John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography 9781400880508

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Li ves o f Gr e at R eli gi ous B o oks

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion

Lives of Great Religious Bo oks The Dead Sea Scrolls, John J. Collins The Bhagavad Gita, Richard H. Davis John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Bruce Gordon The Book of Mormon, Paul C. Gutjahr The Book of Genesis, Ronald Hendel The Book of Common Prayer, Alan Jacobs The Book of Job, Mark Larrimore The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Donald S. Lopez, Jr. C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, George M. Marsden Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Martin E. Marty Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, Bernard McGinn The I Ching, Richard J. Smith The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, David Gordon White Augustine’s Confessions, Garry Wills Forthcoming The Book of Exodus, Joel Baden The Book of Revelation, Timothy Beal Confucius’s Analects, Annping Chin and Jonathan D. Spence The Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, Carlos Eire Josephus’s The Jewish War, Martin Goodman The Koran in English, Bruce Lawrence The Lotus Sutra, Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joseph Luzzi The Greatest Translations of All Time: The Septuagint and the Vulgate, Jack Miles The Passover Haggadah, Vanessa Ochs The Song of Songs, Ilana Pardes The Daode Jing, James Robson Rumi’s Masnavi, Omid Safi The Talmud, Barry Wimpfheimer

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion A B i o gr a ph y

Bruce Gordon

P R I N C ETO N U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Sadao Watanabe, Flight to Egypt, hand-colored kappazuri stencil print on momigami wrinkled paper, 1987 All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gordon, Bruce, 1962– author. Title: John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian religion : a biography / Bruce Gordon. Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University, 2016. | Series: Lives of great religious books | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015048197 | ISBN 9780691152127 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Calvin, Jean, 1509–1564. Institutio Christianae religionis. Classification: LCC BX9420.I69 G67 2016 | DDC 230/.42—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048197 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Sebastian Moser, my Swiss godson Calvin may not be as much fun as driving a tractor, but he’s close

With what clear manifestations his might draws us to contemplate him! —Institutes 1.5.6

contents

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xvii

Note on the Translation Used

xix

Introduction Remembering a Man and His Book 1 Chapter 1 A Book Emerges 13 Chapter 2 1559: The Year of the Book 35 Chapter 3 The Inheritors 48 Chapter 4 Enlightenment Ambivalence 68 Chapter 5 Fashioning a Reformer 89 Chapter 6 America’s Calvins 110 Chapter 7 “A Very Calvinist Professor” and His Dutch Friends 122 Chapter 8 Titans: Barth and Brunner 133 Chapter 9 Prophet of Modernity—Prince of Tyrants 148 Chapter 10 Oppression and Liberation: South Africa 166 Chapter 11 Change and Dissent: China 183 Chapter 12 Contemporary Voices 198

Afterword 219 Appendix 1 Burning a Man and His Books: Michael Servetus and John Calvin 223 Appendix 2 Calvin’s Editions of Institutes of the Christian Religion 227 Notes 229 Index 255

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preface

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that this book is none of the following: a theology of John Calvin, a history of Calvinism, or an overview of scholarship on the Frenchman and his most famous theological creation. A short book of this sort could never hope to address such enormously complex topics, and I am the wrong person for all three. My goal is rather different, though equally quixotic. I intend to take the reader on a journey from the desk of the young John Calvin in Basel in 1536 to our world of social media religion by following the lives of one of the great books of the European Reformation, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. My investigation makes no pretense of exhaustive coverage, and the narrative is necessarily selective, privileging certain characters and events, yet mindful of omissions and silences. I wish to introduce readers to Calvin’s Institutes as an account of Reformation thought penned by a luminary of the Northern Renaissance. The Institutes was never a dusty reference volume confined to the scholar’s desk; a passionate author conceived it for flesh-and-blood Christians, and it was written for laity who hungered for knowledge of salvation and

for young men training to serve as pastors in the emerging churches in a France where martyrdom was their likely fate. John Calvin wrote his book in Geneva, but it transcended that place to become a book for the church and for many churches spread across Europe. Calvin knew the faces of those for whom he wrote. They gathered in worship before his pulpit in Geneva, in the classroom, and on the streets of his adopted city. He spoke to the crowds of refugees that swelled the population of the city to the breaking point, stirring the enmity of locals, and he knew what it was like to be among the displaced and impoverished. At the same time, Calvin taught young men to be ministers of the Gospel, preparing clergy to instruct their flocks that God’s promises in Christ are certain, that there is assurance of true faith. Calvin wrote the Institutes in Latin and French, creating two distinct books. In French, as well as in the other vernacular languages into which the work was translated, the Genevan reformer reached readers, both men and women, drawn to his account of God and salvation. It has long been the fate of the Institutes to be classified as a book of “theology,” an extended argument over four books, a system to be cracked. Today, the Institutes continues to be gutted to provide a Reformation reading for university-level theology courses in which selections (usually passages on predestination) are read without the slightest awareness of their historical context.

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Calvin would have hated the designation of his Insti­ tutes as a book of academic theology. That was precisely what it was not. Above all, his creation was a structured exposition of the biblical account of divinity and humanity, of what Christians should know and how they should live. The opening words of the book set the tone for the whole. Calvin moved directly to how we know God and ourselves, to how we are in a relationship with a God who has reached out to a lost people. The Insti­ tutes is about relationships, principally God with us, but also us with our neighbors and ourselves. These relationships are inseparable in the sanctified life Calvin envisaged for women and men. Calvin walks us through the redemption and sanctification of life, not in some abstract argument but as Moses forging a path in the desert. The Institutes is a book to be lived. In the following, we will think a good deal about the reception of the Institutes in the centuries following the reformer’s death. The book was read in diverse contexts and through the lenses of intellectual and cultural forces of passing ages. Multiple, even contradictory, readings are the fate of all enduring books. Calvin could hardly have anticipated the worlds in which the Institutes would be studied, cited, and referenced (not the same thing), and much of our story will be about the ways in which both he and his book were appropriated to an extraordinary range of theological and ecclesiastical causes. Memory and the written word are familiar to all of us surrounded by shelves of books that both define our

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living space and remind us daily of volumes read and unread, despite our best intentions. Our books point to our past and present. Various factors determine our relationship to those books: how we choose to arrange them, and which ones we make visible to our eye and the eyes of others. Books we choose to forget are left in boxes or given away. We make choices about our books that tell a story about each one of us, even if we opt to pile or shelve them in a state of chaos. Many books are of value to us because they were received as gifts, were inherited, or were obtained as prizes. In each case our book memories are shaped by recollections of the people and events involved in the procurement of a volume, what we have read of it, what we hoped we would learn, and what we unexpectedly discovered. Books return us briefly to what was going on in our lives when they entered our world. Occasionally, we find as a bookmark a letter from a family member or a forgotten friend. Our marginal notes reveal how much or little we understood of the author’s intentions. Such seemingly random reflections on our relationship to books are wholly germane to our story of Calvin. The Institutes never disappeared over the past five hundred years, though it often sat on shelves for long periods of time. Even as a book neglected, it continued to occupy the mental and spiritual space of the age. When cited, referred to, or read, whether from deep reading or as a talismanic reference, Calvin’s book appeared in the selective memories of individuals

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and cultures. It was placed in a variety of narratives drawn from historical and theological memories essential to the formation of contemporary identities. In nineteenth-century France, Calvin represented Protestant clericalism and a hated minority, while in the next century he was a voice in the struggle against apartheid and spoke to an aspirational middle class in China. Labile, the term psychiatrists apply to unstable moods, can be applied also to Calvin’s Institutes, which has never had a sole proprietor and could represent both the aspirations and nightmares of different folks. Our story is of Calvin read and unread, of fulsome engagement and silences. How much did the Institutes shape the theological conversations of the eighteenth century? Very little, but to name Calvin and his book remained a provocative act, a statement of confessional identity. More often than not, references and citations formed cultural or theological markers to indicate that a person was positioning himself or herself within a certain understanding of a tradition. And the death of Michael Servetus played an enormous role in the reception of Calvin’s person and book, so much so that by the beginning of the twentieth century, the two men could not be separated, and both had to be turned into monuments. Servetus’s execution in 1553 remains an unresolved debate for Reformed Protestants that to this day colors the reception of the Institutes. (For an account of the Servetus affair, see appendix 1.) The Institutes and its author have inspired and horrified men and women from the 1530s until our day for

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Calvin’s book is immensely powerful. From Theodore Beza to Friedrich Schleiermacher, and from Karl Barth to Marilynne Robinson, the Institutes has engaged, enraged, and stimulated the minds and imaginations of the most thoughtful and creative men and women, who have wrestled with its ambitious and arresting opening consideration: the nature of true wisdom.

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Acknowledgments

Calvin had a high view of friendship. In the preparation of this book, I have been extremely fortunate to benefit from the wisdom, knowledge, and wit of many friends, to whom I wish to express my deep gratitude. Brad Abromaitis, Jamie Dunn, Bill Goettler, Ward Holder, Mark Letteney, Christopher Ocker, Fred Simmons, Nick Wilson, and Jonathan Yeager read parts of the manuscript at an early stage, and I benefited enormously from their insights, corrections, and recommendations. I wish to make particular mention of Randall Zachman for his generosity. In the final stages, Nate Anteil offered invaluable feedback and suggestions. I owe a great debt to Brad Holden, whose goodnatured yet iron-fisted editing and creative insights were invaluable. In spring 2014, I had the great pleasure of reading through the Institutes with a group of twenty-five students. Their contribution to the book is evident in the final chapter. I am humbled by all that I learned from them. I wish to thank in particular the instigators of that journey: Toni Alimi, Martha Brundage, Steven Harris, Justin Hawkins, and Andrew Schuman.

My good friends Carlos Eire and Michael Walker have taught me much about Calvin(ism), and I hope they will find in these pages something of the wisdom they shared. My fellow Winnipegger Fred Appel at Princeton University Press kindly invited me to contribute to his wonderful series and has been supportive throughout the process. I offer him heartfelt thanks. Much of this book was written while I was in Berlin with Rona and Charlotte. To be in a great city with your two favorite people (and Calvin), what inspiration, joy, and fun. Finally, I dedicate this book with love to my godson, Sebastian.

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Acknowledgments

Note on the Translation Used

Unless otherwise stated, the translation used is Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion in two volumes, edited by John T. McNeill, translated and indexed by Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).

Li ves o f Gr e at R eli gi ous B o oks

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion

Remembering a Man and His Book Introduction

In the 1559 letter to the reader that accompanied his last Latin edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin permitted himself a degree of satisfaction: For I believe I have so embraced the sum of religion in all its parts, and have arranged it in such an order, that if anyone rightly grasps it, it will not be difficult for him to determine what he ought especially to seek in Scripture, and to that end he ought to relate its contents.1

Calvin had labored for more than twenty years to find that “order,” an explanation of Christian doctrine that not only instructed readers in the faith but also moved their hearts and minds to accept the truth of the Gospel. Through those years of writing, revision, and additions, Calvin created one of the great books of his age. Posterity for Calvin and his book has been complicated in light of their curious, often strained relationship with the past four hundred and fifty years. Unflattering caricatures of the reformer endure in our day,

often with little reference to the Institutes, which is assumed to express Calvin’s repugnant vision of a tyrannical God. From the sixteenth century onward, numerous detractors have asserted that Calvin’s book is covered with the ashes of Michael Servetus, the Spanish heretic executed in Geneva in autumn 1553 following a trial in which Calvin played a central role.2 Servetus stalks the story of Calvin’s Institutes to this day. Equally, among those today who praise the Frenchman, even to the extent of calling themselves “Calvinists” or “New Calvinists,” familiarity with the contents of the Institutes is patchy, often mediated through figures such as Jonathan Edwards or leading modern church and scholarly interpreters such as John Piper, Richard Muller, and Mark Dever (all three very different). Calvin and his Institutes have been regarded as one and the same, in a symbiotic relationship, with the book, whether read or not, the manifestation of the man. Yet such assumptions rest uneasily on the foundations of history. Calvin was no one-book wonder, and he never saw himself as having a singular relationship to the Institutes despite the years devoted to the work. The Institutes belonged to a larger body of writing that included Calvin’s voluminous biblical commentaries, where, it could be argued, his heart truly lay. The Institutes and commentaries were to be read side by side. Both provided interpretation of God’s Word, but in different yet complementary ways. The commentaries followed the grain of the biblical text and

2

Introduction

explained the meaning of the words, while the Insti­ tutes offered instruction in doctrine found in scripture. Calvin’s letter to the reader reminds us of his compelling desire to interpret the Word of God. He did have an intimate relationship with one book, but that book was the Bible. Nevertheless, Calvin was immensely proud of the content of the Institutes and believed that its powerful arguments should determine his persona as a doctor of the church.3 He saw his work as a sum of doctrine for the Reformed churches across Europe, which he reached in both Latin and vernacular translations in increasing numbers. The Institutes grew over the years on account of Calvin’s reading and preaching, as the result of theological controversies and exigencies, and through the influence of colleagues and friends, notably Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon. Study and debate spurred Calvin in his search for a book that articulated the proper order of doctrine whereby the church would rightly teach scripture. The backwash of the Servetus execution in 1553, combined with the hostility of Lutherans, ensured Calvin and the Institutes a troubled legacy. To name “Calvin” and “Institutes” in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries was to voice assumptions and prejudices that often had little to do with either the historical figure or the content of his book. On the one hand, the book could mean the authentic Reformed tradition, as it did for Charles Hodge in Princeton of the nineteenth century or does for John Piper today. On

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3

the other, it could refer to a problematic bundle of doctrine and moral attitudes, such as we find in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about Calvinism in eighteenthcentury Rhode Island, The Minister’s Wooing. At times the pious devotion accorded the work proved insufficient. The Institutes was summoned to fight the battles of a new age. Reform-minded persons believed Calvin’s book to express something contemporary writings could not match. In disruptive moments of controversy, Calvin’s words in the Institutes burst through the mere symbolic qualities of the text. We will encounter, for example, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner in the 1920s and 1930s and Allan Boesak in the 1980s, crucial figures who lived in times of crises when what Calvin said shaped theological debates. Suddenly, how one reclaimed the Reformation and read Calvin was of the utmost importance. In America, Calvin’s influence was found in the religious disputes of the Civil War and the visceral debates between Mercersburg and Princeton Theological Seminary. The Frenchman was given voice for the twentieth century by the “lion of Princeton,” Benjamin B. Warfield, and his close friend Abraham Kuyper. The Institutes has been employed to justify and raze hierarchies of power. Like its author, the Institutes was forged in controversy and did not want for polemic. Its pages tell the stories of Calvin’s arguments with Lutherans, Anabaptists, Catholics, and the ever-present Servetus after 1553. It pulses with life, a mixture of elegant prose and pugnaciousness. Calvin’s work is not a

4

Introduction

book for complacent, bourgeois churches, tepid Christians, or indifferent secularists. Today it nurtures growing house churches struggling in China and rapidly expanding Reformed communities in Brazil. Regardless of whether its reader professes a faith, the Institutes challenges and encourages, informs and outrages; like tempered steel, it thrusts its message of redemption and reprobation into the soul. It demands change; it demands that its reader be changed. Calvin’s tale subverts summary, for each age found different ways of reading or ignoring the Genevan reformer. The pursuer of the Institutes’ biography stumbles over numerous rabbit holes, some deeper than others. Many prominent meetings or persons, such as the Synod of Dort (1617) or, later, Jonathan Edwards, make little or sparing mention of the Frenchman, leading us toward one set of conclusions. Then, suddenly, we learn that at the Westminster Assembly (1643–53) Calvin was among the figures most frequently cited, and that he was amply cited in the eighteenth century by the first black African to be ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church. Bean counting of references is evidently of limited value as we seek to measure the Insti­ tutes’ influence. In the following I have attempted to hold to certain principles. First, I consider, if briefly, references to the Institutes within the broader context of the author’s thought. Further, I bear in mind that in the centuries after his death, from the Netherlands to Milton’s England and Jonathan Edwards’s America, the Institutes

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5

belonged to the tradition of Reformed theology and sat in the library of any educated Protestant cleric. Calvin was part of a tradition, and neither in his day nor in the ensuing centuries until the nineteenth century was he treated as a solitary voice. Calvin and the Institutes belonged to a wider, protean body of literature that evolved with the passing decades.

Mixed Identities Distinctions make for a good start. Historians, theologians, and others who should know better frequently believe that equating John Calvin with “Calvinism,” the diverse movement that carries his name, is sufficient proof of the Genevan reformer’s enormous influence on Western, and now Eastern, culture. This casual assumption that the historical person and a diverse movement are pretty much interchangeable falters when, for example, we consider South Africa. The opponents of apartheid held that Calvin should be separated from what was sanctioned as “Calvinism,” which was appropriated as a racist creed. Collapsing the sixteenth-century reformer into the myriad movements that claimed his name, if little else, is common enough. However, as a reading of history, this interpretation both grossly overinflates and distorts a legacy. Yet we persist in our pursuit of Calvin, for what’s a movement without a face? Innumerable books and articles attempt to attract readers by putting Calvin in

6

Introduction

their titles only to discard the reformer in the text for some amorphous “Calvinism” with which he might be loosely associated. Urban myths abound. Didn’t Max Weber and R. H. Tawney demonstrate that Calvin was in favor of capitalism? Wasn’t Geneva the source of modern American democracy? Isn’t Calvin the patron saint of Puritan moralism and sexual repression? It would be convenient for many historians and journalists if these platitudes were accurate, but the truth is no, no, and no. The conflation of Calvin and Calvinism serves the purposes of supporters and detractors. The Genevan reformer has often been abducted by individuals and groups seeking to use his name for positions he could never have held, such as modern ideas of biblical inerrancy. This literary and doctrinal kidnapping took place while Calvin lived and continued unabated after his death, forcing us to ask, who was this man and what was the relationship between him and his successors? Our obsession with great figures, usually great men, seriously distorts our understanding of the Reformation by suggesting that Calvin and his Institutes of the Christian Religion dominated the age and that they pushed other reformers and their works into the shade. That view says more about us than about the sixteenth century, when Calvin lived and worked as part of a network of scholars and churchmen whose influence on him was decisive. Without Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, there would have been no John Calvin as we know him; without the partnership

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of his near contemporary Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, Calvin might well have been thrown out of Geneva a second time. Such contextual considerations should not lead us to undersell a great book. The beauty and vision of the Institutes are truly amazing, and so too is Calvin’s ability to speak down the ages from his Genevan pulpits to, for example, nineteenth-century Princeton, and now to the social media world of New Calvinism. To understand Calvin’s Institutes as a “great book,” we need to understand the remarkable way in which it captured the spirit of its age, continued to be read by succeeding generations, and then emerged as a defining text of a theological ecclesiastical tradition.

Origins What sort of person was the author of the Institutes?4 Historical myths offer us several options: a defender of the faith and great interpreter of the Bible, an advocate of theocracy in Reformation Geneva, or a murderer of an innocent, if deluded, doubter (Servetus). Calvin appears as the founder of democratic government and the epitome of intolerance, depending on one’s perspective. Such attributions are deeply complicated. In many Reformed churches today, the Frenchman is spoken of with great affection, even reverence, but the theology with which he is associated owes more to writers of the seventeenth century, more to the Synod

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Introduction

of Dort than to the pulpits of Geneva. Calvin never saw a tulip in his life. Liberal churches, in turn, often name Calvin as a “heritage” figure and perhaps use the occasional anodyne or unthreatening quotation from his works on Reformation Sunday, but ignore anything of substance. Outside churches of the Reformed tradition, the only acceptable “Calvin” in contemporary parlance is linked to money, patriotism, and a modern ethic of overwork. Apart from providing a vaguely religious basis for capitalism, however, Calvin is a metaphor for everything people dislike about Christianity, in particular its supposed intolerance and moralism. If Doctor Frankenstein were to create a Calvinist monster out of the enduring clichés, what would emerge from the laboratory? Probably a self-righteous, wealthy workaholic, who thinks everything is to be exploited for profit, and, driven by guilt, feels himself superior to others but cannot decide whether God loves or hates him. If required to make a decision about things divine or human, he would create a committee from which he would split. And it goes without saying that the monster would be humorless company. In a 1983 article for Vanity Fair titled “The Last Donahue Show,” Catholic writer Walker Percy ridiculed daytime television, its obsession with sex, and what such luridness says about a society addicted to the salacious.5 In Percy’s parody, toward the end of the show John Calvin appears from the green room with a Confederate general and third guest, who Donahue

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thinks is Harry Truman. Calvin is first identified as Moses and then as “reverend” until he says his name. Just before a bemused Donahue interviews the reformer, the program cuts to commercials for shampoo and dog food. Percy writes: But when the show returns, John Calvin, who does not understand commercial breaks, has jumped the gun and is mid sentence. Calvin (speaking in a thick French accent not unlike Charles Boyer’s):—of his redemptive sacrifice? What I have heard is licentious talk about deeds which are an abomination before God, meriting eternal damnation unless they repent and throw themselves on God’s mercy. Which they are predestined to do or not to do, so why bother to discuss it? Donahue (gravely): That’s pretty heavy, Reverend. Calvin: Heavy? Yes, it’s heavy.

Donahue challenges the reformer, saying everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and asks what is wrong with “two consenting adults expressing their sexual preference in the bedroom or, ah, under a bush.” An uncomprehending Calvin responds, “sexual preference?” and turns, puzzled, to his fellow guests and shrugs. In many respects, the Institutes and its author remain as foreign to modern society as to Percy’s bemused TV host. Yet it is that very otherness, those powerful convictions and refusal to compromise, that continue to draw new readers.

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The genuine excitement of many young people on reading Calvin contrasts sharply with mainstream traditions, ecclesiastical and secular, that have thoroughly domesticated his Institutes of the Christian Re­ ligion into yet another book on the shelf. Such banality strips the Institutes of its truly revolutionary message, that nothing in human existence, absolutely nothing, possesses a shred of authority or legitimacy apart from the will of God. The Institutes was not conceived to legitimate power structures. Calvin wrote to Francis I in 1536 to stop persecution, and he fought with the Genevan magistrates until his last breath, just as Nathan excoriated David the king. Calvin’s enemies had little difficulty identifying the implications of his writing, and the Institutes was even publicly burned in Switzerland, by his Protestants opponents. The Institutes is a thoroughly subversive work in need of liberation from the pallid articles and monographs that in their pedantry lose sight of the book’s breadth. Calvin understood exactly what he had written, and until his last days he hesitated to utter the conclusion he knew he had led others to draw: the ungodly and unrighteous rulers of the earth had everything to fear from the Gospel. Those who oppose God can expect his wrath, while those who hear his voice, show compassion, and seek justice will possess God forever. The message is uncompromising, but in times of persecution and exile, moral and political chaos, and personal tragedy—the very times in which the

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Institutes found its first readers—who derives comfort from equivocation? How individuals and communities responded to Calvin—with enthusiasm, indifference, or malignity— determined the reception of his Institutes. Such complex history is not a tale easily conveyed in a short, highly selective book, and no doubt Calvin would disapprove of the absence of his beloved luciditas in what follows. I’ll save my apologies for any future encounter. For my part, I am content to render one service, and that is to dissuade readers that the following chapters are about a dreary theological treatise by a bearded killjoy. The Institutes is an extended hymn of praise by an exiled Frenchman to a saving God he believed never abandoned the faithful. It was deeply personal. Faith, Calvin writes, is to know that God is Father.

