I’ve been reading Calvin’s commentary on John as I preach
expositionally through the Fourth Gospel. In those sermons I only get to refer
to a fraction of the Geneva master’s insights. One overlooked comment from
recent sermons on John 4 was Calvin’s contrast of the woman at the well’s
simple trust in Christ (turning from the corruption of Samaritan religion) with
that of “Papists” and “Mahometans” in his remarks on John 4:25:
I wish that those who now boast of
being the pillars of the Christian Church, would at least imitate this poor
woman, so as to be satisfied by the simple doctrine of Christ, rather than
claim I know not what power of superintendence for putting forth their
inventions. For whence was the religion of the Pope and Mahomet collected but
from the wicked additions, by which they imagined that they brought the
doctrine of the Gospel to a state of perfection? As if it would have been
incomplete without such fooleries. But whoever shall be well taught in the
school of Christ will ask no other instructors, and indeed will not receive
them.
….There is, therefore, no danger that
he will disappoint one of those whom he finds ready to become his disciples.
But they who refuse to submit to him, as we see done by many haughty and
irreligious men, or who hope to find elsewhere a wisdom more perfect—as the
Mahometans and Papists do—deserve to be driven about by innumerable
enchantments, and at length to be plunged in an abyss of errors….
Notice that Calvin sees the problem with both groups to be
their tendency to make “wicked additions” to Scripture in order to bring it to “perfection.”
For Calvin, the Scriptures are sufficient and complete as they are.
JTR
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