Theology of John Calvin

Calvin has often been seen as little more than a systematizer of the more creative insights of Luther. He followed Luther on many points: on original sin, Scripture, the absolute dependence of human beings on divine grace, and justification by faith alone. But Calvin’s differences with Luther are of major significance, even though some were largely matters of emphasis. Calvin was thus perhaps more impressed than Luther by God’s transcendence and by his control over the world; Calvin emphasized God’s power and glory, whereas Luther often thought of God as the babe in the manger, here among human beings. Contrary to a general impression, Calvin’s understanding of predestination was virtually identical with Luther’s (and indeed is close to that of St. Thomas Aquinas), and, although Calvin may have stated it more emphatically, the issue itself is not of central importance to his theology. He considered it a great mystery, to be approached with fear and trembling and only in the context of faith. Seen in this way, predestination seemed to him a comforting doctrine; it meant that salvation would be taken care of by a loving and utterly reliable God.

But in major respects Calvin departed from Luther. In some ways Calvin was more radical. Though he agreed with Luther on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, he understood this in a completely spiritual sense. But most of his differences suggest that he was closer to the old church than was Luther, as in his ecclesiology, which recognized the institutional church in this world, as Luther did not, as the true church. He was also more traditional in his clericalism; his belief in the authority of clergy over laity was hardly consistent with Luther’s stress on the priesthood of all believers. He insisted, too, on the necessity of a holy life, at least as a sign of genuine election. Even more significant, especially for Calvinism as a historical force, was Calvin’s attitude toward the world. Luther had regarded this world and its institutions as incorrigible and was prepared to leave them to the Devil, a far more important figure in his spiritual universe than in Calvin’s. But for Calvin this world was created by God and still belonged to him. It was still potentially Christ’s kingdom, and every Christian was obligated to struggle to make it so in reality by bringing it under God’s law.

Spirituality

Calvin’s reservations about the capacities of the human mind and his insistence that Christians exert themselves to bring the world under the rule of Christ suggest that it is less instructive to approach his thought as a theology to be comprehended by the mind than as a set of principles for the Christian life—in short, as spirituality. His spirituality begins with the conviction that human beings do not so much “know” God as “experience” him indirectly, through his mighty acts and works in the world, as they experience but can hardly be said to know thunder, one of Calvin’s favourite metaphors for religious experience. Such experience of God gives them confidence in his power and stimulates them to praise and worship him.

At the same time that Calvin stressed God’s power, he also depicted God as a loving father. Indeed, although Calvinism is often considered one of the most patriarchal forms of Christianity, Calvin recognized that God is commonly experienced as a mother. He denounced those who represent God as dreadful; God for him is “mild, kind, gentle, and compassionate.” Human beings can never praise him properly, Calvin declared, “until he wins us by the sweetness of his goodness.” That God loves and cares for his human creatures was, for Calvin, what distinguished his doctrine of providence from that of the Stoics.

Calvin’s understanding of Christianity is thus in many ways gentler than has been commonly supposed. This is also shown in his understanding of original sin. Although he insisted on the “total depravity” of human nature after the Fall, he did not mean by this that there is nothing good left in human beings but rather that there is no agency within the personality left untouched by the Fall on which to depend for salvation. The intention of the doctrine is practical: to reinforce dependence on Christ and the free grace of God. In fact, unlike some of his followers, Calvin believed in the survival after the Fall, however weak, of the original marks of God’s image, in which human beings were created. “It is always necessary to come back to this,” he declared, “that God never created a man on whom he did not imprint his image.” At times, to be sure, Calvin’s denunciations of sin give a very different impression. But it should be kept in mind that as a humanist and a rhetorician Calvin was less concerned to be theologically precise than to impress his audience with the need to repent of its sins.

The problem posed by sin was, for Calvin, not that it had destroyed the spiritual potentialities of human beings but rather that human beings had lost their ability to use their potentialities. Through the Fall they had been alienated from God, who is the source of all power, energy, warmth, and vitality. Sin, on the contrary, had exposed the human race to death, the negation of God’s life-giving powers. Human beings thus experience the effects of sin as drowsiness when they should be alert, as apathy when they should feel concern, as sloth when they should be diligent, as coldness when they should be warm, as weakness when they need strength. Thus also, since the Devil, who seeks to drain human beings of their God-given spirituality, tries to lull them to sleep, God must employ various stratagems to awaken them. This helps to explain the troubles that afflict the elect: God threatens, chastises, and compels them to remember him by making their lives go badly.

The effect of sin also prevents human beings from reacting with appropriate wonder to the marvels of the world. The failure of spirituality is the primary obstacle to an affective knowledge that, unlike mere intellectual apprehension, can move the whole personality. Calvin attached particular importance to the way in which sin deadens the feelings, but spiritual knowledge renews the connection, broken by sin, between knowledge, feeling, and action. Thus God’s spirit, in all its manifestations, is the power of life. Calvin’s understanding of sin is closely related to his humanistic emphasis on activity.