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A Book Emerges Chapter 1 I have given a summary of religion in all its parts. —John Calvin

The young John Calvin was surprised by the positive reception accorded his Institutes in 1536. In his letter to the reader written for the 1559 Latin edition, the Frenchman reflected on what had happened almost twenty-five years earlier, recalling that he had not “the least expectation of the success which God, in his boundless goodness, has been pleased to give it.”1 It was, however, the last time he permitted his book the unexpected. Over the years following its initial appearance, he revised and reworked his summary of Christian doctrine by adding material, repositioning arguments, and refining language. With each edition, Calvin imposed himself more forcefully on his readers, establishing his authorial voice as a man chosen by God to interpret the whole of scripture to the confused and perplexed, but willing. Calvin never doubted he possessed a singular calling, that he was a David, Isaiah, or Paul to his age. He regarded Martin Luther as an apostle, while he was a pastor and teacher.2 Despite suggestions to the contrary,

Calvin never called himself a prophet. His self-belief, however, was evident as he spoke from the pulpit, sat at sessions of the Consistory in Geneva, and appeared before the magistrates of the city, many of whom detested him. An unbowed sense of purpose flowed from the printing press in countless editions of treatises and commentaries, and, naturally, from his beloved Insti­ tutes of the Christian Religion. A tireless worker, Calvin permitted himself tenminute breaks to walk around the room and then returned to his labors.3 In his later years, as he grew ever frailer he dictated many of his works from his bed, yet his zeal for a punishing regime of study, reading, and writing never diminished. He produced almost a hundred titles. His discipline was astonishing. After early morning prayers, books were brought to him in bed. By his own account, he could not leave a piece of work alone, a tendency evident in the revisions to the Insti­ tutes. He believed that every minute God had given was to be used fruitfully.

The Book The Geneva monument completed in 1917 has Calvin stepping out before his contemporaries like a Reformation Diana Ross in front of the Supremes. His preeminence is unchallenged. Out of the vast amount of literature written in the sixteenth century, Calvin’s In­ stitutes remains one of the few identifiable works, even

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among those who revile both author and book. Why? In short, what Calvin wrote was powerful, persuasive, and readable. Like a small number of books in any age, the Institutes perfectly identified and addressed the needs of the time. It spoke with the voice of certainty in a crumbling world. Our sense of what has survived from a particular period reveals not only our limitations and prejudices but also the distinctive and even peculiar qualities of that past age. Those with even a passing acquaintance with medieval history and theology can likely name Saint Anselm’s Why God Became Man, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, or Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, even if they have never read them. Curiously, Protestant reformers, despite the backing of Gutenberg’s printing press, produced few classics whose titles roll off the tongue. The Ninety-Five Theses were crucially important, but a terrible read. One could make a case for the notoriety of Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church or his Freedom of a Christian from 1520; however, for a readership beyond Lutherans and theologians, it’s a stretch.4 The point is not that the writers of the Reformation were of inferior quality. Quite the opposite. Following the model of Erasmus, and as part of the revival of Cicero, sixteenth-century authors wrote profoundly beautiful works of religion in elegant, economical prose. The vernacular emerged in poetry, Bible translation, and drama; we need think only of Rabelais,

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Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Calvin was not alone as an accomplished author. So where, then, are the great works of the Reformation? The absence of identifiable best sellers in the sixteenth century owes much to the very nature of the Reformation. The core teaching of sola scriptura put biblical interpretation at the heart of the movement; the creation of new church orders required pedagogical and pastoral writings; and the poisonous polemic of the age demanded cut and thrust rather than contemplative classics.5 Calvin’s Institutes was by no means the only comprehensive summary of doctrine, but in style and conception it was distinctive, both eloquent and accessible. As a literary voice on doctrine, Calvin was alone. Calvin’s Institutes emerged in a perfect storm. His passionate, lucid account of the Christian life found a broad clerical and lay audience among the emerging Reformed churches. But his work made its way to those readers as a result of Calvin’s ready access to leading printers and book distributors. Latin was certainly an international language, but the Institutes was soon also available in all the principal European languages. A shrewd businessman, Calvin understood the interplay of learning, piety, and marketing. The Institutes is best known through translations of the 1559 Latin edition, which has come to be regarded as the version of the book, a position, whether informed or not, that largely disregards the editions of the previous twenty years. True, most of Calvin’s work on the earlier editions is inaccessible to those without

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Chapter 1

Latin or sixteenth-century French, making the English translations of the 1536, 1541, and 1559 Latin and French editions most welcome. But a yawning gap remains, because the Institutes was not one book but a project that evolved over twenty years. The earlier volumes of the book are not to be dismissed because they were overtaken. They represent distinct phases in the evolution of Calvin’s thought, a development that ended only with his death. Calvin’s revisions did not overthrow his past. Each edition belongs to and expresses the historical moment in which it was created. One can through successive instantiations of the Institutes map Calvin’s life and work, as well as his doctrinal thought and his anxieties and cares. One hears the voices of his opponents as he heard them. Calvin’s life and thought were in a constant state of becoming. Calvin was becoming Calvin.

The Book in Context We do not diminish Calvin’s achievement in the Insti­ tutes by identifying its place within his wider project of interpreting the Word of God and providing a summary of the Catholic faith. In preaching and writing, his eye never drifted from scripture, and in the Consistory and other offices of church and state he saw himself applying the Word of God to the building of Christian community. Theology and preaching were to be nothing other than the interpretation and

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application of the Word of God, illumination through the Spirit of God’s revelation. Scripture revealed God and the manner in which men and women should live, leading them from the dullness of life that is their sinful state. Famously, in the first book of the Institutes, Calvin speaks of scripture as spectacles: Just as old and bleary-eyed men or those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly: so scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.6

In his zeal to interpret the Bible for the people, Calvin was not alone. He belonged to a community of churchmen whose passion for the Word was by no means inferior to his. Writing in the decades that spanned the 1530s through the 1560s, he belonged to a generation of reformers, notably including Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, who sought to draw together the theological advances of Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli in a rapidly changing world. These men, Calvin among them, believed the Word of God was the only basis for the unity of a broken church, which made the imperative to study, write, and preach the Gospel all the more pressing.

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As the Reformation moved from breakthrough to establishment and bitter internal quarrels, this generation refined, expanded, and furthered the thought of their forebears, attempting to express the faith of the Reformed churches in ordered compendia that could be used to instruct and build Christian polities. The genesis of the Institutes therefore was within a corpus of Reformed theological literature with which it was in conversation and by which it was heavily influenced. Calvin, however, did not create the book ex nihilo; models from the tradition were readily available. Already the name “Institutes” had been used by the early Christian father Lactantius (ca. 240–ca. 320) for a summary of Christian doctrine that opened with the words “We undertake, therefore, to discuss religion and divine things.” Calvin owed a deep debt to his friend Philip Melanchthon, whose Loci communes likewise traced the development of its author’s theology.7 Between 1521 and 1559, the Loci appeared in various revised editions in both Latin and German. Calvin’s 1539 Institutes was deeply shaped by Melanchthon’s Loci of four years earlier, and changes Melanchthon made through the 1540s were often followed by changes the Frenchman made. It has also been persuasively shown that the great work of medieval theological education, Lombard’s Sentences, left its mark on Calvin.8 Readers of the Institutes also soon encounter Calvin’s great admiration for Bernard of Clairvaux. Calvin was an exile who could speak to exiles as only a fellow sojourner could. He was a humanist

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writer who had found refuge in Basel while Erasmus still lived, a Frenchman who could address his countrymen and women in their language, not as a foreign German professor but as one who knew dialects and colloquialisms. He was a pastor who spent much of the week listening to the trivial disputes of the people before the Consistory. He knew exactly what Genevan men and women believed or did not believe, and what they had made of his sermons. Language, however, served a higher purpose. No other major religious book of the Reformation apart from Melanchthon’s Loci was so heavily revised, went through so many editions, and reached so many people. It was a work of a restless author who saw his life in terms of a journey to God, just as his spiritual and intellectual mentor Augustine famously expressed at the opening of his Confessions. “You stir man,” the African bishop wrote, “to take pleasure in you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in you.” With each step, guided by scripture and the Holy Spirit, Calvin found something more of the self-revealing divinity. That was the regenerate life of becoming more Christ-like, the hallmark of the Reformed journey. Contrary to long-standing reputation, Calvin’s God was inviting and hospitable, drawing the faithful to experience him in a relationship. God had surrounded his people with the wonders of creation, in which his craftsmanship, glory, and love would have been visible if only women and men had not fallen. Sin

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obscures reality, requiring the spectacles of faith, that metaphor we have just encountered, to restore vision. All that humans can know of God has been revealed in scripture, and, mired in the bog of sin, the lost have no other support to grasp. Calvin was an exile in Geneva and preached from its pulpits, but the Institutes carried his presence to distant lands in tongues he could not speak. The book taught people what they needed to know of true doctrine and how to read the Bible, and it exhorted them to lives of piety. Like a sermon, the Institutes was rhetorical, but not in our modern sense. Through argument and literary beauty, Calvin sought to move intellect and senses, the whole human person. He wanted not to persuade readers of a few principles or aphorisms, to achieve mere intellectual assent, but rather to bring about transformation to the life of Christ, a goal that would end in union with Christ. In the third book of the Institutes, the Christian life is presented as the imitation of Christ, a discipline requiring daily training of spirit, mind, and body. We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours. On the other hand, we are God’s; let us, therefore, live and die to him. (Romans 14:8)9

Particularly in the final two books of the 1559 edition, Calvin assumes a highly pastoral voice, concerned with how doctrine is manifested in the lives of the people.

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The Man But what of the author? Born on August 10, 1509, Jean Cauvin grew up in the shadow of the cathedral in Noyon, France, in neither affluence nor deprivation.10 His father had a respectable job and had high hopes for his bright son. As Calvin related in his autobiographical account written in the preface to his psalms commentary of 1557, his father intended him to study law in the hope of a lucrative career. Following a conversion experience to the Gospel, however, Calvin remained in Paris until forced to flee on account of the crackdown on evangelicals. Calvin left France in 1534, but he already seems to have abandoned his spiritual homeland, for he had begun to write Protestant works. He settled in Basel, where the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466– 1536) was spending his last years. There is no evidence that the two men met, but the influence of the Dutchman on the young Frenchman was pervasive. Calvin had already written a commentary on Seneca’s De cle­ mentia (1532), which had been a very limited success, but while in Basel, where he encountered the full presence of the Protestant Reformation, he started on theological works. Most notable was the first version of the Institutes, which immediately brought approbation and praise for an otherwise unknown young man. While returning to Basel in 1536 from a visit to France to attend to family matters, Calvin stopped in Geneva, where he encountered the fiery Guillaume

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Farel, who threatened and cajoled him into staying in the newly reformed city. Calvin had no pastoral experience, and the guidance of Farel proved problematic. After a series of confrontations, the two men were asked to leave the city and departed with their tails between their legs. It was a humiliation Calvin never forgot. After spending time in Strasbourg under the mentorship of Martin Bucer, Calvin returned to Geneva with a much better understanding of the church and its affairs. He had learned to be a pastor and had participated at the highest level of Reformation politics, attending colloquies held between Catholics and Protestants. He had met Philip Melanchthon and had been commended by Martin Luther, whom Calvin would continue to idolize. He did not speak German (always French or Latin), but he had come to know the leading figures of the age. Further, by the time he returned to Geneva in 1541, he had revised the Institutes (1539) and written a commentary on Romans (1540); his work on Romans profoundly influenced the new form of the Institutes. He was now an author, churchman, pastor, and teacher. With the exception of some arduous and lengthy journeys, he would remain in Geneva until his death in 1564.

Genesis of the Book The Institutes first saw light in 1536 as a Latin text printed in Basel by the reputable Thomas Platter.11 Calvin’s dedicatory letter to the French king, Francis I,

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which continued to be printed in editions of the Insti­ tutes long after the king was dead, offers clues to his purpose. He was fully aware that he was a complete unknown and not yet a member of the humanist republic of letters he aspired to join, so he addressed the French king as a supplicant. His book, Calvin wrote, was “solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped into true godliness (pietas).” Calvin’s dedication sought to bring to the king’s attention two urgent concerns he believed had arisen from defamatory accusations against supporters of the Gospel in France. First, countering charges of heresy leveled at the evangelicals, Calvin argued that the Christian faith that declared the authority of scripture was no aberration but the profession of the apostolic, Catholic Church. Second, the evangelicals who declared the verities of grace, scripture, and faith alone should not be tarred with the brush of sedition rightly applied to Anabaptists polluting the kingdom. Calvin pleaded with the king not to believe those who maligned his fellow French evangelicals as a threat to the monarchy and the order of the kingdom. Indeed, our adversaries cry out that we falsely make the Word of God our pretext, and wickedly corrupt it. By reading our confession you can judge according to your prudence not only how malicious a calumny but what an utter effrontery this is.12

Francis, he assured, had no reason to fear those who preached the Gospel; they were loyal Frenchmen. 24

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The 1536 Institutes opens with words with which the book would forever be associated: “the whole of sacred doctrine consists of two parts, knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Although a great deal would be polished and much would be added, we see in the 1536 Institutes many of Calvin’s distinctive theological positions. His principal source, long recognized, was Luther’s Catechism of 1529, a relationship evident in the order of subjects: the law, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper).13 Following these traditional topics, Calvin turned to the five other “sacraments,” which he roundly rejected, the freedom of a Christian, and spiritual and temporal authority. The young Frenchman revealed a genius for crystalline summaries of the faith: For what is the sum total of the gospel except that we all, being slaves of sin and death, are released and freed through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus [Romans 3:24], but that they who do not acknowledge or receive Christ as their liberator and redeemer are condemned and sentenced to eternal chains [cf. Jude 6].14

A Book of Election A hallmark of Calvin’s Institutes was what he had to say about how God sealed the fates of all men and women.15 Calvin’s doctrines of predestination, providence, and union with Christ emerged with clarity in A Book Emerges

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the 1539 edition and were closely linked to the pastoral question of why some people believe and others do not. Calvin was no longer the clever young author but rather the working pastor of a congregation in Strasbourg, where he learned what it was like to deal with all manner of people who thought of themselves as Christians. Calvin revised his explication of doctrine with the faces of congregants before him. His commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, which appeared in 1540, together with the 1539 Institutes revealed a new depth of theological argument. Three years after the first edition, Calvin’s status as a teacher and writer was greatly enhanced, as was the breadth of his studying and reading. The Romans commentary reflected the reformer’s engagement with the New Testament letter he, along with Luther and Melanchthon, regarded as the doctrinal key to the whole Bible. From 1539, Calvin emphatically insisted that God predestined the elect to life and the reprobate to death (double predestination), a position that separated him from his friends Philip Melanchthon and Heinrich Bullinger, who objected to the second part of the equation.16 For Calvin, Christ’s death fully atoned for the sins of the world, but the benefits of that saving act are extended only to those whom God has chosen. His doctrine of election held that before the moment of creation God had determined who would be saved and who would be damned entirely apart from any reckoning of human merit. Calvin believed this dread doctrine to be the teaching of scripture, most clearly

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expressed in Romans, “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated” (Romans 9:13). Although it is misleading to regard predestination as the core theological argument of the Institutes, over the centuries it would remain the doctrine with which Calvin was most closely associated. Predestination, though forever tied to Calvin, was by no means unique to the Frenchman in the Reformation period. Together with the other reformers, Calvin taught an Augustinian theology of grace in which divine election played a central role. In his Institutes, Calvin followed Martin Luther in connecting faith with assurance. God’s doctrine of predestination or election eliminates the place for human merit, thus offering the assurance of salvation. Heaven is in the hands of God. Predestination enabled Calvin to reflect on the nature of Christ as the whole end of faith. Christ the chosen Son of God reveals the generosity of God the Father, who alone grants righteousness. Therefore, in turning to Christ, the people behold God’s love as in a mirror. The prominence that the doctrine of election would come to play in the Institutes speaks to us about Calvin’s understanding of predestination as a pastoral doctrine that brought the comfort of assurance to the people and explained the problem of evil by placing the wisdom of God beyond all human understanding. The doctrine of election was not the cornerstone of the Institutes, but it was central to Calvin’s vision of the life and witness of the church.

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French Editions When Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541, he had prepared the first-known French translation of his Insti­ tutes, titled Institution de la religion chrétienne.17 The appearance of Calvin’s heretical teaching in the language of the people immediately raised the ire of Catholic authorities in his native land, and a 1542 edict of the Paris parlement declared possession of the book a punishable offense. As ever, nothing boosts sales like censure, and Calvin’s French Institutes became wildly popular, quickly establishing him as the most widely read Protestant author in France. Colporteurs transported contraband pocket-sized editions into the kingdom for eager readers, leaving hapless Catholic officials to curse their impotence. Calvin was all the more dangerous because he wrote beautiful French that appealed to the educated. He addressed the French as one of them, using their idioms, turns of phrase, colloquialisms, and even humor. Geneva became the devil’s lair, immune to Parisian fulminations, and, worst of all, the prince of demons proved not to be some fat, beer-swilling German but a native son who had betrayed Catholic France.18 Translation is a weak term to describe the vernacular Institutes.19 The French editions were not simply knockoff versions of the Latin originals, though they followed Calvin’s revisions and expansions. It is more accurate to say he rewrote the Institutes in French, without changing doctrine but in a manner suitable

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for an entirely different audience. The sixteenth century brought about major changes for the languages of Europe. Increasingly stylistic forms took shape, and printing presses brought wide dissemination of ideas and literature for those who read no Latin. The French Institutes of 1541, 1545, 1551, and 1560 open to us the literary world of a master craftsman of vernacular prose and argument. Like Luther in German and later Galileo in Italian, Calvin expressed central ideas and shaped and developed his native tongue through prose works. In very different contexts, all three men used the vernacular to reach beyond the academy. The Institutes, in all its editions, was not merely Latin with French words.20 It was French literature in which syntax and vocabulary were reformed to express the conciseness of Calvin’s Latin. With short, elegant sentences, Calvin turned religious writing away from the prolix mess of early French Protestant authors, such as his friend Guillaume Farel, and made it an art. After one paragraph of Farel’s tortuous, mile-long sentences, the reader’s strained eyes turn with gratitude to Calvin’s graceful economy of language. From 1539, the Latin Institutes were written to educate pastors. The French Institutes (and later English, Dutch, German, and other versions) were intended for the hands of educated laymen and laywomen, to instruct them in doctrine and piety. Calvin excised material of little use to his lay readers, such as classical and patristic references familiar to the formally educated,

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but otherwise the wine was not watered down. Educated ministers, he was adamant, should understand Christian doctrine’s relationship with ancient Greek and Latin philosophy, history, and literature. Laypeople had other priorities, and the Frenchman shared the vision of Erasmus and Luther: the burgermeister, tanner, and mother should learn the faith.

A Book of the Reformation The Institutes became the book of Calvin’s Geneva. Its revisions embodied continuous study of scripture, a deepening grasp of the theological tradition (principally patristic and medieval scholastic writers), conflicts with Genevan authorities, pastoral experience, and doctrinal controversy. Never mere abstract “theology” (a term Calvin hated on account of its medieval resonance), the Institutes invites a range of descriptive metaphors: dynamic organism, topographical map of an evolving reform movement, and conversation between author and readers ended only by death in 1564. Calvin is often said to have eschewed self-reference. Indeed, for the Frenchman there is no equivalent of Luther’s Table Talk, although, as letters reveal, there was plenty of talk among friends and visitors over a glass of wine (possibly free refills) at the Calvin household. The reformer’s life can be found, though, in the way he chose to represent others, such as Moses, David, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Paul. The Institutes was no dry

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textbook, but a spiritual and intellectual autobiography; its evolution was the biography of its author’s mind. Calvin desired to be buried in an unmarked grave, a clear reference to the hidden burial of Moses on Mount Nebo. Like the great lawgiver of the Old Testament, Calvin saw himself as having left behind instruction for how the godly community was to live faithfully. By the mid-1550s, the popularity of the Institutes had made Calvin famous and Geneva’s printers wealthy.21 The Frenchman no longer needed sellers to promote his books. His reputation as an author and reformer was such that his name alone was sufficient to guarantee success. For all that the Genevan magistrates found their chief minister exasperating and troublesome, they fully understood Calvin’s market value. Single-handedly, he transformed the printing business in Geneva, turning it from a publishing backwater into a center of Protestant book production that instructed the growing evangelical communities in France. Other books were produced, but Calvin commanded the market, and he expected his printers to give their best work to the Institutes.22

Calvin as Author Like Erasmus, Calvin the author was extremely intentional and determined to control every aspect of his writing, both its content and its material production.23

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He knew exactly what he was doing and what he wanted to achieve. Humanist authorial conventions were sublimated to the prophetic calling: the Insti­ tutes, biblical commentaries, sermons, and tracts were all intended to persuade people of the truth. There was no aesthetic purpose apart from persuasion and pedagogy. Calvin deployed every means at his disposal to cultivate his authorial voice and establish his authority as the leading light of the Reformation.24 Calvin’s success as the author of the Institutes came not simply from his telling the people what to believe. Like all great authors of the period—one thinks of Erasmus, Luther, and, later, Teresa of Avila—Calvin engaged his readers and understood how to write for them. In Latin, the humanist word was accommoda­ tio.25 Just as God accommodated himself to humanity when he spoke—Calvin famously described God’s speaking as a nurse’s babbling (or lisping) to an infant—so must an author, and a preacher, accommodate his work to his readers. Whether in Latin or French, Calvin repeatedly stated that the revisions to his Institutes arose from the questions and concerns of his students and parishioners, suggesting that the voice of his audience is to be heard in the text. Calvin’s readers pushed him to provide better answers and more compelling accounts of God and creation, sin and redemption. Pulpit, lecture hall, council chamber, and writing desk were all minutes apart in the cramped, fetid urban space of Calvin’s Geneva. Proximity, however, was not only physical. In

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the Genevan world of the Institutes, words spoken about God and faith and words written about God and faith lived together. There were many critics. When Calvin died, Catholics and most Lutherans despised him. The Catholic Council of Trent regarded Calvin as the arch-heretic among Protestants. Among his fellow Reformed Christians, many hated his uncompromising doctrine of double predestination. For Calvin, that teaching was the message of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, but for his numerous opponents it was an appalling idea that made God the author of sin. Calvin’s God—they wrote, preached, and taught—was a capricious tyrant who created women and men in order to destroy them. That God, they claimed, was made in the image of one man, John Calvin. The Institutes may have been the most famous Protestant book of the Reformation, but it was also the most hated. The burning of Servetus was seen as a sign of the length to which Calvin would go to defend his spiteful God. The Institutes offered a world picture to those who suffered depredations and loss in God’s earthly kingdom, which was only partially realized and whose inhabitants awaited the fulfillment of God’s glory. Until that day, they had the assurance of faith presented by Calvin. The God of history, the God of the Israelites, he preached and wrote, was their God and was wholly dependable. Their God never broke the covenant made with Abraham, and he forgave transgressions repented. Women and men did not have to earn salvation, and

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although they had lost the certainty of purgatory and faced immediate judgment at the moment of death, the Institutes presented a message of hope. Not to itself did Calvin’s book point, but to Christ and his saving sacrifice, the sure promise of the Bible.

