Dissonant Pieties

John Calvin and the Prayer Psalms of the Psalter

Riemann

• Éditeur: Cascade Books
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781630870935
• Sujet: Teología y religión
• Sous-sujet: Religión

Throughout his years as a leader of the Reformation, John Calvin had a special interest in the proprieties of prayer. This interest climaxed in his formulation of four basic rules for proper prayer, rules that he applied in his extensive commentary on the book of Psalms, which dominated his last several years.Calvin was especially interested in the psalms associated with David, particularly the complaint psalms. He sensed an unusual personal affinity with David, who as king faced many situations that seemed to parallel his own less authoritative but very powerful role in Geneva. He was, however, quite critical of the psalm prayers that he found to be in violation of his rules. Riemann analyzes Calvin's criticism and offers a reevaluation of the complaint psalms in themselves.Riemann finds the complaint psalms to have been misunderstood not only by Calvin but by many present-day commentators, who likewise find these psalms to only echo their own piety. Riemann demonstrates the risks of abstracting elements from someone else's piety and appropriating them for ourselves. He asserts that rather the complaint psalms can help us learn how to think about the humanity of God and become proper pray-ers ourselves.

1

Introduction

Some years ago one of Calvin’s writings on prayer found its way into the syllabus for a course I taught on the book of Psalms. It was this work that provided the point of departure for the present study. What first drew my attention was his keen sense that many of the prayers of the Psalter do not follow his own guidelines for due and proper prayer, and his directness in saying so. This is a notably candid assessment, far less common in the interpretive tradition than it ought to be. In spite of all he was able to say in praise of the Psalter, when all was said and done he could not commend it to his readers as a book of model prayers they needed only to imitate. When he praised it he had other uses in mind, as we shall see. There is no doubt either that his judgment was correct; taken as a group, the prayer psalms1 do not conform to his own convictions about the proprieties to be observed in prayer.

I have come to the conclusion that the piety implicit in the prayer psalms and the piety Calvin himself endorsed and espoused differ significantly. They embody fundamentally different perceptions of prayer, what it is, why one engages in it, what one hopes to achieve by it. From what I have said thus far it may appear that this was also his view. It was not. The purpose of this study is to learn why it was not and to trace some of the more important consequences.

Calvin did not work in splendid isolation, to be sure. He was a figure of his time, his approach was shaped by the interests and conflicts of the period, and he was of course building upon the work of others. He was drawing upon the rich traditions of the ancient and medieval Church, and the work of other reformers who were his predecessors and contemporaries, Luther above all. In the case of the book of Psalms he was making use of many sources, and may well have been influenced by the commentary of Martin Bucer of Strassburg in particular.2 He was well read in Augustine, whom he greatly revered, and the introspective character of Augustine’s writings doubtless encouraged him in a reading of the Psalms in the same mode, even though the fourth-century bishop had no comparable interest in the Psalter’s historical setting and Calvin is frequently critical of his exegetical judgment.3 In view of recent studies that have shown how extensively scholars of this period drew upon their predecessors in the late Medieval period as well as each other, it cannot simply be assumed that he was solely responsible even for those insights that most shaped his understanding of Psalter piety.

For the purposes of the present study we shall focus our attention upon Calvin and his own historical setting, leaving aside the matter of antecedents and forerunners. The clarity of his thought makes it relatively easy to see what led him to take the stance he did and, more important, how he managed to work it out and justify it. There is at least a hint, as we shall see, that he did not do this all at once, that there was something about the Psalms he had to ponder for some time before he was willing to commit himself in writing. But at least by the time he published his commentary on the Psalms he had found a way to disapprove much that the psalmists say in their prayers and yet approve the piety to which they were ultimately committed. He regarded the piety that lay behind the Psalms as due and proper and, in all essential respects, compatible with his own. In the end it was no doubt precisely because he was so certain he recognized and approved their piety that he could so confidently fault them for their lapses, shortcomings and excesses, while identifying personally with their faith and their failings.

I shall take the Psalms as Calvin himself read them, and ask how he proceeded from that point to an understanding of their piety. Citations of the biblical text, for example, will follow his translation and stand for the most part without comment. It goes without saying that his judgments about text, translation, authorship and historical setting do not always conform to those of contemporary biblical scholarship, but it serves my purpose best to allow him his own perspective on these matters. His understanding of the piety of the prayer psalms does not hinge upon matters of this sort, and I suspect he would have held to this understanding even if he had known of, and accepted, the latest historical-critical judgments about them. That there are well-known scholars trained in the historical-critical method who espouse a similar understanding today shows well enough that it can be done.

