Calvin’s Institutes: The error of indulging in indulgences and purgatory

I did not disappear. After a week and a half of computer trouble I am finally up and blogging again. This blog entry is on Calvin's dissertation on purgatory.  Having computer problems is purgatory.  It's a trouble for sure.

Here is my entry.

Calvin’s polemic against Rome, which began in chapter four of Book 3, chapter four continues here in chapter five. In chapter four he dealt with the Roman doctrines of repentance, and confession. Here he deals with the Roman doctrine of indulgences, or to put it another way, the idea of satisfaction for sin. Luther nailed his 95 theses against indulgences on a church door; Calvin writes his thesis against indulgences in this chapter of his Institutes.

1. It stands to reason that if church officers can retain or forgive sins, the people under their tyranny will look to them for a prescription, a list of do’s, something they perhaps could give so that they could be forgiven! Enter giving of indulgences.

2. Calvin calls all indulgences, “A profanation of the blood of Christ, a Satanic mockery, to lead the Christian people away from God’s grace, away from the life that is in Christ, and turn them aside from the true way of salvation” (Pg., 671).

3. These indulgences had taken the place of Christ’s atoning work at this period in the Roman Church. That is, they declare Christ’s atonement to be insufficient, unable to forgive sins and unable to save. But the Bible clearly teaches that salvation is through the sacrifice of Christ. (1 John 1:7; 1 Cor. 5:21; 1 Cor. 1:13; Acts 20:28; Heb. 10:14; Rev. 7:14). The sacrifices of the martyrs by their martyrdom did not add to the atonement for their sin.

4. Was there something lacking in Christ’s suffering, thus necessitating Paul to complete it with his own suffering (Col.1:24)? No! But this was one of the texts the Romanists used to support indulgences.

5. Calvin explains what this verse means. “Here he refers to that lack or that supplement not to the work of redemption, satisfaction, and expiation but to those afflictions with which the members of Christ ‘namely, all believers’ must be exercised so long as they live in this flesh....what once for all he suffered in himself he daily suffers in his members” (Pg., 673).

6. What about the Romish doctrine of purgatory? Calvin calls it a “deadly fiction of Satan, which nullifies the cross of Christ, inflicts unbearable contempt upon God’s mercy, and overturns and destroys our faith” (Pg., 676). Why? Because by purgatory the Romanists mean another way for dead people to make satisfaction for their own sins, and this is an attack against the sufficiency of Christ.

7. There is no New Testament passage to support the existence of purgatory, but the Bible is replete with descriptions of the sufficiency of Christ’s work in bringing the gospel.