Blog 3: Preface 3-4

Rome's antagonism towards the Reformers, and Calvin in particular, was that what they taught was "new" and "of recent birth." To this charge Calvin responds with evident feeling: "First, by calling it "new" they do great wrong to God, whose Sacred Word does not deserve to be accused of novelty. Indeed, I do not at all doubt that it is new to them, since to them both Christ himself and his gospel are new. But he who knows that this preaching of Paul is ancient, that "Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again for our justification" [Romans 4:25], will find nothing new among us." For Calvin, an appeal to Scripture is itself an appeal to something ancient! But Calvin's point remains vulnerable to the charge that the Reformers were disregarding church teaching - teaching which had fifteen hundred years precedence.

The charge may be brushed aside lightly in an age when modernity is valued above antiquity, but it was a serious and potentially deadly accusation in the mid-sixteenth century. The Reformers did not see themselves as the Anabaptists did in forming a new church. They saw themselves in the line of the ancient church and the early church fathers, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the church of the medieval period.

Calvin was unmoved by the charge - not because he saw the issue as irrelevant but rather because he knew antiquity lay on his side: "If the contest were to be determined by patristic authority, the tide of victory -- to put it very modestly -- would turn to our side." It is almost unimaginable that such a thing could be said of evangelicalism five hundred years later.