SOVEREIGN GRACE
This page intentionally left blank
SOVEREIGN GRACE The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom ...
170 downloads
632 Views
13MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
SOVEREIGN GRACE
This page intentionally left blank
SOVEREIGN GRACE The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought
William R. Stevenson, Jr.
New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1999
Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1999 by William R. Stevenson, Jr. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stevenson, William R. Sovereign grace : the place and significance of Christian freedom in John Calvin's political thought / William R. Stevenson, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512 506-1
1. Freedom (Theology)—History of doctrines—1i6th century. 2. Calvin, Jean, 1509-1564—Political and social views. I. Tide. BT809.S74 1999 233'. 7'092 -dc21 98-24152
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
[U]nless this freedom be comprehended, neither Christ nor gospel truth, nor inner peace of soul, can be rightly known. Institutes 3.19.1
This page intentionally left blank
PREFACE
y interest in John Calvin's political ideas began to develop in earnest only
M after I came to teach courses in the history of political thought at Calvin
College in fall 1989. Before that time I had not been drawn to study Calvin's writings and as a result knew little about them. That ignorance quickly began to dissipate as I sought to learn more about the Reformed tradition reflected in the educational mission of the college. I began to study John Calvin, that is, to learn more about Calvin College. This book is the best evidence that for me, Calvin's writings have been difficult to put down. Just before the spring semester, 1990, I decided to include in my course in the history of modern political thought the compact John McNeill collection of Calvin's political writings, On God and Political Duty (New York: Macmillan, 1950). As I was reading through that collection, preparing to compose a syllabus, the thought occurred to me that Calvin's essay "On Christian Freedom" might serve as a kind of organizing framework for the course. Thinking about his three "parts" of freedom caused me to consider a categorization of the key modern thinkers according to their views on the sources, content, and goals of human freedom. Somewhat tentatively, I decided to try out this framework on my Calvin undergraduates. They were supportive enough that I determined to solicit from the college some release time to put together for presentation at the 1991 American Political Science Association (APSA) meeting a paper detailing the ways which Calvin's idea of Christian freedom both anticipates and serves as an "antidote" for the primary modern ideas of freedom. At every stage I was encouraged and supported by colleagues, both near and far, and the college administration. Seven years later, that paper has now become a book.
viii PREFACE
Several items regarding my presentation of this argument need early mention. First, I have tried to document my understanding and interpretation of Calvin's political thought with some care. While I have held fast to Calvin's "Christian Freedom," I have concentrated my overall efforts on a close reading of Calvin's entire Institutes, a number of his relevant Commentaries, Letters, and Sermons, and several of his more significant tracts. I have as well tried to read carefully through the relevant secondary literature on Calvin, including the primary biographies and studies of both his political thought and his theology. To gain some historical perspective, I have tried to read broadly in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European history. My goal has thus been to picture Calvin's view of Christian freedom both in its own light and in the light of its wider philosophical and historical context. I do not expect that my goal has been fully accomplished, however. Readers attuned to the scholarly community about which I write are therefore encouraged to examine my findings with a wary eye and to respond as seems appropriate with their own evocations of Calvin's "Christian Freedom." The great reward of my experience so far in struggling with Calvin's ideas has been the hospitality and good graces extended to me by other Calvin scholars. I expect that I will continue to grow in my knowledge of Calvin and Calvinism as such colleagues confront me with the many things I should have taken into account! To invite such scholarly comment will not, I hope, unduly distance my argument from more general readers. Such readers should know that the scholarly apparatus included in the endnotes and bibliography may be safely ignored if they wish only a broad introduction to Calvin's political thinking. Indeed, I have tried to present my argument as much as possible in nontechnical language and without unnecessary scholarly sidetrips. At a number of places it has seemed important to give readers a sense of the particular scholarly controversy at hand, but I have attempted to do this without trying their patience. As a result, readers not drawn to particular scholarly disagreements should feel free to overlook the notes and citations that I have included to support my reading of Calvin. Experienced Calvin scholars will find immediately that my presentation of Calvin's thinking assumes continuity in his various intellectual positions over the period of his mature writing. Although a number would disagree, I believe that such continuity is largely present. No doubt Calvin found himself on many occasions hedging here and elaborating there, but I have found no convincing evidence that—after his conversion to evangelicalism and his first statement of the Reformed perspective in the 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion—the substance of his theological or political stances changed significantly. This is an arguable point, of course, but I have chosen not to argue it fully here. One last point: After thinking through the matter of gendered pronouns, I have chosen to adopt a posture I believe to be in keeping with Calvin's own understanding. Clearly Calvin does not intend to exclude women from significant places in the community of believers. (One might look specifically at either Institutes 2.13.3 or his commentary on 1 Corinthians 11:7, not to mention Jane Dempsey Douglass's fine work, for evidence of such inclinations.) Yet at the same time, so far as women's places in the political, institutional structures of his day were con-
PREFACE ix
cerned, Calvin patently resembled what Glenn Tinder has labeled a "patriarchal conservative." (Calvin's commentary on Genesis 2:18 and a number of his letters seem to support this conclusion.) My procedure on this matter has therefore been to use gender-neutral language where Calvin clearly intends it, unless I am quoting directly from his work or unless gender-neutral expression competes unfavorably with stylistic flow. In these exceptional cases, I believe the context will make plain Calvin's intent. My debts to others during the time I have worked on this project are huge. Calvin College and its administrative officers have been mainstays of support and encouragement throughout the process. Presidents Anthony Diekema and now Galen Byker; Provosts Gordon Van Harn and now Joel Carpenter; Dean Frank Roberts; and Department Chairs Corwin Smidt and James Penning have trusted my instincts, spoken up on my behalf, and supported at every turn my applications for research aid. I am deeply grateful to them all. The college supported this research with two Summer Research Fellowships (1991 and 1995) and a sabbatical leave (fall 1995). The H. H. Meeter Center for Calvin Studies and the Calvin College Library have made available to me such a wealth of resources that I could find no need to travel abroad to conduct my research. The college is and has been truly blessed by the foresight to assemble its magnificent Calvinism collection and by the diligent efforts of a number of staff members to keep this collection current. For adept and cheerful guidance through this collection, I am grateful to the Meeter Center's former director, Richard C. Gamble; its former administrative aide, Dianne Eves; its current administrative aide, Susan E. Schmurr; its current librarian, Paul Fields; and its ever-present neighbor and well-wisher, Rev. Benjamin Boerkoel. For a critical research leave and designation as a Meeter Center Fellow during the spring semester, 1992, and for an invitation to deliver the spring 1997 Meeter Center lecture, I am grateful as well to the Meeter Center Governing Board. For all those who heard early versions of this argument and responded with detailed and constructive criticisms, I am grateful, too. These include the primary respondent to my paper at the 1991 APSA meeting, James W. Skillen; my former departmental colleague, Luis Lugo; Reformation theologian and former Meeter Center Fellow Ralph Keen; fellow Meeter Center researcher Danny G. Wells; longtime friend Alberto R. Coll; fellow political theorist Paul Marshall; the students in my history of political thought courses over the last several years, especially David Polet and Randall Smit, who helped me through my first attempt at organizing Political Science 306; and the students and faculty in Politics at the Catholic University of America who graciously heard my defense of Calvin's ideas during spring 1992 and responded with helpful criticism and in great good humor. Later versions of the argument also had help. Calvin student and friend Kelly Van Andel carefully copyedited the second full draft of the book, saving me from needless repetition and confusion in the argument's presentation. My colleague John E. Hare of the Calvin Philosophy Department was kind enough to read the penultimate draft, thereby steering my argument away from a number of pitfalls in logic and in clarity. The outside readers consulted by Oxford University Press evaluated the manuscript with care and grace, affording me hope in its value, but
X PREFACE
taking pains to keep me from overstating the import of Calvin's political ideas for our contemporary world. Finally, editors Cynthia Read and Will Moore oversaw with uncommon diligence and sensitivity the study's journey from manuscript to published book. Five people saw me through the entire project, each generously offering his time, his attentiveness to my subject matter, his critical skills, and his indispensable encouragement and goodwill. Without their collective help this project would be in a pitiable state indeed. They are my former teacher and longtime mentor and friend Glenn Tinder, now retired from the University of Massachusetts at Boston; my coworker and instructor in the intricacies of religious language in early modern thought, Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown University; my friend, intellectual clarifier, and cheerful encourager, Jay Budziszewski of the University of Texas at Austin; my student and fellow traveler (who also prepared the index) Michael Wassenaar; and my former dean and current colleague, Reformation historian Frank Roberts. I wish to dedicate this book to the members of my family, Rosemary, Rachael, and Clark, blessed gifts every one; and to Marion Davis Battles—widow of Ford Lewis Battles and accomplished Calvin scholar in her own right—who died suddenly during the preparation of this work but not before she had opened her mind and heart to my quest and made me feel that I was at last right where I belonged. Praise God, from whom all these blessings flow! Grand Rapids, Michigan February 1999
W.R.S.
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND TRANSLATIONS
Calvin's writings, I have relied primarily on the two volume John I T.n examining McNeill edition of the 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960); the 45 volume Calvin Translation Society edition of Calvin's biblical commentaries (reprinted in 22 vols., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993); the four volume Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet collection of Calvin's letters (reprinted as vols. 4-7 in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, 7 vols. [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983]); the Leroy Nixon selections of Calvin's sermons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950 and 1952); and the Henry Beveridge (reprinted, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958) and Benjamin Farley (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1982) editions of Calvin's tracts and treatises. As necessary, I have checked each of these English translations with Calvin's original Latin or French in the 59 volume loannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia (Brunswick and Berlin, 1863-1900). In checking Ford Lewis Battles's English translation of the 1559 Institutes (ed. McNeill), though, I have relied instead on Richard Wevers's computer search program for the Peter Barth and Wilhelm Niesel edition (Munich: C. Kaiser, 1926—62) of Calvin's last Latin version of his magnum opus. I have listed Wevers's program in the bibliography as John Calvin's Institutes, 1559: Search Routines (Grand Rapids: Digamma, 1993). Endnote 1 of part 1 of the text describes my specific method for citing Calvin's 1559 Institutes as well as that for citing his biblical commentaries, his letters, and his sermons. The most common abbreviations I have used in citing Calvin's works are listed below. For Calvin's commentary on a specific book in the Bible, I have used the form Comm. Gen. 1:1 to, in this case, refer the reader to Calvin's remarks on chapter 1, verse 1 of the Book of Genesis.
xii
o
A N O T E ON S O U R C E S AND T R A N S L A T I O N S
Comm. Harm. Evang. Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, 3 vols., in Calvin's Commentaries, 45 vols., trans. Calvin Translation Society (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843—59; reprinted as vols. 16-17, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993). Comm. Harm. Moses Commentaries on the Last Four Books of Moses arranged in the Form of a Harmony, 4 vols., in Calvin's Commentaries, 45 vols., trans. Calvin Translation Society (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843—59; reprinted as vols. 2-3, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993). Conc. Etern. Predest. Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J. K. S. Reid (London: James Clarke, 1961). CO Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, 59 vols., ed. Wilhelm Baum, Eduard Cunitz, and Eduard Reuss (Brunswick and Berlin, 1863-1900). Haroutunian Calvin: Commentaries, trans. and ed. Joseph Haroutunian (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958). Serm. Deut. The Sermons of John Calvin upon the Fifth Booke of Moses Called Deuteronomy, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Henry Middleton, 1583; reprinted, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1965). Serm. job Sermons from Job, sel. and trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952). Serm. 2 Sam. Sermons on 2 Samuel, trans. Douglas Kelly (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1992). Suppl. Calv. Supplementa Calviniana; Sermons Inedit, 8 vols., ed. Edwin Milhaupt (Neukirchen Kreis Moers: Neukirchener Verlag der Buchandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1961- ).
