Does the Mass crucify Jesus another time? Part 4 of a series on Calvin’s Institutes IV.18.

Note: This post belongs to an ongo­ing series on Calv­in’s Insti­tutes which begins here.

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ery ear­ly in this chap­ter, John Calvin is already mak­ing claims that are painful­ly easy to dis­prove. He has grown des­per­ate. “What is the direct aim of the mass,” he cries, “but just to put Christ again to death, if that were pos­si­ble?” I’m glad he admits it’s not pos­si­ble. That’s a first. Just before this, Calvin claimed that the Mass “over­throws the cross of Christ,” but nowhere says that that’s not pos­si­ble. As Calvin grows more wreck­less in his charges, he also becomes more apt to sea­son his wreck­less­ness with cau­tion.

But I want to look at this claim that the Church’s direct aim in the Mass is to put Christ to death anoth­er time. You’d think we were pro­cess­ing him down the aisle in his crown of thorns and nail­ing him to the cru­ci­fix. Calv­in’s not so fool­ish as to think that. What he means is that if the Mass is a sac­ri­fice, it must entail cru­ci­fy­ing Christ all over again. Now, of course, Catholics don’t do this, and so if they don’t, the Mass can’t real­ly be a sac­ri­fice as they claim it to be. It would have been clear­er had Calvin just said it that way. But Church! You say the Mass is a sac­ri­fice. But you can’t have a sac­ri­fice with­out blood. Hebrews says so. Unless you’re putting Christ back up on the cross, which you could­n’t do if you want­ed, it’s no sac­ri­fice.

This is an argu­ment about the mean­ing of a word and the exe­ge­sis of a text in Hebrews. Calvin, how­ev­er, does­n’t say those words above. Instead he says: But Church! Your direct aim—I said direct aim—is to cru­ci­fy Jesus all over again. It’s what you mean to do. Yes, I said it.

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So we go once more to the Church texts to dis­prove this non­sense.

One. The Coun­cil of Trent says that Christ “offer[ed] Him­self once on the altar of the cross unto God the Father.” The sac­ri­fice of Christ was “once to be accom­plished on the cross.” Now, if the Church says that Christ offered him­self once and the sac­ri­fice was accom­plished once, the Church can hard­ly be said to have a “direct aim” of killing Jesus all over again.

Two. The Cat­e­chism of Trent says the same thing: “Christ was offered once to exhaust the sins of many.” Again: Christ was “offered once on the cross.” Again: “Christ our Lord … offered Him­self once only.”

(An amus­ing aside here. I recall an anti-Catholic ser­mon of Dr. John MacArthur in which he read these very truths straight from the book of Hebrews, and he kept empha­siz­ing the word “once” as though it were the author­i­ta­tive blud­geon against Catholic error. But the Coun­cil and Cat­e­chism of Trent affirm the same thing.)

Three. The sub­ti­tle of one full sec­tion of the Cat­e­chism of Trent is: “The Mass Is The Same Sac­ri­fice As That Of The Cross.”

Let’s linger over this. Here’s the full text:

We there­fore con­fess that the Sac­ri­fice of the Mass is and ought to be con­sid­ered one and the same Sac­ri­fice as that of the cross, for the vic­tim is one and the same, name­ly, Christ our Lord, who offered Him­self, once only, a bloody Sac­ri­fice on the altar of the cross.

 

[You can’t sac­ri­fice the same vic­tim more than once. We don’t need Calvin to tell us this; the Church does.]

 

The bloody and unbloody vic­tim are not two, but one vic­tim only, whose Sac­ri­fice is dai­ly renewed in the Eucharist, in obe­di­ence to the com­mand of our Lord: Do this for a com­mem­o­ra­tion of me.

The sac­ri­fice is renewed, not done all over again. Words mean things, and the Church can hard­ly have the “direct aim” of doing some­thing that its Mag­is­te­r­i­al and cat­e­chet­i­cal texts deny.

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John Calvin knows all this. “I admit they are ready with an answer!” he cries.

They even charge us with calum­ny! [You don’t say.] They say that we object to them what they nev­er thought, and could not even think. [Yes, because you’re mak­ing all this up.] [But] whether they mean to slay him, we regard not.

Wait. Wait. First, Calvin says that the Church’s direct aim—remember?—was to cru­ci­fy Christ all over again. Now, he says it does­n’t mat­ter whether they mean to or not. I don’t care about such things. That’s what they’re doing any­way, because it’s “the absur­di­ty con­se­quent on their impi­ous and accursed dog­ma.” So it does­n’t mat­ter what the Church claims, or what the Church’s texts actu­al­ly say, because I say oth­er­wise, and I’m John Calvin. “Though they insist a hun­dred times that the sac­ri­fice is blood­less,” I know it’s not.

Right. And why is Calvin so sure of this? Has he seen pools of blood under­neath the altar, or drip­ping down from the cru­ci­fix and into the sac­risty? In fact, what­ev­er is going on at Mass, it’s cer­tain­ly blood­less, unless some­one gets a paper­cut from the hym­nal.

And Calvin sure­ly knows all this. The whole point of his rhetor­i­cal overkill and mis­di­rec­tion here is to prove, not that the Mass re-cru­ci­fies Christ, not that Catholics are try­ing to re-cru­ci­fy Christ, and not that there’s blood every­where and the police will soon show up with crime tape. He’s try­ing to prove that the Mass is not a sac­ri­fice at all, because there’s no such thing as a blood­less sac­ri­fice. And in an effort to prove this, he quotes Hebrews 9:22: “With­out shed­ding of blood is no remis­sion.”

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So let’s talk about Hebrews 9:22. The Church has no fear of this text because it means exact­ly what it says. Sac­ri­fice requires the shed­ding of blood, and that is pre­cise­ly what took place on Cal­vary. I need not give a whole list of cita­tions to prove this, because no one denies it.

In fact, the dis­pute real­ly hangs on anoth­er claim, which is that the sac­ri­fice at Cal­vary and the sac­ri­fice at the Mass are the same sac­ri­fice. The Church hard­ly denies Hebrews 9:22, because it agrees that Christ shed his blood at Cal­vary. The Sac­ri­fice of the Mass is the same sac­ri­fice.

But Alt! Calvin may have retort­ed. How then does the Church say that the Sac­ri­fice of the Mass is blood­less if it’s the same sac­ri­fice as the bloody sac­ri­fice on Cal­vary? It can’t be blood­less and bloody at the same time!

Well, actu­al­ly, now that you men­tion it, it can. That’s pre­cise­ly what the Church teach­es. The Sac­ri­fice of the Mass is unbloody in its acci­dents but bloody in its sub­stance. For the Church teaches—Calvin knew this—that the Eucharist becomes the body, blood, soul, and divin­i­ty of Jesus Christ. The Cat­e­chism of Trent says:

[T]he Holy Eucharist … con­tains both, and what­ev­er is includ­ed in the idea of both, the Divin­i­ty and human­i­ty whole and entire, con­sist­ing of the soul, all the parts of the body and the blood,­ all of which must be believed to be in this Sacra­ment.

So the Eucharist is the blood of Christ under the unbloody appear­ance of bread and wine. Catholics have no trou­ble with Hebrews 9:22 at all.

And Calvin would have done bet­ter to try to refute the Church’s actu­al claims than to make up claims the Church does not make and attribute them to her any­way. That’s been the anti-Catholic schtick from the begin­ning.

Find part 5 here.