As you may know, I have just spent an intriguing several
days at Montreat as part of a conference honoring the man who is
considered the father of Presbyterianism, John Calvin. Friday
(July 10) was Calvin's 500th birthday, and yes, I sang to him,
but not on the phone (it would have been really, REALLY long
distance). In fact, we all sang Friday night. We enjoyed some
cake and wine (which Calvin would have enjoyed - he believed food
and drink were God's good gifts for our delight). He would have
rolled over in his grave at the thought of the lottery drawing
for the John Calvin bobble-head dolls that were door prizes. As
to whether he would have approved the commemoration at all is an
open question because, in his commentary on those verses in the
book of Job, where Job laments the day he was born, (1) Calvin waxes
eloquent on NOT celebrating birthdays. But 500? That's a
biggee, so...
Calvin has gotten an awful lot of bad press over the years.
Richard Mouw, the President of Fuller Seminary in California, had
a column in Presbyterian Outlook a few weeks ago and said this:
In a speech I once gave to a Jewish audience, a rabbi
friend introduced me as a Calvinist. After the session
ended, a couple walked up to me to thank me for my
presentation. They said they appreciated my remarks,
but were puzzled by the Calvinist label. "You seem
like a nice person,' the woman said. "That's not the
image we have of Calvinists." (2)
I know, I know. Ask the average person to describe a
Calvinist and you will probably get a response along the lines of
"somebody constantly on the lookout for anyone having fun so they
can make them stop." Thus, the big, BAD John. But if you
suffered from chronic indigestion, gout, fevers, kidney stones,
tuberculosis, migraine headaches, and to add insult to injury,
hemorrhoids, you might be a bit of a crank yourself.
Born in France on July 10, 1509, Calvin grew to be a
brilliant young man who intended to be a Catholic priest but
entered law instead. After encountering the writings of
Protestant Reformers, Calvin had a conversion experience. "God
subdued and brought my heart to docility," he said.
Breaking away from Catholicism, he left France and settled
in Switzerland as an exile. In 1536, Calvin published one of the
greatest theological works ever written, The Institutes of the
Christian Religion. This major systematic theology, which begins
with God the Creator and ends with reflections on civil
government, stands as one of the most important expressions of
Reformation thought. Not bad for a 27-year-old.
Calvin's writings impressed the people of Geneva,
Switzerland, so he was invited to move there and help with the
Reform movement. Calvin's workload in the city was staggering:
he pastored a church and preached daily in it, wrote commentaries
on almost every book in the Bible, authored dozens of Christian
pamphlets, trained and sent out missionaries, and influenced the
schools and the civil government. No wonder he suffered those
migraines!
The city of Geneva became a magnet for Protestant exiles
from all over Europe. One of them, John Knox, who took
Presbyterianism to Scotland, described Calvin's city as "the most
perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles." (3)
What made Calvin and Geneva so magnetic? It was his
theology, I think. It was solid, it made sense, and it answered
the questions that people had.
It begins with God. Many of you have read Rick Warren's
book, The Purpose-Driven Life. (4) You may recall that the first
line in that mega-best-seller is, "It's not about you." He says,
"If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must
begin with God." You do not discover your life's purpose by
focusing on yourself. Instead, you turn to your Creator, and
discover the reason God has put you in this world. It's not
about you. It's about God.
That is Calvin's thinking. This is his bedrock doctrine; we
refer to it today as the Sovereignty of God. "God is Lord over
all!" he wrote. (5) This was good news then; it is good news now.
He stressed that no human being -- whether king or bishop -- could
demand our ultimate loyalty. You can see why such thinking
attracted people who were suffering under the authority of
oppressive churches and governments. It was this belief in God's
sovereignty that made such a dramatic impact before World War II,
when a group of faithful Germans took a stand against the Nazis
in a statement of faith called "The Theological Declaration of
Barmen." God is sovereign, not Hitler.
Calvin also emphasized the importance of grace and claimed
that salvation is possible only through the grace of this
sovereign God. He believed that nothing earthly can save us, and
he criticized the Catholic Church of his day for becoming a
religion of salvation by works. Because God is Lord over all,
according to Calvin, human beings, human works and human
institutions cannot manipulate or control God in any way. We
cannot be saved by anything but God's grace, which is a
completely free gift to people who trust in Jesus Christ.