CONTENTS
A Note on Sources and Translations
xi
Introduction: Why Calvin? Why Now? 3 P A R T I:
The Irreducible, yet Partial, Individual 1. The Irreducible Individual 15 2. The Individual as Part of the Whole
P A R T II:
II 37
Corporate Action, but under Judgment 59 3. Action in the World 63 4. Action under Judgment 81
PART III:
Cultural Dissociation and the Tutelage of History 105 5. 6.
Progress and Revolution 109 Historical Pedagogy 131
Conclusion: Freedom as a Woven Cord, Sheathed in Sovereign Grace 149 Notes
153
Bibliography Index
197
183
This page intentionally left blank
SOVEREIGN GRACE
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION Why Calvin? Why Now?
ach set of readers likely to come across this book on John Calvin's "political" E thought will no doubt look at it by the light of distinct but pressing questions. Readers interested in political thinking but unfamiliar with the full range of Calvin's work will ask whether Calvin really addressed political questions in a deliberate or systematic way such that the body of his answers constitute a novel or at least unusual perspective on politics. Was not Calvin merely a religious figure, concerned only with theological and pastoral issues? At the same time, readers already at home within the field of Calvin studies—and knowing of the close connection for all the Reformation figures between religious and political matters—will accept the topic's legitimacy but may very well question the need for one more book on Calvin's thinking, given the storehouse of scholarly findings already available. Have not the fine studies of Calvin's political ideas by J. W. Allen, John T. McNeill, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Walzer, Harro Hopfl, W. Fred Graham, William J. Bouwsma, and more recently Ralph Hancock, among many others, satisfactorily covered this territory?1 My intent in this study is to address both these questions and by doing so to address both sets of readers. Yes, Calvin had significant and unusual things to say about life in public encounter, things which both anticipate much modern political thinking and serve as important foils to some of modern thinking's broader pretensions. His political ideas, therefore, deserve a wider audience than they have traditionally gotten, especially now that Ralph Hancock—in Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics—has so eloquently appealed to that wider audience in charging that Calvin's ideas are behind modernity's broader pretensions. And no, Calvin's political ideas have yet to be exhaustively mined. Even among Calvin 3
4
o
INTRODUCTION
scholars the temptation has been to categorize Calvin somewhat narrowly, to see him, for example, as either a protoliberal democrat (McNeill), a reckless revolutionary (Walzer), a "constructive" revolutionary (Graham), an unforgiving authoritarian (Allen, Hancock, and, to some extent, Hopfl), an intransigent traditionalist (Wolin), or, interestingly, all of these in separate psychic compartments (Bouwsma). Each characterization is entirely plausible, of course; yet, given the existence of the others, each is also problematic. What are needed, therefore, are not fewer but more attempts at comprehensive and nuanced treatment of Calvin's political ideas. Can Hancock's picture be reconciled with Bouwsrna's, Wolin's with McNeill's, or Walzer's with Hopfl's? If so, how so? This study attempts one such reconciliation by following the stream which flows from Calvin's fascinating short essay, "On Christian Freedom," an essay which constitutes one coherent chapter in book 3 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, I argue that a full examination of this essay on Christian freedom yields not only a more thorough explication of Calvin's political ideas proper but also a more complete and coherent picture of their theological underpinnings. Treating this short but close-textured essay as a key link between Calvin's theology and his politics opens the door to the possibility that Calvin had a more deliberate, broader, and more extensive view of politics than he is often given credit for having. At the same time, working through the various "parts" to Christian freedom which Calvin identifies in his essay presents to attentive readers not only the various dimensions of his strongly biblical theology but also the biblically inspired notion of God's sovereign grace which weaves them all together. For it is in this essay that readers find not only the "parts" of Calvin's political theology but the whole behind those parts. Between and among the parts, there is tension, even paradox, in Calvin's thinking, but it is the authentic, constructive tension of living the Christian life in the face of a sovereign yet loving divine Creator, Ruler, and Redeemer. To deny or degrade any of the parts is therefore both to miscalculate—even evacuate—their creative tension and to gloss over the larger whole. Starting the analysis in the essay on Christian freedom makes sense on a number of pragmatic counts as well. First, Calvin used this essay to introduce the explicitly political final chapter in his first edition of the Institutes (1536). Yet in later editions he moved it wholesale to conclude his section on the explicitly theological question of faith justification. Calvin's particular transfer of this essay, then, suggests that in his mind the idea of Christian freedom constituted an important link between his theological and political understandings. Moreover, the fact of his wholesale removal of the essay would certainly imply that for Calvin, Christian freedom remained a fully coherent concept, one with its own. distinct contours and bodily integrity. Finally, the essay is one of the few substantial portions of the Institutes that remained undisturbed throughout Calvin's fourteen editions, and many revisions, of his magnum opus. This latter fact surely demonstrates that Calvin's initial expression of the idea of Christian freedom satisfied him to the end, and thus that, in his mind, Christian freedom had a clear and abiding scope, bearing, color, and substance.
INTRODUCTION
o
5
Perhaps the primary reason for concentrating this study on Calvin's idea of Christian freedom concerns the potential this idea has for establishing Calvin as a significant political thinker in his own right. In addition to showing that Christian freedom holds together Calvin's theology and his politics, I argue that his fuller, more nuanced vision of human freedom exposes by comparison the shallow and seemingly truncated ideas found in the major modern thinkers. In this way Calvin's vision might serve as a strong antidote to the more narrow and thus more hollow conceptions we moderns tend to confront. There is an obvious danger in so presenting Calvin's ideas, for the temptation to anachronism is strong. Indeed, historians of the Reformation period are right to remind us that the particular institutional arrangements of that period provide the necessary context even for comprehending Calvin's ideas, much less for comparing those ideas with later thinkers. Any political idea, some would assert, grows out of a particular historical context. Thus it can be understood and evaluated only by acknowledging the boundaries of that context. I am happy to concur with this historian's truth and as a result try to demonstrate in this study not only a sensitivity to Calvin's place and time but as well a realistic awareness of the eccentricities of our own place and time. Without question, there is an important sense in which Calvin's development of a political theory out of his understanding of Christian freedom depends on the language and assumptions of his time. At the same time, however, we are not—because of our chronological bias and perhaps even historical disability—prevented from entering into a "conversation" with Calvin about his fundamental ideas. Our handicap is not as debilitating as that. Calvin assumes throughout his writing and public speaking what no doubt we do as well, that human beings must ever wrestle with certain fundamental questions and problems about their own makeup and about their existential condition. Historical periods may come and go, that is, but the perennial questions remain. We may have to work a bit harder to engage Calvin and other historical figures in conversation about these questions, of course; we may need to peel off the husk of strange assumptions these figures first present to our glance. Yet it is possible to enter into dialogue with these historical aliens in the same way it is possible to enter into communion with geographical and cultural aliens. Would not the results of such conversations be to the advantage of both parties? Certain of the assumptions Calvin makes, for example, may very well enlighten our own search for social and political health. Although we ought not casually accept Calvin's entire political framework, then, we can perhaps learn something by seeing our own starting point reflected in the mirror of his assumptions. To lay out Calvin's vision of freedom is therefore no piddling affair, because for modern political thinkers freedom looks like the quintessential, even foundational, concept. It is this concept, after all, around which thinkers as historically and politically diverse as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and even Marx organize their thoughts on governmental roles and responsibilities.2 Surely the idea of freedom deserves our full attention. No doubt the modern thinkers who assert freedom do so out of their own particular historical experience, but the fact that they all assert it should cause our collective conceptual antennae to
6
»
INTRODUCTION
quiver. Apparently all these thinkers understand human beings either to be free or to need freedom. In spite of its obvious centrality to modern political understandings, however, there appears to be little agreement on what freedom actually means. Machiavelli, for example, finds freedom to be largely a matter of national self-determination. Hobbes, by contrast, defines it as the mere absence, for "atomistic" individuals, of physical restraint. For Locke, freedom resides in the self-determinative character of "rational" individuals. Rousseau departs from the individualist view to find freedom resulting directly from one's alignment with the unfortunately often provincial "general will." Attempting to transcend Rousseau, but still failing to see the legitimacy of human individuality, Hegel pictures freedom as arising from the selfconscious identification with customs and traditions that have developed historically through the suprahistorical Spirit of Universal Mind. For Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the dominant ideologues of the twentieth century, freedom means a posthistorical liberation from the "false consciousness" imbued through exploitative economic structures and enforced by social and political superstructures. Freedom for these revolutionaries arrives only when the coercive apparatus of government has "withered away."3 The communist Utopia, says Marx in The German Ideology, will then emancipate the human being to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic" (Tucker, 160). The sheer number of conceptions of freedom even in this short list testifies to the need for deeper analysis. For even if we boil this diversity down to a few primary ideas, and there appear to be at least three, we still see the incompatibility of these primary notions with each other and thereby question the sufficiency of each in the face of ongoing human experience. If, for example, we envision freedom as a matter of individual fulfillment in individual identity and distinctiveness (such as is apparently offered by Hobbes and Locke), we wonder if freedom's communal and historical dimensions ought not to figure in. At the same time, the confining of freedom to the realm of individual choice may ignore our experience of the shallowness of such choice when disconnected from any kind of transcendent pattern. Furthermore, if we envision freedom as perhaps both individual and communal fulfillment, but only within the context of communal identity and sacrifice (such as is apparently offered by Machiavelli and Rousseau), we wonder about the human need to distinguish ourselves as particular persons with particular gifts and talents. We may also bury the possibility of the transhistorical judgment of particular communal norms. Finally, if we invoke the notion of freedom as historical development and thus dialectical fulfillment, within the context of changing sets of political and economic institutions and relationships, but culminating in a particular posthistorical epoch (such as Hegel and Marx apparently offer), we may discard the timeless quality of human experiences of freedom, not to mention arrogantly attribute to ourselves a transhistorical comprehension of which we are no doubt incapable. Interestingly, for the bulk of the twentieth century the battle between the century's two great ideological movements, communism and liberal democracy (both, it seems, claiming residence in the territory of "freedom"), appears to have
