JEAN CALVIN
This year, Protestants are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of John (Jean) Calvin. Calvin, born in 1509, is of course the second great name of the Protestant Reformation after Martin Luther. Calvin was a Frenchman but he lived most of his life in exile, mainly in Geneva, the city with which his name will always be associated, but he also spent three important and productive years in Strasbourg from 1538 to 1541 (and we’re very grateful to Rémi Kick for having shown us Calvin’s Strasbourg yesterday).
Calvin built on Luther’s Reformation, but took Luther’s ideas further – to their logical conclusion, Calvin would probably have said. Calvin’s reformed teaching and church order spread like wildfire, and became dominant in the Protestant churches of Switzerland, parts of Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Hungary and France. Wherever you find churches called “Reformed” or “Presbyterian”, you know they're built primarily on the Calvinist heritage.
Calvin’s ideas played a very important role too in the Church of England in the Reformation period. It's often said that in so far as Anglicanism is Protestant, it is Calvinist rather than Lutheran. In the end, after many struggles, the Church of England did not end up thoroughly Calvinist, but the English Calvinist tradition (usually referred to in England as “Puritanism”) continued to flourish in the so-called “dissenting” or “non-conformist” churches – and above all in the American colonies, and Calvinism has arguably been the dominant Protestant tradition in the USA.
But as I said in the preliminary announcement of this sermon, Calvin and Calvinism have had a pretty bad press in modern times, and so the question I want to ask today is this: is Calvin still a source of inspiration for us?
My answer to that question is a resounding Yes. I don’t mean by that that I agree with everything Calvin said, far from it, but Calvin is and always will be one of the giants of Christian theology; there is still much we can learn from him, and we can profitably let ourselves be challenged by what he said.
But first we should ask: why does Calvin have such a bad image these days?
Well, he has a reputation as a severe and gloomy moralist (and admittedly his portraits don’t help very much). Calvin’s Geneva is remembered as a place where people's daily lives were tightly controlled and many pleasures were frowned on, almost a bit like Iran today. We think too of bare Reformed church interiors, with nothing to appeal to the eye. We think of Puritanism as moralistic, legalistic and self-righteous. Not to mention the fact that Puritanism is the very antithesis of our modern hedonistic, pleasure-loving culture.
And this leads on to a second question: why, then, was Calvinism so attractive to so many Christians in Calvin’s time and after?
Well, first we need to remember the beauty and the clarity of Calvin's writings. His use of the French language makes him a real pleasure to read; it's all so well expressed, so clear, so logical. You can’t help being impressed even when you don’t entirely agree.
But, above all, Calvin brought people a sense of freedom, of liberation. Liberation from an overbearing Church, from priests who controlled and dispensed God’s grace, who told you what the Bible means, who dictated your conscience. Liberation also from subjection to oppressive kings and rulers who thought they had a God-given right to do what they liked.
Calvin brought liberation from tedious, burdensome and sometimes frankly ridiculous religious practices; and liberation from the hopeless struggle to make yourself acceptable to God, because Calvin taught that there is absolutely nothing you can do to win God’s approval: it has all been done for you already in Jesus Christ.
I think this is why Calvin's ideas were so attractive to people in sixteenth century Europe. And we have to remember that, as is so often the case, his followers tended to develop his – often very subtle – thoughts in a more extreme and intolerant way. We ought not to blame Calvin himself for all the excesses of Calvinism and Puritanism.
I’d like to illustrate these points by looking at just a few of Calvin’s central ideas.
Calvin’s theology begins and ends with a stress on the greatness of God. “Your God is too small”, he would have said to a lot of the people around him. God is far greater than any of our ideas about him.
You cannot picture God adequately, and any attempt to do so is a kind of idolatry; hence Calvin’s intolerance of images and the use of art to portray God. This is why he was so virulent in his opposition to statues, ornaments, holy relics and all the other paraphernalia of Catholic devotion. And this is why reformed church buildings in the true Calvinist tradition seem to us so bare; they have no beauty to lift the soul up to God because, for Calvin, the attempt to do this was a snare and a delusion.
You cannot “capture” God here on earth, and this applied to the sacrament too. So, for Calvin, the bread and the wine of the Eucharist are not themselves to be identified with the body and blood of Christ; they are not in themselves holy or to be adored. Not that Calvin thought that holy communion was just a memorial service. Less “high church” than Luther, he was nonetheless not as “low church” as his colleague Zwingli of Zurich. Calvin taught that those who faithfully receive the bread and wine do indeed receive Christ’s body and blood, but only in a spiritual sense, not in a material sense.
