments” of grace the “real hallmark of Calvinist doctrine.” The center of Calvin’s theology of baptism is therefore the primacy of divine agency within the outward rite. The cognitive-testimonial aspect is certainly present, but must be viewed as secondary to the fundamental unity of sign and reality. There may certainly be a Zwinglian aspect in Calvin’s later baptismal theology, but it never appears to occupy the singular focus of Calvin’s sacramental definitions. Rather, Calvin’s essential view of baptism is characterized by the movement of divine grace in and through the physical rite. The incarnational aspect is critical: the physical rite is not efficacious in se, since the finite cannot place limits on the infinite; but the physical rite is animated by grace, through the power of the Spirit. In other words, the finite cannot contain the infinite as such, but the finite can be radically transformed by grace. As Elwood writes, for Calvin,

The value of identifying the sacraments in this way is that they can be seen to be efficacious without being viewed as repositories of divine power. As instruments, the Spirit may utilize their signifying capacity, and the Spirit’s power may be said to operate in and through them. Their efficacy is therefore not a function of a kind of communicative potency that has been assigned to them but rather “proceeds entirely from the Spirit of God.”

It appears that any attempt to understand the heart of Calvin’s baptismal theology must grasp the core belief that “the power of God… is the efficacy of the sacrament.” In this, Calvin’s theology of baptism is not so alienated from Lutheran or even Catholic baptismal theology. Schlink himself concludes that, “The most profound difference [in baptismal theology] runs its course not between the Eastern Church and Augustine, nor between Thomas and Luther, not even between Luther and Calvin, but between all these on one side and Zwingli and the Baptists on the other. The most profound difference is…the understanding of baptism either as God’s deed or as the deed of human obedience.”