INTRODUCTION
o
7
exhibited just the sort of superficiality and insufficiency of understanding I am describing and has thereby demonstrated the need for more subtle and thorough analysis of human freedom. Not only were these twentieth-century antagonists intransigent vis-a-vis each other, they were each also, rather obviously in hindsight, only partially right and as a result—in their presumption, we might say— profoundly wrong. As testified by the eloquent witness of an Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the enforced "community" of Soviet communism did suffocate individuals. At the same time, as testified by the widespread alienation and social breakdown of contemporary American cities, the shallow individualism of much liberal thinking does undermine community. We have all watched as "liberation movements" have sought systematically to coerce individual consciences into lock-step uniformity, and as disciples of "liberty" have praised personal privacy to the point of communal disintegration and near moral anarchy. Do we not look back on a century marked less by liberation than by progressive ideological enslavement, and less by liberty than by growing spiritual despair, even terror? It is therefore my contention that a concentrated study of Calvin's conception of Christian freedom can help us to see what is most problematic about the various modern notions of freedom, namely, their fragmented and thus superficial, even illusionary, character. Diverse and partial notions of human freedom, it seems, vie for supremacy as comprehensive and complete. Simplistic understandings selfrighteously assert moral and political autonomy. In our day, we appear to confront a public sphere within which, to borrow Alasdair Maclntyre's description of our moral predicament, "the language and the appearances of [freedom] persist even though the integral substance of [freedom] has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed" (After Virtue, 5). My study of Calvin's writing thus attempts to introduce students of modern politics to what I believe to be a much more intricate and comprehensive conception of human freedom. In fact, it turns out that in his anticipation of a number of modern ideas Calvin warns against just the sort of superficiality and fragmentation of freedom the modern age appears to have bequeathed us. He systematically describes three parts of freedom, which correspond quite well to the three primary modern ideas of freedom I described earlier. Significantly, though, Calvin not only indicates, and critiques, the shallow understanding that each particular part might engender, he also demonstrates the interdependence, even coherence, of the parts within the larger context of Christ as God's incarnate Word. One might say, then, that Calvin's conception both anticipates and serves as a needed foil to each of the primary modern ideas of freedom. His portrait aims to account for all three dimensions of human political experience, the individual, the communal, and the historical. My primary goal then is to elucidate for contemporary readers what seems a more satisfactory understanding of freedom than we are otherwise accustomed to behold. My second, but equally important, goal is to indicate to students of Calvin proper that his understanding of Christian freedom is both more significant and more integral to his writing as a whole than is generally appreciated. For example, there is a sense in which the idea of Christian freedom holds coherently together the "two Calvins" which William Bouwsma in his John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century
8
»
INTRODUCTION
Portrait has so exhaustively tried to distinguish. There was indeed both a libertarian and an authoritarian element in Calvin's thinking, but Calvin was no schizophrenic. The larger cohering of these two elements in the sovereign love of God was to Calvin a plain fact of life.4 Indeed, Calvin's idea of Christian freedom works to fill out and explain each of the conflicting portraits of his political thinking to which I have already alluded, as I hope to show. In showcasing the subtlety and creative tension of Calvin's thinking, I realize that I may be risking its practical irrelevance. For as stimulating as Calvin's idea may be to us intellectually, politically it may only work to clog our institutional arteries. Indeed, the problem with any explicit injection of creative tension or paradox into the public realm is the apparent unsuitability of such tension to ordinary policymaking. At some deep level human beings may acknowledge the reality of spiritual paradox, but the Socrates or the Jesus who points it out to them will likely get trampled in the stampede to systematic certainty. It is a rare statesman who can maintain anything like spiritual equilibrium. Yet should the difficulty of the enterprise win the day? Calvin thought not. Again and again he found himself reminding his listeners and his readers that Christian freedom revealed a kind of existential hesitation. The grounding of such freedom in the sovereign love of God in Christ pointed both to the assurance of his love and to the recognition of his sovereign judgment; it recalled to the believer both the potency of grace and the impotency of sin. As a public and prophetic voice, Calvin often found himself in the position described later by the Irishman Edmund Burke. At the end of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke sought to assure his readers that his opinions "come from one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end, and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise" (218). A quick overview of the basic tenets of Calvin's theology would no doubt be in order here, so that his analysis of Christian freedom can be put in philosophical context. For Calvin, the primary reality for human beings is the reality of a sovereign and loving God, one who reveals himself in the patterns and substance of the natural order, in the scriptural accounts as inspired by his Spirit, in the person and earthly ministry of his only begotten son Jesus Christ, and in the spiritual promptings of human conscience. This God is the Creator of all time and space; of all life; of all the beings, both living and nonliving, which function within time and space; of all the mechanisms and patterns of their functioning; and therefore of all humankind and of all moral law. He is as well Ruler and Governor of his creatures and the created order in which he has placed them; he thus sustains and directs his creatures in accordance with his design and plan. As Ruler and Governor of his creation, God is no puppeteer: Human beings have the gift of human will, though due to their own willful pride and its resulting self-imprisonment, one could hardly describe that will as free. Finally, therefore, God determines to serve as the Redeemer of all that his human creatures have perverted by following their
INTRODUCTION 9
own designs rather than his. In and beyond historical time, therefore, and in and through his three Persons, he works by way of both natural and supernatural means to save and restore what he has made, what he clearly loves, indeed treasures. As sovereign, God is his own authority: He is accountable to no person or no principle other than his own will. Yet his will is the will of a righteous but loving, gracious, and long-suffering parent. In nature, in Scripture, and in the person and historical destiny of Jesus Christ he shows both the precision and ferocity of his judgments and the boundlessness of his love. In taking the punishment of human perversion upon his own shoulders Christ simultaneously satisfies God's judgment and personifies his love. It is on account of Christ's atoning sacrifice and the Holy Spirit's redemptive inspiration, then, that Christians live lives that move from heedful guilt to heady gratitude. This rhythmic interplay of guilt and gratitude, growing from recognition of the meritless grace that has issued from a sovereign God, thereby defines the Christian stance, according to Calvin.5 In more practical and immediate terms, living a grateful life in the face of a sovereign God implies recognition and experience of the three-dimensional liberation, even emancipation, from the ordinary institutional structures and expectations that Calvin describes in his pointed essay. Yet at the same time it implies the newly and intimately felt sense of even closer attachment to God and to the very same institutional order he in his providence has ordained for their good. By way of the first dimension of Christian freedom, then, believers are freed as individuals from the curse of punishment aimed at violators of God's moral law. Because they have, individually and as humankind, locked themselves into cages of prideful rebellion against the full majesty of that law, God comes in Christ to pay the price of their imprisonment and to reintegrate them into his sainted community. Their liberation as individuals, then, composes this first dimension of freedom in Christ. For God comes to them in the immediacy of personal faith and subsequent repentance. They now stand as though fully righteous in God's sight. Yet at precisely the same time, they now recognize how beholden they are to the institutional workings of God's persistent love. They experience both a newfound independence in the face of humanly constructed barriers to God and a newly felt dependence on the God who reaches out to them through and around those barriers. Their independence from institutions joins with their dependence on them. Because they are freed individually from the "curse" of God's law, Christians are freed, second, for willful and grateful obedience to the commands of God's law. As a body, they are now spiritually and emotionally equipped to perform what Calvin calls "all the duties of love." They are freed for full service to the loving and ruling God they adore. In political terms, they are freed for world-transforming action as this body of believers. Their freedom blossoms in their losing themselves in the bonds of corporate institutional life. In this way they are electrified, in God's name and through his power, to address the needy and reform the perverse. At the same time, however, they now understand even more poignantly that their actions remain under the omniscient eye of God's righteous judgment. Their energizing gratitude melds with their muzzling recognition of the insidious spell of pride and the terrifying judgment of sovereign God.
10
»
INTRODUCTION
Christians are freed, third, from those culturally idiosyncratic "outward" or "indifferent things" for which Calvin uses the Greek term adiaphora. Because such things as particular ceremony, ritual, or custom are in themselves inessential to salvation, Christians may take or leave them alone. Politically, this third dimension emancipates believers from their particular historical setting, thereby opening their eyes to see God's transhistorical progress in ushering in his final kingdom. Seen narrowly, this third dimension may thus constitute Calvin's most revolutionary teaching. Yet while God's providential tending of his creation points believers to look ahead in time, it points them to look back as well. That God is slowly, deliberately, inexorably restoring his creation is as true as that he is doing so by means of particular historical constraints. What this means is that at the same time Christian believers discover their freedom to move progressively toward the culmination of God's restoration history, they discern anew the grace of their current historical setting: God works progressively through what he has in tradition and ceremony provided. Christian freedom once again means feeling one's way along the delicate interplay between, progressive renewal and attentive inveteracy, in full reliance on God's explicit, though for believers often mysterious, revelation. The strong thread that weaves all of freedom's dimensional strands together is Calvin's biblically grounded notion of sovereign grace. Human confrontation with an all-powerful, all-authoritative, yet all-loving and all-forgiving God yields both a new humility and an energizing gratitude. The God who rules, by inspiration and loving example, quite logically finds followers both willing to judge and willing to withhold judgment, both willing to act and willing to wait, both willing to transform and willing to conserve. In all things they determine to acknowledge both God's perogative and their own crying need. The elements of sovereignty and of grace are both essential to this equation. How could believers follow a God who is not truly Lord of their lives? At the same time, how could believers sacrificially serve a God who is not ultimately about love? Right away, then, Calvin denies the two great truths of modernity: that human beings are their own masters and that the exercise of power is superior to all other motivations. Right away, indeed, Calvin asserts that the myths of power and human mastership are exactly what stand in the way of authentic human living.