In his opening to the Institutes, Calvin says, "Before God
nothing remains for us to boast of, save his mercy, whereby we
have been received into hope of eternal salvation through no
merit of our own." (6) "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/ that
saved a wretch like me."
OK, if God is completely sovereign and in control of
everything, what happens to human freedom? Does God micro-manage
everything to the extent of having one of us eat eggs for
breakfast, another cereal, and another get no breakfast at all?
Calvin would say that God COULD if God chose to do so, but God
does not. We are free agents, not puppets-on-a-string, and in
control of the choices we make.
All right, preacher, what about this doctrine of
predestination? Contrary to popular understanding, Calvin did
not invent it. In fact, he borrowed it. Predestination is set
out in the writings of a number of the church fathers, most
notably Augustine of Hippo.
Predestination says that the sovereign God, who is all-powerful and all-knowing, must therefore know not only everything
that has happened, but also everything that is going to happen,
and is ultimately in control of it all. That was a comfort to
people in the Middle Ages who had such a fragile hold on life.
To survive childbirth was a big thing and for a child to grow
into an adult was even bigger. Death was a constant companion,
(Calvin and his wife lost their child, and she died leaving him
to care for three other children from her previous marriage), so
for worshipers to hear that God's hand was involved was a
comfort.
To be honest, that is COLD comfort to us. Some years ago, a
beautiful, vivacious 14-year-old was killed in an automobile
accident late one spring Saturday night. By the time we gathered
for church the next morning, word had swept through the
congregation, and the tears flowed freely. As I preached that
morning, I said that God had been with Ashley that night - not
causing the horrible accident, but staying with her through every
moment. I said that God's heart was as broken by what had
happened as ours were.
The family said they were comforted by those words, but
another couple in the church ended up leaving the congregation
because of them. You see, those folks had lost TWO of their
children, one in an accident, another to a childhood disease.
The only way they had been able to deal with their twin tragedies
was to firmly believe that God had caused them. In some
inscrutable divine plan, these children had to die, and someday,
perhaps, they would find out why. This was their comfort, and
Calvin would have been content with their understanding.
Most modern Calvinists would find that hard to preach or
teach. We want to say that God is intimately involved in every
aspect of our life down to the number of hairs on our heads, (7) as
Jesus said, but we do not believe that God goes around killing
little children.
Properly understood, the Presbyterian understanding of
Predestination is not related to some divinely-ordained plan for
the day-to-day events of your life. Predestination has to do
with salvation. It was the term chosen by Calvin (and other
reformers as well) to explain that our salvation is not simply
the result of our choice - God acts first in extending the
invitation and providing us an opportunity to respond.
The late John Leith taught theology at Union Seminary in
Richmond for many years and was as good a Calvin scholar as
anyone I ever knew. Dr. Leith has written that, for Calvin, this
doctrine was another source of comfort in that "salvation does
not depend upon our faltering human efforts but upon the mercy
and power of God." (8)
Remember your history here. Back in Calvin's time, the
people in his churches spent a lot more time than most of us
worrying about whether or not they would be saved. As we say, it
was a dangerous and scary world. What is going to happen to me,
people wondered, if tomorrow I wake up with a fever, and it turns
out to be the plague, and I die? There are all those resolutions
I made, and never got to keep. There are the good deeds I meant
to perform, but somehow never got around to. What if I am so
sick, I cannot get in to see a priest to confess my sins, and
receive the absolution of the church? If something like that
happens to me, I am a goner - not only physically, but
spiritually. (9)
Not to worry, says Master Calvin. Not to worry. I have a
doctrine for you, called predestination. It says God has already
chosen those who will be saved by grace, before they were even
born. If you are so fortunate as to be numbered in that blessed
company, then failing to keep that resolution or do that good
deed is not going to make a bit of difference. Your passport to
heaven is already written.
Dr. Leith writes, "Calvin located the doctrine of
predestination in the ordering of his theology after his
discussion of the Christian life. This suggests that
predestination can best be understood, not at the beginning, but
at the conclusion of the life of faith. It is the testimony of
the believer that what has happened in the life of faith has not
been the result of one's own efforts about which one can boast
but of the grace of God." (10) In other words, predestination, from
a human point of view, is simply 20/20 hindsight about how you
and I came to Christ.
