Does the Mass “overthrow the cross of Christ”? Part 1 of a series on John Calvin’s Institutes IV.18.

n the com­box of this post over on Out of His Mind (a blog that makes John Bugay look like a marvel—an absolute marvel—of intel­lec­tu­al depth), the loopy Mr. Kevin Failoni quotes from this most pleas­ant bit of pro­pa­gan­da in John Calv­in’s Insti­tutes of the Chris­t­ian Reli­gion:

Anoth­er iniq­ui­ty charge­able on the mass is, that it sinks and buries the cross and pas­sion of Christ. This much, indeed, is most cer­tain—the cross of Christ is over­thrown the moment an altar is erect­ed. For if, on the cross, he offered him­self in sac­ri­fice that he might sanc­ti­fy us for ever, and pur­chase eter­nal redemp­tion for us (Heb. 9:12), undoubt­ed­ly the pow­er and effi­ca­cy of his sac­ri­fice con­tin­ues with­out end. Oth­er­wise, we should not think more hon­ourably of Christ than of the oxen and calves which were sac­ri­ficed under the law, the offer­ing of which is proved to have been weak and inef­fi­ca­cious because often repeat­ed. Where­fore, it must be admit­ted, either that the sac­ri­fice which Christ offered on the cross want­ed the pow­er of eter­nal cleans­ing, or that he per­formed this once for ever by his one sac­ri­fice.

The Mass “sinks and buries” the cross? The cross is over­thrown by the Mass? That’s a wild claim for Calvin to make. Do peo­ple real­ly still quote this garbage as though it’s true? “We Catholics,” I replied to F., “sure have a lot of pow­er to over­throw Christ. Guess he isn’t all that omnipo­tent, accord­ing to Calvin.” F., rather than say some­thing like “Yeah, that John­ny C, what a card, he sure could let the old hyper­bole fly,” thought it a bet­ter tack to say that I just did­n’t under­stand Calvin.

Scott, I think you mis­un­der­stand his quote. [Quo­ta­tion. And tech­ni­cal­ly it’s F.’s quo­ta­tion of Calvin, but these points are prob­a­bly lost in this dan­ger­ous and ungram­mat­i­cal age.] When the Catholic altar goes up, it is a com­plete denial [Oh, it’s “denial” now, not “over­throw”!] of His per­fect, one[-]time sac­ri­fice, at the con­sum­ma­tion of the ages, that put sin away, per­fect­ed us, and obtained eter­nal redemp­tion (Hebrews 9:22). He didn’t obtain 6 months of redemp­tion or 6 days, but eter­nal redemp­tion. There are no more sac­ri­fices for sin (Hebrews 10:18).

Yes, yes. Well, we can stop the poor man here and not allow him to blath­er on (as he does on The Cel­e­brat­ed Mr. K.’s blog) about Melchizidek; Malachi; Adam; Scott Hahn; Christ remain­ing sacra­men­tal­ly present in a com­mu­ni­cant for fif­teen min­utes; pan­the­ism; Aris­totle’s “pagan cat­e­gories”; Aquinas’s obser­va­tion about how grace occurs as sub­stance in God but acci­dent in the soul (which he inept­ly para­phrased as though Aquinas had said that grace occurs in the soul as some­thing like a car crash); the Greek word κοινωνία as used by Peter (actu­al­ly, Peter nev­er uses this word, Paul does, and Paul uses it in vari­able sens­es); the Coun­cil of Trent; and on and on and on. F. seems to suf­fer from ADD, and there’s no need to fol­low him down all these Rital­in-free rab­bit trails, or we shall nev­er get back home again. Each rab­bit trail will inevitably branch out into a thou­sand more.

So let all that detri­tis go; what con­cerns me here is—well, two things. The first of them is that F. cites Heb. 9:22 for the asser­tion that Christ’s “one-time sac­ri­fice” obtained “eter­nal redemp­tion.” Except that Heb. 9:22 says no such thing. What it says is this: “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and with­out shed­ding of blood is no remis­sion.” F. does at least get Heb. 10:18 right, but one has to step back ten whole vers­es ear­li­er than Heb. 9:22 to find the part about Christ obtain­ing eter­nal redemp­tion. That’s in Heb. 9:12; Calvin gets the cita­tion right, F. gets it wrong. His slop­pi­ness on this point makes me very dubi­ous about his schol­ar­ly mer­its.

