On Chastity

I'm working my way, with others, through Calvin's Institutes, and have just come across an interesting sentence in the preamble, in which Calvin addresses the French king, Francis. He outlines a number of objections to the work of the Reformation often raised by Roman Catholics. In a section refuting the claim that the Reformers are violating the faith delivered by the Church Fathers (that is, the early Christian leaders such as Augustine), Calvin points out that one of the Fathers denied the need for a celibate priesthood.

"It was a father who denied that marriage should be forbidden to the ministers of the church, and declared that cohabitation with one's wife could be chastity." (Prefatory Address Section 4. p22 in the Battles translation).



Obviously, Calvin's point was that opposition to married clergy was not universal in the early Church, indeed, that at least one authority (Pathnutius the Confessor) spoke out strongly against clerical celibacy. Except in Roman Catholic circles, that is a dead argument nowadays. We no longer have to argue in favor of married pastors.

A more interesting point concerns Calvin's use of the word "chastity." He uses it to describe the cohabitation of a husband and wife. In this, he seems to support those who interpreted the, now defunct, line in the constitution of the PC(USA) that used to hold church officers to the standard of "chastity in singleness or faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman," to mean that sexual behavior outside marriage could be regarded as, in some sense, "chaste." I don't think that this argument holds at all. Calvin appears to be referring to the purity of a relationship; he would hardly have countenanced modern libertarianism as chastity. It's interesting to see, though, how things have changed, and how language intended to promote moral purity can be twisted to include licentiousness.

The Catholics accused Calvin of moving the boundaries of belief. His reply, that the Medieval Church had moved the boundaries, and that he was simply reinstating them, is equally valid for us. When Evangelicals within the denomination are accused of moving away from traditional Presbyterianism, one has to ask whether boundaries of belief are being moved or reinstated.