Journal: Puritan Reformed Journal
Volume: PRJ 01:2 (Jul 2009)
Article: According To The Custom Of The Ancient Church? Examining The Roots Of John Calvin’s Liturgy
Author: Daniel R. Hyde

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PRJ 1:2 (July 2009) p. 189

According To The Custom Of The Ancient Church?
Examining The Roots Of John Calvin’s Liturgy

Daniel R. Hyde

John Calvin entitled his service book “The Form of Church Prayers and Hymns with the Manner of Administering the Sacraments and Consecrating Marriage According to the Custom of the Ancient Church.”1 In reading this long title, we may gloss over it as just another title of a published liturgical service book for a Protestant enclave in the sixteenth century. Yet within the title is embedded a polemical claim: Reformed worship is according to the custom of the ancient church.

The validity of this claim has been challenged by no less than Yale liturgical scholar, Bryan D. Spinks, who says that Calvin’s claim was “wide of the mark,” given that “the Reformers did not have access to the many liturgical texts from the pre-Nicene and early post-Nicene Church.”2 It is the thesis of this essay that John Calvin’s designation of the Genevan liturgy being “according to the ancient church” was accurate. I will seek to demonstrate this by setting Calvin’s Forme des Prieres in the context of the Reformation’s preoccupation with identifying the Reformation with the ancient church and by comparing Calvin’s liturgy with earliest extant liturgies of the church.

The Reformation And The Ancient Church

The Reformation was just that: a re-formation. It was an attempt to take the church that existed in the sixteenth century and reform it into its early form in the days of the church’s fathers. When it came

PRJ 1:2 (July 2009) p. 190

to liturgy, our Protestant forefathers did not get rid of the existing liturgies in their regions by radically starting over, although this is asserted in popular literature.3 Instead, the many Reformers took what existed and followed the dictum of the Renaissance: “[back] to the sources” (ad fontes). To be a Protestant, then, was not to be novel, as Rome accused, but to be truly catholic by protesting the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church as a means of aligning with the historic Catholic church.4 In what follows, I will survey several treatises of the Reformers that attempt to do just this. In doing so, we will discover the appropriate context for Calvin’s liturgy.

Bucer: “Ground And Reason” (1524)

One of the first attempts to locate the reforming work of the sixteenth century within the ancient church liturgy was the Grund und Ursach (“Ground and Reason”). Written on be...

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