The counterpart of Calvin’s belief in the grandeur of God is his low view of humankind in our fallen state. For Calvin, sin pervades all our faculties and everything we do. As the general confession in the old Book of Common Prayer has it, in very Calvinist language, “there is no health in us”.
Moreover, there is absolutely nothing we can do to remedy this miserable state of affairs. All our religious devotions, all our attempts to haul ourselves up to God by our own bootstraps are worthless; “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves” (the Prayer Book again). Even what look like our good works are worthless and “have the nature of sin” (from the 39 Articles of the Church of England).
All this sounds terribly depressing. But for the believer it is not depressing at all because the counterpart of Calvin’s emphasis on human depravity is his exalted view of what, with the grace of God, human beings can become.
In Christ, and in him alone, the radical, unbridgeable gulf between God and man is overcome. Through faith in Christ the believer is set free from the sin that weighs him down.
Now this belief in salvation by our faith in Christ, rather than by anything we can do ourselves, is common to Protestants in general and is also more or less agreed by Catholics too these days. But where the majority part company with Calvin is in his belief that God in his inscrutable sovereignty has decided in advance which of us will be saved, and which of us will be damned. In other words, for Calvin, it is not open to everyone to choose salvation through Christ because God has already chosen some – and not others.
This is the famous, or should I say notorious, doctrine of double predestination. It follows naturally from Calvin's strong belief in God's sovereignty and his belief that unsaved human beings are incapable of making free decisions; it also has quite strong, though certainly not unequivocal, biblical support.
But to most of us these days the full-fledged belief in presdestination makes God seem arbitrary and cruel. How can we believe that for some of God's creatures, by God's own decision, there is literally no hope? Probably the majority of Protestants, therefore, have not followed Calvin on this. Most consider that we do all have freedom to choose whether or not to accept the salvation offered to us in Christ.
The attraction of the belief in predestination was that it made the chosen ones, the “elect”, very sure of their salvation. They could stop worrying about it, and get on with the business of living responsibly, working hard and building a just society.
Because Calvin was much more interested than Luther in what people did after they came to know their salvation in Christ. He stressed that the elect went through a process of sanctification by the Holy Spirit, and that this would enable them to live in accordance with God's laws.
Calvin was much more interested than Luther in building a just and holy society here on earth, and he set out to make Geneva the prototype of that society. Not that the inhabitants of Geneva always enjoyed being part of that experiment! It was not always very comfortable to live in a city where morality was enforced by law and deviations of any kind were punished.
But strangely enough, despite his low estimate of unsaved human beings, an idea which is in many ways so opposed to our modern ways of thinking, Calvin laid the foundations for so much of the Western world as we know it today.
He had a high view of the responsibility of rulers to order society according to God's law, but he knew that rulers did not always live up to their god-given vocation. He “desacralised” political power, rejecting the contemporary idea that kings ruled by “divine right”. Calvin saw that rulers were tempted to use their power for selfish ends, and he considered that it might in extreme cases be necessary to overthrow tyrants.
And in his church order, clergy were not more important than lay people; all had their part to play in the life of the church. Moreover all clergy were equal in status (in theory anyway, because you could hardly deny that Calvin himself was more equal than the others in practice). But this meant for example that there were to be no bishops, no superior order of clergy.
These ideas can be seen as preparing the way for freedom of thought, for equality and democracy, the idea that rulers rule only with the consent of the people and that all people, however humble, have equal rights. Moreover, Calvin said that every Christian reading the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit to understand its message, and this can be seen as preparing the way for the later development of freedom of thought.
It's also argued too that Calvin's insistence on the responsibility of the elect to work hard and live frugally, together with his allowing of money to be lent at interest, prepared the way for the capitalist market economy. Certainly Reformed Christians did become leaders in the development of modern industry and commerce in places like Scotland, Holland and also in Alsace (especially in the Reformed – not Lutheran – city of Mulhouse).
So I think you can say that although Calvin's theology is not as influential in the Church as it once was, his ideas about society, about law and politics, and about economic activity, have played a big part – for both good and ill - in laying the foundations for the Western world as we know it. Calvin would see a tremendous amount to criticise in the Europe we live in today, but at the same time there is a sense in which he made it all possible.
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Church
9 August 2009
Commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth.