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1559: The Year of the Book Chapter 2

The 1559 Latin edition of the Institutes was written by a man who believed he was dying. Given the ghastly physical ailments Calvin suffered most of his adult life, imminent death was not unlikely. When he completed the preface to the Institutes in August 1559, he still had five years to live, during which he would observe the horrors of religious war in France, the fate he dreaded would befall his native land. Not only illness but also a sense of a labor unfinished drove Calvin’s desire to revise the work significantly. In 1559, the Institutes had the descriptive heading, “Now first arranged in four books and divided by definite headings in a very convenient manner so that it can almost be regarded as a new book.” In fact, Calvin had vastly expanded the work. Had he then changed his mind on key arguments? Not a bit. His purpose, explained in his letter to the reader, remained unchanged: he continued to present and explain the topics (loci) of scripture. His search had been to find the right order in which to treat those topics, and in

1559 he did so in four books on, respectively, creator, redeemer, Spirit, and church. He rearranged the order of many of the topics and greatly expanded his treatment, but in terms of content and argument virtually nothing was changed. Within the four-book structure, Calvin sought to follow the order of topics derived from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, explain the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, and meet the catechetical needs of the church. The best way to imagine the Institutes is as a series of topics drawn from Calvin’s work in interpreting the Bible. The flow was always from scripture to the book. The topics also arose from Calvin’s numerous doctrinal controversies with a range of opponents, from the heretic Michael Servetus to the Lutheran Andreas Osiander. The final order in which Calvin arranged the topics in 1559 across the four books of the Institutes was above all true to his mission to educate pastors, and the Institutes was shaped to provide the right order of teaching.1 Moreover, it has been my purpose in this labor to prepare and instruct candidates in sacred theology for the reading of the divine Word. . . . For I believe I have so embraced the sum of religion in all its parts, and have arranged it in such an order, that if anyone rightly grasps it, it will not be difficult for him to determine what he ought especially to seek in Scripture, and to what end he ought to relate its contents.2

From its opening page, the Institutes is a book about knowledge—knowledge of God, Christ, and self. But

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what did Calvin mean with a word seemingly so familiar to us? Our minds run to finite learning or cerebral discourse, but Calvin does not follow us there. “By knowledge of God,” he writes in book 1, I understand that by which we not only conceive that there is some God, but also apprehend what it is for our interest, and conducive to his glory, what, in short, it is befitting to know concerning him. For, properly speaking, we cannot say that God is known where there is no religion or piety.3

The last sentence contains three of the most important ideas in the Institutes: knowledge, religion, and piety. We stumble when applying to Calvin a modern sense of knowledge in which a finite body of information is obtained and retained. For Calvin, true knowledge is a continuous state of awakening from our dullness and becoming aware of who we are and who God is. Knowledge constantly moves forward as “an active thought process” made possible because God initiates a person’s recognition of his or her true self.4 When a person turns inward, he or she will come to see God. The verve of Calvin’s prose and choice of syntax and vocabulary in the opening chapter of book 1 richly capture the excitement and vivacity of the stirring of knowledge and the commencement of a lifelong journey to God and to knowledge of one’s self redeemed in Christ. That journey is the “religious life,” which is not a thing in itself but a disposition to live piously; that is, in accordance with the revealed Word of God. As Leland

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Grigoli has commented, for Calvin, “ignorance is a state while awareness is a continuous progression.”5 Calvin commences with twofold knowledge. He opens the first book with words first written in 1536: “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”6 Then, in the following chapter, he speaks again of knowledge. “First,” Calvin writes, “as much as in the fashioning of the universe as in general teaching of scripture the Lord shows himself to be simply the Creator. Then in the face of Christ he shows himself the Redeemer.” This, Calvin continues, is “the resulting twofold knowledge of God.”7 There is no binary relationship between the two forms of knowledge. The Institutes, in its ordered treatment of topics, is Calvin’s labor to explain knowledge. It is crucial to grasp what he meant. Knowledge of God is not God’s knowledge but what humans can know of him.8 It is what God has given to us to know through revelation. Human knowledge is limited; God’s knowledge is not. It reveals our sinfulness and errors; it exposes our cruelty, lack of wisdom, selfishness, and venality. Awareness of such faults causes those to whom God has granted his grace to look to him as the source of all goodness. We look to ourselves, then to God, and then back at ourselves, with the result that we recognize that only God can be our creator and judge.9 The suffering of humanity is one means by which God calls us out of our stupor. Otherwise, we would

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remain completely mired in ourselves. God alone has the agency to commence the human journey of knowledge. The human role for the most part is passive, yet women and men are not excused their sins. One cannot blame God for sin, a point on which Calvin was adamant, though he was frequently attacked by detractors who believed that his arguments inevitably led to God as the author of evil. Calvin repeatedly repudiated that charge, pounding his fist on desk and pulpit, declaring that humans alone are responsible for their fallen state. In a perverse version of true knowledge, human sinfulness is also not static. We are not simply stuck in the mud of our fallen state. Calvin argues that we even enjoy it, that we labor to remain where we are. Only God can liberate us from ourselves. We are called through the conscience, as Calvin makes clear at the opening of book 2. “The natural order,” he writes, was that the frame of the universe should be the school in which we were to learn piety, and from it pass over to the eternal life and perfect felicity. But after man’s rebellion . . . even if God wills his fatherly favor to us in many ways, yet we cannot by contemplating the universe infer that he is Father. Rather, conscience presses us within and shows in our sin just cause for his disowning us and not regarding or recognizing us as his sons.10

The conscience leads us to recognize that we have lived apart from God, finding even his mercy an unbearable burden.

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The door is opened to the principal subject of book 2, Christ the Mediator, who is “prophet, king, and priest.” In his priestly office, Christ died on the cross in order that death and sin be overcome. Distinctive of Calvin’s account of Christ is the participatory way he speaks of humans, who become priests and friends alongside the Son of God: “Christ plays the priestly role, not only to render the Father favorable and propitious towards us by an eternal law of reconciliation, but also to receive us as his companions in this great office.”11 Calvin looks to the revelation of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to explain knowledge of God and ourselves. In the Institutes, he sought to summarize this twofold knowledge on the basis of God’s selfrevelation in creation and redemption.12 Such is true wisdom. In book 1, we encounter knowledge of God as creator, while books 2–4 concern the redeemer. The treatment of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit marks the Trinitarian arrangement of the Institutes, which was by no means original to Calvin, but rather a longestablished tradition of framing theology that Calvin shared with his contemporary reformers.13 Book 3 opens with the Holy Spirit. Calvin writes of the first fruits of the Spirit as faith and repentance. The second fruits are justification and sanctification, which unite faith and good works in the right order, leading to the freedom of Christ, which ensures liberation from the law and faithful obedience to God’s commandments. Calvin then turns to prayer, the third

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fruit of the Holy Spirit, and finally to the doctrine of assurance through God’s predestination of the elect, which forms the fourth fruit. Here we find one of the most beautiful passages in the Institutes, Calvin’s treatment of the Christian life: I do not insist that the moral life of a Christian man breathe nothing but the very gospel, yet this ought to be desired, and we must strive toward it. . . . [In the Christian life] let us look toward our mark with sincere simplicity and aspire to our goal; not fondly flattering ourselves, nor excusing our own evil deeds, but with continuous effort striving toward this end: that we may surpass ourselves in goodness until we attain to goodness itself. It is this, indeed, which through the whole course of life we seek and follow.14

In the third book we gain a clear sense of Calvin’s understanding of our relationship to God, with whom we have union through Christ. Calvin is adamant that there is no mystical annihilation of the human person when we are united with God, for while Christ is our reconciliation we continue to live as human beings, redeemed yet sinful. All the faithful participate in Christ because they are engrafted onto him and live piously, which is to live wholly in response to God’s “favor.”15 Faith is entirely given by God and cannot be fabricated by humans. It is openness, receptivity to God’s Word: “We compare faith to an empty vessel, for unless we come empty and with our mouth of our soul open to seek Christ’s grace, we are not capable of

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receiving him.”16 The faithful hear Christ’s redemptive words. Yet God has determined from before the moment of creation who is to be saved and who is to be lost, all without regard to the merit of the individual. For Calvin the doctrine of predestination simply flowed from Romans, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Luther; he never saw himself as saying anything new. What proved most controversial was his insistence on double predestination. “In actual fact, the covenant of life is not preached equally to all men,” he writes in the third book, and among those to whom it is preached, it does not gain the same acceptance either constantly or in equal degree. In this diversity the wonderful depth of God’s judgment is made known. For there is no doubt that this variety also serves the decision of God’s eternal election.17

Calvin did not hesitate to concede the dreadful nature of salvation at the “pleasure of God,” who “spontaneously offered to some,” and not to others. Yet, as scripture, then, clearly shows . . . we say that God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those whom he long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, he would devote to destruction. We assert that, with respect to the elect, his plan was founded upon his freely given mercy, without regard

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to human worth: but by his just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible judgment he has barred the door to those whom he has given over to damnation. Now among the elect we regard the call as a testimony of election.18

Under this doctrine, which was received with widespread repugnance, even among his friends, as God chose the elect to heavenly bliss he also chose those who were to be damned. In other words, the damned had no chance. Following Huldrych Zwingli and others, Calvin understood predestination as repudiation of any form of human righteousness: salvation is in the hands of God alone. Human life is lived in conformity with the image of Christ in the face of God’s providence, by which God governs the world. For his opponents, though not for Calvin, the problem with this view is that it deprives humans of all agency, making them entirely passive and not responsible for their evil deeds. Worse, it makes God the author of sin, a charge Calvin angrily refuted with his signature argument about the divine will. For God’s will is, and rightly ought to be, the cause of all things that are. For if it has any cause, something must precede it, to which it is, as it were, bound: this is unlawful to imagine. For God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that what ever he wills, by the fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous. When, therefore, one asks why God has so done, we must reply: because he has willed it.19

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Closely associated with predestination, though distinct, was Calvin’s powerful belief in the providential nature of God. All things, good and bad, have been ordained to our benefit and must be accepted in gratitude and patience. We must bear with patience God’s displeasure toward us for what we have done. Such is the foundation of the Christian life so beautifully described in book 3, as put strikingly and concisely, in Calvin’s own words: But I do not so strictly demand evangelical perfection that I would not acknowledge as a Christian one who has not yet attained it. For thus all would be excluded from the church, since no one is found who is not far removed from it, while many have advanced a little toward it whom it would nevertheless be unjust to cast away.

Calvin asks what course should be pursued. The Christian life must involve the discipline of not picking and choosing from God’s Word, although adequate provision for human weakness should be made: For in the first place, God everywhere commends integrity as the chief part of worshipping him. By this word he means a sincere simplicity of mind, free from guile and feigning, the opposite of a double heart. It is as if it were said that the beginning of right living is spiritual, where the inner feeling of the mind is unfeignedly dedicated to God for the cultivation of holiness and righteousness.20

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Calvin writes of the substance of book 4 as “the external means or aids that God uses to bring us to Jesus Christ his son and keep us in Him” and discusses here the “Holy Catholic Church,” continuing with a treatment of the Holy Spirit. The doctrinal, historical, and practical discussion of the church sets out Calvin’s understanding of the presence of Christ and the sanctification of the Christian community. Calvin’s treatment of the church is seemingly paradoxical. The true church, following the doctrine of predestination, is the body of those elected to salvation before the creation of the world. Their number is small, Calvin always assumed, but could not be certain, often referring to one in a hundred.21 Calvin could not abide spiritual arrogance. It is not given for any one Christian to know the eternal state of another person. God’s doctrine of election should put women and men in a disposition of humility, looking to care for their neighbor rather than judge. A recent commentator has written that Calvin believed that God saves not his friends but his enemies. God saves sinners, Matthew Myer Boulton writes, “and for Calvin, . . . sin is no mere neglect of duty. It is a posture and way of life oriented against God, a way of mistrust, ingratitude, idolatry, disobedience, and impietas, comprised ‘partly by ignorance, by malice.’ ”22 And so to the paradox: the church in this world is therefore a mixed body of the elect and reprobate, as Augustine had taught, the wheat and the tares. It embraces the whole of the community. The church,

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according to Calvin, is a body at prayer, worship, and care for the poor. It is where the Word is preached and the people gather around the Lord’s Table, the supreme moment of unity when they are fed by the Body of Christ. Central to the life of the church was the maintenance of discipline, by which open sinners were punished and reconciled to keep the body healthy. How can we convey in a few words Calvin’s vision? The Institutes is about God: a God who reaches out to humanity, who reveals himself in creation and in the redemption of women and men, and who through his son, Jesus Christ, restores the relationship with his people destroyed by sin. The covenant God initiated is enduring, and as God accompanies his people in their pilgrimage through life, Calvin can encourage his readers: No one will travel so badly as not daily to make some degree of progress. This, therefore, let us never cease to do, that we may daily advance in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair because of the slender measure of success.23

The book that emerged from Stephanus’s press in 1559 conveyed in words the elegant forms of a Holbein portrait rather than the glorious chaos of a Bruegel village, yet the Institutes shared the Dutch painter’s unbridled joy in God and creation. However one responds to Calvin and his theology, the gravest misreadings arise from the belief that with the Insti­ tutes in hand one is holding a textbook. It is a book of

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doctrine, but doctrine is ultimately about God’s revelation, and the Institutes is primarily about a God whose goodness is beyond human knowledge and imagination yet who offers gifts freely. It is also an account of a God whose will is supreme and who demands utter fidelity. God need never be justified or defended. His very nature is goodness and justice. Calvin believed with every fiber of his being that God’s goodness is so pervasive it is spoken in our ears and stands before our eyes even when we are neither listening nor looking.

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The Inheritors Chapter 3 The holy scriptures excepted, this is one of the most profitable books for all students of Christian divinity. —Thomas Norton

The end was quiet. Theodore Beza, the anointed successor, arrived too late for the moment, but in printed words he later comforted friends and followers, telling them that Calvin had died in peace. The Elizabethan English translation captures the poignancy of that death: Behold as in an instant that very day the sonne did set, and the greatest light that was in the world for the building of the Church of God was taken into heaven. And we may well say that in our time by one only man it hath pleased God to teache us both to live and die well.1

No contemporary doubted that a man unlike any other had died, but on his eternal fate opinions were divided. Saint or demon? The debate would run for centuries. Beza was compelled to publish an apologetic vita of his mentor and friend as Calvin’s enemies turned the printing press against the dead reformer with a revenge both vicious and successful.2 The life of the Frenchman

written by Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec (d. 1584), once unceremoniously driven from Geneva for opposing the doctrine of double predestination, tarred Calvin with all manner of vice, including pederasty—a sin not generally considered one of Calvin’s failings. Nevertheless, dirt sells, and Bolsec’s bilious and lurid accounts found an audience significantly greater than Beza’s pious, didactic, and slightly dull biography. The burning of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus in 1553 secured Calvin his place as a monster of intolerance, described by one disillusioned student as the “Zeus of Lake Geneva,” hurling thunderbolts at any and all who dared oppose him. Was Calvin so dreadful? In 2009 media coverage of the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth obsessed over that question.3 “Was Calvin a Monster?” asked the Telegraph of London. That issue is highly relevant to the biography of the Institutes, for perceptions of Calvin’s character have always shaped attitudes toward his writing. From the moment the 1559 edition appeared until our time, the reputation of the man accused of putting Servetus to death in 1553 has cast a long shadow across the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

A Changing World John Calvin wrote the first edition of the Institutes in 1536, the year the great Dutch humanist Erasmus died in Basel. Calvin had come to Basel to live the life of a

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humanist author, to dwell with the venerable figures of Greece and Rome, even if, according to Calvin’s autobiographical account, God had other plans for the young Frenchman. Calvin had been educated in the best humanist and legal traditions and much admired Erasmus, the prince of the Northern Renaissance. Like many educated young men of his generation, Calvin sought to emulate Erasmus’s command of classical literature and his harmonization of the wisdom of antiquity with Christianity. Much of the beauty of the Institutes arises from Calvin’s consummate skill as an author in command of the literary styles of Cicero and Seneca.4 After 1564, the year of Calvin’s death, however, the intellectual world of the Protestant Reformation was changing, moving away from the humanist forms of writing that shaped the Institutes.5 Theology began to take a different form, but one that was in some respects already familiar. Protestants embraced the art of scholasticism, a theological method determined by the rigors of logic and academic debate. Luther and Calvin had roundly condemned the medieval scholastic authors for their hair-splitting logic chopping, but by the final decades of the sixteenth century, Protestants had taken a different path, in part in response to the adoption of the theology of Thomas Aquinas by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent. Scholasticism was an academic and theological method. The classic doctrines of the Protestant Reformation were altered not in terms of content but in the

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manner in which they were presented and debated.6 The humanism and legal training of the sixteenth century in which Calvin had been educated were still highly prized, and men of the following generations studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts and knew their classical authors. The mode and form of intellectual formulation and debate, however, had changed for a different world. Theses and disputations became the methods of teaching theology in the academies and universities of the Reformed churches from Geneva to St. Andrews in Scotland.7 For Calvin’s Institutes, the evolving intellectual climate had significant implications. Calvin had written his work to educate those preparing for the ministry of the church. The problem, however, was that in the decades following Calvin’s death students no longer received the form of education common in the Frenchman’s day. The scholastic curriculum, which emphasized precision of argumentation, replaced the more discursive elegance of Calvin’s humanist prose. In 1559, Calvin had greatly expanded the Institutes, creating a book that was well over a thousand pages long and not easily referenced—a daunting prospect for a young would-be pastor who had little familiarity with Calvin’s style. The response of Calvin’s inheritors was by no means to abandon the man and his book but rather to adapt them for the times. First, between 1559 and 1590, extensive work was undertaken to frame the Institutes with critical apparatuses to help the reader understand Calvin’s arguments and consult the final 1559 edition

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with greater ease. The erection of this scaffolding was a massive task that consumed dedicated scholars and churchmen. The second development saw the appearance of compendia and epitomes (summaries), such as those of Edmund Bunny (1540–1619) and William Delaune (ca. 1530–1611) in England.8 These efforts summarized Calvin’s Institutes in more manageably sized books that could be used by pressed pastors and frazzled students. The task of providing the Institutes with a textual apparatus was first taken up by Calvin’s friend and student Nicholas Colladon (1530–1586), who provided brief summaries to help readers who found Calvin’s argument not entirely clear or were in a hurry to read on a specific doctrinal topic. Following Colladon, the most important figure in the metamorphoses of the Institutes was the Englishman Bunny, who worked on a Latin edition. The result was printed in London in 1576 by the French Protestant and entrepreneur Thomas Vautrollier (d. 1587), with added chapter summaries and marginalia to augment the work of Colladon. Bunny later collected this material for a separate publication he called a Compendium, an octavo volume of 190 pages that was translated into English in 1579 and proved a great success at home and on the Continent, particularly in the Netherlands.9 Even more successful than Bunny’s Compendium was the 1583 Epitome of William Delaune (1530–1610), once more from the publishing house of Vautrollier in London. When Delaune was denied a license to practice medicine in London, he changed course to

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demonstrate an admirable range of skills in editing Calvin, and his Epitome was a publishing triumph, with multiple Latin editions followed by English and Dutch translations. Delaune’s summary of the Insti­ tutes (in twelve editions) became the face of Calvin’s work during the seventeenth century. Delaune described himself as an enthusiastic follower of Calvin, and his purpose in summarizing the Institutes echoed Bunny’s: that pastors might memorize key arguments, and that those locked in religious debate might have a helpful handbook. The dedication of the 1585 English edition to Richard Martin, a London alderman, opens: The Institution of Christian religion written by Iohn Calvin seemeth to me to challenge to iselfe by good right (right worshipful) that which being uttered by men most wise and of singular experience, is common almost in every mans mouth, that good things must be repeated againe and againe. For seing that in things necessarie and profitable the same things are spoken againe & againe: or things ten times repeated do please, neither is that spoken & repeated too oft, which is never sufficientlie learned, undoubtly all those which are studious of sound divinitie, doe acknowledge long ago that the commodities of this writing are diverse & manifold, not onlie to learne but also to teach: & not only to the sowing, watering & new digging, but also to gather in the fruit of the fild of the Church.

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The Epitome was a book of a book, a new form of the Institutes for use in the field. Calvin’s thought was turned into programmatic statements to provide not only a means of learning and retaining theology but also a debating tool. As an aid for those disputing with religious opponents, Delaune offered a list of the principal objections commonly raised by Calvin’s antagonists along with summaries of the reformer’s responses—a seventeenth-century version of “frequently asked questions.” Finally, one hundred “aphorisms,” or theses, provided pithy statements of doctrine that were subsequently printed in the authoritative 1590 edition of the Institutes. Aphorism 64, on predestination, reads: It [the Institutes] teaches that the efficient cause of predestination is the pure freedom of God which we must recognize with humility and thanksgiving; the material cause: Christ the beloved Son; the final cause: the glorification of God in this life as in the future life motivated by the certainty of salvation because we are for God.10

In the Reformed lands of Germany, Caspar Olevianus (1536–1587), court preacher in Heidelberg, taught the complete Institutes each year out of regard for Calvin’s theology. Olevianus regarded the Institutes as an essential part of the theological curriculum.11 With remarkable economy of language, he prepared an Epit­ ome to enable the faithful to recite the essential teachings of the Institutes as they might those of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563).12 In one sentence, Olevianus offered his readers Calvin’s book: 54

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Such is the arrangement of The Institutes, which may be thus summed up: Man being at first created upright, but afterwards being not partially but totally ruined, finds his entire salvation out of himself in Christ, to whom being united by the Holy Spirit freely given, without any foresight of future works, he thereby obtains a double blessing—viz. full imputation of righteousness, which goes along with us even to the grave, and the commencement of sanctification, which daily advances till at length it is perfected in the day of regeneration or resurrection of the body, and this, in order that the great mercy of God may be celebrated in the heavenly mansions throughout eternity.13

The beauty of the language and the praise of Calvin’s work indicate Olevianus’s esteem, but the Institutes possessed no singular authority. By the time the German theologian was writing in Heidelberg, the Reformed Church had a large body of doctrinal, catechetical, and confessional literature, among which Calvin’s book had an honored but not elevated place. Nevertheless, attempts to fit the Institutes to the systematic theology of Reformed scholasticism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued apace with Olevianus’s compatriot Johannes Piscator (1546– 1625), who in 1589 produced another set of aphorisms so popular that they had gone through eleven editions by 1630. For many later theologians and members of the Reformed tradition, Calvin’s successors departed from his thought in fundamental ways. To this way of Inheritors

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thinking, often referred to by the phrase “Calvin against the Calvinists,” the principal culprit was Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, though he was by no means alone.14 Among the numerous faults attributed to succeeding generations was an increased emphasis on double predestination as the central doctrine of the Reformed faith. The debate is far more complex than can be conveyed by a few reductive remarks, but the question of Calvin’s relationship to those who followed him remains fraught. Whatever position we take, it is essential for us to think about how Calvin was read after his death. To do so requires us to step out of our contemporary assumptions about the Reformation that focus on the lives and work of a couple of major figures, notably Martin Luther and John Calvin. The Frenchman’s contemporaries and successors, while acknowledging greatness, did not treat Calvin’s writings as canonical or of special authority. His words did not appear in red letters. He was venerated as a founder of the Reformed tradition and as its first great theological author, but as the decades passed after his death, others, in particular his successor Beza, led the church.

England Lying in an unmarked grave somewhere outside the walls of Geneva, as he had wished, Calvin would never see the influence the Institutes exercised across Europe.