Parti
The Irreducible, yet Partial, Individual
hristian freedom's first part, says Calvin, invites "the consciences of believers" to "rise C above and advance beyond the law" (3.19.2, 834).' Thus, on first inspection, Calvin's language seems to have him imparting to Christian individuals an almost radical independence, even autonomy, as to decisions of conscience. Given the early influence of Luther on Calvin's thinking, and Calvin's own personal decision to join the Lutheran reformers, such language ought not to surprise. At least for the Roman church, Calvin does seem to put an uncomfortably strong emphasis on the capabilities and legitimacy of individual conscience. But does Calvin's emphasis on such conscience provide either spiritual or political nourishment to the subsequent rise of classical liberalism? In chapter i, I try to show how the first part of Christian freedom might indeed anticipate liberal individualist notions of political freedom. For Calvin, Christian freedom issues in a new appreciation of human individuality. Through Christ's liberating presence, the individual believer becomes the specific contact point with divine reality. Not surprisingly, then, the moral and political status of the individual believer grows apace. To begin, Calvin understands each human being to be created in the "image and likeness" of God. Even though humankind falls away from God through the sin of Adam and thereby loses close connection with divine reality, it remains linked to God by means of individual conscience. The spark of recognition which conscience provides thus elevates even the sinful human being above all other parts of God's good creation. Yet the real power of individual conscience arises as a result of the restorative power of Christ. Thanks to the mystery of God in Christ "electing" some human beings from among the entire lot, the redeemed and restored Christian believer manifests an even more refined human individuality. Ironically, for Calvin, it is precisely by way of the mystery of God's election that the individual attracts notice. Because of God's secrecy in electing, his elect are not iden-
12
»
THE
INDIVIDUAL
tifiable by means of the ordinary indicators. They could be literally anyone, of any social status or political rank. What identifying marks they have concern spiritual progress more than worldly power. It would therefore not be difficult to cull from Calvin's description of the mature believer an individual human being fully sufficient, through God's gracious interposition, to judge the institutions surrounding him or her and to rate them on the divine scale. Calvin speaks, for example, of a limited right on the part of the believer to interpret Scripture and to judge Roman church councils. The political implications of giving such place to individuals in Calvin's time would be plain. Christian freedom as the health and strength of individual conscience would point to the characteristic developments of seventeenth-century liberalism. And, indeed, Calvin does appear to subscribe to a number of liberalism's tenets. The idea of human institutions resting on an explicit "contract," the so-called privatization of religious concerns, the idea of political equality, the capacity of ordinary individuals to distinguish legitimate from tyrannical governments—all these liberal principles can be found, in at least a superficial way, in Calvin's writings. However, although Calvin does see the individual believer as, in an important sense, irreducible—in the sense of basic, integral, unshrinkable—he insists on holding that irreducibility of individual conscience in continuous tension with human partiality and finitudc. Calvin's individual, in other words, while potentially independent of human social structures, is far from autonomous. Although freedom measures itself against individuals, individuals do not wholly contain freedom. Calvin thus manages to hold in creative tension an elemental individual, as the primary building block in the world's moral order, with a partial and incomplete individual, dependent for the very working of his conscience on a moral order reflected in but transcending the world. In chapter 2, then, I uncover the obverse of Christian freedom's first part. Although human beings, even in a state of sin, are God's image bearers and thereby attuned to his law by means of conscience, their self-capture in sin imprisons them more extensively and more exhaustively than their now feeble reason and will can fully comprehend. As a result, the liberating work of Christ and the Spirit presents Christian believers as much with a picture of their pitiful dependence on that work as with one of their footloose sufficiency in the face of it. After all, the regenerating work which God through Christ carries on in the believer can progress only in the full recognition by the believer of his radical insufficiency. Christian freedom may liberate from guilt but not from spiritual and emotional need. Indeed, for the consciously needy individual it does not fully liberate from guilt. Journeying through the stages of mortification, vivification, and sanctification, believers grow even more deeply in the awareness of their personal inadequacy and their consequent need for divine guidance and support. The major part of faith, after all, is the recognition of one's need for something or someone outside oneself, and the Christian faith begins with an acute and aching sense of one's own sin. Following Augustine, Calvin finds human sin to be the most palpable and painful personal rebellion against God and his law for humankind. Sin is both deeply seated and universally engrained. Worse, it is manifest self' enslavement. Freedom in Christ opens the believer's eyes to the breadth, depth, and persistence of his own sin, and by so doing it plants in that believer an even more wide-ranging cognizance of his need for specific and continuous guidance from God's holy Word. Thus when Calvin discusses the "life of the Christian man" in one long section of his Institutes, he concentrates on virtues such as humility, gratitude, self-renunciation, prudence,
THE I N D I V I D U A L
9
13
and recognition of one's status as only one member of the larger body of Christ. In this way, Christian freedom does not restore the prelapsarian—or "pre-Fall"—capacity for envisioning God's law directly through reason, and acting on its tenets promptly through a sound will. Rather it links human beings even more tightly to the specific detail of God's now revealed law. For Calvin, law is as much a help as a warning and a barrier. His socalled third use of the law thereby places him in a new category of Reformer and drives his emphasis on the close connection between living the Christian life and acknowledging the legitimacy of the institutional reflections of God's law. Church, family, polity: All are ordained institutional manifestations of the law by which God desires sinful human beings to live and thrive. Even Christian conscience requires the aid of sound and supportive human institutions. Hence the legitimacy of those institutions and their superiority to individual conscience should in the vast majority of cases be plain. One is obliged to honor their place and obey their prerogatives. In fine, the attempt to see Calvin's individual in simple and logically consistent fashion, risks missing one or perhaps both of these two key dimensions. The individual Christian believer, Calvin insists paradoxically, is both a whole and a part, both sufficient and insufficient, both complete and incomplete, and both adequate and inadequate. One can easily turn Calvin's Christian individual into a caricature of what Calvin understood him to be.2 No doubt Calvin found himself tempted, either as an Aristotelian scholar or as a defiant Reformer, to oversimplify the Christian individual's character and makeup. What appears to have driven him to hold to the truth of human tension, however, was his determination to be faithful to Scripture, to God's revealed Word, and to the one God in whom all things cohere. Calvin's exegetical skills are of course well documented, but what appears plain throughout his scholarly writings (especially his biblical commentaries) is a marked determination to listen, attentively and responsibly, to what God intends to say through his prophets, his apostles, and his Son.3 And what God intends to say, Calvin repeatedly stated, was that the truth about human beings cannot be confined to humanly contrived logical formulae. Drawing out the political implications of Calvin's first part of Christian freedom will thus always be a dangerous business, for Calvin's determination to be faithful trumped his desire to be philosophically coherent or systematic. In other words, the mysteries of human experience, and God's secret providence in relation to those mysteries, will forever defy human attempts to contain them in either logic or language. What matters is that the holding together of all things in God's loving sovereignty remains a firm and unshakable truth.
This page intentionally left blank
I
THE IRREDUCIBLE INDIVIDUAL
W tance easily surmounting his classical and medieval counterparts. Now the
ithout question, Calvin's individual believer takes on an order of impor-
direct repository of God's will and of God's grace, he embodies the pivotal human contact point with divine reality. The individual conscience becomes, as it were, the Archimedean fulcrum by which the triune God discloses his will in the midst of historical circumstance. Indeed, Calvin understands conscience to be the key operating component of each human being, and so the principal source of political maturity.
The Created, and Fallen, Individual Endowed in creation with both "natural" and "supernatural" gifts, human beings as originally conceived frame a wondrous whole, "among all God's works,.. . the noblest and most remarkable example of his justice, wisdom and goodness" (1.15.1, 183). Not only are they endowed with both body and immortal soul but also with intact and functioning parts of the soul, namely, "understanding" and "will" (1.15.7, J94~95)- Moreover, they are fully equipped for communion with their Creator and their fellow human beings; they are equipped with the "supernatural gifts" of spiritual discernment, of "faith, love of God, charity toward neighbor, [andjzeal for holiness and for righteousness" (2.2.12, 270). As originally created Adam (i.e., humankind) is fully "the image of God" (imago Dei). From each part of him, but particularly from within his soul, "God's glory shines forth" (1.15.3, 186). Adam is the best reflection of God in all created nature 15
16
,
THE I N D I V I D U A L
for by means of his imaging himself in Adam, God "introduces" mankind as "a tacit antithesis" (tacitam subesse antithesin), one that "raises [extollat] [him] above all other creatures, [so that he] towers over [emmet] them." Adam has direct and uninhibited contact with his divine Creator; he has "full possession of right understanding," "all his senses [are] tempered in right order," and thus he "truly refers his excellence [back to] his Maker" (1.15.3, 188). Indeed, Adam issues forth as a kind of "microcosm" of God's created order, a created order which, in its entirety, reflects God (1.5.3, 54-55)- Calvin thus denies the hermeneutical distinction between "image" (imago) and "likeness" (similitudo). Between the two "there is no ambiguity: simply man is called God's image because he is like God" (1.15.3, 187-88).' We should note that in this original condition, human understanding and human will work together in a wonderful conjoining of purpose, namely, to know and love God. As theologian Richard Muller has pointed out so effectively, Calvin's sense of the intertwining of faith (fides) and knowledge (cognitio) grows inexorably out of his "non-speculative soteriological voluntarism." In other words, Calvin sees human beings as motivated by the working out of their salvation. Their knowledge grows ultimately out of their will to know, that is, their faith ("Fides and Cognitio," 217, 223, and passim). In his perfect simplicity, then, Adam both knows and loves God (1.15.8, 195-96). Once Adam falls, however, once he rebels against his Creator (motivated now by a self-deceptive urge to self-salvation), he poisons the well from which he nourishes himself. Postlapsarian human beings, Calvin proposes, find themselves completely devoid of "supernatural gifts." Hence, the human being's spiritual discernment, his "faith, love of God, charity toward neighbor, [and] zeal for holiness and for righteousness" were all "stripped from him" as a result of the Fall. Human beings remain "rational beings," endowed still with "understanding" (intelligentia) and "will" (voluntas). In their "perverted and degenerate nature, some sparks still gleam." Nevertheless, these "natural gifts" of reason (ratio) and will, both "partly weakened and partly corrupted," now appear in "misshapen ruins" (2.2.12, 270— 71). The human frame, once a "well-knit structure," now more resembles the "scattered fragments" of a ruin than an integrated "building" (1.15.8, i96). 2 While these "parts of the soul" (understanding and will) remain at least minimally functional (1.15.7, I94~95; 2.2.12, 271), then, they remain distressingly empty of any positive, constructive, content. Indeed, they militate against each other. Surely, understanding "possesses some power of perception" (2.2.12, 271), and can perceive the minimal requirements of "earthly" life, of, for example, "certain civic fair dealings and order": "Hence no man is to be found who does not understand that every sort of human organization must be regulated by laws, and who does not comprehend the principles of those laws" (2.2.13, 271-72). Likewise, "the power of human acuteness also appears in learning," so that "hardly anyone is to be found who does not manifest talent in some art" (2.2.14, 2 73)Rather pathetically, however, this gift of God's "general grace" (2.2.17, 276), this "longing \ap[xtenlia] for truth," such as it is, "languishes before it enters upon its race because it soon falls into vanity." For Calvin "natural reason never will direct men to Christ." Even though human beings are "endued with prudence for
THE
IRREDUCIBLE INDIVIDUAL
o
17
regulating their lives," or are "bom to cultivate the liberal arts and sciences, all this passes away without yielding any advantage" (Comm. Jo/in 1:5 [1:34]). The human mind, "because of its dullness, cannot hold to the right path." By examining "empty and worthless things [supen/acuis ac nihili rebus], it torments itself in its absurd curiosity," thinking itself on the road to wisdom when it is in fact aiming only at the "vain and trifling [mania . . . et frivola]" (2.2.12, 271). For example, Calvin notes in his commentary on the Psalms, It is not merely from the intrinsic insufficiency of wealth, honors, or pleasures to confer true happiness that the Psalmist proves the misery of worldly men, but from their manifest and total incapacity of forming a correct judgment of such possessions. Happiness is connected with the state of mind of that man who enjoys it, and none would call those happy who are sunk in stupidity and security, and are destitute of [genuine] understanding.3 (Comm. Ps. 49:6 [2:241])
Calvin's point here is that in the fallen human being, understanding is now at odds with a perverted will, and in such a contest, as we might expect, the perverted will wins.4 "The evil desires that gently tickle the mind," the "diseases of [human] lusts" (2.2.24, 2cH) lead the sinner "to evade his innate power to judge between good and evil": "Man is so indulgent toward himself that when he commits evil he readily averts his mind . . . from the feeling of sin." While "every man will affirm that murder is evil," the one "who is plotting the death of an enemy contemplates murder as something good." Likewise, "the adulterer will condemn adultery in general, but will privately flatter himself in his own adultery" (2.2.23, 282). Whereas in the healthy human being the understanding was "the leader and governor of the soul," in the fallen human being the perverse will has abandoned its rightful place and effectively usurped the power of right understanding (1.15.7, 194; 2.3.2, 290-91; 2.3.4, 293-94)-5 Yet in spite of these, for Calvin, all too obvious failings of the human understanding, God's "general grace" leaves intact a small "spark" (scintilla) of conscience (conscientia) (4.10.5, n83).6 Conscience is thus distinct from both understanding and will but inevitably colors them both, affecting each even if in relatively modest ways. For example, Calvin explains, in its etymological source in the Latin words for "knowledge" and "together with" (3.19.15, 848; 4.10.3, 1181), conscience represents a kind of knowing. In effect, then, conscience acts as some small reflection of divine reality, a reed-like connection to transcendence, an ability to "discern between good and evil." Indeed, the existence of conscience is for Calvin the primary evidence of the soul's immortality, not to mention the soul's essence (1.15.2, 184). Conscience, an "inner witness and monitor" (2.8.1, 368), both enlightens the understanding and informs the will. Without conscience, understanding stands directionless and the will blind to its own slavery. Conscience is thus "a certain mean between God and man" (3.19.15, 848).7 Of itself, of course, conscience for Calvin is not a "supernatural" gift. Quite unlike the "incitement" to good, developed and trained by reason, of Thomas Aquinas,8 Calvin's conscience remains only a kind of link, or channel, to the reality of God's transcendent order. Without this channel, reason is both useless and enslaved to perverse will. Hence, in no way could Calvin accept the premises
l8
o
THE I N D I V I D U A L
of Aristotelian/Thomistic natural law, for Calvinistic reason is radically dependent on conscience, rather than the reverse.9 Indeed, for Calvin conscience appears to have only a negative function. It can only challenge the understanding and torment the will. It cannot incite toward the good. It thus serves to convict the individual human being of the vast chasm between his own perverted soul and God's pure goodness (4.10.3, 1181) but can of its own do little else. As David Foxgrover has put the matter, "conscience is alive when it comes to rendering man without excuse, but dead with regard to the source of salvation." ("Calvin's Understanding," 13).'° Yet it is just Calvin's view of the existence and workings of conscience—of both God's placement of this link and its own helplessness—which points to Calvin's individualism. For the existence of conscience depends neither on a certain capacity for reason, a capacity perhaps confined only to a few unusual human beings, nor on a tradition of enlightened teaching. Individual conscience is rather the direct repository in every individual of God's primary revelation of himself. Conscience carries the possibility of a kind of direct divine illumination for each individual human being; it is prerational, precultural, and precommunal. As David Bosco has put it, conscience "functions as the delivery service for [divine] judgment." It both judges the understanding and chastens the will, acting as both "court" and "worm" (336 and passim). Even before the restorative powers of Christ are applied, Calvin proposes an individual human being having reason and will (perverted but real), and connected to God—in spite of his perversion—by means of his own particular, individual conscience.
