Calvin and the Reformed Tradition

On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation

Richard A. Muller

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780801048708
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441242549
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Richard Muller, a world-class scholar of the Reformation era, examines the relationship of Calvin's theology to the Reformed tradition, indicating Calvin's place in the tradition as one of several significant second-generation formulators. Muller argues that the Reformed tradition is a diverse and variegated movement not suitably described either as founded solely on the thought of John Calvin or as a reaction to or deviation from Calvin, thereby setting aside the old "Calvin and the Calvinists" approach in favor of a more integral and representative perspective. Muller offers historical corrective and nuance on topics of current interest in Reformed theology, such as limited atonement/universalism, union with Christ, and the order of salvation.

1

From Reformation to Orthodoxy: The Reformed Tradition in the Early Modern Era

Approaching Reformation and Orthodoxy

Between the beginnings of the Reformation in the first three decades of the sixteenth century and the deconfessionalization that took place between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there was a significant development of Protestant religion and theology, ecclesial and intellectual culture. From the perspective of confessionality and theological formulation, that development can be described as the rise of an institutional form of Protestantism, founded on the historical datum of the Reformation-era break with Rome and framed in its approach to religious and doctrinal identity by the confessional documents written largely by the first and second generations of Reformers: in short, the development of confessionally orthodox Protestantism or as it is typically called, Protestant Orthodoxy. From a methodological perspective, the description and analysis of that development is far more complex than the simple account of the theologies of various individuals and major confessional controversies, as is typically found in the older literature.[1]

The teachings of no single theologian, not even one as important as Calvin, can account for the development of the Reformed tradition, not even in his own time, much less over the course of nearly two centuries. Nor does analysis of such debates as those with Rome, or with the Lutherans, or over the teachings of Arminius give an adequate picture of the development, given the large number of debates that did not rise to the confessional level and the even larger number of doctrinal points that were developed with some diversity of formulation but did not become the subjects of significant debate.[2] And, of course, neither the Reformation in general nor the Reformed tradition in particular arose ex nihilo: there was not only a broad late medieval background of the Reformation; within that broad religious and theological culture of the later Middle Ages, there were also diverse currents that carried over into the Reformation and into post-Reformation Protestantism, the reception of which varied from theologian to theologian.

Recent studies of this development have begun to emphasize its complexity and variety, setting aside the over-simplified narratives of much of the earlier scholarship. The Reformation itself, once described as an almost hermetically sealed theological box, is now understood in the context of broader cultural patterns extending back into the Middle Ages and forward into the early modern era. Individual Protestant theologians are now understood not as creators of an entirely new and radically biblical theology but as fairly conservative Reformers whose immediate theological roots are to be found in the theological milieu of the later Middle Ages and whose positive sources included the greater part of the older tradition of the church. Beyond this, a larger portion of the scholarly community has recognized that individual Reformers like Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Bullinger, and Calvin cannot rightly be understood as creators of unique theologies abstracted from the thought of their teachers and immediate predecessors or from the theological formulations of their contemporaries.

The importance of this approach to the complexity and variety of Protestant theological development is particularly evident in the specific case of the Reformed tradition, often identified as “Calvinism.” Given that a significant number of Reformers contributed to the development of this tradition in the generation prior to Calvin, including several who either individually or in accord with others produced the first layer of Reformed confessional documents, and given that Calvin’s own theology developed both out of this prior context and in dialogue with other Reformers of his own generation, the rise of Reformed theology, indeed, the formation of a specifically Reformed tradition cannot be adequately analyzed or properly understood if individual thinkers are abstracted from this broader religious and theological context. The theological formulations of the individual writers, in other words, cannot be rightly understood either in isolation or in one-to-one comparisons. The problem was recognized by John T. McNeill, who commented at the beginning of his History and Character of Calvinism that there were already, at the beginnings of the development of the Reformed tradition, “not inconsiderable” differences between the theologies of Calvin and Zwingli, but that these differences were not ultimately “divisive” of the confessional tradition. McNeill concluded, “There is therefore no incongruity involved in making Zwinglianism a part of the wider movement that, in the unavoidable shorthand of language, is here called Calvinism.”[3] Of course, the shorthand is avoidable and one might use the more accurate term “Reformed” in place of “Calvinist.”