By the way, if you are looking for someone to blame for the
doctrine of predestination, Calvin is not the man. As we have
already noted, he borrowed the idea from Augustine, but in fact,
it goes even further back than that. It goes all the way back to
the New Testament, to the writings of St. Paul.
Paul, too, teaches predestination as a source of comfort.
In our lesson from Romans, he points out that "all things work
together for good for those who love God, who are called
according to [Godīs] purpose." There is a comforting thought.
"All things...ALL things...work together for good" for God's
people. Even the pains and heartaches we experience in life can
serve some larger purpose - though we may fail to see or
understand, right now, precisely what that purpose is.
Where Paul goes next may seem like a surprising move, to
modern ears: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to
be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be
the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he
predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also
justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified."
As with John Calvin, for Paul, predestination is a doctrine
of comfort. Remember, Paul is writing to a church undergoing
persecution, to people whose lives are filled with uncertainty
and fear. Even the bad things that happen in life, he says,
ultimately lead to a greater good. Paul would give a big "Amen"
to Martin Luther King, Jr., who once taught his beleaguered
people, "Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but
it bends toward justice."
Back to Romans 8. Paul moves on from his explanation of
predestination to ask his suffering people this question: "What
then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is
against us?" Who, indeed?
Back to the birthday boy. As we have noted, he was a
lawyer, as well as a theologian. Calvin initially trained as a
priest in Paris, but then his father got in trouble with the
church and was excommunicated, so family loyalty led young John
away from preparing for the priesthood and into law school. This
training would stand him in good stead later, when he got to
Geneva. He ended up running many aspects of the city's life.
Calvin emphasized representative government in the church,
as well as the state. Our Presbyterian system - with the people
of God meeting to elect their own leaders and to make other
important decisions - may sound humdrum to us, but in Calvin's
time, it was revolutionary. Remember that, in most of Europe,
the church was ruled over by powerful bishops and the state by
kings. In Geneva, Calvin sowed seeds of democracy that
eventually sprouted here, on the far shore of the Atlantic, in
the American Revolution.
Calvin, like Martin Luther before him, encouraged the
reading of scripture. It was in Geneva, among that group of
expatriate Englishmen and Scots, that one of the early English
translations of the Bible, the Geneva Bible, was produced.
Calvin worked to make sure the scriptures were translated into
the common tongue, so ordinary people could read them. Early in
Calvin's Institutes, he identifies two essential forms of human
knowledge, "knowledge of God and of ourselves." Calvin points
out that poor, earthbound creatures like you and I can know God
only through scripture. The Bible is our means of understanding
the ways of God - in this, it is our authority without parallel.
Finally, Calvin presented two signs by which Christians
might identify the true church - an important skill, in the
turmoil of Reformation Europe, where new, radical churches were
springing up all the time, and where a determined Roman Catholic
Church was pushing back against the reformers. A true church of
Jesus Christ, Calvin says, is a place where the Word of God is
truly preached and heard and the sacraments are rightly
administered. To this day, Presbyterian worship is built around
these two elements: the sermon, by which God's people are fed
spiritually, and the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper,
through which we experience God's presence in powerful, non-verbal ways.
To far too many people today - even many Presbyterians -
John Calvin is a nearly-forgotten figure. May we use this 500th
anniversary of his birth as a way to call his wise, serious
spirit back from the mists of the past: so we, too, might build a
church that is "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was
in the earth since the days of the apostles!"
Amen!
1. Job 3:1ff.
2. Richard Mouw, "Trendy Calvinism!" The Presbyterian Outlook, 5/25/09, p. 27
3. "Calvin at 500," Homiletics, July 2009, pp. 9-10
4. Philadelphia : Running Press, 2003
5. Institutes, 1.14.3
6. Institutes, PA 2
7. Matthew 10:30; Luke 12:7
8. John Leith, An Introduction to the Reformed Tradition, (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981), p.
105
9. Carlos Wilton, sermon, "John Calvin, We Hardly Knew Ye," delivered at Pt. Pleasant
Presbyterian Church, Point Pleasant, NJ, 5/24/09
10. Leith, pp. 105-106
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