The sec­ond, and more impor­tant, con­cern is that F. (and John Calvin) mis­rep­re­sent both the Catholic teach­ing about the Mass and the argu­ment of the book of Hebrews. Hebrews is the one of the books Calvin­ists most love to get wrong. But we’ll get to that in Part 2. In Part 1, I want to look a lit­tle more close­ly at Calv­in’s over­wrought pan­ic attack about the Mass.

•••

Here is what I said, in my response, on Out of His Mind, to the loopy Mr. Kevin Failoni:

I’m sure I under­stand per­fect­ly well what he meant, it’s just that the way he says it is not how he osten­si­bly means it. He says “over­thrown” where he means “denied.” Now, unless this is a mis­trans­la­tion [I’ll get to this present­ly, dear read­er.], it’s an extreme of hyper­bole to imag­ine that a denial (so-called) of the cross amounts to an over­throw of it. Not even Christo­pher Hitchens, who (unlike Catholics) real­ly did deny the cross, had one minor scratch on an iota of an abil­i­ty to “over­throw” the cross, even if he had done noth­ing else in his life but utter blas­phemies from dawn to dusk. In oth­er words, Calvin was so wrought up about the Church that he unwit­ting­ly ascribed to her a fic­ti­tious pow­er she could not have even if she had sought it. Whether it’s what he meant or not, it’s what he said. (Again, unless that’s a mis­trans­la­tion.) “Over­throw” and “deny” are two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent things. This is hyper­bole gone mad.

As blithe about the dic­tio­nary as he was about the cal­en­dar, F. respond­ed in the fol­low­ing clear and high­ly lit­er­ate fash­ion:

“Over­throw is the per­fect word. The Catholic church and there [sic] faulty axioms of nature grace inner con­nec­tion and the church as a con­tin­u­a­tion of incar­na­tion and atone­ment (altar) syn­er­gis­tic atom­e­nent thru [sic] the acts of the church, seek­ing to over­throw the fin­ished work of Christ on the cross [We “seek to over­throw the fin­ished work of Christ”? This is our intent?] that put sin away, and accom­plished eter­nal redemp­tion. Please see my post above on the God passed over the Jews and not infused them at the passover.

Pass­ing over F.’s deep dif­fi­cul­ties with coher­ence, I pressed him on Calv­in’s hyper­bol­ic use of “over­throw”:

If “over­throw” is the per­fect word, then you need to show one of two things:

• That the word “over­throw” and “deny” mean the same thing. Do you have any lex­i­cal sources you can direct me to which would estab­lish this?
• That the Catholic Church has the pow­er to over­throw the cross—that is to say, that the Catholic Church is more pow­er­ful than God.

Which of these two are you argu­ing?

F. replied by call­ing me “pet­ty” and a “hyp­ocrite” and sug­gest­ing that I—I, Scott Eric Alt—buy a lex­i­con so that I can look up the dif­fer­ence between “one” and “many.” Well, that’s one answer. Case closed!

(Inci­den­tal­ly, dear read­er, the rea­son I write about F. here is because he has a long his­to­ry of mak­ing a blither­ing spec­ta­cle of him­self across the apolo­get­ics blo­gos­phere, from Out of His Mind to Jol­ly Green Bag­gins, Called to Com­mu­nion to Creed Code Cult to Nick­’s Catholic Blog. Should he spread his pro­pa­gan­da unan­swered? Let him come here and defend his rant­i­ngs, if he can. He should show they can hold up under cross-exam­i­na­tion. The com­box is open. But I digress.)

I replied:

Very well, you tell me noth­ing. Prob­a­bly because you can’t. Inci­den­tal­ly, I agreed with you about what Calvin meant. I mere­ly said that he was either using gross and impos­si­ble hyper­bole, or this was a mis­trans­la­tion. Insist­ing that words mean things is not being “pet­ty,” it’s called know­ing how to use the language—a con­cept that obvi­ous­ly is too vast for you to com­pre­hend.

From this point, the exchange trailed off into the tru­ly bizarre, so we can leave F. alone to sput­ter in fol­ly while we take up the seri­ous issues. And I want to look at this pos­si­bil­i­ty I floated—that the expres­sion “over­throw the cross of Christ” in the Insti­tutes is a mis­trans­la­tion. It’s good to know we can check these things out. The Inter­net is a mar­vel. The Insti­tutes was writ­ten in Latin, and we can find the orig­i­nal text of IV.18.3 here. The Latin reads: “Hoc qui­dem cer­tis­si­mum est, ever­ti Christi crucem, sim­u­lac erig­i­tur altare.”

