Calvin's Preaching

When I did read Reformed types on Calvin I had the sense that they were pushing Calvin into a position he never assumed for himself, namely as the man to whom you turned to justify your present position, whether ecclesiological or political. That mutually exclusive positions can be legitimately maintained based on Calvin's thought ought to inform us that Calvin might have been up to something other than systematic theology - or systematic anything. It is remarkable that after the development of Western scholarship Edward A. Dowey's 1994 expanded version of The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (1952) still believes that the Institutes are Calvin's definitive word and that the role of rhetoric in shaping Calvin's thought does not affect his theology. And while Reformed feminists can turn to Jane Dempsey Douglass' Women, Freedom and Calvin (1985) to learn that Calvin regarded the ordering of church life as adiaphora, that is, as a matter of custom, indifferent to the basics of the gospel, and that Calvin had no formal objections to women's ordination, there is a "Ja, aber ..." able to tear a church apart on this issue. The right decision, for Calvin, would depend upon the Bible's message in relation to context. Regarding the church's political involvement, besides reading Book IV of the Institutes for a great "Nein, aber ...", one can read Calvin's exegesis, also in the Institutes, on the fifth commandment: honour your father and your mother. In paragraph 36 (p.402), the scope of the commandment reaches out to include the state, equivalent to your parents and, therefore due obedience and honour. But in the last paragraph (38), read Calvin lash out at government and call for a Christian to oppose it if the government is no friend of the gospel. It is nothing less than a call to revolution. Again, the faithful position would depend upon the biblical message in relation to context. In short, a church must decide for itself in each age on the basis of its interpretation of scripture and the Zeitgeist.

The Anglicans, however, are not pushing Calvin into any theological comer but simply trying to understand him. Through their eyes, we Reformed can breathe a little easier and, I think, get closer to this fellow to whom we refer for our marching orders in the world. I focus here on two books by Anglican scholars and the lectures of Francis M. Higman at the University of Geneva. The first is William J. Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford U.P., 1988). Bouwsma uses Calvin as an iconic representation of the tensions - philosophical, political, religious of the Renaissance. In so doing, he brings into the foreground a Calvin who, consistent with his era, focused on what was practically possible for the church, the faith and the believer. The essential question for Calvin is, "is it useful?". By asking this question, Calvin "clarified and strengthened the instrumentalism of Renaissance culture. The belief that knowledge is 'for use' dissolved the boundary between the contemplative and active life; it brought biblical scholarship and theological reflection out of the study and into the world... The most important knowledge of all, that which God imparts to his people, is for Calvin supremely and exclusively practical. Scripture contains nothing 'that is not useful to us', nothing 'but what is expedient'".

The heavy emphasis Bouwsma places on the utilitarian character of the Renaissance and thus of John Calvin draws our attention to certain lines in the Institutes, which do not quite convey the image of the cowering believer trembling in his or her shoes in face of God. Rather, right away, God is put to the test: "What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle speculations. It is more important for us to know of what sort he is and what is consistent with his nature. What good is it to profess with Epicurus some sort of God who has cast aside the care of the world only to amuse himself in idleness? What help is it, in short, to know a God with whom we have nothing to do?"

The key notion of gratitude to God for his/her benefits has been sugared and spiritualized by generations of Reformed Christians who have not yet understood that this question is more than just a rhetorical nicety. Calvin means it. In Calvin's rescuing God from the clutches of the church, questions from the believer's mouth to God's ears had to be asked again clearly and directly. Indeed, even God's Bible undergoes a certain "demotion" from a book too lofty for any but clerical minds to read. Scripture is God's technology, a teacher and guide, a nursemaid cooing to the infants who can't speak God's language. The Principle of Accommodation, God's condescension, is just this chucking the infant under the chin.

The sum and substance of Bouwsma's contribution, I believe, is the presentation of Calvin's frame of mind as essentially anxious, always seeking clarity and eminently practical. If philosophy is a matter of definitions, Calvin offers few, and if systematic theology is, in part, a formal presentation of God's ways to humankind or humanity's ways to God, Calvin offers only one clear path that is yet never open to scrutiny: the experience of God's nature and human nature uniting together in the soul. The following is taken from the French version (1560) of the 1559 Institutes, which, I feel, points precisely to the intimacy between God and the human being that Calvin had felt called to proclaim and encourage. It is a corollary to the opening strophe in Book I which set out the purpose of the Institutes as to come to the knowledge of God and ourselves: "C'est pourquoi il a fallu que le Fils de Dieu nous fut fait Emmanuel, c'est-a-dire Dieu avec nous, voire a telle condition que sa divinite et la nature des hommes fussent unies ensemble: autrement il n'y eut point eu de voisinage assez proche, ni d'affinite assez ferme pour nous faire esperer que Dieu habitat avec nous."