The two letters reflect the central issues under debate during the Reformation: the formal principle (sola scriptura) and the material principle (sola fide). Notice, these are the same theological tenets at stake in Luther’s Reformation two decades earlier.

Celebrations of the Reformation typically revolve around the larger-than-life reformer, Martin Luther. On this Reformation Day, however, I would like to wind the clock forward two decades after Luther posted his monumental 95 theses to a debate you may never have heard of before: the Reformation debate between John Calvin and Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto.

Return to Rome…While you Still Can

On March 18, 1539, Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, bishop of Carpentras in southern France, wrote a letter to the magistrates and citizens of Geneva. Why? Sadoleto’s purpose was strategic: He was writing to the Genevans in order to persuade them to return to Rome.

Sadoleto’s letter was timely. Previously, in April of 1538, John Calvin and Guillaume Farel had been banished, exiled from the pulpit, due to conflict with the civil authorities in regard to ecclesiastical authority and reform. Now was the perfect opportunity to write to the Genevans in order to bring them back to the Catholic fold.

However, the council that received Sadoleto’s letter, committed as they were to the Protestant Reformation, struggled to find a worthy theologian for the task of responding to Sadoleto. So, the letter was sent to Bern, who assured the Genevan magistrates that an appropriate responder would be recruited. Calvin was the obvious choice. Once agreed upon, the letter was sent to Calvin in Strasbourg, who would take but six days to respond.

The Opportunity of a Life-Time

The two letters reflect the central issues under debate during the Reformation: the formal principle (sola scriptura) and the material principle (sola fide). Notice, these are the same theological tenets at stake in Luther’s Reformation two decades earlier.

Sadoleto argued that the Genevans had departed from the one, true Church, which does not error. The Church “errs not, and even cannot err, since the Holy Spirit constantly guides her public and universal decrees and Councils.” The dilemma for the Genevans is serious:

Whether is it more expedient for your salvation . . . by believing and following what the Catholic Church throughout the whole world, now for more than fifteen hundred years . . . approves with general consent; or innovations introduced within these twenty-five years, by crafty, or, as they think themselves, acute men; but men certainly who are not themselves the Catholic Church?

According to Sadoleto, Calvin and the Reformers “tear the spouse of Christ in pieces,” but now the Genevans, with Calvin banished, have the opportunity of a life-time: they can return to the one, true faith of the one, true church.

Additionally, Sadoleto scoffed at the Reformation dogma of sola fide. Yes, said Sadoleto, we obtain the blessing of “complete and perpetual salvation by faith alone in God and in Jesus Christ.” Yet Sadoleto quickly clarifies that when

I say by faith alone, I do not mean, as those inventors of novelties do, a mere credulity and confidence in God, by which, to the seclusion of charity and the other duties of a Christian mind, I am persuaded that in the cross and blood of Christ all my faults are unknown; this, indeed, is necessary, and forms the first access which we have to God, but it is not enough.

“For Sadoleto,” observes John C. Olin, “the process of justification must encompass good works, and faith, used in the justification formula, must be understood as more than a ‘mere credulity and confidence in God.’”

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