Now, the word trans­lat­ed “over­throw” is “ever­ti.” It sure sounds like it might be trans­lat­ed “avert”; and if Calvin had said that the Mass “averts the cross of Christ,” that would at least—though false—sound more calm and ratio­nal. It would be clos­er to what he seems to have had in mind. But in fact, the Eng­lish word “avert” comes from the Latin ab vert­ere through the Old French aver­tir. If you look up “ever­ti” in Mor­wood’s Latin Gram­mar (here), you’ll find that the range of mean­ings is near­ly iden­ti­cal to the range of mean­ings asso­ci­at­ed with the Eng­lish word “over­throw.” So it would be the right trans­la­tion.

The only real alter­na­tive would be the word “reverse,” which might car­ry a mean­ing some­thing like “make the cross of none effect,” in the sense that St. Paul meant that in 1 Cor. 1:17. Back in the com­box on Out of His Mind, the philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed Eric W, who accused me of hav­ing a “feigned devo­tion to Christ,” float­ed this very pos­si­bil­i­ty him­self. “The Bible,” EW informs the world—or at least that part of it that reads Mr. K below the post—“acknowledges a pos­si­ble ‘made void’ sit­u­a­tion.” Yes, well. Let’s look at that, since it is 1 Corinthi­ans rather than Hebrews that is now being appealed to. Here is what Paul says in the text:

For Christ sent me not to bap­tize, but to preach the gospel: not with wis­dom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.

The Greek words that the KJV trans­lates “wis­dom of words” are σοφίᾳ λόγου, sophia logou. The NIV more clear­ly trans­lates them “wis­dom and elo­quence.” Reformed com­men­ta­tor John Gill dis­cuss­es this pas­sage:

This [preach­ing the Gospel] was what he was rather sent to do than the oth­er [bap­tism], and this “not with wis­dom of words.” Scholas­tic divin­i­ty, or the art of dis­pu­ta­tion, is by the Karaites, a sect among the Jews, called “wis­dom of words”: this the apos­tle seems to refer to, and sig­ni­fies he was not sent with, or to preach, with words of man’s wis­dom, with human elo­quence and ora­to­ry, with great swelling words of van­i­ty, but in a plain, hum­ble, mod­est man­ner; on which account the false teach­ers despised him, and endeav­oured to bring his min­istry into con­tempt with oth­ers: but this way and man­ner of preach­ing he chose for this rea­son, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect; that is, either lest men’s ears and fan­cies should be so tick­led and pleased with the elo­quence of speech, the ele­gan­cy of dic­tion, and accu­ra­cy of expres­sion, the caden­cy of words, and beau­ty of the ora­tion, with the man­ner, and not with the mat­ter of preach­ing, and so the true use, end, and design of the doc­trine of a cru­ci­fied Christ be defeat­ed; or lest the suc­cess of the min­istry should be attrib­uted to the force of entic­ing words, and the strength and per­sua­sion of ora­to­ry, and not to the ener­gy of divine pow­er attend­ing the doc­trine of the cross.

So to allude to 1 Corinthi­ans 1:17 (Gill is most cor­rect in his expo­si­tion) as sup­port for the view that the Mass “over­throws” or some­how makes the cross “void” is sleight-of-hand. In truth, 1 Corinthi­ans 1:17 is very incon­ve­nient for Reformed Chris­tians, who got rid of the sac­ri­fice of the Mass as the cen­ter of wor­ship and replaced it with just that sort of elo­quent preach­ing that Paul con­demns. I mean, have you ever lis­tened to the high rhetor­i­cal wind that blows and kills in a ser­mon by John MacArthur or R.C. Sproul? Accord­ing to Paul, it may very well be they who are “mak­ing void” the Cross. They do it by attract­ing peo­ple to their elo­quence (and dem­a­goguery) more than to Christ. Or what about Charles Spur­geon? See what Spur­geon has to say about the Catholic Church, and how he says it, here:

It is all very well with that Church when it is sep­a­rat­ed from her hereti­cal sons, and a great gulf fixed, but all that helps to bridge that gulf must mar her glo­ry and destroy her pow­er. We must have no truce, no treaty with Rome. War! war to the knife with her! Peace there can­not be. She can­not have peace with us—we can­not have peace with her. She hates the true Church, and we can only say that the hatred is rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed. We would not lay a hand upon her priests; we would not touch a hair of their heads. Let them be free; but their doc­trine we would destroy from the face of the earth as the doc­trine of dev­ils. So let it per­ish, O God, and let that evil thing become as the fat of lambs. Into smoke let it con­sume: yea into smoke let it con­sume away.