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In life the reformer had been consumed with events in his native land, preaching and overseeing the life of the church in a middling-sized city swamped by French refugees. Yet his greatest posthumous success came in another kingdom. With great optimism, Calvin greeted the new “Deborah” in England, Elizabeth I, a Protestant queen to whom he dedicated his commentary on Isaiah upon her accession in 1558.15 Calvin had every reason to expect to receive royal favor and to win influence in the kingdom. Then, in a moment of spectacularly bad timing, John Knox (1514–1572), resident in Geneva, published his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Mon­ strous Regiment of Women (1558), a crazed tirade against Mary Queen of Scots in which the legitimacy of female monarchs was denied.16 Elizabeth didn’t care that the prime target of Knox’s book was her Scottish cousin; the argument left her incandescent with anger, and she blamed John Calvin, who haplessly and untruthfully claimed no knowledge of the text. The Isaiah commentary arrived at the court to stony silence (whether Elizabeth ever looked at it we do not know), and Calvin’s Geneva was urbs non grata. Despite the queen’s animosity, which was personal, Calvin’s posthumous influence in England eventually soared, and by the 1580s he outsold all other Protestant reformers combined, making him the most influential voice in the kingdom. Between 1564 and 1600, sixtyfive editions of his complete works, mostly in folio, were available in England.17 What accounted for this

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dramatic reversal of fortune? Apart from the popular writings of Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, Calvin’s Institutes, with its clarity and elegance, had no competition, certainly none from English authors. For the diverse group of men and women who saw themselves as Reformed, including Presbyterians and the emerging Puritans, the Institutes became the definitive statement of doctrine. The success of Calvin in England can be credited to the abovementioned bookseller, printer, and refugee in London, Thomas Vautrollier. A committed Protestant, Vautrollier produced the first English translation of Calvin’s Institutes, in 1574, followed by four editions in Latin. He was among the few printers in England to produce major works in Latin, and his edition of the Institutes was a product of a partnership with the Anglican churchman Edmund Bunny. Between 1576 and 1584, Vautrollier produced three editions of the Insti­ tutes in Latin (two in London and one in Edinburgh), Thomas Norton’s English translation, Bunny’s Com­ pendium, and also three editions of Delaune’s Epitome and its English translation by Christopher Fetherstone. Vautrollier held a printing privilege for Calvin’s Latin works, and it proved extremely lucrative.18 The translator of the Institutes into English, however, was an altogether more controversial figure. A political insider and sometime torturer who created the standard edition for the seventeenth century, Thomas Norton (1532–1584) was a trained lawyer, member of Parliament, and Thomas Cranmer’s son-in-law.19 Under

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Edward VI, the remarkably phlegmatic Norton demonstrated a vicious temperament, persecuting and torturing Catholics, a penchant that earned him the name “rackmaster”—a departure from the usual reputation of translators. Norton had once been in epistolary contact with Calvin, and he was widely admired for the prose and verse of his English editions of Latin and Greek literature. Despite these gifts, he found translating the Institutes a serious challenge. With an admirable mixture of self-promotion and admonition, Norton told his readers why the book had been prepared in its current form: This also is performed, that the volume being smaller, with a letter fayre and legible, it is of more eas price, that it may be of more common use, and so to more large communicating of so great a treasure that those that desire Christian knowledge for instruction of their faith, providing of their dueties. Thus on the printers behalf and mine, your ease and commodity good readers is provided for. Now resteth your owne diligence for your own profit in studying it.20

Many great reformers of the age, including Melanchthon, had produced books of commonplaces, but none, Norton told his readers, compares with Calvin’s Institutes, “so that (the holy scriptures excepted) this is one of the most profitable books for all students of Christian divinity.” They should not expect, however, easy passage to the wisdom the great reformer offered:

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I confesse indeed it is not finely and pleasantly written, nor carieth with it such deliteful grace of speech as some great wise men have bestowed upon some foolisher things, yet it containest sound truth set forth with faithfull plainness without wrong done to the authors meaning: and if you accept and use it, you shall not faile to have great profit thereby, and shall thinke my labour very well employed.

The Institutes in Context Through the seventeenth century, the Institutes was widely read and much admired by Reformed Christians, taught in theological schools, and generally venerated as a preeminent book of the Reformation. No Reformed church leader or theologian would have been without a well-thumbed copy, and to claim agreement with Calvin was to assert one’s orthodoxy. The assertion was, however, partially rhetorical. In truth, a respectful distance was retained from the Institutes, which could not serve as an authoritative textbook in a rapidly changing church engulfed by controversies and debates Calvin could not have anticipated. We should not undersell, however, the place of the Institutes. In the Dutch Republic, Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), professor of theology in Leiden and onetime student of Beza, claimed to own more books by John Calvin than by any other author. Even so, he was adamant that the Frenchman’s books be read in light

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of the authoritative Heidelberg Catechism, prepared by the German Reformed Church and adopted by the Dutch in 1568. Arminius was a professed, though critical, admirer of the Institutes, wary of recommending it to be read in isolation. Calvin’s book was not a standalone work but rather an aid to understanding the Catechism.21 Arminius and his contemporaries had no intention of diminishing Calvin and his Institutes—quite the opposite. In the seventeenth-century theological debates over predestination, free will, and universalism, for example, Calvin’s name was invoked by opposing parties. John Yates (d. ca. 1657), an Anglican clergyman and philosopher, wrote in his 1616 defense of Calvin against Arminius, God’s Arraignement of Hypocrites: This likewise may appeare in his [Arminius’s] followers, who bear a most deadly hatred to all that professe M. Calvin, and his best followers; and most shamefully rayle on them: the Papists shall find more love at their hands then a Calvinist.22

Even a cursory glance at English vernacular religious literature of the first half of the seventeenth century reveals the frequency with which Calvin and the Insti­ tutes were cited. A search in Early English Books Online for the years 1610–20 brings up almost 230 books. Closer examination, however, tells a more complex story. Defenses of Calvin are often polemic against contemporary opponents, while selected quotations from the Institutes buttress rather than determine the

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authors’ positions. And, most frequently, Calvin and his book are cited alongside other Reformation greats as the “witness of the fathers,” part of a series of “begats” that establish the true heritage of the church. In these years many Reformed Christians became known as “Calvinists”—a term Calvin himself naturally reviled—usually by their opponents, who wanted to pin on them the sins of their tyrannical founder. Most damaging was the discrediting of Calvin from Rome by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), who portrayed the Frenchman as an arch-heretic who led his followers away from the apostolic church. “Who is John Calvin to contradict the Son of God?,” Bellarmine scoffed in his attack on the Frenchman’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. The cardinal’s disparagement of Calvin found a large audience through the medium of print, forcing Reformed Christians to defend Calvin and themselves. Indeed, Yates names Bellarmine as one of Calvin’s chief detractors, alongside Arminius. Calvin’s currency among seventeenth-century English writers may not have matched the halcyon days of the 1580s and 1590s, but among admirers and critics alike his name was frequently found in print. That the Institutes continued to form part of theological discourse is abundantly evident: it was well known to all educated Protestants, particularly those of Reformed sympathies.23 The book was printed in Latin (1618) and twice in English (1611 and 1634), with a translation into Gaelic produced in Edinburgh in 1631.

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Detecting the Frenchman’s presence among the writers of the age does not require a form of theological bird-watching. His work was everywhere. The greater questions were how did a different church and age read and remember him?, to what extent did they claim him?, and, conversely, how could his name be used to blacken others? A good example of our need to read carefully is found in one of the great works of seventeenth-century Presbyterianism, The Divine Right of Church Govern­ ment and Excommunication (1646) by Samuel Rutherford, Reformed professor of divinity at St. Andrews, Scotland. Rutherford’s extensive treatment of church polity and the authority of civil magistrates contains about a dozen references to Calvin, most of which are to the Genevan reformer as one of a group of figures called “our divines,” who included Luther, Beza, Piscator, Franciscus Junius, and William Whitaker. The only direct citation from the Institutes is from book 2, chapter 28, where Calvin refers to magistrates as “parents.”24 The references to the Institutes in Rutherford’s hand are appeals to historical authority rather than crucial theological arguments. We find a slightly different case in London. The Scot’s massive Divine Right appeared during the meetings of the Westminster Assembly (1643–53), where Calvin’s Institutes featured prominently, though by no means as primus inter pares. The newly edited papers of the assembly reveal how often Calvin was cited in debate, and by whom.25 In terms of numbers, he did

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well, finishing some distance behind Augustine and only just nosed out by his successor, Beza. Otherwise, Calvin was mentioned more often than any other figure, ancient or contemporary. Sometimes the remarks were simply invocations of his authority as a reformer, but more often they contained material drawn from the Institutes (especially book 3) to buttress theological points relating to justification and faith. In a learned debate over the active and passive obedience of Christ, one speaker interceded with words from Calvin’s dedication to Francis I: “Judicious Calvin,” alluding to the words of the prophet, “let us draw watter out of the well of salvation,” and, hath this expression, “never any man blamed for drawing too much water out of the well of salvation.”26 Thomas Goodwin, a prominent Puritan delegate to the assembly and later a chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, remarked of the Institutes, “O how sweet was the reading of some Parts of that Book to me! How pleasing was the Delivery of Truths in a solid manner then to me.”27 Clergyman John Cotton (d. 1652), when asked why he stayed up into the late hours reading the Insti­ tutes, replied, “because I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep.” Note the inflections in the responses of the divines to Calvin’s Institutes. For some, the reformer’s theological voice could carry an argument, while Goodwin and Cotton have an affective language of “sweetness.” As both author and historical figure, Calvin enjoyed great authority, but for an audience that was

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fully aware of his work’s temporal distance from the Reformation. The delegates to the Westminster Assembly closely scrutinized the Institutes on crucial matters, including the Trinity, though not uncritically. Calvin’s status among the delegates did not arise from a belief that he was unquestionably correct, and there was considerable disagreement with his positions on various doctrines. Nevertheless, on account of his Institutes, Calvin was venerated as a worthy and esteemed interlocutor. The situation was similar across the English Channel in the Reformed Low Countries and in Swiss and German lands. Two prominent Calvinist leaders, Dutch theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) and Swiss-Italian scholastic churchman Francis Turretin (1623–1687), provide good examples. Both referred to Calvin extensively, but, like Rutherford, they saw him as part of a wider body of authorities from whom they could draw. Voetius is particularly interesting on account of the high regard in which he held the Genevan reformer, whom he frequently cited, particularly from the Institutes.28 He commended the Institutes to both students and pastors, referring to Calvin’s work in theological debates and defending the Genevan reformer against accusations that his doctrine of election made God the author of evil. In his defense of Calvin’s statements in the Insti­ tutes, however, Voetius also cited Thomas Aquinas as well as other scholastic authors. Voetius’s purpose was less to recover Calvin’s original teaching than to

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demonstrate that the source of Reformed thought could be reconciled with scholastic theological discourses of the Dutchman’s age. Where Voetius felt it necessary to refine or reformulate the Institutes, he justified his interventions as efforts to bring to light Calvin’s intentions. The widespread appropriation of Calvin to contemporary theological debates distressed some Reformed writers, who felt the man had been lost. Most notable was Theodor Zwinger the Younger (1597– 1654), a prominent churchman in Basel, who in 1652 produced his massive Theater of Heavenly Wisdom from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.29 Running to a mere 1,300 pages, the Theater was a vast tome of Reformed learning in which Zwinger decried the neglect of Calvin’s Institutes by students he regarded as enslaved to “scholastic barbarity.” Calvin’s book could evidently be used both to defend and to attack the Reformed scholastic tradition of the seventeenth century. The Theater of Heavenly Wisdom was a major attempt to reclaim Calvin’s Institutes for the Reformed Church of the “High Orthodoxy” of the late seventeenth century, when the scholastic system of theology was fully developed. Moving beyond theology, Zwinger presented a vigorous defense of the life and work of John Calvin, fending off the slanders of Catholics and Lutherans.30 Without a doubt, John Calvin above all others was identified as the founder of the Reformed tradition.

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Opponents such as Cardinal Bellermine never let the Reformed churches forget Calvin. He was the most controversial Reformation figure, whether as archheretic or the executioner of Servetus. For Reformed churchmen, it remained of the greatest importance to demonstrate agreement with Calvin. However, in a revolutionary age of Cartesian thought, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Thirty Years’ War, and Baruch Spinoza, Calvin was read in ways determined by a new era. The Institutes was a book of repute, but its fate was to be mined to serve the arguments of others. And why not? Can we reasonably expect of Calvin’s book an authority he never granted the writings of the great authors of the past, even his beloved Augustine, whose critically appropriated words fill the Insti­ tutes? Calvin understood time, history, and change.

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Enlightenment Ambivalence Chapter 4 It is no small example of the progress of human reason, that my History has been printed at Geneva with public approbation, in which I have characterized Calvin as a man of a disposition as much more villainous as his understanding was more enlightened than that of the rest of mankind. —Voltaire (1757)

If there was continuity from the Reformation to the seventeenth century, when Calvin was still read as a theological authority, a radical break ensued with the Enlightenment. Knowledge, among Calvin’s first words in the Institutes, came to mean something very different. So did “religion,” which was no longer as the Frenchman had understood it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. In the Age of Enlightenment, knowledge was not of “God and ourselves,” as Calvin had argued; scientia became “reason,” which rendered possible religion without doctrine. Among leading thinkers of the eighteenth century, from Geneva to Edinburgh, the Institutes was dislodged, its assumptions rejected in churches and salons. Churches set aside the classic Reformed theological statements enshrined in the confessions of faith in favor of a new

creed of “reasonable religion.” An ethical, exemplary, and reasonable Christ, the supreme moral example, replaced the God as redeemer from books 2 and 3 of Calvin’s Institutes.1 Further, Calvin’s character and reputation were hotly contested. Despite profound theological changes, many Reformed Christians and churches continued to venerate the reformer as a hero of the Reformation. For others, notably the philosophes, the Frenchman became less the founder of the Reformation than a figure of intolerance, the very embodiment of the religious cruelty from which enlightened thinkers sought emancipation. By the eighteenth century, for many intellectuals and churchmen the Reformation was over, and much of the content and structure of classic Protestant doctrine had been shed in favor of a religion of reason. The age was conscious of this rejection. In 1764, James Boswell recorded a chance encounter in the Swiss city of Basel: “There was here a genteel young man, a Genevois, Monsieur Buisson. He and I chatted a good time together. He gave me a letter to a Monsieur Huber at Geneva. I said, ‘Sir, you at Geneva are much changed. If John Calvin should come back, he would not recognize you.’ ”2 Indeed, there was a great deal about Enlightenment Geneva the French reformer would not have recognized, and the compliment was reciprocated. Wisdom, Calvin had declared, comes from “knowledge of God and of ourselves,” but Enlightenment Europe was no longer prepared to accept that argument.

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In the seventeenth century, the Dutch Jew Baruch Spinoza and the French Catholic Richard Simon had devastatingly undermined Christianity’s historical claims: the biblical texts in themselves, they argued, were wholly unreliable. They were historical texts, and the originals were unrecoverable. Christianity was losing its distinctive claim to primacy, and the door was slowly opened for the faith to become one “religion” among others.3 The radical changes that transformed Christianity in European culture during the eighteenth century were by no means harbingers of the end of religion as a powerful force in society. The Enlightenment is no longer understood as a wholly antireligious and secularizing movement; it took place in a thoroughly Christian Europe. Revolutionary France, beyond the studies of the philosophes and the “Goddess of Reason” erected in Notre Dame, remained a deeply Catholic country. Unquestionably, however, there was profound change. Let us return to Calvin’s opening words of the Institutes, “the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Such knowledge, for the reformer, was not simply a matter of intellectual assent but a confident acceptance of what God reveals in scripture. By the end of the eighteenth century, an entirely different configuration of what could be known with certainty about the divine had taken hold. In 1787, Immanuel Kant claimed in his Critique of Pure Reason that he had found it necessary to “deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”4 The relationship of Calvin and Kant is striking. Both

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men, in very different ways, spoke of knowledge in order to save religion, to rescue the truth from false speculation and error. For Kant, religious belief could be called knowledge, because it is true only subjectively, not objectively. Religious belief is not false but should be understood as falling between knowledge and opinion. The Lutheran Pietist Kant completely recast the discussion of knowledge of God, and while sympathetic to Reformed doctrine left little of the intellectual scaffolding of Calvin’s Institutes in place. Intellectual and religious change cannot be explained by single causes, but the emphasis on reason in the eighteenth century was in part a reaction against the uncertain dogmas and entrenched ideologies that had brought about so much conflict in the seventeenth century: Calvinists, Catholics, and Anglicans had ripped themselves apart with no resolution, only heightened claims about the validity of their competing doctrines. Reason, many hoped, offered a critical means of escape from turgid confrontation, and a fresh path to truth. Calvin, and the oft-retold story of Michael Servetus, became the morality tale of all that had been wrong with Reformation religion.

Enlightened Figures Whereas in the seventeenth century churches had struggled to claim their Reformation heritage, by the 1750s many Reformed theologians and pastors were

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content to sever the link with the past. This meant, above all, that doctrinal formulations of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods were mothballed, no longer required. The association of Calvin with Geneva was still proudly touted by a city seeking to attract visitors, but its churches professed little of classic Reformed theology. The situation was similar across Protestant Europe. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned to Geneva in 1754, he officially readopted Calvinism, but within ten years he had published a book on the education of a young man, Emile (1762), in which he denied original sin and the doctrine of the Trinity. During the eighteenth century, the Reformed churches of Europe progressively shed previously binding doctrines of the Reformation, with Geneva itself, in 1725, no longer requiring its pastors to subscribe to the Helvetic Consen­ sus Formula (1675), a scholastic statement of faith to which clergy had hitherto been expected to adhere.5 Henceforth, what one thought of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of creedal Christianity varied according to personal preference, a degree of latitude unthinkable for the reformers. In Geneva, as Boswell observed, it was a different age, although the people were not entirely prepared to surrender their Calvin to Voltaire, who described the reformer as a “tyrant” with a “vicious soul.” Public outrage, however, had little to do with defending Calvin’s theology, which had largely been abandoned along with the confessions. What really perturbed the

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Genevans was the outrage that a foreigner had slandered the city by traducing its famous reformer— conveniently forgetting that Calvin had been reviled in the city for being an outsider. A Catholic visitor to Geneva picked up on the difference between Geneva’s reputation as the “city of Calvin” and the current reality: “In 1728, of the thirty-three theology students bound for the ministry, I met only five or six who were true Calvinists. The others were Socinians, Arminians, or Pelagians and I could name a few who thumbed their nose at everything religious.”6 The most significant figure was Jacob Vernet (1698– 1789), who emerged as Geneva’s defender of Calvinism, but in a distinctly Enlightenment manner. In contrast to Voltaire and others, Vernet promoted what he called “reasonable belief ” or “enlightened orthodoxy,” which he saw as a middle way between traditional Christian doctrine and new ideas. He placed Calvin alongside Descartes and Boyle, Locke and Newton, as teachers of this “middle way.”7 Calvin’s place in this company, according to Vernet, was on account of his relationship to theology, which was analogous to Descartes’s to philosophy. Both introduced new truths and corrected old errors. However, Vernet’s distance from Calvin was hardly to be overlooked. Concerning virtue, the eighteenth-century Genevan wrote that “the road which leads to it is open to everyone . . . to be a good man you only need to will it.”8 Since the sixteenth century, the Reformed faith had flourished in many cities and towns of the Low

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Countries, and the cultural impact of Dutch Calvinism was enormous. In this stronghold of the faith, we find the divided soul of Calvin’s legacy. During the eighteenth century, no new edition of the Institutes was produced in Dutch, indicating, on the one hand, a low level of interest. Yet, on the other, in churches across the land, theologians continued to preach traditional Reformed religion, and Calvin’s name was highly regarded. At the 1817 celebrations of the Reformation in the Netherlands, Calvin was praised alongside Luther “as sons of the Reformation.” Among intellectuals and church leaders, however, the impact of the Enlightenment was to be found in a growing rejection of central Calvinist doctrines such as predestination, and by the early nineteenth century liberal Protestants in the Netherlands would claim Calvin as the cultural icon of the Reformation and a prophet of the freedom of conscience, not as a theologian.9

An African Theologian One of the most extraordinary stories in the history of Calvinism is that of a young slave from Ghana who was brought to the Netherlands, received a theological education, and was ordained into the Dutch Reformed Church before returning to the west coast of Africa as a missionary. Jacobus E. J. Capitein (1717–1747) wrote of his capture:

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As a child of seven or eight years, having been robbed of my parents either by war or by some other calamity, I was sold to an enterprising sea captain, Arnold Steenhart, who had landed at a certain place in Africa, the S. Andrews River, for trade in slaves.10

After his conversion to Christianity, Capitein was given a thorough Dutch education before entering the prestigious theological faculty at Leiden in 1737. A series of benefactors supported his work, and he made a number of Dutch friends among the other theology students. Yet his dissertation complicated his legacy. Capitein wrote on slavery and Christian liberty, arguing that the two are not incompatible. The work was extremely popular and was widely disseminated by the church, which found the contribution of a former slave helpful in defending its position on slavery. For the Dutch East India Company, Capitein’s work was manna from heaven, and the African became publicly prominent.11 After fifteen years in the Netherlands, in 1742 Capitein returned to Africa on a slave ship with the intention of evangelizing his people, only to die five years later. The story is fascinating in itself, but its place in our account arises from Capitein’s particular attachment to the writings of John Calvin. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the Dutch Reformed Church continued to support slavery, and Calvin’s interpretation of the Curse of Ham, which justified the practice as a form of mission, was regularly cited.12

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In his dissertation, Capitein does not quote Calvin frequently, but he does quote him at crucial moments. In his treatment of human freedom, he argues that Christ “understood nothing else by saying, the truth shall make you free, than that believers would be sanctified by the Truth in God’s Word.” Capitein continues, “Those who wish to be edified by a fuller exposition of the nature and elements of this Christian freedom may read chapter nine of the third book of the teachings of John Calvin.”13 Again, although Calvin appears only a few times by name, for Capitein his authority is clearly evident. As David Nii Anum Kpobi has argued, Calvin was Capitein’s “final authority,” and Capitein sought to “put the 16th century reformer on the same level as St Paul.”14 This equating of Calvin and Paul is evident in the crescendo argument for slavery, in which Capitein turns to book 4 of the Institutes for a long quotation from Calvin’s treatment of Galatians 3:28 (neither man nor woman, slave nor free). Capitein writes: But to draw together this demonstration of our position, based as it is on the nature of the New Testament order, I shall close with the words of the Reverend John Calvin, in which that earnest and godly man, famous among the first promoters of Christian Truth, even in his own time openly refused the ideas held by our opponents.

Jacobus Capitein, the first African to study theology and be ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church,

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remains a difficult figure for Christians, both African and global.15 Attention to his achievements has led some writers to argue that African religious history has to be written from a new perspective, in which the European colonial story is no longer the dominant narrative. Kpobi writes, “However, if our modern perspectives prevent us from describing Capitein as an African-theologian, it was because of his captivity to Western theology and culture. It was only in the terms of Western theology that he could express his ideals. The standards of the West were his standards.”16 Two hundred years later, another African went to the Netherlands to study Reformed theology and found in John Calvin and the fourth book of the Insti­ tutes a radically different message. It was not for the enslavement of his people that Allan Boesak found arguments in the Frenchman’s book but for liberation.

