John Calvin’s two-fold notion of faith and the possibility of faith formation

The purpose of this study is exploring John Calvin’s two-fold notion of faith in the 1559 Institutes and its central implications for pastoral theology in the emerging Reformed tradition in order to reclaim a broader and contextualized understanding of pastoral care and its relation with faith formation. To that end, this paper will focus on the ways the emerging Reformed church of second mid-sixteenth century in Geneva applied the Calvinian notion of faith to pastoral theology. It also explores some applications of such an understanding, especially for the modern American-Dutch reformed church.

In the Reformed faith Calvin’s two-fold notion of faith should not be ignored in the field of pastoral theology since it allows theologians and clergy to continue reclaiming a broader and contextualized understanding of pastoral care and leadership. I showed how pastoral theology and pastoral care was strongly related to the proclamation of the Word and faith formation in the sixteenth-century Geneva reformed church, and how reformed theologians and church leaders of those times understood rightly that it is in the church where the ethos of the believer’s heart is mainly formed and strengthened. By experiencing God’s providence, the Holy Spirit strengthens the faith of the believers and forms their them into the image of Christ, a faith which also shapes their understanding of God’s providential work in creation ––past, present, and future. Therefore, pastoral care in the Genevan church was more than providing simple answers to complex questions, but an integral calling of the church to turn and pressing into the knowledge of God and ourselves toward the process of Christlikeness and wholeness in the community of faith. As this paper has explored it, pastoral care may be understood broadly and narrowly in an ecclesiastical context, depending on our understanding of faith. In the general or broader sense, pastoral care is strongly related to faith formation in the Reformed tradition where spiritual care shapes pastoral work and the functions of the visible church as mother; in the particular or narrower case, pastoral care is seen more as an individualized practice between the pastor and the congregant to discuss a person’ life affairs in light of the Scriptures.

Overall, the emerging reformed church also understood pastoral care mainly as a communal and individual service to God, where the particularized practices of such care were concrete manifestations of a bigger picture, which is an integral part of the calling and mission of the church. Consequently, rediscovering the broader aspect of pastoral care based on Calvin’s two-fold notion of faith will allow the American-Dutch reformed church today to pay closer attention to her calling as a forming body not only of the intellectual-assentive (catechisms and religious instruction) but also of the fiduciary-experiential knowledge of God (piety). In this respect, Calvin’s view of faith constitutes a solid resource for pastoral theology in the Reformed tradition because it offers a well-grounded framework where pastoral theology may also interact and engage in conversations with other areas of study. In my view it is urgent that the modern church may rediscover the classical notion of soul care where not only suffering but also sin can be properly addressed when offering pastoral care in an ecclesiastical context, and thus, avoid a position when one of these two elements may be overlooked to the detriment of the other.

*This is a summary of the paper published as “John Calvin’s Two-Fold Notion of Faith and the Possibility of Faith Formation: The Emerging Genevan Church’s Understanding of Faith and Its Relation to Pastoral Care,” Fides Reformata 24, no.2 (2019): 109-137. If you’d like to read this paper in full, please click here. All rights reserved by the publisher. Used by permission.