Wow. Just wow. “You can just hear him preach­ing that in the taber­na­cle in Lon­don,” John MacArthur says with envy and approval, after quot­ing this pas­sage in a rav­ing ser­mon of his own. You would think the cen­ter of worship—the very thing peo­ple went to church for—was Spur­geon’s hot dash of words. And it is this that Paul was warn­ing about when he allud­ed to mak­ing the Cross “of none effect.” He was not talk­ing about the sac­ri­fice of the Mass. For indeed the priest can’t stir us into a pitch of froth. The words are fixed; he must not improve on the litur­gi­cal text with his improv. The Mass is not about the priest; it is about Christ. It does­n’t “avert” or “over­throw” the cross; it ren­ders the cross—not wild words, but the cross itself—present.

And that is why it is of great con­cern to me when dem­a­gogues like Calvin say that the sac­ri­fice of the Mass “over­throws the cross of Christ.” You can fall down laugh­ing at such words, and I often do. But the point of them is to stir an audi­ence to an irra­tional pitch of wild fear of the Catholic Church. The Church has no pow­er—none—to “over­throw the cross of Christ,” not even if she meant to do so. (And she does not. Please. Get a grip.) God is not so weak.

But sup­pose you believed that some church could “over­throw the cross of Christ”? Would that not cause you grave con­cern, if it had pow­er where you lived? I know it would me. And that is what Calvin wants his read­ers to believe. That is why his words over­state his mean­ing. It is delib­er­ate; it is of ill intent. It is of ill intent when men do so today. (And men do.) This is the expres­sion of an anti-Catholic dem­a­gogue who does not want to oppose Church teach­ings as much as he wants to wipe the Church from the earth. That is why Spur­geon says “into smoke let her con­sume away” and why John MacArthur quotes the same line with such rel­ish even today. This has not gone away.

Look you, dear read­er, how Calvin titles Chap­ter 18 of Book 4 of the Insti­tutes:

OF THE POPISH MASS. HOW IT NOT ONLY PROFANES BUT ANNIHILATES THE LORD’S SUPPER.

And watch how the chap­ter begins:

By these and sim­i­lar inven­tions, Satan has attempt­ed to adul­ter­ate and envel­op the sacred Sup­per of Christ as with thick dark­ness, that its puri­ty might not be pre­served in the Church. But the head of this hor­rid abom­i­na­tion was, when he raised a sign by which it was not only obscured and per­vert­ed, but alto­geth­er oblit­er­at­ed and abol­ished, van­ished away and dis­ap­peared from the mem­o­ry of man; name­ly, when, with most pesti­len­tial error, he blind­ed almost the whole world into the belief that the Mass was a sac­ri­fice and obla­tion for obtain­ing the remis­sion of sins.

Well. No bias at work here? This is not sim­ply the care­ful ana­lyt­i­cal and exeget­i­cal work of a dis­pas­sion­ate schol­ar. You may say, “Well, this was just the rhetor­i­cal fever of the age, we must put it in his­tor­i­cal con­text.” You may say, “This is just the rant­i­ngs of some blowhard in a com­box on a blog.” Real­ly? Just that? No more? Well, go to the ser­mon series by John MacArthur I linked to above. He’s not some fringe kook putting out videos on YouTube or rant­i­ng below the post; he’s a pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial preach­er with a doc­tor­al degree. This kind of stuff has not gone away. There are peo­ple who, like Calvin, salt their the­o­log­i­cal objec­tions to the Church with a man­ic and dem­a­gog­ic hate meant to stir peo­ple’s pas­sions, not their rea­son. It is ugly. It is full of long-since-refut­ed untruths, half truths, myths, and out­right lies. It is why I call it out for what it is. There are peo­ple who still fol­low Calvin, even the wild parts.

•••

In Part 2, I will begin to take up Calv­in’s actu­al argu­ment against the Mass, which he derives from the Book of Hebrews. I will show not only how it was answered by the Coun­cil of Trent (a quar­ter cen­tu­ry after the Insti­tutes), but how it had already been answered—one thou­sand two hun­dred years ear­li­er—by St. John Chrysos­tom. As the series con­tin­ues, I will also look at what the Church Fathers believed about the prophe­cy of Malachi 1:11, as it relates to the Mass.