The Redeemed (Restored?) Individual The real power of human individuality, though, arises with the full restorative powers of Christ, who works in the individual believer at the behest of God the Father and through the instrumentalities of God the Holy Spirit and the great body of believers (3.1.1, 537)." Because such restorative power arrives without deservedness (or "merit") on the part of the believer, and without any worldly pattern of application, it is clear to Calvin that God could choose and restore literally any individual.12 Following Luther and Paul, Calvin insists on the doctrine of "faith righteousness" (3.11.16, 746): Believers are "justified" before God (i.e., reconciled to him and reunited with him) not by anything they have done or thought (or could have done or thought—not, that is, by "works") prior to their justification but only by God's having mercy on their "miserable condition" as sinners, and thus by his "free gift" of the "inheritance" of faith (3.11.16 & 18, 746 6k 747-48). The key point about Calvin's doctrine of election (for our purposes here, at least) therefore concerns its mystery, a clear result of its undeservedness. Calvin makes consistent and continual reference throughout his works to the "secret providence of God."n By this language he means to disabuse his readers of any pretense they may be tempted to employ that they can know with security the pattern of God's providential ruling and choosing. Indeed, with regard to the
THE
IRREDUCIBLE INDIVIDUAL
an(i 2.2.15—16, 273—75).46 At base, as Tonkin asserts, "Calvin never tired of insisting that the ultimate purpose of Creation, as of all the works of God, was the showing forth of his glory. Every created thing, every living creature, every human being, whether destined for salvation or perdition, lives to manifest that glory" (144-45). And salvation history is the long, deliberate story of God's saving, restoring, and re-creating grace. If history is the story of God's progressive and deliberate restoration of all created order, even through nonbelievers, and if believers themselves have been liberated from all humanly devised traditions and customs to be fully God's instruments for historical redemption and change, then the potentially "revolutionary" implications of Christian freedom's third part become clearly manifest. By forcefully drawing out these implications, Michael Walzer, Eric Voegelin, and David Little emerge as perhaps the most persuasive (or at least the most conspicuous) proponents of the idea of "revolutionary" Calvinism, though Little appears to display a bit more openness to the nuances of Calvin's thought here. Let us examine Walzer's argument first. For Walzer, Calvinist puritanism "was the earliest form of political radicalism" (vii). Calvin himself, then, was not "a theologian or a philosopher but an ideologist." As ideology, the power of his thought lay in its capacity "to activate its adherents and to change the world" (27). From early specimens of Calvinist political practice, Walzer can see that reform came to mean "transformations of the sort associated today with revolution" (n). For Walzer, such connotations of Calvinist politics are logical and ineluctable. Beginning with the individual believer, or "saint," Walzer finds Calvin developing a new Christian psychology. The Christian believer is no longer a patient and largely passive member of society; he is now a divine instrument. As such, he poses as a manifest and prototypal agent of God's righteous judgment on worldly institutions and practices. Saints were thus "oppositional men," their primary task
PROGRESS AND R E V O L U T I O N
o
127
being "the destruction of traditional order." Hence, they were without hesitation transformational, political beings, beings whose politics was that "of wreckers, architects, and builders" (3). Furthermore, the Calvinist saint is "an extraordinarily bold, inventive, and ruthless politician," one who has " 'great works' to perform," great works which have "great enemies" (vii). The Calvinist notion or conscience thus "gave to war and to politics... a new sense of method and [historical] purpose" (13). More to the point, through Calvin's "theology antitheological" (24), he demanded that "politics be bent to serve a religious purpose" (26). Whereas secular political order "could only repress nature," Calvinist religion (or, perhaps, ideology) "could transform it" (47). Hence, "[t]he struggle for a new human community, replacing the lost Eden, was made a matter of concrete political activity" (28). Calvin thereby inspired "a tightly disciplined group" of saints, as the "supreme example of the new ideology's organizing power" (53-54). Demanding of his followers "wholehearted participation" in the transformational activity, he called upon "every saint... to do his share for the holy cause" (28-29). As a result, Christian fellowship "required the sacrifice of all familial ties" (48). Not surprisingly, Walzer concludes that such a perverse psychology of "Calvinist saintliness [has] scarred us all" (vii). Walzer's characterization of Calvinism as the first modern ideology clearly has at least a superficial basis in fact. Calvinist revolutionaries were extraordinarily committed. The renowned intellectual historian Eric Voegelin (a strange bedfellow with Walzer, to be sure) reaches a similar conclusion. Categorizing Calvinist puritans as early and paradigmatic examples of "Gnostic" revolutionaries, Voegelin points to Calvin himself as a key source for modern gnosticism. Culminating in totalitarianism, the "existential rule of Gnostic activists," and thus the "end of progressive civilization," gnosticism for Voegelin is simply that "great modern enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action." The perversity of gnosticism is thus the ineluctable gnostic murder. Losing oneself in "world-immanent action" commits one to "sacrifice God to civilization" (New Science, 131-32). What Voegelin means is that modern ideological movements both assume an unquestionable truth and organize to actualize that truth in concrete social structures. Their perversity lies in their denial both of the mystery of divine transcendence and of the scope and ground of human limitations. Standing visibly behind the puritan revolutionaries, according to Voegelin, was Calvin, whose Institutes provided for his holy warriors a "Gnostic koran." Intending through his Institutes to offer both "a guide to the right reading of Scripture [and] an authentic formulation of truth that would make recourse to earlier literature unnecessary," Calvin, says Voegelin, seeks to "break with the intellectual tradition of mankind because he lives in the faith that a new truth and a new world begin with him" (138-39). Following Calvin's lead, and his "Gnostic koran," puritan revolutionaries used Calvin's "codification of the truth" as the "spiritual and intellectual nourishment of the faithful" (140). As a result of his unquestioning obedience, the Calvinist saint becomes a "Gnostic who will not leave the transfiguration of the world to the grace of God beyond history but will do the work of God himself, right here and now, in history" (147).
128
»
CULTURAL
D I S S O C I A T I O N AND
HISTORY
I cannot help but find the characterizations of both Walzer and Voegelin to be simplistic and far-fetched.47 Within Calvin's mind clearly rests a more moderate ambition and a more profoundly Christian humility, as we have seen already, and I shall attempt to draw these out even further in chapter 6. Moreover, as Carlos Eire has perceptively pointed out, to make Calvinism "no more than a political party" (307), which both Walzer and Voegelin appear in the end to do, is to engage in just the kind of ideological reductionism their characterizations of Calvin purport to discredit. Definitions of Calvinism that fail to take Calvin's full theology of the grace of divine sovereignty into account tend thereby to miss the point. Nevertheless, one can hardly deny the revolutionary implications that can flow from a doctrine of providential restoration, especially when this doctrine is ripped from its footing in God's sovereign mercy and grace. Graham, for example, who sees Calvin as "constructive" but no less a revolutionary, has no trouble seeing important parallels between the Huguenot revolt in sixteenth-century France and the French Revolution two centuries later. Indeed, Graham is struck by the similarities in revolutionary political outlook between Calvin and his latter-day Genevan compatriot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Constructive, 22—24). Although, as DeGruchy (3) has summed up, Walzer's thesis (and Voegelin's, too, we can assume) "is undoubtedly open to criticism," nevertheless, "there is no denying that Calvinism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contributed significantly to social movements that managed to turn a theology of evangelical salvation into a program of political transformation."48 For David Little, who appears to work harder at reading Calvin empathetically than either Walzer or Voegelin, the "unstable combination" of "two essentially incompatible images of the relation between church and state" worked to produce "a peculiarly destabilizing and renovating effect on political and religious life" wherever Calvinism went. The two images result from "the fact that Calvin both disassociates and interconnects the two tables of the Decalogue." One image is thus "uniformist [and] establishmentarian," according to which "the state by means of coercion enforces, at least externally, true piety and worship as well as civil righteousness." The other image "moves in the opposite direction." This image "differentiates true piety and worship—'things of the spirit,' of the inner life— from social behavior and civic virtue." It thereby places "the spiritual order . . . beyond the reach" of the civil order ("Reformed Faith," 9-11).49 According to Little, the hardly surprising result of such conflicted thinking was the revolutionary impetus found both in France and in Scotland. John Knox, "[i]n the name of the freedom of Christian conscience . . . endeavored to reform Scotland along the lines of Calvin's Genevan ['establishmentarian'] ideal." In Knox's thought, says Little, "as in the thought of some other Calvinists. . . the assault upon idolatry became the foundation for political resistance and reform" ("Reformed Faith," n). Hence, for Calvin, "a 'new order'—a new command and a new structure—not only is possible, but already is making its mark on the world" (Religion, 37).50 What Little sees as "essentially incompatible images" are, I hope to show in chapter 6, not only "compatible" but: even necessary and inevitable if one is to follow Scripture faithfully, as Calvin tries to do. Indeed, the two "images" are really only two dynamic dimensions of one Christian vision.