Accordingly, attempts to drive intellectual wedges between, for example, Calvin and Bullinger, by way of claiming two Reformed traditions—or between Calvin and Beza, by way of claiming differences in nuance between Calvin’s theology and Beza’s as “deviations” from Calvin—operate on a fallacious ground.[4] Such attempts fail to allow for individual diversity within a theological tradition. They fail to allow for differing antecedents, sources, and contexts for the formulations of individual theologians. They also fail to observe the rise and development of a confessional tradition at the hands of a rather diverse group of formulators, they fail to consider the tradition as itself represented by a series of documents arising from different contexts, and they fail to identify the patterns of relationship and difference belonging to the tradition itself. And from a methodological perspective, they also fail to observe how the more specific characteristics of one major theologian’s formulations are rather differently received by other thinkers within the confessional tradition.

The issue addressed, therefore, in reassessing and reconstructing the historical development of Reformed orthodoxy as an exercise not in modern dogmatics but in intellectual history, is the tracing of patterns and trajectories of argumentation within the early modern Reformed confessional tradition, with a view to the historical context of the debates and developments productive of the rather diverse movement toward confessionalization and institutionalization in the Reformed churches. It is important to recognize, moreover, that the periodization of Reformation, early, high, and late orthodoxy, extending from circa 1517 to circa 1780, provides an imprecise framework: specifically, identifying the Reformation as an era from 1517 to 1565 and early orthodoxy as an era from 1565 to 1640 or thereabouts does not propose either a completed Reformation as of 1565, a fully developed early confessional orthodoxy as of 1565, or a uniformly identifiable high orthodoxy in 1640, any more than it claims a defined Reformation-era Protestantism in 1517. The rise of early orthodoxy in particular was a gradual development that had its beginnings in the confessional writings of the mid-sixteenth century and its major systematic expression only in a series of rather different, albeit confessionally circumscribed, theologies written between 1590 and the decades after the Synod of Dort. Similar comments can be made concerning the high orthodox development and the waning of orthodoxy or late orthodoxy in the eighteenth century.

Deconstructing the Master Narratives

Reappraisal of the nature and character of the Reformation and of the developments that followed in the Protestant churches of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been a central concern of the theological historiography of the early modern era during the last fifty years and has resulted in a massive recasting of our understanding of early modern Protestantism. From the perspective of intellectual history, part of the reappraisal was grounded in the reception by historians of the Reformation of a significant body of scholarship on the scholasticism and humanism of the centuries preceding the Reformation that, when drawn into an analysis of the confessional, ecclesial, academic, and dogmatically formulative development of Protestantism, altered considerably our understandings both of the Reformation and of the orthodoxy that followed it.[5] This scholarship on scholasticism and humanism has never been fully assimilated by proponents of the older interpretations of the development from Reformation to orthodoxy. With these altered understandings of scholasticism and humanism in view, the new scholarship has also engaged in reading a rather vast array of documents that had been largely ignored by the previous scholarship—and, indeed, that continue to be ignored by proponents of the several older interpretations of the development of Protestant thought.

