John Calvin, Myth and Reality

Images and Impact of Geneva’s Reformer. Papers of the 2009 Calvin Studies Society Colloquium

Amy N. Burnett, Burnett

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608996933
  9781498212847
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621891970
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The chapters in this volume were originally presented as papers at the 2009 colloquium of the Calvin Studies Society, held to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of John Calvin's birth. They offer a fresh evaluation of Calvin's ideas and achievements, and describe how others--from his contemporaries to the present--have responded to or built upon the Calvinist heritage. This book dispels popular misperceptions about Calvin and Calvinism, allowing readers to make a more accurate assessment of Calvin's importance as a theologian and historical figure. Contributions address areas in which Calvin's legacy has been most controversial or misunderstood, such as his attitude toward women, his advocacy of church discipline, and his understanding of predestination. These essays also give a nuanced picture of the impact of Calvinism by taking account of both the positive and negative reactions to it from the early modern period to the present. Part 1: Calvin: The Man and His Work Part 2: Appeal of and Responses to Calvinism Part 3: The Impact of Calvin's Ideas

Part 1

Calvin: The Man and His Work

1

Demoting Calvin

The Issue of Calvin and the Reformed Tradition

richard a. muller

2009 was the year of promoting Calvin. It therefore merits some attention that Calvin himself did not seek promotion. He yearned for the quiet life of a scholar and profoundly appreciated his few years of respite in Strasbourg between his sometimes-tumultuous years in Geneva. He did not choose a leadership role but had it thrust upon him. He was, despite his prominence, a retiring personality who attended nearly all Consistory meetings but seldom spoke. And he was buried, by his own wish, in an unmarked grave.1 The year’s celebrations, which included encomia on his theological greatness and his importance to education, political theory, philosophy, modern science, and a host of other fields to which his work was only tangentially related, would be less than pleasing to him—and, by the way, less than historically accurate. The title of this volume, Calvin—Myth and Reality, perhaps provides a moment of salutary caution, if the myth and the reality are not confused, and as long as it is not the myth that is promoted.

Mythology and the Need for a Demotion

There is perhaps no better way to begin a presentation of this theme than with the following characterization of Calvin’s work by a noted writer of the twentieth century: “It belongs to the great merit of John Calvin that he worked out the difficult transition from the medieval mode of thinking in theology to the modern mode, and placed the theology of Reform on a scientific basis . . . Calvin made such a forward advance in theological thinking that he outstripped his contemporaries by centuries, with the result that they tended to fall back upon an old Aristotelian framework, modified by Renaissance humanism, in order to interpret him. Thus there was produced what history has called ‘Calvinism.’”2

In short, Calvin’s contemporaries and successors simply could not grasp his insight. When he used the same words and phrases, the same technical terms and distinctions that other thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used, indeed, when he entered into dialogue and debate with them, he clearly filled his words with utterly different meanings, leaving their proper interpretation to the twentieth century! Add to this a comment such as,

history is at least as much subject as object, at least as much here in my eyes as there in the sources. The historical Calvin is not a fixed, finished, dead entity imprisoned in the years 1509–64 and unable to leave them. The fifty-nine volumes of the Corpus Reformatorum that contain his works are not secretly his coffin. In Calvin studies, we cannot keep to what he once said as though he had nothing more or new to say today! His work did not simply occur then; it still occurs today. In what he once said he still speaks, saying what he once wanted to say. We may not speak merely of Calvin’s historical impact; Calvin himself has an ongoing history into which we insert ourselves when we deal with him.3

Why study Calvin as a thinker of the past when we can experience the event of Calvin today?

Some, to be sure, have reveled in such language. And that is quite unfortunate, as is a good deal of the theological literature on Calvin that either explicitly or implicitly takes such an approach: Calvin’s theology is presented as if, from early on in his career, he knew intimately and in detail the whole body of Christian doctrine, as if he had mastered (prior to rejecting it) the medieval Scholastic tradition in philosophy as well as theology, as if he began writing with a profound knowledge of the fathers of the early church, as if his thought was in no way dependent on the work of predecessors and contemporaries—and, indeed, as if he utterly transcended his time. His patterns of expression, his theological arguments, and his exegetical conclusions are read out into dialogue with modern theology and philosophy as if they fit easily into modern modes of thought.

As if Calvin did not live, think, and learn within an early sixteenth-century context . . . As if he were not a product of his own education, its breadth and its limitations . . . As if the Reformed tradition, which had its beginnings before Calvin and that was developed in Calvin’s own day not only by Calvin but by a goodly number of other reformers, somewhere, somehow, decided that Calvin was its only normative thinker for the space of approximately three centuries. Sadly, this ahistorical approach has not simply collapsed under the weight of its own mythology. It has become its own self-sustaining trajectory in what we somewhat facetiously call Calvin studies.