P R O G R E S S AND R E V O L U T I O N
o
129
Graham ends up presenting, on the whole, a comparable analysis of Calvin's political thought in his The Constructive Revolutionary. Graham (Constructive, 185) points to a "tension" in Calvin between his double predestinarianism and his preaching of human "mastership over nature, politics and history." On the one hand, Graham argues, Calvin sees human beings as involuntarily caught up in God's salvation plan. Yet on the other hand, and because of their predicament, they sense the acute pull of personal responsibility and accountability to the God who lovingly captures them. Calvin's sermons can thus "remind us in many ways of revolutionary preaching in any age." They address themselves to "this world" and to "the necessity of serving God here." "They cry scorn against all injustice," of whatever kind. And they are "stern, dogmatic, and occasionally self-righteous" (19). Indeed, says Graham, in its deterministic yet revolutionary impetus Calvinism anticipates Marxism. Atheistic, socialistic Marxism "flies in the face of most Western revolutionary thinking since the Reformation," yet in Marxism's self-portrayed determination "to be a future-oriented revolutionary movement dedicated to the smashing of all the unhealthy traditions of the past," it is not difficult to discern that Calvin "expressed clearly enough this same tendency" (Constructive, 209). According to Graham, then, the "tension" Calvin develops between predestination and human freedom is ultimately unresolved, and, by implication, unresolvable. It did help to "create a great number of spiritual heroes—witness the bravery of Pilgrims and Puritans.. . —[heroes who] knew themselves predestined to give man a new beginning." Yet, "when the heroics were over and it was time to get with the task of shaping the future, the Calvinist found himself confronted by a tyrant God, not a heavenly Father." Indeed, if the Calvinist "could not be free spiritually, how could he be free to create human community" (Constructive, 185)? Graham's point is well taken. There is clearly in Calvin's predestinarian thinking an impetus to social revolution. If God through Christ is truly restoring and re-creating, his world, and human beings are his primary instruments, then any acutely sensitive human being, attentively attuned to God's Word and to God's will, could easily envision himself to be a revolutionary instrument in God's hands. Yet we have already worked hard (in chapters i to 4) to show that the tension of which Graham speaks can be both an energizing and a humbling tension. Although Graham is no doubt right to portray many Calvinist revolutionaries as more destructive than creative, he is wrong to suggest that this imbalance results from the unresolved tension. Rather, because the tension is indeed unresolved, and yes, unresolvable, Calvinist destructiveness is more likely the result of that universal human determination (of which Calvin himself was very much aware) to be free of such tensions, to be, as it were, either completely controlled by God and therefore somehow personally irresponsible, on the one hand, or completely liberated from any transcendent standards, thereby exercising only one's own criteria of judgment, on the other. Yet Calvin repeatedly denies that Christian freedom entails either a liberation from God's expectations and standards or a liberation from one's own personal responsibility to attend to those expectations and standards.51 Rather, Christian freedom means, in a sense, living within the tension between sin and grace, between revealed providence and hidden providence, be-
130
»
C U L T U R A L D I S S O C I A T I O N AND
HISTORY
tween individual and society, between action and judgment, and between worldly change and Christ's eternal rest.52 Hancock is, of course, another who finds Calvin unleashing a "driven" believer. As we have already noted, in Hancock's case the culprit is Calvin's emphasis on the sovereignty and providence of God discernible only as power. For Hancock, Calvin holds up no basis for human judgment other than the power of God. Human beings have no discernible purpose other than to act out God's plan within history. They are neither inclined nor equipped to deliberate on the right and the just but only to heighten their consciousness of God's power. "There is no need to wonder about what God is when it is obvious what he does" (Foundations, 152). Hence, "Human activity is wonderfully increased when it is freed from the encumbrance of human purposes. Precisely because man can be nothing, there is no limit to what he can do" (Foundations, 109). As a political force, Calvinism thus has tremendous potential. Because "God's agents do not claim to comprehend the whole," because "they claim only that they advance the order that God wills," then inevitably "they are representatives not of God's goodness but of his power" (Foundations, 80). As a result, what appears as a practical contradiction between what must be and what ought to be is overcome theoretically by Calvin's confidence that what must be, ought to be, or that what ought to be, will be—not by any human choice, but by God's power. The contradiction is overcome practically when men are called, that is, empowered, to be God's agents. For such men action becomes its own argument. (Foundations, 78)
And therefore, "God's glory exhibits itself in history without any respect to human authority. The meaning of history is the laying low of human authority; this is accomplished by humans empowered by God" (Foundations, 81), The peculiarly unsettling aspect here is that, as Hancock puts it, "Order is not a perfected condition of intelligible being but a consciousness of perpetual becoming. The active and fluid nergy of the spirit is not merely the agent of the process of restoration or order; it is the basis of order itself; for order is a process" (Foundations, 161). The implications of Hancock's argument, as we have already seen, are clear. Yes, to a large extent, the Calvinist believer's sense of destiny and place drives him to conquer and transform his world. And, even more profoundly, such psychic mien may drive him to abandon himself to pure action, with revolutionary action quite possibly serving as an outlet for this transformative purpose. But there is plainly more to Calvin's thinking here. Although I have taken steps to address the "activist" account of Calvin's thought in chapter 4, the need to address and explore the "revolutionary" implications of Hancock's argument more fully (not to mention the arguments of Walzer, Voegelin, Little, and others) requires that we inspect that other, more conservative, dimension to Christian freedom's third part. For it turns out that in Calvin's mind God's power, God's purposes, and God's plan are also revealed by and within existing worldly structures and institutions.
6 HISTORICAL PEDAGOGY
hen combined with a strong identification by believers of God's providential W intention and design, Calvin's third part of Christian freedom places those believers in an "indifferent" pose toward certain cultural "outward" things, thereby implying the possibility of real historical progress and even revolutionary change. On the other hand, however, this third part—freedom from the adiaphora—also, and as important, reminds believers of the indeterminacy, the ambiguity, even the apparent "contingency" (contingentia) (1.16.9, 2I°) °f God's providence. It reminds them that history unfolds not as their story but as God's story. And God's specific purposes and directions are not always manifest. The other side of freedom as indifference to cultural forms, therefore, tells believers that any particular culture or tradition, far from being idiosyncratic, signifies a clear and potentially crucial stage in God's unfolding providential design. As much as Christian freedom emancipates believers from their cultural, historical contexts, it grounds them even more firmly in the workings of God by means of such contexts. The other side of providence as change and transformation, then, is providence as the force behind the historical and developed institutional life in which human beings find themselves. Clearly God is active in history, for Calvin. Yet he is active not only in possible future restoration and change but also in past institutional hedges, restraints, and guides. His providential pedagogy commands as much (if not more!) attention as his providential "ideology": What he is immediately teaching becomes as critical as where he is ultimately leading. This equally significant but distinct dimension to Calvin's doctrine of providence grounds itself in another kind of Christian humility. Certainly believers ought humbly to await God's will and then follow with confidence his revealed 131
132
»
C U L T U R A L D I S S O C I A T I O N AND
HISTORY
plan, especially when that plan calls for historical change. Christian freedom does indeed detach human beings from worldly institutions and structures to lead them toward the reformation of self and condition that God envisions for them. Yet, Christian freedom also implies liberation from the fear that one is overly, problematically, embedded in certain institutional structures and thus must assert one's independence on grounds of principle. Christian believers understand that God may be looking out for them in spite of themselves, by enclosing them and their brothers within certain institutional structures. The Christian believer is thus free both to change such structures through God's inspiration and to accept such structures as signs of God's care and love. Christian humility can mean both a raucous charge into the fray, riding the Lord's will, and a quiet acceptance of one's place and time in recognition of one's deep ignorance of the particular details of God's plan. Ultimately, Christian freedom's indifference can imply both cool scepticism and warm acceptance of one's historical circumstances.