The work of reassessing and reappraising the early modern development of Reformed thought has typically framed its analysis in terms of continuities, discontinuities, and diversity in the Reformed tradition. These approaches to reassessment and reappraisal have also included discussion of the nature and character of the Reformed tradition itself and examination of the Reformed reception and use of older theological materials, whether patristic or medieval, both in the earlier strata of the Reformed tradition itself and in the subsequent generational layers of Reformed thought in what can be identified as the early and high orthodox eras. Given, moreover, the enormous broadening of the early modern bibliography of Reformed Protestantism, these various elements of the reassessment ought to be understood as the proposal of a complete alternative to the defective master narrative of the older scholarship.[6]

That older narrative has been characterized by broad theological generalizations resting largely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century dogmatic concerns and by a series of philosophical assumptions grounded on post-Kantian understandings of early modern intellectual history. Both the theological and the philosophical versions of the narrative are characterized by assumptions of a fairly radical discontinuity between the Middle Ages and the Reformation, often defined in terms of the conflict between scholasticism and humanism defined largely as opposing philosophies. Scholasticism, moreover, understood as a medieval philosophical system, is viewed by this narrative as being antithetical to the theology of the Reformation and as functionally terminated with the end of the Middle Ages, at least from the perspective of Protestant thought properly understood. What is more, the narrative has been developed in terms of a “great thinker” approach to history that has tended to elevate individuals and certain documents to the exclusion of interest in contemporary thinkers or historical contexts.

In brief, most versions of the theological narrative have elevated Calvin out of his context and identified him as the founder either of the Reformed tradition or of “Calvinism” or have identified his Institutes of the Christian Religion not only as the fundamental source of his own thought but as the norm for understanding all subsequent developments in the Reformed tradition, breeding debates over the relationship, whether positive or negative, of Calvin to the Calvinists and mistaking the nature of a tradition. There are three variations on this basic approach—two from the nineteenth century relating to the doctrinal issues of predestination and covenant, and one from the twentieth century based on the notion of christocentricity associated with neo-orthodoxy. In the first of these approaches, associated primarily with the work of Alexander Schweizer but also drawing on the studies of Heinrich Heppe, predestination is understood to be the dogmatic center of Calvinism, with Calvin himself as the foremost early formulator of the position and as standing in continuity with the later development of Calvinism as a predestinarian system.[7] The second of these approaches, based on Heppe’s distinction between a Calvinistic predestinarian trajectory and a Melanchthonian German Reformed theology, understood covenant as an alternative focus to the predestinarian approach of Calvin and the Calvinists.[8] The third approach, associated with various neo-orthodox writers, represents a reassessment of Calvin to conform his theology to the standards of neo-orthodoxy, specifically assimilating his thought to a christocentric model and creating a narrative that poses Calvin against the predestinarian Calvinists,[9] and more recently a Calvin focused on union with Christ against Calvinists intent on constructing a rigid ordo salutis.[10] All three of these approaches are highly reductionistic in that they superimpose large-scale dogmatic generalizations on a highly variegated historical development.

The problematic master narrative concerning the history of early modern philosophy, often read in tandem with these theological narratives, assumes the demise of scholasticism and of the Western Aristotelian or Peripatetic tradition with the dawn of the Reformation, regards its continuation into the seventeenth century as vestigial, and assumes that the rise of rationalism, whether of the deductive Cartesian or of the inductive Baconian variety, utterly replaced the older Aristotelianism with little competition from other variant philosophies—rendering incomprehensible either the lively continuation of the Peripatetic tradition or the ongoing use of scholastic method among seventeenth-century Protestants and yielding a detachment of Protestant orthodoxy from the thought of the Reformers.[11] Indeed, in many histories of early modern philosophy, the only thinkers mentioned are Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, Locke, sometimes with the addition of Bacon and, more rarely, of Gassendi—and all treated as part of a massive break with the past and as founders of modernity. Associated with this broader philosophical narrative, there are two primary alternative approaches to Protestant thought. One of these approaches, perhaps by way of an older view of the Renaissance as beginning to strip away the superstitions of the Middle Ages and replacing them with a focus on humanity, identifies the Reformation as the wellspring of theological and philosophical freethought and the ancestor of rationalism, whether for good or for ill.[12] When this understanding is followed, the master narrative interprets Protestant Orthodoxy and its scholastic tendencies as a form of dogmatism contrary to the Reformation and so obscurantistic in its views that rationalism, the true heir of the Renaissance and Reformation, ultimately triumphed.[13] The alternative approach interprets the Reformation’s emphasis on Scripture as a form of fideism, and reads the era of orthodoxy and Protestant scholasticism as a turn toward rationalism that opened the doorway to the Enlightenment.[14] In either case, the traditional Aristotelianism and scholasticism of seventeenth-century Reformed thought are understood as preliminary to the rise of rationalism, with the dominant line of argument identifying Protestant orthodoxy as a form of rationalism or proto-rationalism.[15] And, of course, when medieval scholasticism is improperly identified as a form of rationalism and the phenomenon of scholastic method not understood as itself developing and changing over the course of centuries, the purported rationalism of the Protestant scholastics becomes not only the predecessor of later but also a recrudescence of earlier rationalisms.

