Theologian in the service of piety: a new portrait of Calvin

Christian Century, April 23, 1997 by Randall C. Zachman

When I was a student at Yale Divinity School a friend of mine gave me a pamphlet much like those handed out by street evangelists. This one was a parody of the five articles of the Synod of Dort, a 17th-century document long considered to represent the essence of John Calvin's theology. The tract's cover declared in bold block letters, "God hates you and has a horrible plan for your life."

The title accurately summarizes the impression most people have of Calvin and his theology, including many within the academic community. Encyclopedia articles about Calvin feature a fairly predictable cluster of terms skill associated with his name: strict, moralistic, legalistic, authoritarian, rigorous, rigid, severe, cold, logical, systematic, biblicist, theocratic, dictatorial and austere. Another set of predictable terms and themes are pressed into service to describe Calvin's vision of God: distant, transcendent, sovereign, omnipotent, electing some to salvation and reprobating the rest to eternal damnation and misery.

The common impression of Calvin and his theology can be summarized this way: 1) Calvin is a cold, logical and rigidly systematic thinker. 2) Calvin is a man of one book, the Institutes of the Christian Religion of 1559, which contains the sum of his system. 3) The central concept of Calvin's doctrinal system is God's sovereign omnipotence--a sovereignty that demands our complete obedience, and that necessarily entails the doctrine of electron and reprobation.

But recent analyses of the Reformer's work have dramatically complicated and modified this portrait. Calvin scholarship of the past decade places the Genevan Reformer squarely within the matrix of a French and European biblical humanism that worked to recover the church's purity by restoring access to the sources: scripture, the early church fathers and late classical authors. Overall, the Calvin of recent scholarship is a far more alluring and intriguing figure than the conventional view suggests. In light of this scholarship, I'll try to do my part in restoring Calvin's image by revisiting the three propositions that constitute the popular view of Calvin.

Rigid and systematic thinker. The image of Calvin as a cold, logical and rigidly systematic thinker appears to have been created by Reformed scholasticism, vividly expressed in the Westminster Confession of 1649--which is assumed to be an expression of Calvin's own mode of thought. Scholars now recognize Calvin as above all else a teacher who sought to open the Word of God in scripture to the common people from whom, Calvin claimed, the Bible had been withheld by the scholastics, monks and priests of the Roman church. Moreover, Calvin claimed that true and godly teaching is not "cold, inane speculation" which "flits about in the brain," but is rather "sincere, solid, and certain teaching" which "takes root in the inmost affection of the heart." Such teaching leads not to the development of a system but to the transformation of life. "We have given the first place to the doctrine in which our religion is contained, since our salvation begins with it," wrote Calvin. "But it must enter our heart and pass into our daily living, and so transform us into itself that it may not be unfruitful for us." Calvin thought that all doctrine or teaching which is not useful and fruitful for the building up of piety should be abolished.

Calvin's efforts to restore access to the sources of true and edifying knowledge, and to build up piety by means of those sources, were shared by other biblical humanists such as the classics scholar Guillaume Bude of France and the great Dutch humanist Erasmus. Calvin's own commitment to humanism is evident in the first publication from his pen--a commentary on Seneca's writing on clemency in which Calvin sought to return Seneca to his rightful place in Latin letters.

When he became an evangelical in the mid-1530s, Calvin used the learning he had developed among the humanists to accomplish another restoration project. By recapturing scripture's simple, genuine and natural sense, Calvin returned scripture to its rightful place in the church. In doing so he saw himself in continuity with the great teachers of the patristic period, especially John Chrysostom, whose works he once considered translating into French. Calvin was a representative of the learned class who wanted to use his skills in the liberal arts for the benefit of common people who had neither the time nor the skill to acquire such learning. His sole object as a teacher was "to lay down a pathway to the reading of sacred Scripture for the simple and uneducated."

If the learned are to teach others who lack such learning they must accommodate themselves to the capacities of their students. Such accommodation was made by scripture itself, Calvin thought, for in scripture and through the work of the Holy Spirit God descends to the level of common human understanding and babbles to us the way a mother babbles to her child. Calvin endeavored in his writings--whether in Latin or in French--to mirror such divine self-accommodation by addressing the ordinary reading public. He wanted to lead his students "by the hand."