As his emphasis on sanctification for the individual believer and on reconquering the world for Christ implies, Calvin’s spirituality also included a strong sense of history, which he perceived as a process in which God’s purposes are progressively realized. Therefore, the central elements of the Gospel—the Incarnation and Atonement, the grace available through them, the gift of faith by which human beings are enabled to accept this grace for themselves, and the sanctification that results—together describe objectively how human beings are enabled, step by step, to recover their original relationship with God and regain the energy coming from it. Calvin described this as a “quickening” that, in effect, brings the believer back from death to life and makes possible the most strenuous exertion in God’s service.

Calvin exploited two traditional metaphors for the life of a Christian. Living in an unusually militant age, he drew on the familiar idea of the believer’s life as a ceaseless, quasi-military struggle against the powers of evil both within the self and in the world. The Christian, in this conception, must struggle against his own wicked impulses, against the majority of the human race on behalf of the Gospel, and ultimately against the Devil. Paradoxically, however, Christian warfare consists less in inflicting wounds on others than in suffering the effects of sin patiently, that is, by bearing the cross. In Calvin’s thought the metaphor for the Christian life as conflict thus takes on the added meaning of acquiescence in suffering. The disasters that afflict human existence, though punishments for the wicked, are an education for the believer; they strengthen faith, develop humility, purge wickedness, and compel him to keep alert and look to God for help.

The second traditional metaphor for the Christian life employed by Calvin, that of a journey or pilgrimage—i.e., of movement toward a goal—equally implied activity. “Our life is like a journey,” Calvin asserted, yet “it is not God’s will that we should march along casually as we please, but he sets the goal before us, and also directs us on the right way to it.” This way is also a struggle because no one moves easily forward and most are so weak that, “wavering and limping and even creeping along the ground, they move at a feeble pace.” Yet with God’s help everyone can daily make some advance, however slight. Notable in this conception is a single-mindedness often associated with Calvinism: Christians must look straight ahead to the goal and be distracted by nothing, looking neither to the right nor left. Calvin allows them to love the good things in this life but only within limits.

Thus the Christian life is a strenuous progress in holiness, which, through the constant effort of the individual to make the whole world obedient to God, will also be reflected in the progressive sanctification of the world. These processes, however, will never be completed in this life. For Calvin even the most developed Christian in this world is like an adolescent, yearning to grow into, though still far from, the full stature of Christ. But, Calvin assured his followers, “each day in some degree our purity will increase and our corruption be cleansed as long as we live in the world,” and “the more we increase in knowledge, the more should we increase in love.” Meanwhile the faithful experience a vision, always more clear, of “God’s face, peaceful and calm and gracious toward us.” So the spiritual life, for Calvin as for many before him, culminates in the vision of God.

Legacy

Calvin’s influence has persisted not only in the Reformed churches of France, Germany, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Hungary but also in the Church of England, where Calvin was long at least as highly regarded as among those Puritans who separated from the Anglican establishment. The latter organized their own churches, Presbyterian or Congregational, which brought Calvinism to North America. Even today these churches, along with the originally German Evangelical and Reformed Church, recall Calvin as their founding father. Eventually Calvinist theology was also widely accepted by major groups of Baptists; and even Unitarianism, which broke away from the Calvinist churches of New England in the 18th century, reflected the more rational impulses in Calvin’s theology. More recently Protestant interest in the social implications of the Gospel and Protestant neo-orthodoxy, as represented by Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr, reflects the continuing influence of John Calvin.

Calvin’s larger influence over the development of modern Western civilization has been variously assessed. The controversial “Weber thesis” attributed the rise of modern capitalism largely to Puritanism, but neither Max Weber, in his famous essay of 1904, “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus” (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), nor the great economic historian Richard Henry Tawney, in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), implicated Calvin himself in this development. Much the same thing can be said about efforts to link Calvinism to the rise of modern science; although Puritans were prominent in the scientific movement of 17th-century England, Calvin himself was indifferent to the science of his own day. A somewhat better case can be made for Calvin’s influence on political theory. His own political instincts were highly conservative, and he preached the submission of private persons to all legitimate authority. But, like Italian humanists, he personally preferred a republic to a monarchy. In confronting the problem posed by rulers who actively opposed the spread of the Gospel, he advanced a theory of resistance, kept alive by his followers, according to which lesser magistrates might legitimately rebel against kings. Unlike most of his contemporaries, furthermore, Calvin included among the proper responsibilities of states not only the maintenance of public order but also a positive concern for the general welfare of society.

Calvinism has a place, therefore, in the development of liberal political thought. Calvin’s major and most durable influence, nevertheless, has been religious. From his time to the present Calvinism has meant a peculiar seriousness about Christianity and its ethical implications.