By way of example, a very recent study presents Calvin’s theology, seldom citing anything other than the Institutes. It labors at ignoring Calvin’s predecessors and contemporaries, denies the notion that Calvin ought to be considered as one major codifier of the Reformed tradition among others, identifies Calvin as “the greatest systematic thinker” of his era whose theology is a “complete and sufficient subject” for investigation, characterizes the 1559 Institutes as “a single text to study by which every exposition can be judged,” and, without having examined any of the texts of later Reformed theologians, reiterates the old “Calvin against the Calvinists” theme. The author concludes his set of undocumented assertions with the comment that “Calvin is not a Calvinist because union with Christ is at the heart of his theology—not theirs.”4 What our author might have found out had he researched other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources is that union with Christ was not the sole property of Calvin in his own time, remained a rather significant focus of later Reformed theology and piety, and was developed by seventeenth-century writers often in a fullness not found in Calvin.5 And, of course, had he not so thoroughly decontextualized and dogmatized Calvin, he might not have tried to contort union with Christ into a new central dogma or structural principle for the Institutes.6

The Calvin presented by these three authors is a mythological being: Calvin abstracted from and elevated out of his context, speaking not to his contemporaries but to the twentieth or twenty-first century, and doing so without reference to the very tradition that somewhat unwillingly permitted the name Calvinist to replace its chosen title, Reformed or, indeed, as many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources would have it, Reformed Catholic. As for the method of such studies, it is perhaps best described by a modified form of George Tyrrell’s comment about Harnack’s Essence of Christianity—the authors of this view of Calvin have stared down the well of history and have seen a pious modern Protestant face reflected back at them.

Some Contextual Premises

The Calvin encountered in sixteenth-century documents thought like his sixteenth-century contemporaries: he framed his work in terms of an Aristotelianism modified both by centuries of Christian meditation and by developments in Renaissance philosophy and method, notably some Stoic and Platonic strains. He was trained, not as a theologian, but after a basic bachelor’s-degree training in logic, rhetoric, and philosophy, as a lawyer. He began his theological work not as a trained expert but—as his own account clearly indicates—as an amateur who needed to learn theology as he preached, lectured, and wrote.7 In his career as an organizer of the Reformation in Geneva, he learned theology in the process of preaching and lecturing through the Bible, augmenting his Institutes as he preached and lectured, and defending the Reformation and his own theology in long series of tracts and treatises, mostly polemical. Much of that learning process rested on Calvin’s engagement with the thought of other reformers, most notably, Luther, Bucer, Melanchthon, and Bullinger,8 as can be illustrated not only by a comparison of their works but by the character of their correspondence. Calvin, to make the point simply, was a lot more learned in theology in 1559 as he published the final edition of the Institutes than he was in 1536 when he published the first edition.

In the process of this career, he certainly came to know the church fathers quite well, albeit not at the level of fluency of various contemporaries or later Reformed writers—among contemporaries, certainly Wolfgang Musculus and John Jewel;9 among the later writers, Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf, whose Syntagma theologiae evidences a deep and careful reading of the Fathers; or Abraham Scultetus and Andreas Rivetus, both of whom wrote patrologies.10

It is unclear how much medieval theology and philosophy Calvin ever mastered—and again, various contemporaries and successors were certainly more adept in these matters as well. Calvin certainly did not have a mastery of the tradition of commentaries on Lombard’s Sentences, and it is unlikely that he ever read either the Sentence commentary or either of the Summas of Thomas Aquinas. His later writings contain some accents of Scotus or Scotism, but their source is as yet undetermined. He probably never read the works of Ockham or of John Major as has been sometimes alleged, nor is there any indication (also alleged) that he had an acquaintance with the writings of Richard of Saint Victor. His attacks on “Scholastic” doctrine often do not apply to the major theologians of the medieval period.11 On this issue as well, several of his contemporaries, perhaps most notably Vermigli, were more adept at the tradition than Calvin and more precise both in their critiques and in their appropriations of the medieval Scholastics. The same can be said of many of the Reformed writers in the next several generations.

Calvin’s Institutes, although the most famous, is but one of several major theological surveys produced in what can be called the second phase of the Reformation: it stands beside the large-scale works of Heinrich Bullinger, Wolfgang Musculus, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Andreas Hyperius and in a clear and stron...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Calvin: The Man and His Work
• Part 2: Appeal of and Responses to Calvinism
• Part 3:The Impact of Calvin’s Ideas
• Bibliography