1. By “prayer psalms” I refer to those biblical scholars classify as Klagelieder (in English current usage favors “complaint psalms” rather than “laments”; my own preference would be “plaint psalms”). There are more psalms of this type in the Psalter than of any other. They share many conventional elements; among those that are almost always present are plaint and petition.

2. On Bucer’s prolix but widely-read commentary see Hobbs (1984). Calvin refers to the commentaries of Bucer and Musculus in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, 1557; Bucer’s was published under his own name in 1554 (the first edition, under the pseudonym Aretius Felinus, in 1529), Musculus’ in 1551; see Parker’s comment in Calvin 1965: 11, 387 nn. 2, 3. By 1557 many such works had been published; the list of books on the Psalter provided by Hobbs (1990: 223–25) includes Latin works by nineteen authors published 1508–1546.

3. For example, “All this may be plausible, and, in its own place, useful, but [it] proceeds upon a complete misapprehension of the meaning of the passage” (Com. Ps. 58:1). Citations from the Psalms commentary, including Calvin’s translations of the biblical text, are taken from the James Anderson edition for the Calvin Translation Society (1845–49).

2

Discerning a Savor of Intemperance

Calvin’s Disquiet with David

Calvin is speaking of prayer in his The Institutes of the Christian Religion when he writes that “No one has ever carried this out with the uprightness that was due; for, not to mention the rank and file, how many complaints of David savor of intemperance!” (Inst. 3.20.16).4 With these words he introduces an assessment of the psalms that tells us a great deal about his own understanding of their piety. To be sure, the premise that not even the prayers of biblical saints are wholly satisfactory follows from his basic theological stance. He uses David to clinch the argument precisely because he greatly admires “that most illustrious prince and prophet” and ranks him above all other psalmists. But there is a certain sense of amazement here that this “savor of intemperance” should be so prevalent and so obvious, and an implication that the reader must surely have felt this too.

“Not that he would either deliberately expostulate with God or clamor against his judgments,” Calvin continues, “but that, fainting with weakness, he finds no other solace better than to cast his own sorrows into the bosom of God.” He means to put the emphasis here upon David’s good intention and the mitigating circumstances; in such cases God is forgiving, and this is the point he has been aiming at all along. “God tolerates even our stammering and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us; as indeed without this mercy there would be no freedom to pray.”

At the same time Calvin’s own disquiet comes through clearly enough. He must feel that David did sometimes “expostulate with God” and “clamor against his judgments” or he would not think it an adequate defense to say that David would not do either “deliberately.” The sentence that follows has the same double edge. “But although David intended to submit completely to God’s will, and prayed with no less patience than zeal to obtain his request, yet there come forth—sometimes, rather, boil up—turbulent emotions, quite out of harmony with the first rule we laid down.”

A Work in Revision

As Calvin writes this he is nearing fifty and his health is deteriorating. Perhaps sensing that his time is short—he would die before he reached fifty-five—he has set himself to produce a new and final edition of his major work, adding here one of several wholly new sections to the chapter on prayer. He had been only twenty-six, and had not yet laid eyes on Geneva, when the first, much smaller edition was published as “an almost complete summary of piety” (so the 1536 title page).5 At that time prayer was already the topic of one of the book’s six chapters, so he has been thinking and writing about this for half his life.

The chapter had been revised and expanded soon after for the second edition of the Institutes, published in 1539, but it had hardly been touched since.6 He is now thoroughly reworking it; by the time it is published in 1559 much of the text will be revised and more than a third will be entirely new.7 What is surprising—and intriguing—is that the new text will triple the number of references to the Psalter.8 It will also introduce general observations on the book, most of the references to David by name, and all of the critical remarks about the prayers of the psalmists.

One reason for this must certainly be that he had just recently published (in July 1557) a commentary on the book of Psalms, the fruit of some five years of study and teaching,9 all of it undertaken since the last major revision of the Institutes. In fact, the Friday afternoon Congrégation, a study group conducted in French that the Genevan pastors were required to attend and to which others came also, had been working through the book under Calvin’s direction for several years and would continue to do so until August 1559, the very month the final edition of the Institutes was published.10 Evidently the book of Psalms had come to play an increasingly prominent part in his thinking about prayer, perhaps precisely because of the problems it posed for him.

The Rules for Framing Proper Prayer

When he writes that David’s complaints are “quite out of harmony with the first rule we laid down,” he is referring to the rules “for framing prayer duly and properly,” which he has just finished setting out in the first part of the chapter. To call them “rules” is perhaps a bit misleading; as François Wendel (1963: 254) remarks, “it is a question of the general attitude required of the faithful rather than of precise and clearly-distinguishable rules.” Nevertheless, Calvin clearly m...