Providence as God's Personal, though Puzzling, Care Although Christian believers should indeed, on occasion "declare [their freedom] before men," they ought not to do so, as we have seen already, in a way that "offends weak brothers." The point here, says Calvin, is that the freedom of believers "consists as much in abstaining as in using" the indifferent things of the world. Because "the conscience . . . is now set free," because, that is, one's destiny is not tied up with a particular stance toward such things, because "it makes no difference in God's sight whether they eat meat or eggs," and so on, they can use or abstain "with a free conscience." Consequently, the assertion of one's freedom must be accompanied by "the greatest caution." The obvious limitation of such Christian freedom is that it not cause believers to "abandon the care of the weak, whom the Lord has so strongly commended to us" (3.19.10, 842). The obverse of freedom as cultural dissociation, then, is that believers ought not rashly to undermine those cultural institutions that in their own way express God's providential love and care, both to themselves and to their "weaker" brethren. The important point about God's providence here is not only that it is real, restorative, and redemptive but that the details of it are obscure, hidden, even secret. God rules history, but all the manifest and innumerable details of that rule are for him alone to know. Before believers recklessly sever themselves from established patterns of life, they ought first to consider the possibility that such patterns mysteriously serve God's salvation plan.1 After all, believers' ignorance of the precise unfolding and circumstances of God's providence is both deep and profound. We have already noted Calvin's common use of the adjectives "secret" and "hidden" to describe both God's providence (e.g., 1.16.9, 209) and his predestination, not to mention his "judgment."2 Not only are the details of God's predestined salvation plan ultimately hidden from human view, so are the details of his specific provision of providential care. The particular means by which God nourishes and sustains believers are therefore not always clearly visible to them. Should the obscurity of God's providence sur-
HISTORICAL P E D A G O G Y
„
133
prise believers? Not at all, Calvin affirms. Given what Scripture plainly teaches about both human experience and divine reality, believers ought to expect the unfolding of God's providential care to be both hazy and, in the end, arresting. How could it be otherwise? For believers to anticipate God's action in the world would be an implicit claim to forsee the unforseeable, to have achieved the transcendent vision which is in reality available to God alone. Perhaps more to the point, Calvin understands God on occasion intentionally to conceal his salvation tactics to keep believers humble and attentive to his leading. The mystery of providence thereby owes itself to God's hiding of the details of his work from human beings as well as to the very limited vision human beings have in the world, not only because of their status as creatures but also because of the blinding effects of their own sin. God does of course reveal much of himself to his creatures. In Scripture, in the life of Jesus, in the still faintly discernible Creation order, and by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, God provides both rules for life and glimpses of glory. Yet he also, necessarily and for his own good purposes, hides much of himself from them as well. Indeed, because of both the great chasm separating Creator and creature, and the obstinacy of the rebellious and hardhearted creatures themselves, God must often go to great lengths to get through to humankind. Not only are human beings deficient in their spiritual senses, they are stubbornly determined not to use what sense capacity they do have.3 To begin, God surely does withhold much of himself and his purposes from humankind. As I noted in chapter 5 (in this volume), Calvin is often pointing out in his Commentaries the extent to which God apparently conceals himself and his purposes, and the confusion and anxiety such concealment understandably brings to human believers.4 In fact, in his primary discussion of providence in book i of the Institutes, Calvin acknowledges that from the human perspective the historical unfolding of God's providence appears "fortuitous" (fortuita). While the Christian believer can entertain no notion of chance or fortune (fortuna), he must acknowledge that "the order [ordo], reason [ratio], end [finis], and necessity [necessitas] of those things which happen for the most part lie hidden [plurimum latet] in God's purpose [in Dei consiJio]." As a result, the specific aims of God's providence can never be comprehended or even fully "apprehended" by human beings (1.16.9, 208). Such inscrutability need not imply an ectopia of events, and to the Christian believer it will not so insinuate. For Calvin is quite certain that God's selfconcealment of the great number of details of his providence is not only intentional on his part but necessary and helpful for human beings.5 The discussion Calvin devotes to the doctrine of election in book 3 of his Institutes is instructive on this pedagogical dimension to the mysterious nature of God's providence. It is no accident that the prospect of God's election of only some human beings to eternal life, and that on criteria independent of "merit," presents a "baffling question" to many, says Calvin. It is also no accident (as already noted) that to inquire persistently into this question, to attempt thereby to "penetrate the sacred precincts of divine wisdom [in dwinae sapientiae adyta penetrare]" in a futile attempt to "satisfy [one's] curiosity" will be to "enter a labyrinth [labyrinthum] from which [one] can find no exit" (3.21.1, 921-23). Indeed, says Calvin elsewhere, "if anyone will seek to know more than what God has
134
«
C U L T U R A L D I S S O C I A T I O N AND H I S T O R Y
revealed, he shall be overwhelmed with the immeasurable brightness of his inaccessible light" (Comm. Rom. 11:34 i447l)- Human impertinence "unrestrainedly [impune] to search out things that the Lord has willed to be hid in himself [seipso abscondita], and to unfold from eternity itself [ipsa aeternitate evolvat] the sublimest wisdom" is, quite simply, "not right [aequum]" (3.21.1, 923). In fact, Calvin says later, "it is very wicked" (3-23.2, g4g).6 For human beings to claim either cognitive or moral equality with God would be to assert the worst kind of pride. Not surprisingly, then, God condemns at the very fountainhead of human experience such perverse and inequitable self-assertion. The root cause of human pride, after all, is the human "desire to know more than is right, and more than God allows" (Comm. Gen. 3:5 [1:151]). For Adam and through him for all human beings, Calvin writes, it somehow "seems a small thing" to have been made "in the likeness of God . .. unless equality [with God] be added" (Comm. Gen. 3:6 [i: 155] [emphasis in the original]). The later Tower of Babel account thus makes crystal clear that "everyone who trangresses his prescribed bounds makes a direct attack upon God" (Comm. Gen. n:i [1:324]).7 God withholds full knowledge of himself because "he would have us revere" him, so that by way of our human lack of understanding "he should fill us with wonder." His Word therefore sets before human beings only those "secrets of his will that he has decided to reveal to us." And what things God has decided to reveal he does so only "in so far as he foresaw that they would concern us and benefit us" (3.21.1, 923 [emphasis added]).8 As far as the doctrine of election is concerned, then, Calvin finds Scripture teaching that God withholds the details of his election from human beings for his own reasons. Yet for anyone who will give God the benefit of the doubt, the beneficence of his concealment is plain enough. For without the mystery of election, "We shall never be clearly persuaded, as we ought to be, that our salvation flows from the well-spring of God's free mercy." It is only through human ignorance of God's particular choices that human beings can come to appreciate their undeservedness in the face of God's grace. If they thought that they could discern a pattern to God's election, they would inevitably conclude that election is based on some sort of "reward" or compensation. Yet only when "the salvation of a remnant of the people is ascribed to the election of grace" will human beings "acknowledge [that] God of his mere good pleasure preserves whom he will." Of course, "he pays no reward, since he can owe none" (3.21.1, 923). Ultimately, as Bavinck expresses it, for Calvin, "God wants us to adore, not to comprehend, the majesty of his wisdom" (450). To propose God's will as the final arbiter is, as we have seen, a sticking point for many.9 Yet Calvin backs off not one whit. By what right, he asserts, do "[fjoolish men contend with God . . . as though they held him liable to their accusations?" God's will is, "and rightly ought to be, the cause of all things that are." If instead God's will has some prior "cause," then "something must precede it, to which it is, as it were, bound." Yet such speculative projection "is an abomination [ne/as] to imagine."10 God's will must be "the highest rule of righteousness," the final end or cause, because "if you proceed further to ask why he so willed," then "you are seeking something greater arid higher than God's will, which cannot be found" (3.23.2, 949). To assert the accountability of God's will
HISTORICAL
PEDAGOGY
.
135
to some superior cause is in the end to assert a superior God, for Calvin an absurd nonsequitur. At the same time, contrary to Hancock's assertion, Calvin does not, he says, "advocate the fiction of 'absolute might.' " Calvin envisions "no lawless god who is a law unto himself." To describe God's will as unaccountable is not to portray such will as either insouciant about or unattached to its own creation scheme or plan. For God reveals himself in Scripture as both free and loving, as both emancipated from human representations of him and bound in love to those who attempt so perversely to represent him. God is love, in other words (i John 4:8), and if human beings require "evidence" or even "proof" of that divine character and essence, they need only contemplate Christ: "[W]henever we look upon him, he fully confirms to us the truth that God is love" (Comm. i John 4:9 [239]).u More to the point, if "the will of God is not only free of all fault but is the highest rule of perfection, and even the law of all laws," then human beings can hardly hold God "liable to render an account." Indeed, how can human beings even claim to be "competent judges [able] to pronounce judgment in this cause according to our own understanding?" Will not "God . . . be the victor whenever he is judged by mortal man" (3.23.2, 950)?12 The chasm between divine and human reality places before human beings an impasse which only God, through Christ and the Spirit, can bridge (e.g., Comm. Rom. 11:34 [446]). Hence, "there cannot be greater folly than to make our own judgment the measure of God's works" (Comm. Ps. 147:4-5 [5:294]).13 If believers only "ponder who God is" (3.23.4, 951), they will cease trying to "separate the justice of God from his ruling power" (Ccdumniae nebulonis. . ., reply to art. i). 14 "For how could he who is the judge of the earth allow any iniquity?" The point is this: "If the execution of judgment properly belongs to God's nature, then by nature he loves righteousness." To envision a supreme judge, believers know through the grace of faith, is to behold a supreme justice; without justice the act of judging loses its meaning. And although God does not always reveal the precise tenor of his judgments, he does reveal through the eyes of faith that he is a righteous judge. Simple human modesty thereby enjoins believers to acknowledge, as the Apostle Paul shows clearly, "that the reason of divine righteousness [iustitiae divinae rationem] is higher than man's standard [humano modo] can measure, or even man's slender wit [ingenii humani tenuitate] can comprehend" (3.23.4, 951-52).15 In fact, the mystery of God's providence is so far removed from human comprehension that God must go to incredible lengths to make himself understood. This is so not only because of the chasm between Creator and creature but, most significantly for Calvin, because of the general human stubbornness and determination not to listen when God speaks. Calvin elaborates quite thoroughly on this point in his sermon on Job 38:1-4. There he argues the necessity of the Lord's appearance to Job "in a whirlwind" from the Lord's need to get Job's full attention. Because, from the human perspective, "God dwells as it were in an obscure cloud," and thus when human beings wish to contemplate God "our senses are dazzled," it appropriately serves God's purposes to grab human attention through extraordinary natural phenomena. Yet there is also another divine motivation at work here: "[N]amely, because of our rebellion God must show himself in terror" (289).