Nearly all of these theological and philosophical master narratives are indebted to the grand modern master narrative of the end of the Middle Ages in the Renaissance and Reformation as signaled by the rise of humanism and the downfall of scholasticism, the most famous version of which appeared in Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy:

In the Middle Ages both sides of the human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. . . . In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of the state and of all things of this world became possible. The subjective side at the same time asserted itself with corresponding emphasis; man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.[16]

According to Burckhardt, humanism stood utterly opposed to medieval culture:

as competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilization, founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential because they knew what the ancients knew . . . because they began to think, and soon to see, as the ancients thought and felt.[17]

The underlying problem with all of these narratives is that they are largely of nineteenth-century origin and do not at all reflect the currents of thought that were actually present in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reassessments of medieval thought and culture have clearly indicated that humanism was not only a product of the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages, but also that it arose, not as a successor to scholasticism, but as a parallel development in the university faculties of the thirteenth century.[18] Those reassessments have also pointed to both humanism and scholasticism as primarily descriptors of method—specifically of patterns or models of argument that were applied to the various subject areas of the medieval university curriculum, both of which carried over into the early modern era. Indeed, the most recent studies of scholastic method have indicated that, in a series of developments and modifications, including an accommodation to humanistic interests, it carried over from the Middle Ages as far as the first half of the eighteenth century.

Recent examinations of the writings of the Reformers have begun to detail medieval backgrounds, sometimes to be associated with the orders or academic backgrounds of individual thinkers, sometimes to be associated with diverse patterns of reception of late medieval materials. Thus, Martin Luther has been studied in terms of antecedents in late medieval nominalism and in the varied currents of thought within the Order of Augustinian Eremites and in terms of his reception of various threads of medieval thought in and through his studies at Erfurt and his reading of Gabriel Biel’s theology.[19] Peter Martyr Vermigli’s thought has been analyzed in terms of its backgrounds in the Thomist and Augustinian trajectories of medieval theology.[20] John Calvin’s work has been shown to evidence the impact of various lines of medieval thought extending from Bernard of Clairvaux to late medieval Scotism and Augustinianism, albeit without any definitive identification of his patterns of reception or his specific backgrounds other than from the sources actually cited by him.[21]

S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. From Reformation to Orthodoxy: The Reformed Tradition in the Early Modern Era
• 2. Was Calvin a Calvinist?
• 3. Calvin on Christ’s Satisfaction and Its Efficacy: The Issue of "Limited Atonement"
• 4. A Tale of Two Wills? Calvin, Amyraut, and Du Moulin on Ezekiel 18:23
• 5. Davenant and Du Moulin: Variant Approaches to Hypothetical Universalism
• 6. The "Golden Chain" and the Causality of Salvation: Beginnings of the Reformed Ordo Salutis
• 7. Union with Christ and the Ordo Salutis: Reflections on Developments in Early Modern Reformed Thought
• 8. Calvin, Beza, and the Later Reformed on Assurance of Salvation and the "Practical Syllogism"
• 9. Conclusions
• Index
• Notes
• Back Cover