Some days John Calvin’s teaching are gentle and a comfort. This is one of them: you can see not only the scholarly but the pastoral side of this man. He has clearly talked to those who are damned by the passage. So, before the passage, I’m going to put the commentary, then the passage, and then comments: reversing the blog order

He shows how severe a vengeance of God awaits all those who fall away from the grace of Christ; for being without that one true salvation, they are now as it were given up to an inevitable destruction. With this testimony Novatus and his sect formerly armed themselves, in order to take away the hope of pardon from all indiscriminately who had fallen after baptism. They who were not able to refute his calumny chose rather to deny the authority of this Epistle than to subscribe to so great an absurdity. But the true meaning of the passage, unaided by any help from any other part, is quite sufficient of itself to expose the effrontery of Novatus

Those who sin, mentioned by the Apostle, are not such as offend in any way, but such as forsake the Church, and wholly alienate themselves from Christ. For he speaks not here of this or of that sin, but he condemns by name those who willfully renounced fellowship with the Church. But there is a vast difference between particular fallings and a complete defection of this kind, by which we entirely fall away from the grace of Christ. And as this cannot be the case with any one except he has been already enlightened, he says, If we sin willfully, after that we have received the knowledge of the truth; as though he had said, “If we knowingly and willingly renounce the grace which we had obtained.” It is now evident how widely apart is this doctrine from the error of Novatus

And that the Apostle here refers only to apostates, is clear from the whole passage; for what he treats of is this, that those who had been once received into the Church ought not to forsake it, as some were wont to do. He now declares that there remained for such no sacrifice for sin, because they had willfully sinned after having received the knowledge of the truth. But as to sinners who fall in any other way, Christ offers himself daily to them, so that they are to seek no other sacrifice for expiating their sins. He denies, then, that any sacrifice remains for them who renounce the death of Christ, which is not done by any offense except by a total renunciation of the faith.

This severity of God is indeed dreadful, but it is set forth for the purpose of inspiring terror. He cannot, however, be accused of cruelty; for as the death of Christ is the only remedy by which we can be delivered from eternal death, are not they who destroy as far as they can its virtue and benefit worthy of being left to despair? God invites to daily reconciliation those who abide in Christ; they are daily washed by the blood of Christ, their sins are daily expiated by his perpetual sacrifice. As salvation is not to be sought except in him, there is no need to wonder that all those who willfully forsake him are deprived of every hope of pardon: this is the import of the adverb eti, more. But Christ’s sacrifice is efficacious to the godly even to death, though they often sin; nay, it retains ever its efficacy, for this very reason, because they cannot be free from sin as long as they dwell in the flesh. The Apostle then refers to those alone who wickedly forsake Christ, and thus deprive themselves of the benefit of his death.

I will have some comments on who the Monatists are later. Instead let us think of that most besetting of sins, pride. If we, like the Pharisee praying, thank God for our blessings and that we are righteous — chaste, prudent, charitable, discerning, wise and mature (I am talking about you: I am none of these things) then we are still failing. For we do not understand that we are unchaste when we stare twice, imprudent when we shop overmuch, uncharitable when we gossip, undiscerning when we vote (in fact, given the choices we have, a lack of discernment could be a comfort), and before God we are but foolish infants.

We err. We are like drunks, looking for the key in under a lamplight. We do not know the truth: in fact we cannot handle the truth. We would rather sit there and nurse our pride.

Taking Calvin at this word, one of the reasons we need to be in the church (discussed prior to this in the same chapter) is so that we will be encouraged in the faith and in doing good works. So that we will have examples: so that the men will compete — and the women share and encourage. And we need to remain with the Gospel. For it alone is our salvation.

Hebrews 10:26-39

²⁶For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, ²⁷but a fearful prospect of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. ²⁸Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy “on the testimony of two or three witnesses.” ²⁹How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace? ³⁰For we know the one who said, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” ³¹It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

³²But recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, ³³sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. ³⁴For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. ³⁵Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward. ³⁶For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised. ³⁷For yet “in a very little while, the one who is coming will come and will not delay; ³⁸but my righteous one will live by faith. My soul takes no pleasure in anyone who shrinks back.“

³⁹But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.

Now, Calvin has a habit of assuming that everyone knows their church history. I do not: so I double checked with the Catholic Encylopedia, which is generally reliable on church history. They describe the Montanists thusly:

The followers of Novatian named themselves katharoi, or Puritans, and affected to call the Catholic Church Apostaticum, Synedrium, or Capitolinum. They were found in every province, and in some places were very numerous. Our chief information about them is from the “History” of Socrates, who is very favourable to them, and tells us much about their bishops, especially those of Constantinople. The chief works written against them are those of St. Cyprian, the anonymous “Ad Novatianum” (attributed by Harnack to Sixtus II, 257-8), writings of St. Pacian of Barcelona and St. Ambrose (De paenitentia), “Contra Novatianum”, a work of the fourth century among the works of St. Augustine, the “Heresies” of Epiphanius and Philastrius, and the “Quaestiones” of Ambrosiaster. In the East they are mentioned especially by Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom. Eulogius of Alexandria, not long before 600, wrote six books against them. Refutations by Reticius of Autun and Eusebius of Emesa are lost.