Transatlantic World The theological debates of the Reformation and the highly confessional scholasticism of the seventeenth century were gone, replaced by church cultures in which old certainties no longer held sway. Enlightenment figures fiercely attacked Calvinism, and its hold on both sides of the Atlantic was slipping. The rise of Methodism and the Great Awakenings sparked a more emotive interiority that softened the edges of classic Calvinist teaching. The Reformed faith seemed to lose

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its way; what did the religion of Calvin mean when its adherents cast off many of his key teachings? Yet the book did not disappear. What can we know of the Institutes in the eighteenth century? The answer hangs on what we make of the wealth of references to and citations of Calvin and the Institutes found in the religious literature produced in Britain and its American colonies during the eighteenth century. Search engines such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online bring up thousands of references to Calvin, who was cited, named, and referenced in many kinds of works, from sermons and tracts to letters and journals. Such numbers, clearly, do not equate to influence, which eludes measurement. Nevertheless, Calvin and the Institutes remained part of the reading world of the eighteenth century, and quotations from the book were regarded, in certain circles, as adding authority to arguments. In some respects, we find continuity with the seventeenth century. Calvin’s name was well known, and as a figure he represented a range of ideas, beliefs, and actions. The Institutes could be cherry-picked for apt passages that supported or undermined a case. Calvin could be made to look good or bad depending on the debate in which he was being invoked. In part, he was theological and historical shorthand. But he was not that dull: Calvin’s personality was so divisive that his best and worst qualities were readily attributed to his followers. In the eighteenth century, Calvin was treated in a manner akin to a modern-day academic on a television

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documentary. To keep the story interesting, the expert is edited down to a sound bite. Instructive is the case of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), often referred to as the most prominent Calvinist in colonial New England, who wrote, “I utterly disclaim a dependence on Calvin, or believing the doctrines which I hold, because he believed and taught them; and cannot justly be charged with believing everything just as he taught.”17 More significant is the evidence that throughout his life Edwards continued to read the Institutes and Calvin’s commentaries, which are frequently referenced and even quoted in his works, such as the Reli­ gious Affections (1754). In the 1950s, William Morris argued for the influence of the Institutes on the young Jonathan Edwards studying at Yale. The spiritual diary the nineteen-year-old began in 1722 closely follows Calvin’s account of the Christian life in book 3 of the Institutes.18 In later years, Edwards referred to Calvin less frequently, but when he did so the sixteenthcentury reformer was placed alongside Puritan luminaries such as William Ames, John Owen, and John Flavel. Edwards’s relationship with Calvin was certainly complex, but the New England preacher knew the Institutes intimately. Yet the quotations from the Institutes raise an important question about the relationship of the author to the text. The frequent citations are not evidence of a broader familiarity with Calvin’s arguments, suggesting the reformer’s name held greater force than the content of the Institutes. John Calvin’s most regular appearance

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in English and American literature was as an iconic figure of the Reformation and therefore of Protestant legitimacy, and the quotations served to reinforce that symbolic role. Calvin was regularly placed in the pantheon of Reformation giants alongside Luther, where they functioned as symbols of a common Protestant inheritance: two titans of the faith, the German being the hero and the Frenchman the lawyer and church builder. Among the more ill-disposed on both sides of the Atlantic, the story was familiar. The Frenchman was portrayed as a patriarch of error, not truth. In Jonathan Swift’s 1704 satire “A Tale of a Tub,” the character Jack is drawn from the name of John Calvin. Jack, a deeply austere member of the family, represents dissenters who rejected the order of the church and fell into error by reading the Bible too literally and relying solely on the illumination of the Spirit. For another Church of England author, Reformed Christians were the “sons of Calvin,” and that was not good. Such denunciations were legion. One economical, contemptuous account of the Institutes and predestination is found in Frans Swediaur’s (1748–1824) entry on “Calvinist divinity” in his Philosophical Dic­ tionary (1786). Swediaur quotes the words of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and universalist Chevalier Ramsay (1666–1743), who mocked, “Though he [God] appears unjust and barbarous, yet we must believe the contrary, because what is injustice, crime, cruelty, and the blackest malice in us, is in him justice, mercy, and sovereign goodness.”19

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Equally hostile were those in the eighteenth-century Church of England for whom Calvin represented an assault on the judicious Elizabethan Settlement of 1560, which had preserved bishops, the office that marked continuity with earliest Christianity. With reference to the fourth book of the Institutes, William Reeves (1667–1726), onetime chaplain to Queen Anne and a distinguished translator of the church fathers, identified Calvin as responsible for erroneous views on ecclesiastical authority that were plaguing the English church. The problem, Reeves argued, was that Calvin had never held a legitimate church office: Bishop, Presbyter and Deacon then were the three Orders of the Church from the Beginning to the Days of John Calvin, who was a wise and learned Man, but he was a Man, and notably distinguish’d his Frailty upon these two Accounts. For first, as is evident from himself (Institutes 4.34), and the Writer of his Life [Beza], he thrust himself into the Sacred Function, without being lawfully called and sent to execute the same.20

It was a touchy subject, and the question of whether Calvin was ever ordained continues to divide scholars. Further, without “sense and practice of all Christian antiquity,” Calvin drew up an ecclesiastical order without bishops and then proceeded to act like a tyrant, regarding his authority as if it had been “dictated from Mount Sinai.”21 Although Reeves was correct in a

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sense, for Calvin had abolished the episcopacy in Geneva, the reformer was not in principle opposed to its survival, as he demonstrated in his acceptance of the Elizabethan Settlement. The English clergyman was using the figure of Calvin to attack later Reformed Christians. In a lighter tone, in his General biography; or, lives, critical and historical, of the most eminent persons of all ages (1799–1815), John Aitkin told the story of the English divine John Hales (1584–1656), who had converted from Calvinism to Arminianism. When to his surprise a friend found Hales reading Calvin’s Insti­ tutes, the friend asked, “if he was not past that book?,” to which Hales replied, “in my younger days I read it to inform myself, but now I read it to reform him.”22 The Boston Puritan Cotton Mather (1663–1728) offered a more amicable view of Calvin in his church history of New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in which the Frenchman made numerous appearances, all favorable. Mather offered in editions of the Mag­ nalia lives of distinguished churchmen, including Englishman John Cotton (d. 1652), who had remarked, as we have noted, that he ended his day with the Insti­ tutes “because I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep.” Cotton’s biographer tempered the sentiment; he added, “hot of the mouth, rather than sweet, we of to-day might think his piece of Calvin.” Such a piece of Calvin would have made the Wesleys gag. The founders of Methodism, John and Charles

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Wesley, brothers born in 1703 and 1707, respectively, shared an intense hostility to Calvinism and its founder. Charles, after preaching on Hebrews in Kingswood in 1740, recorded the occasion in his diary, writing, “The Spirit gave me utterance. I calmly warned them against apostasy, and spake with great tenderness and caution. But who can stand before envy and bigotry? The strong ones were offended.” The reason for the congregation’s truculence, he doubted not, was that “the poison of Calvin has drunk up their spirit of love.”23 John Wesley referred to the “poison” of Calvinism several times, including in his debate with Anglican James Hervey on imputed righteousness and in his abridgements of Jonathan Edwards’s works.24 John was able to muster some warmth, though not much, writing in August 1744 that “I love Calvin a little, Luther more; the Moravians, Mr. Law, and Mr. Whitefield far more than either.”25 However, twenty years later, in a sermon on Jeremiah 23, John was prepared to quote the Institutes on the crucial doctrinal point of justification. The meaning is, God justifies the believer for the sake of Christ’s righteousness, and not for any righteousness of his own. So Calvin: (Institut. 1.2, c. 17) “Christ by his obedience, procured and merited for us grace or favour with God the Father.” Again: “Christ, by his obedience, procured or purchased righteousness for us.”26

This passage tells a good deal about how we encounter the Institutes in this age. For John Wesley, as well as for

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other eighteenth-century writers, Calvin’s principal strength in the Institutes was his account of the saving power of Christ. In the same year he wrote his Jeremiah sermon, John recorded in his journal, “I think on Justification just as I have done any time these sevenand-twenty years, and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him an hair’s breadth.”27 At the same time, Dissenter Samuel Wilton (1711– 1779), much to the chagrin of other eighteenthcentury Anglicans, was persuaded that the Thirty­Nine Articles (1563), the defining doctrinal statement of the Church of England, was wholly consistent with Calvin’s theology. In no place, Wilton controversially wrote, was this affinity more evident than with the doctrine of election. To pour more fuel on the fire, Wilton argued in his Review of Some of the Articles of the Church of England (1774) that Calvin had only expressed more elegantly in the Institutes what was to be found in the Articles. “Calvin and the Compilers agree,” Wilton wrote, “in their representation of the origin and source of election—of the fruits and effects of it—of the means of ascertaining it—and of the danger of looking only to the purpose of God, without having respect to the scriptural signs and evidence of election.”28 Toward the end of the century, we find more effusive joy in the Institutes, this time from the marvelously named Augustus Toplady (1740–1778), in his Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England (1774). The English cleric devoted five

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hundred pages of his seven-hundred-page book to the Reformation and counterimpulses in the English church under Archbishop William Laud (1573–1645). For Toplady, the agreement of Calvin and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer on essentials of theology was evidence for the Reformed nature of the English Reformation. In addition, Calvin’s approval of the episcopacy in England demonstrated that there was no tension between his theology and Anglican polity, a point William Reeves ignored. Toplady, best remembered for the hymn “Rock of Ages,” was a prolific and warmly regarded Calvinist preacher who denounced Arminianism and quarreled with John Wesley. In turn, Wesley mocked Toplady’s severe Calvinist doctrine of predestination as suggesting that one in twenty would be saved and amounting to “The elect shall be saved, do what they will—the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can.”29 Church of England clergyman and Methodist John William Fletcher ( Jean Guillaume de La Flechere) (1729–1785), a friend of Wesley’s, launched a fierce attack on Toplady’s arguments for predestination in which he ridiculed Calvin repeatedly for his “imaginary decrees” wherein the reformer made God the author of sin. The arguments were hardly new, but Fletcher, who made no direct references to the Insti­ tutes, sought to discredit Toplady all the more fully by demolishing his far more prominent spiritual ancestor. Like Wesley, Fletcher satirized Toplady’s belief that only a few would be saved because that was God’s

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will. Fletcher referred to the damned as “Calvin’s reprobates.”30 Where Calvin the appalling advocate of reprobation was found, Servetus was never far away. Reference to Servetus had an independent life as a metaphor for religious intolerance, even among those who knew little of the story apart from the accepted wisdom that Calvin had behaved like a beast. Writing as “Solomon Abrabanel,” William Arnell’s Complaint of the Chil­ dren of Israel (1736) could make an appeal based on the execution: Did Calvin burn Servetus? Might then not all the followers of Servetus’ opinions as justly burn all Calvin’s disciples as Christians punish Jews because the Jewish priests crucified Christ? Say, then are we more accountable for what was done in our church before we came in the world than other churches will own themselves to be?31

The most dramatic repudiation of Calvin’s doctrine in the eighteenth century was that of predestination, with which he was so closely associated by friend and foe. In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin writes that the source of faith lies in God’s election of some men and women to salvation and others (the majority) to perdition. For Calvin, God’s eternal decree flows from his will, but he is neither tyrannical nor lawless.32 God’s justice is beyond human comprehension, and we must accept whatever God wills as righteous. Calvin was clear that predestination was good news for

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Christians, a source of assurance, and should be preached from the pulpits.33 By the eighteenth century, leading Protestants were not persuaded. In a 1739 sermon, John Wesley remarked that “so directly does this doctrine tend to shut the very gate of holiness in general, to hinder unholy men from ever approaching thereto, or striving to enter thereat.”34 Calvin never believed that he was saying anything new; the doctrine of election, he insisted, was taught by Christ, Paul, and Augustine. Indeed, the similarities between Calvin’s writings on the subject and those of Thomas Aquinas are striking. All the major reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held to the doctrine of predestination, but it was Calvin who has remained—to this day—the prophet of doom. Calvin embodied a range of theological ideas and principles, admired or hated depending on one’s perspective, of clear symbolic importance. His name could be effectively invoked to support or blacken a position or historical event without any particular reading of the Institutes. For some, he was a monstrous tyrant, for others a founding father of the Reformation, a distant, better age. The book provided support for competing visions of the man and his place in the religious polemic of the age. The collapse of Reformed Protestant theology on the eve of the French Revolution left the churches of the Reformation unable to face the tumultuous changes of the century to come. It would take the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834),

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alongside lesser figures, to recover Reformed Protestantism in the nineteenth century. No longer the symbol of intolerance or a footnote in the works of others, John Calvin emerged in the nineteenth century as a towering figure of the church, and the Institutes his great work of theology.

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Fashioning a Reformer Chapter 5 It is impossible at the present day to justify Calvin on his own grounds. —Thomas Henry Dyer

As the witch of Endor was summoned by the prophet Samuel from the sleep of the dead to advise a desperate Saul (1 Samuel 28), likewise many nineteenth-century Reformed Protestants, fearful of being engulfed by radical change, sought to conjure John Calvin and the distant Reformation as an authority. The appeal was not straightforward. During the eighteenth century, Reformed churches across northern Europe, including Geneva, had embraced certain Enlightenment ideals and divested themselves of classic Reformation doctrines, leaving critics to wonder what, if anything, remained of traditional Protestantism. In the secularizing wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise and fall, as well as advancing industrialization, liberal revolutions, and nationalism, Reformed Christianity was in danger of becoming a relic, an irrelevant and unwanted reminder of intolerance and dogmatic rigidity. Having abandoned the theology that had defined their identities, European

Reformed churches seemed uniquely ill prepared to resist or adapt to the zeitgeist of the new century. The reformer to whom many turned was no longawaited savior, a Frederick Barbarossa ready to rise and defend his people. By 1800, John Calvin was a forgotten figure in his native France, occasionally mentioned, though usually for his role in the Servetus execution.1 The long-dead Frenchman aroused little interest or passion. How things would change. A century later, in 1909, the four hundredth anniversary of the reformer’s birth was celebrated by the great and good who gathered in Geneva to commemorate the venerable son of Noyon, France. The year 1909 was a landmark year in the historical and theological memory of John Calvin, a time of fierce debate over his legacy, yet somehow expressive of a need to come to terms with a towering figure of the Reformation and his ideas. Calvin had indeed been conjured during the nineteenth century, but with little agreement on who he was and what he should be. Had he returned to European society from heaven or hell? In the bewildering changes wrought by industrialization, Darwinism, and secularization, John Calvin emerged as a symbol for the varying and even contradictory aspirations of Reformed Protestants in a world increasingly hostile to their beliefs. The Calvin to whom the churches and individuals looked had several portraits. For some nineteenth-century Christians, Calvin was a hero from a better age, a time of pure, orthodox faith, a product of the Edenic world of the

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Reformation. For others, Calvin was the source of modern values, a liberator of the conscience, a forerunner of contemporary liberalism, a founder of republican democracy, and, virtually all could agree, a great writer. To opponents inside and outside the churches he was none of these. Rather, he was nothing less than an arch-demon of reaction, and, as Voltaire had acidly remarked, the man who killed Servetus and created a God who took pleasure in the damnation of most people. Divided views on Calvin quickly became entrenched, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the influential Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) could wearily relate what seemed the prevailing attitude: One accuses him [Calvin] that he had no eye and no heart for all that lay outside his essential vocation. The conviviality of life did not exist for him. In his letters, he never mentioned any family affairs. The beauty of nature left him cold. He did not show an interest in art, in poetry and music. The most innocent enjoyments were questionable in his eyes. He was, in one word, un spirit chagrin, un genie triste [a grieving spirit, a sad genius].2

Yet what distinguished the nineteenth-century critiques from those of the Enlightenment was that supporters and detractors were far better informed about the reformer. No previous age had been more familiar

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with his life and character or had had such ready access to his Institutes. The nineteenth century witnessed a flood of biographies, while popular histories of the Reformation poured off the presses. Editions and translations of the Institutes were printed in every major European language. Most significant was the Corpus reformatorum, which included the complete Latin and French works of Calvin in almost sixty volumes and appeared between 1864 and 1900. Without a doubt, a fascination with the giant of Geneva arose, fed by the nineteenth century’s passion for the lives of great men.

Recovery of a Book Theologically, the leading figure in the revival of Calvin’s thought in the nineteenth century was the Prussian pastor and professor Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose Christian Faith was the most significant Reformed theological work of the age. In 1936, Hugh Ross Mackintosh, former professor of dogmatics (or, systematic theology) at Edinburgh University, described Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith as follows: “next to the Institutes of Calvin, it is the most influential dogmatic work to which evangelical Protestantism can point, and it has helped to teach theology to more than three generations. One could no more understand present-day systematic thought without this book—its faults equally with its

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virtues—than one could understand modern biology without Darwin.”3 Schleiermacher is often referred to as the “father of modern theology.” Karl Barth held the Prussian Reformed pastor to be a giant of his age, a man who had sought what Calvin and Barth himself strove to bring about, the restoration of true religion.4 Schleiermacher saw in Calvin a corrective to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism, and found much in the Institutes that was agreeable, notably predestination, the most controversial of all doctrines. Schleiermacher’s engagement with Calvin was intense. For the German theologian, his sixteenth-century counterpart was a rewarding conversation partner from whom he drew a good deal, while rejecting other parts.5 Reading Schleiermacher’s Christian Faith together with other lesser-known works, one finds Calvin everywhere. The German theologian often refers to his copy of the Institutes, which he was able to cite with ease. Calvin appears frequently in Christian Faith. In one example, referencing book 4 of the Institutes, Schleiermacher draws on the Frenchman in his treatment of baptism and conversion. “Nowhere in the testimony of such churches,” he writes, “is anything more intended than what Calvin himself said. With him we have been in pretty close agreement; his phrase ‘seed of repentance and faith’ might have been our text.”6 The degree to which the thought of the reformer was internalized in Schleiermacher’s text is evident from the frequency with which references to the

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Institutes appear in the notes but without Calvin’s name in the text. Yet Schleiermacher was a critical reader of Calvin, as he was of the other reformers. Again with reference to the Institutes, Schleiermacher scolded Calvin for his writing on the sacraments, comparing the “Calvinist” view with the Lutheran and Zwinglian, and finding all at fault. Schleiermacher writes: Hence, although this view [Calvin on the sacraments] had a strong power of attraction, it provides new excuses for vacillating between the charm of symbolism that allures men to seek more in the sacrament than is brought out in the explanation itself, and on the other hand resting satisfied with something more external, on the ground that it is impossible to make out what the peculiar significance of the [Lord’s] supper is.7

Schleiermacher gave the Reformed churches a new way of reading Calvin, even though he adopted a form of universal election that had little to do with the In­ stitutes. He almost single-handedly restored Calvin as one of the great theologians of the church. Schleiermacher’s legacy was to define the Genevan reformer’s theological profile in the nineteenth century by clearly identifying predestination as the heart of the Institutes. Until the tumultuous work of Karl Barth in the inter war period of the twentieth century, the dominant interpretation of Calvin’s Institutes, and of subsequent Reformed theology, was that its central dogma

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was the doctrine of predestination. This position remained virtually unchallenged for almost a century, and its key proponent was a student of Schleiermacher, professor Alexander Schweizer, a major, though now largely forgotten, Swiss theologian of the nineteenth century. Although Karl Barth would reject much of Schweizer’s interpretation of Calvin, he agreed with him that the doctrine of election was crucial to the Reformed tradition.8

France The asymmetry of Calvin’s relationship with France was clearly expressed in the invitation to Geneva issued by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1909 to commemorate Calvin’s birth. The Calvin the alliance honored had little to do with the teaching of Schleiermacher and his followers; no Servetus, no doctrine of election, and no Trinitarianism were in sight there. The Frenchman had been recast as a patron saint of liberal Christianity, rescued to be presented as a modern, progressive Demosthenes—a prophet of democracy, not God’s judgment. To make Calvin praiseworthy, the alliance turned the reformer into an honorary founding father of the United States, a man of “progress”: In the providence of God [Calvin] was one of the most potent forces of his day for human progress. . . .

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Men of all classes of thought and of all nations recognize his greatness. Particularly was he influential in setting in motion those forces which have resulted in the formation of the American nation. Great historians speak of him as the founder of the United States.9

Ironies abounded. Not only was a gargantuan statue just about the least appropriate memorial for a man willingly buried in an unmarked grave like Moses on Mount Nebo, but also the figure immortalized in stone in 1909 was a symbol of progressive liberal thought, stripped of the religio and doctrina of his Institutes. What role could Calvin play in a country where Protestantism was an irrelevance? History was not his friend. His career as a reformer had been not in France but in Geneva, whence anti- Catholic polemic had poured into the French kingdom. Luther had symbolized a nation, while the traitor Calvin had waged a guerrilla war against his homeland. Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the expulsion of the Huguenots, there were few in France to remember Calvin fondly. Nineteenth-century royalist France had no place for John Calvin, who, more than three hundred years after his birth in Noyon, was regarded as a prodigal son who had not returned home. French Protestants, a minority largely liberal in theological disposition, initially had little inclination to salvage Calvin’s reputation and risk being tainted by his sedition. That

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association was too dangerous for a minority in France whose religious sentiments, for Catholics, were unFrench. Yet for some Reformed Christians in France, Calvin could be seen in a different light, as a lost hero. These more traditional French Protestants found allies in an unexpected quarter. In 1856, the Protestant journal Revue Chretiénne rejoiced that finally the relentlessly negative portrayal of Calvin had been challenged in Jules Michelet’s final volume of the Histoire de France. The reviewer wrote of the Histoire: It is the first time we can see, outside Protestantism, history restoring for us this great figure Calvin, systematically wronged, even by philosophers-historians, who, in their judgement about the Reformation and the reformers, undergo, without being aware of it, the influence of Catholic prejudice.10

Michelet’s more balanced account of Calvin did not immediately translate into a readership for the Insti­ tutes. Before his work would be read, Calvin would have to be recovered as a person, image, and idea. The Reformation became central to debates about contemporary issues, reminding the French of their Calvinist past. Fifteen years before Michelet, Honoré de Balzac had led an attack by the academic and literary elite on the Catholic Church in his “Le Martyr calviniste” (1841), in which brutality and fanaticism were symbolized by the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, when thousands of Calvinists were butchered in Paris. History-obsessed French culture—a parallel

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was to be found in the enthusiasm in England and America for the historical creations of Walter Scott (1771–1832)—did restore Protestantism to a degree, but largely as a stick with which to beat Catholicism, and not always with John Calvin present. That Calvin was a monster was a creedal article for Catholics and monarchists. Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec’s slanderous sixteenth-century biography of Calvin was widely reprinted and read by those filled with revulsion for the reformer. For liberal republicans, however, their relationship to the Reformation was more complex. Calvin was lauded as a revolutionary who had opposed tyranny and founded democratic institutions— both views wholly ahistorical. Even Voltaire had written that “Calvinism is in keeping with the republican spirit though Calvin’s spirit was tyrannical.”11 A decisive moment was the appearance of JeanMarie Vincent Audin’s History of the Life, Writings, and Doctrines of John Calvin (1841), which, although purported to be unbiased, was brutal in its assessment. It remained the definitive work for those with unfavorable views of Calvin, and Audin’s judgments were often parroted, as we see in one historian who wrote of the Genevan reformer, “let him be admired as a skilful and clever man in the style of all these petty tyrants who subjected republics in many a different country. This much may be allowed to weak souls. This muddy soul of his needed blood.”12 The final words were, again, a reference to the supposed murder of Servetus, an accusation Calvin could never shake.

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Where do we find the Institutes in this melee? Reviled by the Catholic Church, Calvin returned by the back door, the Institutes in hand, and slipped into the French literary pantheon. In the wider French public, the Institutes garnered praise as literature, not as theology. By the middle of the century, the Institutes had become increasingly well known among the educated classes, who could separate Calvin’s prose from its supposedly distasteful contents to admire the work of a great author of the Renaissance. Away from CatholicProtestant hostility and the uncertainty of the French Reformed about how to deal with their founder, Calvin’s Institutes found a place on the bookshelves of the respectable bourgeoisie, a symbol of secular education. On the confessional front, various nineteenthcentury events marking the Reformation, such as that held in 1836 to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of Geneva’s turn to Protestantism, drew attention to Calvin. In 1852, the first issue of the Bulletin Histo­ rique et Litteraire de la Société de l’Histoire du Protes­ tantisme Français appeared in Paris as a crucial organ for scholarly and popular articles on Calvin and French Protestantism more broadly. In certain respects, however, Calvin remained an exile; his works were hardly printed in France during the nineteenth century. The 1560 French edition of the Institutes appeared in Geneva in 1818, and it was not until 1911 that readers could obtain a copy of the first vernacular edition of 1541. The Latin Institutes was printed in Berlin in 1834. A notable exception was the work of Aimé Louis

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Herminjard (1817–1900), who provided a wealth of information on Calvin and his circle in his Correspon­ dance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue française, which appeared between 1866 and 1897. Although a review of literature reveals constant interest in Calvin in the final decades of the nineteenth century in France, the rise of the reformer to prominence was primarily the achievement of one man, a mild-mannered schoolteacher. In his seven-volume John Calvin: The Man and His Times (1899–1927), the remarkable Émile Doumergue (1844–1937) took on the reformer’s opponents in a detailed, compellingly written, and hagiographical account.13 Doumergue’s Calvin told the story of a quintessential Frenchman who belonged to a blue-blood pedigree of Gallic reform that owed little to the German, and foreign, Martin Luther. Doumergue may have been enthusiastic, partisan, or both, but he was also shrewd. He understood that the rehabilitation of John Calvin in France required an act of expiation, atonement for Michael Servetus’s death. The penance of self-flagellation took place in 1909, when Doumergue wrote the text for the memorial to Servetus in which he attributed Calvin’s sins to the “excesses of his age.” Doumergue even tried to make a virtue of the execution by arguing that the fact that such an act never happened again was evidence of Calvin’s contrition—even by nineteenth-century standards, historical explanations were rarely so unlikely. Doumergue presented Calvin as the progenitor of modernity:

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Far from being a man who seeks retirement or turns from the world and from the present life, the Calvinist is one who takes possession of the world; who, more than any other, dominates the world; who makes use of it for all his needs; he is the man of commerce, of industry, of all inventions and all progress, even material.14

By the 1920s, following the rise of Neo-Calvinism in the Netherlands, Doumergue believed Calvin’s renaissance was under way in France, and in 1921 Doumergue wrote The Character of Calvin: The Man, the System, the Church, the State, in which he offered a portrait of the man, an overview of his theology, and an assessment of current scholarship. The Institutes makes infrequent but decisive appearances in The Character of Calvin, serving to define the reformer’s person and work. The dedication of the Institutes to Francis I announced something truly remarkable: “Thus spoke the young author of The Institutes to the brilliant king of France, one majesty before another majesty. Which was the greater?” Doumergue was in no doubt: “The style is the man: behold the man Calvin!”15 Doumergue provided French Protestants with a John Calvin for the early twentieth century: liberal, practical, and patriotic, a patron saint of progress. Doumergue delivered the man who could be commemorated at the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, in 1909. The Institutes, following Doumergue,

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was once more the book of the man, to be read as the fulfillment of its author’s unmatchable qualities. While Calvin’s sins belonged to the sixteenth century, his message spoke to the twentieth. The revival of Calvin the reformer was not limited to theologians and church leaders; the history Doumergue presented entered the bloodstream of French Protestantism through both textbooks for Reformed schools and lay religious education. An influential textbook by Jacques-Jules Bastide, which remained in print from 1889 until the early 1930s, told Doumergue’s story to Reformed Christian congregations.16 The message was unambiguous: French Protestantism was truly French, and Calvin was the “greatest theologian” of the sixteenth century, a master creator of institutions, and a brilliant Renaissance author who had shaped the French language.

