Calvin's Theo-political Vision: Reconnecting the Church and Eucharist in the Shadow of Exile

When examining contemporary U.S. immigration policies and refugee issues, one can observe how the modern American government excludes immigrants and the undocumented to maintain national identity and social purity—the integrity of the social body known as "Americans." This logic of preserving a pure social body interestingly corresponds to the Corpus Christianum of the Reformation era, which, in its pursuit of purity, produced countless refugees. By revisiting Calvin, I aim to explore how Reformed theology historically resisted such structures and, in doing so, consider how theology today can be employed to resist systems of exclusion. Calvin’s theology reveals that within the vast theological resources of the Reformed tradition, no earthly community can claim sovereignty, and it further clarifies how the church, as it exists in the world, is called to embrace the marginalized.

  The historian Nicholas Terpstra argues that early modern people thought of families, social groups, communities, towns, guilds, neighbors, friends, and local believers with a specific metaphor: corpus, or the body. These distinct bodies could converge into one social body, Corpus Christianum, through the Eucharist, which brings God directly and substantially down to the earth. The social body of Christ, as a consensus reality, was self-evident to late-medieval and early-modern people, and the image of the body of Christ permeated Christians’ imagination, complex beliefs, assumptions, and perspectives (Terpstra, 12, 17, 18-22). Against this backdrop, certain efforts at reform that seemed to threaten the organization of the body would not merely be understood as a mere disagreement in the realm of ideas or opinions. Instead, such reforming activities were deemed a rejection of society as the Body of Christ. Disagreements that challenged the logic of the social body of Christ were seen as contaminating the purity and integrity of that body, requiring methods of purification. This purification process for a healthy body often led to the expulsion of people who were considered contaminants, and these expulsions produced many exiles and refugees (Terpstra, 51-52).

Calvin was probably the most famous and influential of the French refugees of his time. He lived much of his adult life as a refugee or exile. He led his life in a world in which Corpus-Christianum was self-evident. Living as a refugee outside the community that built an environment and a collection of people, and drew a sharp boundary between inside and outside, meant being “vulnerable, foreign, possibly an outcast and certainly an outsider”(Terpstra, 26). It is inevitable that his status as a refugee and living as an exile would have influenced his perspective, and his writings demonstrate awareness of his distance from the institutional church and state (Michelle Sanchez, 1).

This paper characterizes Calvin’s view on the Church and the Eucharist, given that Calvin was a refugee outside Corpus Christianum and that the Eucharist was the cornerstone for establishing the Corpus Christianum, or for mediating the substantial presence of God. I will analyze the fourth book of Calvin’s 1559 and final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, to examine how his sacramental ecclesiology can be read against the specific theological structure that suppress the freedom of those who reject such a theology, that produced many refugees in the name of purifying the social body of Christ. This paper is divided into three parts. First, I will examine how the Eucharist has been understood, theologically and conceptually, under the structure of the threefold body of Christ. In this part, by reading theorists, such as Henry de Lubac, Michel de Certeau, William Cavanaugh, Ernst H Kantorowicz, I will show how the inversion of the concept of corpus mysticum and corpus verum leads to the separation between the Eucharist and the Church. From this part, I will also show the process in which the Roman Catholic Church historically came to find its source in a legal concept, rather than in the Sacrament, thereby becoming a state-like community of which the Pope is the head.

Then, second, I will analyze Calvin’s writing on the topic, primarily focusing on his ecclesiology with the Sacramental framework, and the Eucharist. Here, Calvin’s comprehensive view will broadly be addressed, including the distinction between the invisible and visible Church, Sacraments as a sign that is tied to substance, the importance of the Holy Spirit, and faith. 

Lastly, I will clearly demonstrate how Calvin’s concepts can be read against the preceding theological structure that produced tons of refugees. From there, I will argue that Calvin, within the framework of the threefold body of Christ, seeks to restore the severed link between the Eucharist and the Church, a bond that began to weaken after the twelfth century, in a way that does not make any visible community sovereign, while allowing the Church to find its source not in legal concepts, but in relation to the Eucharist through the Holy Spirit performatively.

Examining Calvin’s rhetoric and argumentations against the preceding theological structure that produced many refugees will reveals several theo-political implications that are relevant to our current political turmoil. This deep theological vision of understanding the sacraments as bonds of love and unity, as Calvin argues, not only emphasizes the spiritual and communal dimensions of the sacraments of reformed theology, but also challenges believers to embody this unity in concrete acts of care and compassion toward one another. I reckon that focusing on Calvin invites further exploration of how the church should respond, especially to communities of refugees and marginalized people. From this perspective, the sacraments can be read as more than simply providing spiritual nourishment, but as a call to practice the radical unity and mutual care they represent.