Novatian had refused absolution to idolaters; his followers extended this doctrine to all “mortal sins” (idolatry, murder, and adultery, or fornication). Most of them forbade second marriage, and they made much use of Tertullian’s works; indeed, in Phrygia they combined with the Montanists. A few of them did not rebaptize converts from other persuasions. Theodoret says that they did not use confirmation (which Novatian himself had never received).

This helps. Because one gets an idea of where Calvin — writing in a time when people are having to get used to the idea (again) that they are responsible and accountable to God and we are all priests — had to deal with many old errors that the less trained fell into.

You also get a sense of why Catholic sensibility was so offended by the Puritans. Well, in part because the Puritans got unholy glee out of doing this, but also because they were seeing this level of harshness: which is not correct, for the Reformers and Puritans (who knew their church history quite well: Calvin, for instance, had a good, conservative theological and legal training at the Sorbonne prior to converting to the Reformed faith). knew that error and did not preach it: instead Puritans was a name given to them by their opponents.

But this moves to where we are now. For there is a false argument out there which goes something like this ‘If you are truly a righteous man you will be holy and your wife will submit to you and never leave. However, if you break the current rules of marriage, and require her to obey, or raise your voice, or require her to be available sexually, or (horrors) look at porn (defined so broadly that looking at the Oscar red carpet would count) then you are EEEEVIL and DAMMNED and she can leave you because you are not a true Christian and she MUST NOT SUBMIT‘.

Well, no man can live to these standards, but Christ. We live in a fallen world. Ann Barnhardt has just discovered Dalrock, and she has this to say about what is going on

And may I say, my stars, there certainly are a bunch of you “frivorced” men out there. I was shocked at the volume of anecdotal email this relatively small internet outpost generated. I knew my readership was skewed heavily toward to over-55 male demographic, but it was shocking, even to jaded me, how many of you are recently abandoned by your wives. We all like to think that we have been able to “control” and “stand apart” from the culture that we have all been immersed in. We all like to think that, “Yeah, I know the filth on teevee is hideous and evil, but it won’t effect me or my family…” Well, I suspect many of you men now realize that your wives were, in fact, poisoned by that very culture. The endless teevee shows, commercials and movies that played up feminism, sexual libertinism, and rank materialism were a slow poison to your marriages. Yes, fifty years ago your post-menopausal wife would have never, ever left you to go “recapture her stolen youth” or “sow her wild oats” because IT NEVER WOULD HAVE OCCURRED TO HER. And that is a good thing, make no mistake.

Anyway, the particular post on this blog that I want you to read is about feminist philosophy of being miserly with love entitled, “Feminists Are Ugly”. It is completely spot-on. Women today are taught that it is a virtue to utterly resent performing any acts of loving care, most especially for their husbands and children, to the point that women now relish in their willingness to murder their own children in the womb. But the concept maps to not just married women and mothers, but to pretty much everyone, including men. But understand that the genesis of it is squarely in the lap of the feminist milieu. Who can argue that men are now culturally conditioned to avoid acts of simple loving kindness, and to actively resent “taking care” of anyone or anything except themselves? Why do you think there is such eagerness to embrace the Welfare State? Why do you think men are so content to let Pimp Daddy Government raise their children, and so devoid of masculine dignity so as to be perfectly content with a life of suckling at the government teat? Was their right-ordered desire to provide for and protect women browbeaten out of them? Yes. But they LET it be browbeaten out of them. There is guilt in the capitulation.

Hard core feminist theology is Marxism in a cassock, and like all Marxists, the error of Monatus is embraced. They damn sections of society for existing, test them on the most fine of scales, while ignoring their own errors. They move to a Manichean dichotomy: they are all good, while their enemies (men, in this case) are all evil. In this church, divorce and abortion are sacraments — you lay down your children and your sexuality and fertility to the sisterhood.

And this becomes an unwritten schism. For Christ is not about that, but instead calling us to repentance continually, forgiving our errors and acts continually as we confess them and attempt reform (knowing full well that it is only by his power that we can do so), and calling us to remain i the church.

So, we need to reform the church, again, root and branch, for we have the Monatians within us, under a different name. They are now called Feminist Christians.

And the first thing we need to remind these people is that they are in grievous error. For bringing them back to the faith has a great reward.

Secondly, we need to limit divorce in the church. We need to measure our divorce rate. We need to return to the clear teaching of the church: if one looks at the confessions of the 17th century this is summarized, on both sides of the Tiber.

And thirdly, we need to again set up communities of holy singleness. The protestants need to rediscover monasticism — which is starting with the boiler room movement — and the Catholics need to stop using their monasteries and nunneries as focuses for heresy and homosexualism, instead opening them to the poor and lay sister and brother, as the founders of these movement did.

And we need to correct ourselves. which is the final suggestion: as I have quoted from both Catholics and Reformed this morning, we should be looking outside of our own perspective and testing our practices and beliefs. Not in some ecumenical, thoughtless mush, but in the sober realization that we are not that wise, not that mature, and we are prone to error. We are in congregations for that very reason.