European Contexts Despite the association of John Calvin with France, it was in the German Empire that Calvin’s work was revived by the most influential theologian of the century, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and where, specifically in Berlin, the critical edition of the Latin Institutes appeared. During the nineteenth century, Calvin could not hope to compete with the Luther enthusiasm that seized Protestant German lands. At best, he was portrayed as a disciple of Luther, proof of the Wittenberg

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reformer’s preeminence. The Frenchman was an acolyte who, although he deviated from the pure teaching of Wittenberg, could be credited with preserving the Reformation. For many Germans, Calvin was French and Reformed, an unattractive coupling of little interest to the patriotic imperialism of the age. However, in a desire to recover figures of the Reformation as confessional symbols, Reformed Germans, although a mere fraction of the Protestants in the empire, turned to Calvin. In the case of Germany, history was more favorable to the Frenchman than in his native land. Unencumbered by Calvin’s “Frenchness,” German Reformed Protestants could look directly to the reformer’s life and work without any sense that he had betrayed his country. Curiously, the Servetus case seems not to have carried the same weight in Germany, where Luther’s intemperate fulminations provided sufficient Reformation awkwardness. The Latin Insti­ tutes was produced in Berlin in 1834, as we have seen, while major biographies from Paul Henry and the Swiss Ernst Staehlin appeared. Although neither was translated into French (Henry’s work did appear in Dutch and English), these favorable accounts of Calvin found a broader European audience.17 John Calvin may not have fared well against Luther in the struggle for the hearts of Bismarck’s Protestants, but another German catapulted the French reformer to fame and glory in the twentieth century. Max Weber’s relationship with John Calvin, developed in

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perhaps the most misunderstood yet persistent theory of modernity, is far beyond the scope of this book, but no discussion of the life of the Institutes can ignore The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5, English 1930). One cannot imagine any scholarly work with greater influence in shaping perceptions of Calvin, his theology, and the argument of the Institutes. What Weber actually intended, or argued, in the Protestant Ethic is not important. Outside the academy, those able to identify Calvin and Weber coupled them with a belief that Calvinism was the source of modern capitalism, assuming that somehow Genevan godliness has led to our culture of easy credit and unbridled consumerism. In fact, Calvin appears only infrequently, and the Institutes is mentioned only once in the book, though Weber drew from both Calvin’s work and a body of nineteenth-century German scholarship, including that of Heinrich Heppe (1796– 1886), professor of Reformed thought at Marburg. From Weber we can cast an eye to the most significant examination of the relationship between Calvin or Calvinism and the modern economy, which came from the hand of English intellectual R. H. Tawney, in his 1926 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Tawney was critical of what he saw as Weber’s conflation of Calvin and his seventeenth-century successors, and he attributed to the Genevan reformer a distinctive position on economics and theology. Whereas it had been largely absent from Weber’s Protestant Ethic, the Insti­ tutes is frequently cited in Tawney’s book, and Calvin

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appears as a pragmatic thinker on questions of loans and usury. Tawney’s attitude toward the reformer is summed up in his description of the Institutes as “a Protestant Summa and manual of moral casuistry, in which the lightest action should be brought under the iron control of a universal rule.”18 The roots of Tawney’s engagement with Calvin lay in the growth in interest in the Genevan reformer in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth century. A remarkable, though unfairly maligned, biography was the 1850 Life of Calvin by Thomas Henry Dyer (1804–1888), an Englishman who worked for West India House in London before becoming a successful author.19 Like other biographers and writers of the nineteenth century, Dyer felt compelled to treat at length the Servetus affair, a seemingly inexplicable act of vicious intolerance. In contrast to the spate of negative portrayals of the Genevan reformer, Dyer struck a more balanced note, arguing that Calvin’s moderate views on the treatment of heretics in the Institutes were betrayed by his involvement in the 1553 trial. For Dyer, the achievement of the Institutes represented a purity of thought to which the reformer did not measure up when he connived in the execution of a heretic. Dyer’s biography appeared at the end of a decade in which interest in Calvin and the Institutes in Britain had surged with the appearance of a new English translation of the work in 1846–47, by Henry Beveridge for the Calvin Translation Society, which had been founded in 1843 in a short-lived fit of enthusiasm to

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produce English translations of the main works of the reformer.20 However, at the same time, the image of Calvinism remained dark. Also in the 1850s, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit appeared, with the evil and hypocritical Mrs. Clennam, whose perverse delight in the horrors of the Old Testament is the author’s caricature of the Calvinist mentality. In Scotland, where great interest might have been expected, there was also a revival, and societies emerged in which Calvin, Knox, and the Reformation were extolled as formative of true Christianity and a Reformed nation. As ever, the story was not uncomplicated. It was said of Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), regarded as “Scotland’s greatest nineteenth-century churchman” and leader of the Calvinist Free Church, that when asked by an American visitor about Calvin, he replied wryly that he could not lay his hands on a copy of the Institutes. Chalmers’s witty reply reflected the divided soul of Scotland. As in other centers of the Enlightenment, Protestant Scotland had moved away from traditional teachings, such as on the nature of Christ. The land of David Hume and Adam Smith had a vexed relationship with its Reformed heritage. The nineteenth century brought large numbers of Irish Catholics to western Scotland, and to Glasgow in particular. Prominent figures such as Thomas Erskine (1788–1870) openly rejected predestination. However, by the early nineteenth century, attitudes were hardening, and with the formation of the Free Church of Scotland in 1843,

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stricter forms of Calvinism returned in which predestination and church discipline were prominent. In 1825, a massive monument was erected in the Glasgow Necropolis of a twelve-foot John Knox on a pedestal supported by fifty-eight Doric columns. The extensive celebrations included processions, church services, banquets, and public speeches. James Ewing of Strathleven (1775–1853), one of Glasgow’s greatest and most influential men of commerce, education, and philanthropy, captured the spirit of the event: It is the Reformation we have to thank for the wealth of the nation, which had previously been drained by the rapacity of a foreign priesthood. It is to the Reformation we must trace the sources of our commercial prosperity.21

At the same festive dinner, the Reverend Patrick McFarlane of St. John’s Church in Glasgow rose to do something one might suspect has rarely taken place. He proposed a toast to John Calvin. If indeed a gathering has raised a glass to the reformer, it is unlikely to have been after such a lengthy panegyric. On the reformer’s great book, Rev. McFarlane was effusive: Calvin’s Institutes is a work which alone will render him immortal; it is distinguished for the purity of its Latin, and not less so for the profound and comprehensive views which it gives of the Christian system, and for the distinctiveness and simplicity with which it is written.22

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Glasgow was a center of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the words were chosen with care. The absence of theology from the minister’s description is notable. The Institutes is praised for its elegance, simplicity, and system, not for the substance of its doctrine. Likewise, there was a note of ambiguity in McFarlane’s toast. Calvin is endlessly lauded for his moral rectitude, diligence, and piety, but “his errors were the errors of the times in which he lived,” meaning above all that the Frenchman had not been tolerant. The divide over the legacy of Calvinism within Scotland found expression in literature, as it did also in America in the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. Walter Scott (1771–1832), the great historical novelist, was a vehement opponent of the Calvinism in which he grew up, contrasting it with the rationalism of the Enlightenment in, for example, Old Mortality. Likewise, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a story of profound human darkness that reflected the Scottish author’s strict Reformed upbringing. Perhaps most striking is a novel almost unknown in our time, written by a onetime shepherd, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). The work presents the horrific story of a man convinced of his election and with a deluded belief he has been charged with a divine mission to destroy the ungodly. In one scene, a dissolute laird (landlord) who

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has been upbraided by a local preacher fires back in anger at the Church of Scotland minister: You are one, Sir, whose righteousness consists in splitting the doctrines of Calvin into thousands of undistinguishable films, and in setting up a system of justifying-grace against all breaches of all laws, moral or divine. In short, Sir, you are a mildew, a cankerworm in the bosom of the Reformed Church, generating a disease of which she will never be purged, but by the shedding of blood.23

By the decade after World War I, Calvin’s prominence was no longer confined to educated clergy and academics. Through mass printing of biographies and translations of his works, together with a visual culture of monuments and lithographs, he entered the wider public sphere, far better known and recognized than ever. He was image and author, book and person inextricably bound together. The Institutes was read through the narrative of Calvin’s life, with the Servetus execution the most prominent marker on the landscape. Calvin and his book were to be found on the front lines of the significant battles involving Catholic and Protestant confessions, liberal and conservative Reformed churches, and secular and ecclesiastical politics. It was Calvin’s divided self of the nineteenth century that the next generation would attempt to overcome, making the Frenchman the voice of the Reformation recovered for a devastated society.

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America’s Calvins Chapter 6

In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1859 novel of eighteenthcentury Rhode Island, The Minister’s Wooing, loss and redemption shape the lives of men and women in the changing world of New England Calvinism as love and anguish play out under the shadow of divine election. The story was deeply personal, inspired by Stowe’s struggles after the sudden death of her son, Henry, who drowned without sign of regeneration. In the novel, the heroine’s mother reflects on the fate of the young James, with whom the principal character, her daughter Mary Scudder, is in love. James, an apparent unbeliever, was thought to be lost at sea. Stowe, haunted by the question of whether God had willed her son, Henry, to die, desperately sought a deeper, more comforting mystery. Her words are spoken by Mary’s mother: “I have always had a trembling hope for James,” said Mrs. Scudder,—“not on account of any of his good deeds or amiable traits, for election is without

foresight of any good works,—but I felt he was a child of the covenant, at least by the father’s side, and I hope the Lord has heard his prayer. These are dark providences; the world is full of them; and all we can do is to have faith that the Lord will bring infinite good out of finite evil.”1

Stowe described a New England where the Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards was fading, challenged by the rise of liberal Protestantism and Unitarianism, as well as by the emotive piety of the Great Awakenings. Stowe herself came to reject stern Calvinist tenets such as predestination, which she had been taught as a child, and her theological journey eventually led her to Arminianism.2 Her story was not unique. As in Europe, many American Protestants of the nineteenth century, including Presbyterians, no longer adhered to the classic doctrines of the Reformed faith.3 Calvinism had come to be seen as elitist and hostile to human experience. Among numerous influential figures, we find Yale divinity professor Nathaniel William Taylor (1786–1858), who rejected the so-called determinism of Calvinism in favor of a greater role for human will. Repudiation of traditional Calvinism was also to be heard in the preaching of the great Presbyterian revivalist Lyman Beecher (1775–1863). Yet just as Schleiermacher and his followers had restored Calvin and the Institutes to the theological map of Europe, likewise over the course of the nineteenth century the Frenchman’s authority grew in America.

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The Institutes featured prominently in several religious controversies, notably at Princeton and Mercersburg. Fiercely contested battles over the correct interpretation of John Calvin and the Reformation legacy contributed to the emergence of a plurality of American Reformed churches, bitterly divided by theology and ecclesiology. During the American Civil War of the 1860s, when both North and South sought the moral and religious high ground, resulting in a split within Presbyterianism, Calvin’s Institutes was read and cited as the authoritative Reformation witness. The Frenchman emerged in a nineteenth-century American Presbyterianism whose churches were full of the powerful, educated, and affluent.

Recovering a Life As in Europe, in America too John Calvin’s entry into the nineteenth century was through the growing popularity of biographies and general histories. Crucial to stimulating American interest in Calvin were the English translations of works by Swiss Protestant J. H. Merle d’Aubigné (1794–1872). Both his eight-volume History of the Great Reformation (1846) and the equally lengthy History of the Reformation in the Time of Cal­ vin (volume 1, 1863) found broad audiences. The level of interest in Merle D’Aubigné’s histories of the Reformation is indicated by the appearance of English translations in New York shortly after the publication of the

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French originals. In his preface to the American translation of the second work, Merle D’Aubigné wrote that he had two central themes in his Reformation history: “political liberty” and “evangelical liberty.” He continued, “the author, in writing this work often thought of the United States of America, in whose existence this two-fold element seemed more particularly embodied.”4 The book sold over 150,000 copies. Merle D’Aubigné presented a spiritual giant: Simple, frugal, poor, of a disposition “rather morose and bashful”—such is the humble veil that hides the greatness of his genius and the strength of his will. This man is Calvin.5

In 1846, the year Merle D’Aubigné’s first Reformation history appeared in America, an English translation of another influential book was published, this time the work of a Genevan pastor. Albert Rilliet’s Calvin and Servetus was acclaimed as the most detailed and impartial examination of the 1553 trial. Rilliet’s conclusion was to blame not Calvin but the brutality of the age in which he lived. Calvin was a towering figure, and of his masterpiece, the Institutes, Rilliet wrote that the book “formed a standard on which men fall back wherever an earnest belief and an intelligent Christianity sways the heart and life.”6 Bryan Bademan has argued that three Calvins emerged in nineteenth-century America: the intolerant murderer of Servetus, the great hero of the Reformation, and the pioneer of religious freedom.7 Rilliet

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and Merle D’Aubigné fed the appetites of those in search of a commanding figure, a founding father for American Reformed Protestantism. Calvin’s heroic life of exile, his triumph over opposition, and his creation of a Christian society in Geneva fit well with the power and irreducible logic of the Institutes to provide American Presbyterians with an authoritative, legitimating giant from the Reformation. This creation myth, however, was not unchallenged, and beyond Presbyterian circles not all tossed laurel wreaths. Many in America struggled to know what to do with Calvin. John Fiske (1842–1901), described as America’s greatest popularizer of history, captured an ambivalent spirit when he wrote that Calvin “was among all the greatest benefactors of mankind . . . the least attractive.” Further, he was “the constitutional lawyer of the Reformation, with vision as clear, with head as cool, with soul as dry, as any old solicitor in rusty black that ever dwelt in chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. His sternness was that of the judge who dooms a criminal to the gallows.” In the end, according to Fiske, Calvin’s thought was “sheer diabolism.”8 However, Fiske was clear to his American readers on Calvin’s importance: Perhaps not one of the medieval popes was more despotic in temper than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the promulgation of his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind has taken towards personal freedom.9

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As in Europe, the Servetus execution continued to be cited as evidence of Calvin’s horrific character. One of Calvin’s most ardent defenders was Charles W. Shields (1825–1904) of Princeton, who in the 1890s, writing in the Presbyterian Reform and Review, admitted that the general view of the Frenchman was not healthy: “For some generations past the world has had an ideal Calvin, who not only taught that hell is full of infants a span long but proceeded to roast the chief opponent of that doctrine in a fire of green wood.”10 In 1898, Shields published a play titled “The Reformer of Geneva: An Historical Drama,” in which he offered a highly favorable account of Calvin during the Servetus trial.11 Shields sought so far as possible to provide an accurate account of the proceedings, but what makes the play most interesting is the author’s attention to Calvin’s anguish. As he is left alone on stage, the reformer reflects: God knows I never hated, scarce despised This rash, hot-headed Spaniard, who so long Hath striven to mix me up with his wild dreams. Yet were I made of iron not to feel His railings at all saving truth and grace, And blind with folly not to see the ruin He would pull down both on himself and us.12

For American Protestants determined to recover a Reformation hero, a mythical John Calvin took his place among the founders of American republicanism. The words of Merle D’Aubigné provided the text:

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“that American nation which we have seen growing so rapidly boasts as its father the humble reformer on the shores of Lake Leman (Geneva).”13 This optimistic understanding of political lineage was key to the language of the 1909 invitation to Geneva for the celebration of Calvin’s four hundredth birthday: “Great historians speak of [Calvin] as the founder of the United States.” The depth of Calvinist influence in American culture of the nineteenth century is far beyond our scope, but recently Marilynne Robinson has reflected on two authors of particular importance to her who drew deeply from the Reformed tradition and Calvin’s thought.14 After teaching Herman Melville’s Moby­ Dick (1851), Robinson was moved to read the Institutes and the theology so clearly central to that novel. And the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), who grew up in New England Calvinism, displays, Robinson noted, Calvin’s joy in the beauty of God’s creation.

A House Divided The Civil War (1861–65) bitterly divided American Presbyterian churches, not least over the issue of slavery. “Old School” and “New School” outlooks shaped Reformed Christianity in American life, with the former, associated with the South, proving much more theologically conservative and therefore unwilling to engage in social questions, such as slavery.15 New

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School Presbyterians were primarily, though not exclusively, in the North and had, in the words of George Marsden, “a culturalist emphasis, inherited from the Puritans, looking for a Christianization of American life.”16 Members of the Reformed faith were found on both sides of the debate over slavery. Without a doubt, the most significant figure was controversial abolitionist John Brown (1807–1877), remembered by one contemporary as a “Calvinist . . . anti-slavery in sentiment,” who believed that supporters of slavery should be put to death; he was executed himself for inciting slave mutiny. On the other side was the Kentucky Presbyterian pastor Nathan Lewis Rice (1800–1859), who as moderator of the church wrote his “Ten Letters on the Subject of Slavery,” which was published in Saint Louis in 1856. Rice, who repeatedly denounced Calvin’s doctrine of predestination in the Institutes, recorded, “slavery, as it exists in our country, presents itself as a providential fact.”17 For prominent writers on both sides, John Calvin loomed large. One notable figure in the South was James Henley Thornwell (1812–1862), who was a professor at South Carolina Theological Seminary. He spoke of the war in terms of an assault on the Christian Confederacy by the godless North. A resolute defender of slavery on biblical grounds, Thornwell taught his students theology from the Institutes and regarded Calvin’s book as the fullest expression of Reformed theology. One of his students recalled Thornwell’s

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opening lecture on the Institutes: “I remember well the account he gave of his visit to Calvin’s grave, and of his musings upon the molding influence of the mighty Reformer upon theological thought: and the statement of his conviction, that the emergencies of the conflict with Rationalistic infidelity were now forcing the whole Church more and more to occupy Calvin’s ground.”18 Thornwell must have divined some secret knowledge to have known where Calvin was buried. Thornwell is but one figure in a generation of Presbyterian writers on both sides of the conflict who claimed Calvin. The consequence was a deeply divided church that would not be reconciled for generations. Together with the theological developments in Princeton, the religious controversies of the Civil War were most responsible for putting Calvin and the Institutes on America’s theological map.

The Great Debate Calvin’s theology was by no means obscured by his symbolic role—quite the opposite. In the most tumultuous religious debates in nineteenth-century America, the Genevan reformer and his teaching were in the eye of the storm. Indeed, the question of the correct understanding of Calvin and the Institutes brought about the most significant division within American Presbyterianism of the century. On one side stood Princeton Theological Seminary and its venerable professors

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Charles Hodge (1797–1878) and Benjamin Warfield (1851–1921). On the other was the German Reformed seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, which in John Williamson Nevin (1803–1886) and Philip Schaff (1819–1893) possessed some of the most eminent scholars of the age. It was truly a clash of the titans, the likes of which would not be seen again in Reformed Christianity until Barth and Brunner, as we shall explore. In nineteenth-century America, it was the PrincetonMercersburg struggle for the soul of John Calvin that brought the Institutes to prominence. The contours of the debate are complex, but essentially the German Romantic tradition of Schleiermacher was pitted against the Princeton attachment to the rationalist Common Sense philosophy of Scotland. Following Schleiermacher and his school, Nevin and Schaff embraced an ecumenism sufficiently broad that they could envisage union with Rome. Against Hodge and others, they held to a progressive understanding of theology, asserting that it was not static but in continuous development. Both sides looked to the Reformation and Calvin, but whereas Hodge saw the Reformed tradition as fixed and determined, the Mercersburg theologians adopted a more Hegelian view of unfolding truth. Central to Nevin’s work were his controversial writings on the Eucharist. In his Mystical Presence, he had a great deal to say about Calvin and the Institutes. Of the Genevan reformer, Nevin wrote, “No authority in the case [of the Lord’s Supper] can be entitled to greater

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respect. He was emphatically the great theologian of his age.”19 Calvin’s teaching on the Eucharist was, in Nevin’s estimation, the premiere expression of the Reformation doctrine of the sixteenth century. Throughout Mystical Presence, Nevin heaped praise on Calvin’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper, and the Institutes was often quoted. However, Nevin was clear that the sixteenth-century reformer did not fully explain everything, and that it would be unwise to adhere too closely to a long-dead theologian: “We cling to the old; in its life, however, rather than by slavish adhesion to its letter. So it must be indeed in the case of all religious truth, dogmatically considered. It cannot hold in the form of dead traditions.”20 Nevin saw his place as rendering Reformation doctrines “more satisfactory.” The view from Princeton looked strikingly different. From its founding in 1834 to the early decades of the twentieth century, Princeton Theological Seminary was dominated by Calvinism of various sorts under such figures as Charles Hodge and later Benjamin Warfield. Both men looked to Calvin and the Reformation to restore Reformed Christianity and American churches to such an extent that in the eyes of one biographer there was a symbiosis: “Dr Alexander once said to a friend that the mental constitution of Dr. Hodge was more than that of any man he knew—like that of John Calvin, without his severity.”21 Hodge, like many others, claimed to be recovering the true Calvin, thereby returning to a purer age of Reformation thought. However, one must take care

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in reading Hodge’s voluminous works, including, for example, his Discussions in Church Polity, where the Institutes is frequently quoted. The number of references to Calvin is deceptive, leading to the false impression that the French reformer was singularly authoritative. The great Princetonian may have quoted and referred to Calvin often, yet what do these citations mean? Hodge looked to the Frenchman as the leading theological voice of the Reformation, a founding father, as it were. Yet like his nemesis Nevin, he praised Calvin while appropriating him for current theological debates. In Hodge’s case, the real story emerges when we read his sermons and tracts to find that the Institutes was the cart, not the horse. Calvin’s book provided support for arguments whose provenance lay elsewhere, such as in Scottish Common Sense philosophy and other fruits of the Enlightenment. The most significant revival of Calvin in the nineteenth century took place in America, where engagement went beyond biography to serious debate over the Institutes, which remained central to the training of pastors at Princeton, Mercersburg, and a large number of other Reformed seminaries. The debates were far more theological in orientation, giving the Insti­ tutes a singular importance. The recovery of the Reformation was linked to a distinctively American culture of progress. Nowhere would this become more evident than at the end of the century in the friendship of three extraordinary figures.