136
„
C U L T U R A L D I S S O C I A T I O N AND H I S T O R Y
The remarkable thing about the Lord's coming to Job in a whirlwind, then, was that Job was generally considered, and indeed was, "a holy man who had applied all his study honoring God." If Job "needed to be thus checked, what about us?" When believers look at Job, in the "mirror of angelic holiness," they realize that "we are as carnal as could be." Their "vanities so carry us away that we are as it were drunk." Is there not a need "that our Lord shall cause us to experience his majesty, and that we should be consciously affected by it" (Serm. ]ob 38:1-4 [290] [emphasis added]). Indeed, "when the Scripture shows us who we are, it is to empty us of all pride." Although human beings tend to "prize themselves," God sees in them "only odor and stink." In examining themselves, human beings, "from the greatest to the least," should thus learn "to humble ourselves, knowing that all our glories are only confusion and shame before God" (Serm. Job 38:1-4 [293-94]). God must therefore jolt human beings, even believers, into attentive posture.16 Job's whirlwind and Moses's burning bush are not the only ways God brings human beings up short, of course. As the story of Job also discloses, God often shatters human obstinacy through the medium of personal hardship and loss. What better way for God to penetrate human stubbornness, Calvin believes, when "he sees some hardness in us," than to demand human attention through unexpected and onerous burdens. Calvin is not suggesting that God idiosyncratically sends afflictions, but he is saying that for a while he "lets us run like escaped horses," until human beings fall of their own pretense and pride. The point, however, is that when God eventually "awakens us," when through personal hardship he "thunders with his voice," that, says Calvin, "is a privilege which he does not give to everyone" (Serm. Job 38:1-4 [293]).17 In his many letters Calvin finds numerous occasions to confirm this truth in his own and in his fellow believers' daily experience. To the Admiral de Coligny, taken prisoner by the Spanish in August 1557, Calvin is blunt: "fl]n sending you this affliction [God] has intended to set you apart, as it were, that you might listen to him more attentively." How difficult it is, Calvin points out, "in the midst of worldly honors, riches, and power to lend to him an attentive ear, because these things draw our attention too much in different directions." Personal deprivation thus promises a new insight into God's mercy and grace. Moreover, in the midst of such hardship, believers can discover the special grace of being singled out. God uses "such means" to "bring under his wings those whom he has chosen for his own." Hardship presents a unique opportunity "of making progress in [God's] school," as though God had "wished to whisper secretly [and personally] in your ear" (Letter DXII of 4 September 1558 [6:466]). Writing to Madame de Coligny the same day, Calvin elaborates on the point: "God has sent you this affliction only for your good and your spiritual welfare." When God "withdraws us from the allurements and delights of the world, which deceive us," he does so to "let us taste his bounty and feel his aid." Adversity confronts the victim with "our supreme good," which is "to cleave to him." In this instance, as he does so often, Calvin points to King David, who confesses "that when he was at his ease he had more confidence in himself than was lawful," to the point where he was "no longer thinking that: all his virtue was to lean upon
HISTORICAL P E D A G O G Y
o
137
God." David thus confesses in his distress that he "had need of such a medicine" as the hardship he experienced provided him (Letter DXIII [6:468] [emphasis added]).18 In his later sermons on 2 Samuel, Calvin returns to this theme when he summarizes King David's confrontation with the prophet Nathan. For the longterm spiritual health not only of David but of all believers, Calvin here insists, "there is nothing better than when God sends us messengers of his wrath" (Serm. 2 Sam. 12:1-6 [522]). To be called to account is to be called back to one's true home so that one might rest anew in the arms of one's fully sufficient homemaker. It is precisely in adversity, therefore, adversity which "is so hateful to us," that human beings can "perceive the justice of God." For his justice "never shines so brightly as when he punishes our sins" (Comm. Is. 5:15 [1:180]). Hence, God must often "afflict [affligendi] his people to test their patience [ut ipsorum patientam exploret] and to instruct them to obedience [ad obedientiam eos erudiat]." In this way, he can "make manifest and clear the graces which he has conferred upon the saints [as] unmistakable proofs [documentis testotas]," so that these graces will to stubborn and rebellious hearts "not lie idle [otiosae fateant] or hidden within [intus]" (3.8.4, 7o4).19 The full implications of the hiddenness of God's providence thus reveals not only his sovereignty and majesty but also his determination through ways often unexpected and wearisome to hem in and care for his creatures. The providence of God in carefully setting before each human being and each human society what each needs at that moment and what each can bear thus takes on much more significance than the potentially sterile and abstract dimension of Calvin's doctrine of providence manifest in Calvin's description of God's double predestination. Predestination can indeed energize believers to live out what they understand to be God's call in history, but to do so almost headlong. On the other hand, providence as nourishing care provided by and through existing institutions and circumstances (be they comfortable or uncomfortable) works to restrain fanatical manifestations of belief by reminding believers that God knows them better than they know themselves, and that he often hems them in by certain social, political, and cultural institutions, to restrain them for their own good. Indeed, as a number of commentators have pointed out, and as we have seen already, Calvin's apparent "fascination" (some would say "obsession") with predestination grows consistently, and concomitantly with his doctrine of providence, out of his doctrine of God's sovereignty. As Franfois Wendel has put it, "to recognize that Calvin taught double predestination, and underlined its dogmatic and practical interest, is not to say that this must be taken to be the very center of his teaching." In fact, says Wendel, "[h]is earliest writings do not contain any systematic statement of the problem, and although . . . he accorded a growing importance to it, he did so under the sway of ecclesiastical and pastoral preoccupations rather than in order to make it a main foundation of his theology" ("Justification," 161). Muller embodies this frame of reference as well, stating the point forthrightly: "Predestination stands, simply, as the guarantee of divine sovereignty in the work of salvation" (Christ and the Decree, 179). Muller goes on to show in Calvin an "ultimate separation of the doctrines of predestination and providence." Whereas the decree of predestination "has as its intention the salvation of the
138
»
C U L T U R A L D I S S O C I A T I O N AND H I S T O R Y
elect," the decree of providential care "does not have a primarily soteriological function" (Christ and the Decree, 19). Yet providence continues to serve as a kind of auxiliary to God's predestination decree, as we have seen. Through his providential care God elicits from the elect examples of his glory and grace. And both providence and predestination answer to God's sovereignty over his created order.20 Thus, even with all of Calvin's apparent emphasis on predestination later in his career, we ought never to try to separate either this doctrine or that of God's providence from Calvin's emphasis on God's eternal, and sovereign, mercy and grace. After all, for God to predestine any human being to salvation is, in Calvin's mind, to show incredible generosity. Although people often characterize Calvin as though "he knew of nothing else to preach but the decree of predestination," says Bavinck, "[fjhe truth is that no preacher of the Gospel has ever surpassed Calvin in the free, generous proclamation of the grace and love of God" (452). Indeed, says Calvin, predestination is "the true fountain from which we must draw our knowledge of the divine mercy" (Comm. Eph. 1:4 [199]). Summarizes Harold Dekker, "As a preacher Calvin used the doctrine of divine sovereignty first of all as the balm of Gilead. Sovereignty in his sermons is not viewed in the abstract, or developed as a page in dogmatics. It is never dissociated from grace. In a sense sovereign grace is the theme of every sermon" (xxxiv). 21
The Grace of Tradition If God's mercy and love are the primary lessons, and primary foundations, of predestination, then believers must remember that through God's providence he sends not only individualized signals of care and concern, but also his law and the earthly helps discussed in chapter 2. God's providential care manifests itself in one's existing circumstances, as much as it does in one's anticipated circumstances. The institutional helps one experiences thus work not only within history but also through social and political contexts, even through custom and tradition, to encourage, support, and guide believers along their earthly journeys. As Calvin puts the point in his chapter "Providence" in Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, believers should "refer" the providence of God "to past as well as future time" (X.6 [167]). In sum, then, God's providence is just as real, and can be just as apparent, in the status quo as in any anticipated political or social change. Calvin opens his famed essay On Civil Government with just this point. Human beings, he says, are indeed under a twofold government (duplex regimen), one spiritual and one civil (the latter pertaining to "the establishment of civil justice and outward morality"), but it is essential, says Calvin, for believers to understand that the topic of civil government is not "by nature alien to the spiritual doctrine of faith which I have undertaken to discuss." Instead, "necessity compels me [to] join [coniwgi]" them fast together. For the trick, says Calvin is to avoid the twin evils present at each extreme. On the one side "insane and barbarous men furiously strive to overturn [the] divinely established order [ordinem . . . divinitus sancitum] . . . of civil govern-
HISTORICAL PEDAGOGY
o
139
ment \politica administratione]." And on the other side, "the flatterers of princes, immoderately praising their power, do not hesitate to set them against the rule of God himself." Unless both these evils are checked, "purity of faith will perish" (4.20.1, 1485-86).22 Existing governmental structures, in other words, manifest clear divine ordination. The particular institutions one faces have arisen due to God's providential intention and act. Calvin thus goes on, as already noted in chapter 2 (in this volume), to argue the key function of civil government "is no less among men than that of bread, water, sun, and air" (4.20.3, 1488). Would any established government, therefore, to the extent it is able to accomplish its minimal tasks of maintaining civic peace and at least superficial harmony, be anything but a good gift of God? After all, Scripture plainly reveals that "the Lord has designed [civil government] to provide for the tranquility of the good and to restrain the waywardness of the wicked" (Comm. Rom. 13:3 [480]). Political institutions are a clear sign of God's providential care. Having foreseen human rebellion against his created order, God determined not to leave the human race "in a state of confusion," that they might "live after the manner of beasts." Instead, he provided "as it were . . . a building regularly formed, and divided into several compartments." Serving as mechanism to structure and confine human behavior, the building of political order—along with the compartments of civil institutions—provides a mode of living that is "well-arranged and duly ordered, [and as such] is peculiar to men." Such order the Apostle Peter calls "a human ordination" precisely because God designs it so fittingly for human habitation (Comm. i Pet. 2:13 [80]).23 In a very real sense, then, Calvin reports in his Romans commentary, "the safety of mankind is secured" by means of civil order. For "except the fury of the wicked be resisted, and the innocent be protected from their violence, all things would come to an entire confusion." Civil government thus appears to be "the only remedy by which mankind can be preserved from destruction." Civil government is more than a mere expedient to peace, of course. As demonstrated in chapters 2 and 3 (in this volume), such order serves spiritual and pedagogical purposes as well. Nevertheless, the mere "ground of utility," which Paul proposes in Romans 13:3, ought to carry believers a long way toward full appreciation of God's manifest providence in civil government. Even if such government is imperfect, perhaps even despotic, it cannot help but "assist in consolidating the society of men." For rulers "do never so far abuse their power, by harassing the good and innocent, that they do not retain in their tyranny some kind of just government" (Comm. Rom. 13:3 [480]).24 As clear manifestation of God's providential care, existing, established civil government deserves both obedience and respect. To resist or rebel against such government would be not only to "avow ourselves as the public enemies of the human race" (Comm. Rom. 13:3 [480]), but as well, and consequently, "to despise the providence of him who is the founder of civil power." Magistrates are indeed "constituted by God's ordination," which is the primary reason "why we ought to be subject" to them. As the Apostle Paul states explicitly, "it ought to be enough for us" that the particular governing authorities believers face "do rule" (Comm. Rom. 13:1 [478-79] [emphasis in the original]).
140
,
CULTURAL
DISSOCIATION AND HISTORY
In working through the subject of civil government, Paul points directly to God's loving providence by way of the "higher powers." He does this, says Calvin, primarily "to take away the frivolous curiosity of men." For Paul understands that stubborn human beings have an ingrained tendency "to inquire by what right they who rule have obtained their authority." More to the point, by declaring that "every soul" be subject to existing government, Paul "removes every exception, lest anyone should claim an immunity from the common duty of obedience" (Comm. Rom. 13:1 [478] [emphasis in the original]). Likewise the Apostle Peter exhorts believers to submit themselves "to every ordination of man" (New International Version: "to every authority instituted among men"). Not only is every person under government subject to that government, in other words, but every government is worthy of such obedience. "[O]bedience is due to all who rule, because they have been raised to that honor not by chance, but by God's providence" (Comm. i Pet. 2:13 [8o-8i]).25 Such language and public sentiment call into serious question any "revolutionary" implications in Calvin's notion of freedom. Indeed, it seems clear that Calvin tries continually to distance his teaching from any revolutionary ends. As far as political forms and political leaders go, Calvin asserts, Christian freedom buttresses as much as it undermines their authority. Opening his first edition of his Institutes, Calvin provides a "Prefatory Address to King Francis," a preface no doubt intended for all his readers and not simply for King Francis (given that Calvin retained the preface long after the death of this king in 1547), and one he kept virtually unchanged throughout his revisions of the rest of the work. In this preface, Calvin asserts clearly what his intentions are in composing and publishing his compendium, and they are not, as some charged, "to wrest the scepters from the hands of kings, to cast down all courts and judgments, to subvert all order and civil governments, to disrupt the peace and quiet of the people, to abolish all laws, to scatter all lordships and possessions—in short, to turn everything upside down!" If any of these things were true, Calvin states emphatically, "the whole world would rightly judge this doctrine and its authors worthy of a thousand fires and crosses" (Pref. i, 10). Instead, Calvin represents himself—not inaccurately, I believe—as one "from whom not one seditious word was ever heard," and as one "who do[es] not cease to pray for the full prosperity of [the king] and [his] kingdom" (Pref. 8, 30). Robert Kingdon's careful study of Calvinist Geneva's role in assisting the French Huguenot rebellions (Coming of Wars) is most instructive on this point of Calvin's sympathy for existing regimes. Kingdon documents the ways and means by which Geneva became during the 15603 a prime source of money and material for the Huguenot effort. According to Kingdon, Geneva produced a "tide of men and propaganda" (106), making it a "veritable arsenal of Calvinism" (124). Without doubt, Kingdon asserts, Geneva was "the fountainhead of the war's effort" (129). Under the circumstances, however (namely, Calvin's French protestant identity and thus his personal interest in the Huguenot cause, as well as the increasingly ugly oppression of Evangelical believers by the French church hierarchy), Calvin's resistance to the idea of an all-out Huguenot rebellion is notable. As Kingdon himself notes, for example, Calvin apparently expressed to the major plotters in
HISTORICAL PEDAGOGY