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The treatment and value given to prayer stand so dominantly at the center of Calvin’s complete life work that here the systematic theologian, the biblical scholar, the church teacher and the pastoral counselor all are speaking to us with equal force. (Udo Smidt, Das Gebet bei Calvin)

One of the most remarkable renewals brought by the Reformation was a shift in the whole idea of what it meant to be worthy and do good. The very purpose of life was redirected. Preoccupation with acquired virtue and earned status was displaced by confidence in friendship freely received and permanently guaranteed by God’s unearned love.

The revolution in Christian ethics, like so much else in the Reformation, may be seen as an indirect result of the return to the Scriptures. Even before the Reformers, many common people had the intuitive feeling that the medieval Church had set up its own system of hoops, which you had to jump through to merit eternal reward. The traditional approach to life, spelled out in the official canons, was removed from the joyful spontaneity that one could recover through renewed focus on the spirit of Jesus in the Gospels.

The Reformers found it tragically unchristian that the Roman Church should have contrived to manipulate people’s conscience using a kind of balance sheet of earned “merits.” The religious establishment had been less than honest in leaving lay people with the superstition that God keeps score on your pious activities: as you light a votive candle, venture forth to venerate the relics of some saint, subsidize a mass, or contribute to a building fund. One could even receive papers in connection with certain special donations (“indulgences,” they were called), which went so far as to list the amount of remission your gift would merit towards early parole from purgatory. Luther’s indignation, as a loyal churchman, over such huckstering of grace was what had sparked the Reformation in the first place. In the Scriptures there was no basis for this focus on externals.

The Reformation movement rapidly became more than a revolt against a church which had become too high and mighty. People began to rediscover how the Scriptures themselves focused on God’s living grace in Christ. Where “Scriptures alone” were taken as the final authority, Paul’s ardent trust in God’s “grace alone” began to flood back into their minds as the sole basis for a truly human life. When the Reformers began again to take Christ as their key, they regained a sense of the sovereignty of God’s grace not only as the sole basis for salvation, but also as what makes life worth living. They also began to appreciate faith in a new way. For faith, dependent trust on God himself, was the only channel through which we are touched by God’s grace. All renewal depends on this confidence that only God can give: “faith alone.”

We find John Calvin, the greatest among the second generation of reformers, saying surprising things about the Christian life—surprising especially, if we have been thinking in terms of the later “Puritan work ethic.”

If men by their virtue could accomplish the Law, it would be said to them, get to work. But on the contrary, it is said, relax, rest, in order that God might do the job. Law then could well be impossible, indeed, so far as we are concerned; but it is possible for God to print it in our hearts and govern us by his Holy Spirit—so that it will be an easy and light yoke for us and there will be no harshness in it to trouble us.

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