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“A Very Calvinist Professor” and His Dutch Friends Chapter 7

One of the greatest, if not the greatest, figure of American Calvinism at the dawn of the twentieth century was Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, professor of theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1887 to 1921. A brilliant and prodigious scholar with almost superhuman powers of recall, Warfield did more than any other to promote the writings of John Calvin in the United States. He passionately believed Calvinism to be the highest form of Christianity, and he reached out to leading exponents of Reformed theology, including the two most prominent figures of Dutch Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854–1921). Through Warfield’s influence, both Dutchmen were invited to deliver the prestigious Stone Lectures at Princeton and became close friends with the professor. Kuyper, Bavinck, and Warfield were the leading interpreters of Calvin as the anniversary of the reformer’s birth was marked in 1909. Kuyper was the elder statesman, born in 1837, while Bavinck and Warfield

were almost of identical age, yet all three died within months of one another in 1920–21, marking the end of a great age of Calvin scholarship. As Warfield’s coffin was carried from the church, it was remarked that Old Princeton, the world of Charles Hodge, had passed. The personal bonds between the three men by no means meant they held to identical interpretations of Calvin or Calvinism. Indeed, Warfield departed from his Dutch friends in marked ways while retaining their affection and admiration. Nevertheless, the impact of the Dutchmen’s coming to Princeton was profound, for it brought to the New World the Neo- Calvinism that was flourishing in the Netherlands. Kuyper and Bavinck would be followed by fellow Dutchmen who taught in Princeton and in the colleges of the Dutch immigrants in Michigan. Dutch theology became a powerful force in Reformed Christianity in America, and remains so today, as one sees in the current revival of Neo-Calvinism. All three men traced their theology to John Calvin, whom they regarded as the great light of the Reformation and the restorer of Christianity. In his preface to a work by Kuyper, Warfield wrote that Calvin was remembered only as the teacher of the doctrine of predestination, a theological position in which he was the heir of Augustine; what continued to be overlooked in his day, Warfield lamented, were Calvin’s original contributions to theology. Among the principal achievements of the Genevan reformer that stirred “our grateful memory” was Calvin’s teaching on the threefold

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office of Christ in the second book of the Institutes. “It is to John Calvin,” Warfield declared, that we owe that broad conception of the work of Christ which is expressed in the doctrine of his threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King: he was the first who presented the work of Christ under this schema, and from him it has passed into a Christian commonplace.1

“The Lion of Princeton” Benjamin Warfield believed that the Institutes had a special “construction” in which there was an emphasis on the knowledge of God. The Institutes, he argued in “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God,” was “a complete structure of Christian Apologetics.”2 In 1899, Warfield wrote a “literary history” of Calvin’s Institutes for the Presbyterian and Reformed Re­ view that was reprinted at the beginning of American translations of Calvin’s book for the next half century. Warfield not only provided a detailed account of the Institutes’ development but also assembled a vast array of laudations from contemporary churchmen and writers for “that fundamental treatise in the development of that evangelical theology to which the Reformed Churches are committed.”3 Such commendation was only the beginning. Warfield continued:

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It is saying too little, to say that, in reading this work, we are brought into contact with a great book; would we justly express its eminence, we must say that is one of the world’s greatest books—absolutely the greatest book of its class. What Thucydides is among Greek, or Gibbon among the eighteenth century English historians, what Shakespeare is among dramatists, or the Iliad among epics, that Calvin’s Institutes is among dogmatic treatises.4

The Institutes was to theology, Warfield continued, what Bacon’s Organum and Newton’s Principia were to physical science. Perhaps the most singular, even bizarre, piece of praise for the 1559 Institutes is found in a passage quoted approvingly by Warfield from the Chief Actors in the Puritan Revolution (1879), by the popular Scottish writer and Presbyterian Peter Bayne: The Institutes are in all, save material form, a great religious poem, as imaginative in general scheme and as sustained in emotional heat, as Paradise Lost, though, of course, not to be compared for beauty of language or picturesqueness of detail, with Milton’s poem. Calvin treats, in four successive books, of Christ the Creator, Christ the Redeemer, Christ the Inspirer, and Christ the King; if he had written in verse, avoided argumentative discussion, and called the work The Christiad, it would have been the most symmetrical epic in existence.5

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Teaching Calvin’s intended audience of students for ministry through iambic pentameter would have been a novel form of theological education indeed. In their struggle, Princeton and Mercersburg had raised John Calvin to become the towering figure of the Reformation, who bestrode all others. The Frenchman was celebrated as a great writer in the tradition of the Greeks and Romans, a theological genius, and a shaper of the modern world (American democracy). The Institutes was the most perfect expression of a brilliance that was the greatness of the Reformed tradition. The heart of Calvinism, Warfield wrote, was the “heart of John Calvin.” Yet what lay in that heart was fiercely contested. To win the battle for Calvin was to prevail in the struggles that tore apart the Presbyterian churches in America. In a manner unknown to previous centuries, the nineteenth-century Calvin stood alone. As with the monument erected in Geneva in 1909, the virtues of the memorialized reformer were those of the contemporary society that venerated him.

Abraham Kuyper and the Rise of Neo-Calvinism The legacy of the Protestant Dutch Republic and the Reformed faith was a source of pride in a nation that in the nineteenth century remained shaped by Calvinism. Certainly, Dutch Reformed churches promoted Calvin’s work as instruction in true doctrine, and the

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evidence suggests the Institutes was widely read. However, the secularism of the century, the growth of atheism, and divisions between liberal and conservative Protestants laid a heavy burden on the Dutch churches. Dutch Neo-Calvinism, which looked to the Reformation as a tonic for the ills of modern society, emerged in the final decades of the century under its most prominent figure, the remarkable Abraham Kuyper, who was a pastor and later prime minister of the Netherlands.6 Kuyper’s work was closely connected with the Institutes, and in 1865, as he was developing his theological positions, he wrote that through Calvin’s system were laid “the foundations, which, banning all doubt, permitted the edifice of faith to be constructed in a completely logical style—and with the surprising result that the most consistent ethic ruled in its inner chambers.”7 Believing that no work since the apostolic age had been the equal of the Institutes, in 1887 Kuyper reprinted the 1650 Dutch edition of Calvin’s text, with his goal a translation in lucid Dutch. In his preface he argued that the church must return to God’s Word as explained in the Institutes. The importance of Calvin’s work for Kuyper is beyond doubt, though it was by no means singular, for as the Dutchman developed his thinking about the church in the Netherlands, he drew upon both contemporary and Reformation thought. As James D. Bratt has recognized, however, Kuyper sought “to preserve ‘Calvin’s solid church form’ of confessional distinctiveness amid a pluralistic society.”8

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Neo-Calvinism, broadly speaking, was an attempt to accommodate Reformed Christian theology to the modern world, particularly science.9 Under Kuyper, Bavinck, and others, Neo-Calvinism rejected both rigid orthodoxy and Pietist emotions, together with the hyperrationalism of contemporary thought. The core of Neo-Calvinist sentiments was the expansiveness of God’s majesty to the very ends of creation. Nothing was outside his glory. Against the liberal theologians, Kuyper and others emphasized the historical authority of the Bible and the existence of objective truth. Such, he argued, was Calvin’s teaching in the Institutes.

The Gentle Scholar Herman Bavinck was the son of a Reformed pastor who had been instrumental in the founding of the Dutch Reformed Church, which arose from the break with the liberal Hervormde Kerk. The young Bavinck studied theology at Leiden, where he retained his traditional Calvinism despite being taught by distinguished liberal professors. During his student years he came under the influence of Kuyper, and after completing his doctorate he was offered a position at the Free University of Amsterdam. Bavinck initially declined the call of academia for pastoral ministry. In 1883, Bavinck accepted the chair of theology at Kampen, and such was his inaugural address that

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Kuyper exclaimed, “now this is really scientific Reformed theology.” The relationship between Kuyper and Bavinck was personally warm and theologically close, but the younger man was no mere apprentice. Writing in 1920, Henry Dosker observed that “each had his own peculiar points of excellence and also his own peculiar limitations; none of them could have occupied the place of the other. . . . The one gently tries to untie Gordian knots, the other cuts them through with mighty blows of his keen sword.10 In 1902, Bavinck succeeded Kuyper as professor of theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, one year after the latter became prime minister. In 1892, Bavinck traveled to North America, where he visited Princeton and began his enduring friendship with Benjamin Warfield. Upon his return to Europe, Bavinck wrote his most influential work on Calvin’s theology, developing a theme that Kuyper took up and that became a hallmark of Neo- Calvinism. The essay was titled “Calvin and Common Grace” and appeared in the Princeton Theological Review in 1909, the four hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth.11 Bavinck saw the Institutes as the perfect expression of Calvin’s “clear, deep and harmonious insight into Christian truth [such] as to render any subsequent modification unnecessary.” Further, “the first edition of the Institutio which appeared in March, 1536,” he observed, “was expanded and increased in the later issues, but it never changed, and the task which, in his view, the Reformation had to accomplish, remained

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from beginning to end his own goal in life.”12 The Dutchman described the Institutes as a “work characterized by great sobriety, wholly free from scholastic abstruseness,” that embodied all that was great about the reformer of Geneva.13 While admitting that Calvin had erred in consenting to the death of Servetus, Bavinck was adamant that the author of the Institutes was a great and sympathetic man. The unity and the diversity in the whole world alike point back to the one sovereign, omnipotent, gracious and merciful will of God. In this spirit Calvin labored in Geneva. But his activity was not confined to the territory of one city. Geneva was to Calvin merely the center, from which he surveyed the entire field of the Reformation in all lands. When his only child was taken away from him by death, he consoled himself with the thought that God had given him numerous children after the Spirit. And so it was indeed. Through an extensive correspondence he kept in touch with his fellow-laborers in the work of the Reformation; all questions were referred to him; he was the councillor of all the leaders of the great movement; he taught hundreds of men and trained them in his spirit. From all quarters refugees came to Geneva, that bulwark against Rome, to seek protection and support, and afterwards returned to their own lands inspired with new courage. Thus Calvin created in many lands a people who, while made up

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from all classes, nobles and plain citizens, townspeople and countryfolk, were yet one in the consciousness of a divine vocation. In this consciousness they took up the battle against tyranny in Church and state alike, and in that contest secured liberties and rights which are still ours at the present day.14

For Bavinck and Dutch Neo-Calvinists, the Insti­ tutes was the embodiment of a man who was in turn a model for what they should be. Church members were enjoined to admire Calvin’s commitment to writing the Institutes. The Neo-Calvinist paper Timotheus declared in a 1909 article simply titled “Johannes Calvijn” that Calvin was “an example of extraordinary diligence and extraordinary faithfulness in using his gifts.” This bourgeois Calvin, a model for the supposed Protestant work ethic, was hardly the first appearance of the reformer as an advocate of the principles of his editors. Young boys were to imitate Calvin’s dedication to the Institutes in their own professional lives.15 The NeoCalvinists reprinted the book in 1889, 1912, and 1934, and they enthusiastically praised it in their journals and newspapers. Reflecting on John Calvin and the Institutes of the Christian Religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe leads us to the complex and vexing question of religion and modernity. The Enlightenment had changed everything by rejecting the foundations of Reformation thought. With Schleiermacher, and then later Brunner and Barth,

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that legacy and, above all Calvin’s thought, were simultaneously claimed and reformulated for the modern world. In debating with Calvin on God, predestination, or Servetus, Europeans engaged with their own struggles about the claims of religion in a rapidly changing society. Religious identities in the nineteenth century needed the past to authenticate and impart meaning, but the recovery of a book printed in 1559 was fraught with difficulties. While the arguments of the Institutes provided a theological correction to a religion of rationality, the work of the Enlightenment could not be undone; there was no simple return to the mental world of the sixteenth century. To reprint and read the Institutes alongside biographies of Calvin was to draw near and to distance oneself from the Reformation, revealing an intellectual and historical chasm bridged only by appropriation and interpretation. European Reformed churches sought to find Calvin through various routes, such as theology and culture. They constructed narratives of a return to arcadia and of progress to modernity. Together they created the Calvin we recognize.

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Titans: Barth and Brunner Chapter 8

In a 1962 article in Time magazine, Karl Barth quipped, “Calvin is in Heaven and has had time to ponder where he went wrong in his teachings. Doubtless he is pleased that I am setting him aright.”1 The article portrayed Barth as having emerged from the “gloomy Calvinism” of his youth to become the leading theologian of his time. Nevertheless, the role of John Calvin was acknowledged. The reformer was, according to the article, Barth’s “admitted master,” yet one who stood in need of correction on account of a doctrine of predestination that “does not pay sufficient heed to the fact that Christ’s death was intended for all men.” Mechanized slaughter, the rise of fascism, and the deaths of twenty million men, women, and children smashed the optimism of what Karl Barth called the “cultural Christianity” of the nineteenth century. Barth had been educated in the tradition of liberal Protestantism and retained deep admiration for the towering figures of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Nevertheless, the Swiss pastor and professor brought about a theological

revolution that repudiated what he saw as the churches’ fatal accommodation with secular society. Humans, Barth thundered, possessed no means of knowing God other than through his revelation in Christ. Humanly constructed “religion” was idolatrous. Barth took a stand in Europe’s darkest hour. In 1934, he was the principal author of the Barmen Declaration denouncing the German Protestant churches’ acceptance of Nazi propaganda that Hitler “was the way of the Spirit and the Will of God for the Church of Christ among the German Nation.” God alone, Barmen declared, is sovereign, and Christ alone is Lord. The churches were to return to the classic teaching of the Reformation, not to confuse God’s will with National Socialist ideology. Karl Barth was the most significant figure in the recovery of Calvin in the twentieth century, and the professor always had the best lines on the Genevan reformer. In words often quoted, the young Swiss pastor expressed in a 1922 letter the foreignness, exoticism, and allure of the Frenchman. Calvin is a waterfall, a primitive force, something demonic, coming down direct from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, wonderful, mythological. I lack the organs, the suction cups, to take in this phenomenon not to mention presenting it rightly. What I take in is only a thin stream, and what I give out still thinner. I could cheerfully sit down and spend the rest of my life with Calvin.2

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Barth got his wish. Calvin never left him, and Barth’s last seminar in Basel before he died was on the Institutes. Years of study, writing, and preaching, however, tempered Barth’s early enthusiasm for Calvin, though there was no diminution of the intensity of their dialogue. Calvin was never our pope. Calvin could never take the rank of doctor among us, as is the case with Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas in Catholicism. . . . The true authority of Protestant Christians is the Word, which God himself spoke, which he speaks, and which he will speak eternally by the witness of the Holy Spirit in the writings of the Old and New Testament. Calvin is, for us, a master of the art of listening to this one and only teaching in the church.3

Barth would never have wanted to treat Calvin as a “pope,” but his respect was profound, and he saw the Frenchman as a “master” who understood the true nature of Christianity. Already in 1922, writing about the 1536 Institutes, Barth claimed that the Reformation did not fall victim to the illusion that gripped the whole of the Middle Ages and that has gained force again in the modern age, the illusion that there is a continuous path that leads step by step from an earthly city of God to the kingdom of heaven. For [Calvin] the divine was always divine and the human always human.4

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Calvin, according to Barth, had recentered theology on the glory of an all-powerful, gracious God who alone is the source of all that is, who alone saves. The secret was simply this, that [the Reformation] took this theme seriously in all its distinctiveness, that it names God God, that it lets God be God, the one object that by no bold human grasping or inquiry or approach can be simply one object among many others. God is. He lives. He judges and blesses. He slays and makes alive [cf. 1 Samuel 2:6]. He is the Creator and Redeemer and Lord.5

Barth declared Calvin, more than any other reformer, to have raised his voice and shaken the churches. The Frenchman had brooked no compromise, no easy options. Alluding to the Protestant churches of his day, Barth wrote that many of the reformers would have settled for greater accommodation with political authorities, but not Calvin. Referring to the 1909 memorial as a castrated Calvin, Barth wrote that if the other reformers had had their way, how then that a Calvin jubilee might have been celebrated similar to the celebrations in 1909, at a safe distance from the guns, with infinite joy under the shadow of the great name, but joy at what? At being so very different from Calvin himself.6

Contact was made early. Barth had been introduced to the Institutes as a student, and when in 1909 he became a pastor in Geneva he preached from Calvin’s

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pulpit. The young minister was an avid reader of the Institutes. Of his time in Geneva he wrote, “It may have been the spirit of the place which caused me to deepen the experience I had gained from reading Schleiermacher again and again by making considerable inroads into Calvin’s Institutes.” For Barth, Calvin was a Homeric figure of flawed greatness: a man of “tragedy.” This sense of the person as a human being marked their relationship, and their courtship took time. As a pastor trained in the liberal theology of the nineteenth century, Barth initially read Calvin largely in terms of ethics. That focus would change drastically, and Barth would later recall of those early years: “I’m afraid that Calvin would hardly have been very pleased at the sermons which I preached in his pulpit then.”7 In his lectures on Calvin from the early 1920s, delivered in the shadow of Europe’s worst catastrophe and in the face of Weimar chaos, Barth referred to Calvin’s favorite quotation from Cicero: “History is the teacher of life.”8 Calvin, Barth told his audience, would have been a keen reader of newspapers, wholly engaged with contemporary politics, but not to create the theocracy of which he was falsely accused. Calvin’s “tendency to keep a distance between heaven and earth gave him an inner freedom to act more certainly and determinedly on earth.”9 The reformer of Geneva was no dreamer of an ideal world. He was a lawyer who knew how to get things done, who understood the relationship of eternity and daily politics. This was, of course, Barth’s sense of his own calling. As Calvin had

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found himself in the apostle Paul, so the young Barth saw in the Genevan reformer both a witness to the Word and a commitment to the world, free from pandering to human tastes. Barth would later admit that his early infatuation with Calvin and the Reformation tempered over time. Although he retained his great admiration for the reformers, above all Calvin, the further he studied their writings, the greater the critical distance he felt from them. In Bonn during the early 1930s, he wrote: Having in the 1920s swung clearly behind the “Reformation line,” I soon saw it was also necessary to continue it, to arrange the relationship between law and gospel, nature and grace, election and Christology and even between philosophy and theology more exactly and thus differently from the patterns which I found in the sixteenth century. Since I could not become an orthodox “Calvinist,” I had even less desire to support Lutheran confessionalism.10

Calvin was more to Barth than a sympathetic yet deeply disquieting theological partner from the distant Reformation. Barth wrestled with the Frenchman daily. His student, assistant, and biographer Eberhard Busch recalls that Barth had willingly involved himself in the 1959 celebration of Calvin in Geneva, and that “for a long time Barth had thought that Calvin was an incomparable theological teacher, and he presented Calvin’s thinking to his students as a model.”11

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In the years around the four hundredth anniversary of the 1559 Institutes, Barth ran a series of seminars on Calvin. Between 1957 and 1960, he taught on various parts of the Institutes, including in 1960 Calvin’s epistemology in book 1. Barth’s recollection of those seminars perfectly captured the degrees of ambiguity in his relationship to the French reformer, full of criticism and affection for a sixteenth-century interpreter of the Word who shared with him the intensity of life coram Deo. In the second seminar, there was a discussion of Calvin’s Eucharistic doctrine, in which it again proved that “it is inevitable that we shall have serious reservations even about these classic theologians: especially about Calvin’s doctrine of God, his view of predestination that is based on it, and its consequences in all areas of his interpretation of the Christian faith. But it is not difficult to bracket off this problematical complex. Then one can rejoice at seeing Calvin’s clear view of the centre of the gospel.”12 In a manner reminiscent of the experiences of Jonathan Edwards, Calvin haunted, enthralled, and enraged Barth, who although he continued to think and write about the reformer and teach new generations to read the Institutes, found it necessary to repeat his independence. In a preface to the Institutes written in the late 1950s, Barth declared that: Unlike Luther, Calvin was not a genius, but a conscientious exegete, a strict and tenacious thinker and at

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the same time a theologian who was indefatigably concerned with the practice of Christian life, and life in the church. . . . He is a good teacher, of a kind which has been rare in the church—who does not hand over to an understanding reader the results of his study, but asks him to take it up and to discover new results in his footsteps.13

Such “new results” were precisely what Barth had seen as his relationship to Calvin, adding, “only a Christian and a theologian who has learned in Calvin’s Institutes to pursue the truth with which he is concerned by using his own eyes and ears can be a ‘Calvinist.’ ” Just over a year before Barth’s death in December 1968, he announced yet one more seminar in Basel on Calvin. This time it would focus on Calvin the ecumenical reformer and his doctrines of faith and the Holy Spirit. All three themes Barth regarded as the best of Calvin.14

Nein Calvin’s Institutes lay at the heart of the most embittered exchange in twentieth-century theology, a clash in 1934 between two Swiss professors who had once seen themselves as allies against the liberal theology and cultural Christianity of the nineteenth century. As the National Socialists took power, Barth, then teaching at the University of Bonn in Germany, took on his

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countryman Emil Brunner, professor of theology in Zurich, in a fierce debate over the nature of theology.15 The debate between the two men had many dimensions. Brunner had written a scathing attack on the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Barth, although in many respects sympathetic, was deeply irritated by Brunner’s seemingly arrogant dismissal of the great theologian. Barth regarded Schleiermacher as a genius, although he fiercely rejected much of his teaching. For Barth and Brunner, the legacy of Schleiermacher dominated theology, and to correct the errors of liberal Protestantism the two Swiss men had to demonstrate that the German was wrong about Calvin and the Reformation. Famously, Barth and Brunner argued vehemently over natural theology—whether humans have access to knowledge of God by means other than revelation. It was a long-disputed question in Christian theology, all the more pressing in the 1930s on account of National Socialism and the German Protestant theologians who were prepared to accept Hitler as a new form of revelation. The rejection of natural theology that Barth declared central in the Barmen Declaration was closely tied to events of the early 1930s. Both Barth and Brunner laid claim to the classic Reformed theology of the sixteenth century, and their clash over natural theology revealed the very different ways they read Calvin. At stake was Calvin’s question in book 1 of the Institutes, How do we know God? His answer is subtle. There is a general knowledge

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available to all humans through creation that points to God, however vaguely. It is not, Calvin is clear, saving knowledge. That knowledge comes from God alone and is bestowed on the elect through scripture. This account represents Calvin’s twofold knowledge of God, and Barth and Brunner, in clashing ways, attempted to bring it to bear on the theological world of interwar Europe. Although Brunner was better known at the time in America and Asia, Barth largely prevailed, leaving an enduring interpretation of Calvin that left no place for any form of natural theology. Barth’s public savaging of Brunner was not limited to theological debate. He believed that Brunner had betrayed him by attributing to him arguments he had never held, creating a false consensus that, Barth believed, threatened the most fundamental principles of Christian theology that Calvin had taught. Brunner had, in Barth’s mind, connived with the Protestants of the previous century, who had caved in to the bourgeois culture of European society to create a subservient cultural Christianity that had abandoned the Gospel. In his preface to “No! An Answer to Emil Brunner,” Barth kept his polemic personal: Ever since about 1916, when I began to recover noticeably from the effects of my theological studies and the influences of the liberal-political pre-war theology, my opinion concerning the task of our theological generation has been this: we must learn again to

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understand revelation as grace and grace as revelation and therefore turn away from all “true” or “false” theologia naturalis.16

Against Brunner, Barth banged the table, arguing that humanity is utterly lost, incapable of taking one step toward salvation unless God speaks: The image of God in man is totally destroyed by sin. Every attempt to assert a general revelation has to be rejected. There is no grace of creation and preservation. There are no recognizable ordinances of preservation. There is no point of contact for the redeeming action of God. The new creation is in no sense the perfection of the old but rather the replacement of the old man by the new.17

This teaching, Barth passionately believed, was the message of Calvin’s Institutes, and he saw himself as charged with recovering the Reformation message for his broken age. As John W. Hart has written, In addition, their different appropriation of the Reformation partly explains why Barth and Brunner talked past each other in the natural theology debate. Barth wearied of Brunner’s citations of Calvin, since Brunner missed “the intentions of Reformation theology.” Brunner, for his part, was highly suspicious of Barth’s claim that, in order to “adhere to the teaching of the Reformation” it was necessary to re-write “what Calvin wrote in those first chapters of The Institutes.”18

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Brunner was by no means willing to yield the Insti­ tutes to Barth, despite their shared rejection of liberal theology and with it the Jesus of morality. Calvin’s In­ stitutes courses through the veins of Brunner’s writings. What had enraged Barth was that Brunner had found in Calvin the very teaching the Basel professor fiercely rejected. Barth’s “Nein” to Brunner was, in many respects, a repudiation of the latter’s reading of the Insti­ tutes. In “Nature and Grace,” the work against which Barth wrote, Brunner was adamant that the doctrine of natural theology was to be found in Calvin: We might ask why Barth should so violently and brusquely deny a doctrine which is obviously in accordance with Scriptures and the Reformation, in spite of his being otherwise loyal to Scripture and being so seriously concerned to recapture the message of the Reformation.19

Arguing from the Institutes, Brunner made Barth see red by writing: The theological importance of the concept of nature is shown by the fact that God can be known from nature. This is not a confused knowledge, which can hardly be of interest for the Christian, who knows the Word of God.  .  .  . God can be known from nature other than man, but also from man himself.20

Although he attempted to show that Barth had misread Calvin on the question of whether there is a natural theology by which humans could know God,

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Brunner, like his erstwhile friend, had a troubled relationship to the sixteenth-century reformer. He could at times align Barth with Calvin in their common error. In contrast to Barth, for example, Brunner believed that Calvin had led Christianity down the wrong path with his interpretation of the church as the external means of salvation. This unfortunate decision by the reformers, Brunner wrote, was foreign to what the New Testament understood by “ecclesia,” which is the body of Christ. Calvin therefore had turned the Reformation into an institutional movement. Brunner opened his 1952 work, The Misunderstanding of the Church, by depicting Calvin as the most extraordinary and influential yet problematic writer: In his classical work—Institutio Christianae Religionis— which has probably exercised a greater influence than any other writing upon the theology of Protestant Christianity, Calvin does not begin his teaching concerning the Church until the last and fourth book, that is, not until he has in his third book discussed the dogma of justification by faith. This order of treatment, which has subsequently been adhered to by all reformed theology, is not self-explanatory nor is it lacking in significance. It is both an expression and a cause of that Protestant individualism which is so often deplored.21

Brunner added: Certainly, from the point of view of the New Testament, of what is there called “Ecclesia” and what the

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Ecclesia understands itself to be—the thought of Calvin, that the church is an external support for faith, is utterly unintelligible.22

The dispute between the two men pretty much destroyed their relationship, and there was little contact between them for almost thirty years. Toward the end of their lives, in 1960, John Hesselink arranged for Brunner and Barth to meet again over lunch. Both men were cordial, and a photograph captured the occasion with the two men sharing a laugh, though they parted disappointed. When Brunner was dying, Barth wrote in a brief letter: Unfortunately our relationship has been dominated too much by negativity. . . . But I want to affirm you, as our Lord has affirmed us. . . . For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you . . . was not “Yes and No”; but in him it is always “Yes.” . . . That is my last word to you.23

The Barth-Brunner confrontation put Calvin and the Institutes at the heart of the most significant debate within Reformed theology during the twentieth century. Both men had demanded that contemporary theology find its roots in the Reformation, in particular the sovereignty of God and the primacy of the Word. They could not, however, agree on what Calvin had argued, and each made the Institutes say quite different things. Above all, Barth created a Calvin for the twentieth century. By advocating a form of universal

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salvation, Barth removed Calvin’s objectionable doctrine of double predestination. In their critical relationships to the Genevan reformer, both Barth and Brunner fashioned a symbol of the Reformed faith whose Institutes could be read by Protestants across the theological spectrum. As Barth remarked, he had put Calvin aright.

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Prophet of Modernity— Prince of Tyrants Chapter 9

In Europe and America, the anniversary year of 1909 had been the moment of reckoning with Calvin and the Institutes. It had also been the year of propitiation for the “sin” of Servetus’s execution, which was largely attributed to the brutality of Calvin’s age, an interpretation of gross historical condescension. Servetus was honored as a victim of intolerance, while Calvin became a visionary of progress, a curious double act. Yet the ruse did not work. As Warfield, Kuyper, Barth, and Brunner demonstrated, if Calvin was to remain relevant, it would be in dialogue, even disagreement, with modernity. Alongside Doumergue’s work in France, which was never translated into English, the most influential biography to emerge was John Calvin: The Organiser of Reformed Protestantism, 1509–1564, which was written by Yale church historian Williston Walker (1860– 1922) and appeared in 1906.1 In a New York Times review of Walker’s life of Calvin, titled “The Reformer Who Found Infallibility in Himself,” the writer made an unflattering comparison of the Institutes with the

Frenchman’s life. Nothing could be clearer than the opening lines. “John Calvin,” the reviewer warns potential readers, “was not [a] pleasant man, and his biography is not pleasant reading.” The reviewer continues to consider the book, the content of which is not referred to, as a symbol of the reformer: As to Calvin’s magnum opus, that which contained his whole scheme, the “Institutes,” there can be no doubt that it was, as Prof. Walker says, the clearest and most logical presentation of the then Protestantism. But the fact that Calvin never outgrew the limits of this book, which was almost his first, and which though greatly enlarged later, was never modified, is evidence of the stiffness and limitation of his own mind.2

Walker, who in 1901 accepted the chair of church history at Yale, had written a largely admiring account of Calvin’s life and thought. He shared with his hostile reviewer a strong sense that Calvin was a systematic theologian and that the Institutes contained a watertight theological system that defined the Reformed tradition. The 1559 edition, Walker wrote, revealed Calvin as an “experienced teacher and the developed master of logical order.”3 It was a “masterpiece of Reformation theology, [a] signal in its ‘vivacity’ and clearness.” Walker’s understanding of the book was clear from his assessment of the Institutes as the “standard presentation of the Calvinistic system.”4 The Yale professor also sought to break the link between the Institutes and the Servetus affair, to which

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hostile voices continuously referred. Unlike other Calvin defenders at the time of the anniversary, Walker did not excuse Calvin on the grounds of being a creature of a cruel age. Calvin, according to Walker, had simply done the right thing. “He,” we read, “had freed the Swiss churches from the imputation of heresy; he prevented any toleration of anti-trinitarian opinions in the religious circles that looked to him for guidance.”5 Others were less admiring, but like Walker were eager to find in Calvin a system that would provide a theological structure to face contemporary secular thought. Another favorable interpretation came in one of the most remarkable public lectures for the four hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth. Harvard divinity professor William W. Fenn delivered this lecture in King’s Chapel, Boston, in February 1909. The address, titled “The Marrow of Calvin’s Theology,” was printed in the Harvard Theological Review.6 Fenn (1862–1932), professor of New Testament studies at Harvard for thirty years, was a Unitarian minister deeply critical of liberal theology. A much-loved figure who moved easily beyond the academy to offer public lectures in Boston and farther afield, Fenn adhered to a personal form of theism, though students fondly recalled that he never imposed his views on others. In addition to biblical studies, Fenn became an expert on New England theology and an astute reader of Calvin. Speaking in the year of the Calvin anniversary, Fenn acknowledged that “Calvinism” was rejected almost

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everywhere. He, however, regarded Calvin’s theology as a coherent “system” fully expressed in the 1559 Insti­ tutes of the Christian Religion. Fenn wanted his audience to understand Calvin’s system and its appeal to many generations. However, in his lengthy assessment of Calvin’s book, he came to the conclusion that the reformer’s logic could not sustain itself in the end, particularly on the questions of predestination and evil. Commenting on the passage from the third book where Calvin writes of predestination that “ignorance of things which we are not able, or which it is not lawful to know, is learning, while the desire to know them is a species of madness” (3.23.8), Fenn concludes: This then is Calvin’s terrible dilemma between his ethical sense and his intellectual logic. . . . It is simply impossible to follow the logic of Calvin without reaching at last the conclusion that God was the effective cause of Adam’s sin and all the fearful consequences that follow from sin. Is this not the reductio ad absurdum of Calvinism?7

Fenn defended the robustness of Calvin’s thought as a contribution to theology and as a powerful force in the emergence of the modern world. The Institutes belonged to the transforming revolution of the Reformation, when Romanism was overturned. There was, however, a certain irony, for what Fenn saw as the rigor and certainty found in the Institutes was ultimately, in his view, what rendered the logic of the book both unmodern and unacceptable to contemporary Christians,

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though deeply attractive to the faithful of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “Fear not said Calvin’s system,” Fenn wrote in admiration of the Institutes, “salvation is of God’s grace alone; the Church has, and can have, nothing to do with it. You are in God’s hands and salvation does not depend upon rites performed or good deeds done, upon your worthiness or merit, but upon his sovereign will alone.”8 After a century of bitter debate over Calvin and his voice in contemporary American Christianity, Unitarian William Fenn sought an irenic account that placed the reformer in a progressive narrative that moved from the Reformation to modernity while leaving Calvin in the sixteenth century. As Fenn told his audience, Calvin could not answer many of his own questions and could not be expected to anticipate those of their times. Calvin should be celebrated in 1909 not by a return to his theology, an impossible re-creation of the past—although some parts of his teaching remain edifying—but as a symbol of recovery. As Weber, Kuyper, and Doumergue also did in different ways, Fenn placed Calvin in a narrative of change and transformation, an optimistic tale of progress. A tendency in these years to monumentalize Calvin and to turn his Institutes into an artifact is well represented by Richard Taylor Stevenson, a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, who in 1907 published his John Calvin, the Statesman, in which he cast the Insti­ tutes as a crucial moment in the transition to the modern world:

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With the building of St. Peter’s on the banks of the Tiber, and with the issue of The Institutes of John Calvin at Geneva, we reach the two giant conceptions of the century. The black and white page contrasts oddly enough with the golden dome. The one is the proudest monument of religious institutionalism, the other beats its exacting notes for an irresistible march into the future. Within the walls of the Church are assembled the most sacred relics of the Catholic faith.  .  .  . In the pages of Calvin, Logic reached the limit in a mighty effort to exalt the idea of the sovereignty of God.9

Walker, Fenn, and Stevenson saw the Institutes as integral to an optimistic narrative of religious reform, but from different perspectives. The divergent ways in which they read the relationship of the past to the present is instructive. For Walker, the “system” of the Institutes was its very usefulness in the face of secularism and theological backsliding. Calvin was to be heard in contemporary debates. For Fenn and Stevenson, the genius of the reformer lay in his sixteenthcentury achievements, as the father of a form of Christianity that was progressive and evolving. Calvin was a prophet of the modern world, and therefore was to be honored, but his arguments were not a sufficient account of Christianity at the dawn of a new century. Did Calvin belong to the past or to the present? The celebrations in 1909, together with innumerable books, lectures, and articles, yield an array of answers

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from the divided house of Reformed Protestantism in Europe and America. The nineteenth century had given the Frenchman a singular stature among the reformers; he was restored to define a tradition. How that tradition related to the contemporary world was a question that separated those who saw Calvin as a defense against modernity from those who looked for a symbol of progressive Christianity.

A Broadening Audience During the interwar decades before the emergence of Barth and Brunner, the Neo-Calvinism of Kuyper and Doumergue continued to be influential in the United States, though plenty of American theologians and historians engaged with the reformer. One of the distinctive and highly influential voices to emerge in these years was Loraine Boettner (1901–1990), pastor and teacher in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, who played a key role in popularizing Reformed doctrine. He is credited with being the first to use the acronym TULIP for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. Boettner’s The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (1932) contained praise for the Institutes gleaned from a wide range of authors.10 For tens of thousands of ordinary Christians, the first they may have heard of Calvin was Boettner’s encomium of the reformer’s great book:

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The [Institutes] is pervaded by an intense earnestness and by fearless and severe argumentation which properly subordinates reason and tradition to the supreme authority of the Scriptures. It is admittedly the greatest book of the century, and through it the Calvinistic principles were propagated on an immense scale. Albrecht Ritschl calls it “the masterpiece of Protestant theology.” Dr. Warfield tells us that “after three centuries and a half it retains its unquestioned preeminence as the greatest and most influential of all dogmatic treatises.”11

As ever, there was no settled view of Calvin. The reverence shown by Boettner and many others could not erase the enduring legacy of Servetus. In a 1932 review of scholarship on the Spaniard, Yale church historian Roland Bainton (1894–1984) lamented that the overheated debate was stuck on the question of who had been correct—Calvin the tyrant or Servetus the arch-heretic?12 The 1909 anniversary had only inflamed the debate without providing any new evidence, and the arguments found in the standard nineteenth-century works of Rilliet and Louis Ruffet were frequently rehearsed. In a prescient observation, Bainton anticipated a different way forward for historical and theological investigation: But writers on this subject have suffered not so much from a lack of equipment as from what seems to me a mistaken point of view. They have treated Servetus’ theological system more or less in vacuo as true or

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false, orthodox or unorthodox, whereas the point of real interest is not so much as to whether he was right or wrong—surely we are emancipated from the controversies of the sixteenth century—but as to where his ideas came from and what he did with the traditional materials which entered into the system.13

Further damage was done to Calvin in 1936 when Viking Press published a translation of Stefan Zweig’s The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin, an excoriating attack on Calvin’s intolerance and the thoroughly unacceptable views and actions of the Genevan reformer for modern concepts of freedom of conscience.14 Viking had been founded in 1925 to publish works of history and biography of contemporary interest, and Zweig’s polemical text was ideal. It did not matter that Zweig’s account of history was hardly accurate; the appearance of the Servetus case in a book published by a mainstream press put Calvin in a very public and very unfavorable light. Ten years later, Bainton returned to the rather stale quarrel to rethink contemporary approaches to Calvin. In a wide-ranging and profound essay from 1941 titled “The Struggle for Religious Liberty,” he distinguished his treatment of Calvin from the established dichotomy of apology and condemnation and offered an analysis of the Institutes.15 Bainton argued that Calvin’s understanding of heresy was entirely consistent, if distasteful to modern sensibilities, on the basis of his theological positions. What had happened in Geneva could not be explained in terms of either the “spirit of 156

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the age” as Doumergue had earlier done, in 1909, or by Calvin’s monstrous character. Bainton rejected both superficial perspectives to look more deeply at what Calvin said in the key passage from book 3 (3.2.2–14) of the Institutes: “Calvin, by basing religious certitude on Scripture confirmed by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, brought the assurance of the medieval Augustinians to its apex and went beyond them in equating faith with knowledge.”16 The 1930s also saw the great confrontation between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, which attracted many students from America to the theological seminars in Basel and Zurich. It was an entirely new phase in the life of the Institutes as Barth’s and Brunner’s contrasting interpretations of Calvin divided Reformed Christians. Brunner had been in New York, while numerous American students, including the young Brevard Childs and Edward Dowey, who would later teach at Yale and at Princeton Theological Seminary, respectively, traveled to Basel with Barth. Not all, by any means, were persuaded by these new developments. The Dutch Calvinists in Michigan were deeply suspicious of this so-called neoorthodoxy and claimed an authentic tradition rooted in the five-point TULIP. In 1947, Clarence Bouma wrote an article for the Chicago-based Journal of Religion titled “Calvinism in America,” in which he argued that Calvin “belonged to the second generation of the Reformers, [and] had a much more disciplined mind than Luther.”17 Bouma, a Dutch-born pastor, had studied at Princeton, Harvard, Berlin, and Amsterdam before Prophet of Modernity

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becoming professor of systematic theology for more than twenty years at Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan. The Institutes, he declared, particularly in their final edition of 1559, constitute a well-constructed, systematic treatise of the entire body of Christian truth built up from the Scriptures, throughout exhibiting the clarity, incisiveness, and consistency of the mind of the Genevan Reformer, who by common consent was the master-mind of the age of the Reformation.18

For Calvin, Bouma continued, the supreme question was “what is the will of God, and how can I, a redeemed sinner, live to his honor and glory?”19 The Calvinism of New England was effectively killed by what Bouma regarded as a triumvirate of evil: modern philosophy, evolutionary science, and higher biblical criticism. The Presbyterian Church USA, with its great seminary at Princeton, had once taught the works of Charles and A. A. Hodge, Henry Boynton Smith, and W.G.T. Shed and held to the Westminster Standards, but did so no more, having succumbed to a liberalism that no longer preached the sovereignty of God.20 In a searing response to Bouma titled “Calvinism Is Not Fundamentalism,” Joseph Haroutunian (1904– 1968), professor at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and later at the University of Chicago, wrote in the same edition of the Journal that “[Bouma’s] explicit statements on the nature of Calvinism give no indication why nobody but a fundamentalist can be a Calvinist.”21 158

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Fundamentalism, for Haroutunian, meant fivepoint Calvinism (TULIP). He objected to Bouma’s identification of this theological formulation with John Calvin, whose doctrine of predestination was not the “divine decree” spoken of by the Grand Rapids professor. Haroutunian, who would later edit Calvin’s biblical commentaries, was an extraordinary figure in American Presbyterianism. His book, Piety versus Moralism: The Passing of the New England Theology (1932), recovered the long-neglected figure of Jonathan Edwards as a faithful follower of Calvin’s God. Haroutunian wrote against both Barthian neoorthodoxy and liberal theology, seeking to restore the theology of Calvin as relevant to the realities of contemporary society. While allowing that the Social Gospel movement was dangerously “man centered,” Haroutunian had no time for Bouma’s assault on the social service of the church as works of righteousness: “If John Calvin’s career means anything, is it not rather a serious attempt to bring our economic and political life under the will of God?” To see the Gospel and Social Gospel as antithetic was, in Haroutunian’s words, “a sanctimonious garb, and the sooner it is torn off, the better for Calvinists and everyone else.”22

Reinhold Niebuhr Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, shared the disillusionment with liberal theology following the Prophet of Modernity

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catastrophes in Europe. A major figure of Christian ethics and political thought in the twentieth century, he, too, turned to the past to correct a faith gone wrong. The Reformation, Niebuhr wrote, “was the historical locus where the Christian conscience became most fully aware of the persistence of sin in the life of the redeemed.”23 This was the genius of Calvin’s Institutes, a marvelous exposition of salvation by grace and the necessity of works for authentic Christian living. Calvin’s achievement in the Institutes, for Niebuhr, went beyond Luther by developing the third use of the law. Because redeemed Christians continue to sin during their lifetimes, Calvin had emphasized the role of God’s law as a guide and corrective for righteous living. Niebuhr embraced the reformer’s argument, which had become a defining character of the Reformed faith. The past, however, could not be reached. The Reformation, for Niebuhr, had failed, overtaken by a progressive modernity with little time for sin and depravity. Niebuhr held Luther responsible for a “defeatist” ethics and Calvin responsible for a deadening biblicism that led to Puritan legalism. The way forward had to draw on the past to create a new vision in which the optimism of humanity expressed in the Renaissance was tempered by the Reformation’s recovery of the reality of sin. Ultimately, despite his admiration of the Institutes, Niebuhr had to part company with Calvin, for they could never agree on what the Frenchman called “true religion.” In his Institutes, Calvin identified true

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religion with faith, which was the defense of God’s doctrine and law. Doctrine was for Calvin neither mere human speculation nor culturally specific. It was eternal, nothing less than knowledge of God. For Niebuhr, such attachment to what he saw as dogmatic religion was more than disturbing; it bordered on blasphemy. It put institutions and doctrine, both human creations, before the Word of God in what Niebuhr described as “self-deification.” Calvin could not have conceived of Christian religion in any other terms than by what he understood as true doctrine, which was the heart and soul of the In­ stitutes. He had aspired to make his Institutes follow the order of God’s salvation (ordo salutis) as revealed in scripture; doctrine stemmed from the order of creation, not from the human imagination. Nevertheless, on the basis of a selective reading of Calvin’s work, there were significant moments of agreement between the Frenchman and the German-American professor— perhaps none greater than their vision of God. As Richard Crouter nicely puts it, “The God of Niebuhr, like the God of John Calvin, does not fit easily into a vest pocket.”24

New Generation The prominence the great figures of neoorthodoxy bestowed on Calvin and the Institutes put the reformer and his book at the heart of Reformed theology across

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the globe. By the mid-1960s, however, both Barth and Brunner were dead, and while their influence remained powerful in theological circles, the succeeding generations found news ways to read Calvin. A major development in America was the appearance in 1960 of a new English translation of Institutes of the Christian Religion by Ford Lewis Battles at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, edited by John T. McNeill. Battles did not work alone but with a group of Latinists and theologians, including Edward Dowey of Princeton Theological Seminary, who provided many of the detailed footnotes for books 1 and 2 of the Insti­ tutes. Subheadings, often drawn from Otto Weber’s German edition, were introduced to aid understanding. McNeill wrote in his preface, “The purpose held in view has been simply to clarify the work [Institutes] for the modern reader, and, by a selected minimum of serviceable information and interpretative comment, to give an impression of its theological and historical depth and range.”25 In 1963, in time for the four hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s death, an English translation of the 1950 French book Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought appeared from Harper and Row.26 It was the first comprehensive treatment of Calvin’s theology to be published by a major trade press in America, and the intended readership extended beyond theologians to classrooms, churches, and homes. It is a testament to the book’s brilliance that more than fifty years later it is still widely

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regarded as the best introduction to Calvin’s thought. The author, François Wendel, a French Lutheran professor and pastor, offered in elegant, lucid prose a historical account of the reformer’s life and the evolution of his writing. Wendel’s portrait is sympathetic, though not uncritical, emphasizing the influence of Lutheranism on Calvin. Wendel’s liberal theology led him to weave praise and disappointment through his reading of the Insti­ tutes. “The 1559 edition,” he comments, “stands out among its predecessors by its greater coherence. Never did the author succeed so well in mastering the enormous material that he had to organize.” But then, “with regard to the general tone of the work and its style, the results are less satisfactory. Passages of the polemical nature are still very numerous, and they reflect the irritability and vehemence that Calvin found so hard to restrain.”27 In the tradition of Benjamin B. Warfield, the study of Calvin and the Institutes at Princeton Theological Seminary remained central for young men and women preparing for ordination in the Presbyterian churches. One of the most influential scholars was Edward A. Dowey Jr., Archibald Alexander Professor of Doctrine, whose Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology was based on a dissertation he had written under Emil Brunner in Zurich. First published in 1952, it was reprinted in the 1960s and 1990s. Dowey provided a seminal and hotly contested study of Calvin’s 1559 In­ stitutes. When Dowey died in 2003, the obituary in

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the New York Times described Knowledge of God as “among the best introductions to the study of John Calvin, a leading Reformation figure.”28 Dowey’s argument was that the Institutes is fundamentally determined by the “twofold knowledge of God”—knowledge of God the Creator and of God the Redeemer. “From the point of view of the knowledge of God,” Dowey writes, “which is the foundation of Calvin’s theological writing, Calvin’s Institutes contain two, not four, divisions.”29 Although Dowey was heavily criticized at the time of publication by such leading scholars as T.H.L. Parker, who was a student of Barth, and more recently by Richard Muller, it is a testament to the force of his interpretation of Calvin’s Institutes that his book continues to be debated more than sixty years after its appearance. In the very different circumstances of Princeton and Mercersburg, the Civil War, America’s emerging identity as a commercial and world power, the depredations of the Depression, and the postwar boom, Reformed Christians in America struggled with what to make of John Calvin and how to read his Institutes. In a recent essay on Calvin in twentieth-century American theology, Stephen D. Crocco remarks, For some, the idea or symbol of Calvin was important, and what he actually taught was viewed as mostly time-bound and deemed largely irrelevant for the present day. Others were convinced that Calvin’s thought as a whole held up well over the years because

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it was so clear and biblical. . . . Many were able to incorporate Calvin into their narratives after improving him by removing or correcting some distasteful or unnecessary features.30

In America, Calvin’s Institutes rose to prominence when churches were troubled, when they felt the need to reclaim the past, the legacy of the Reformation, in the face of present struggles. Leading figures of the Reformed or Presbyterian traditions turned to Calvin and the Reformation for certainty. How one claimed the past and what its legacy entailed were hotly disputed. The rise of modernity forced American Christians of the Reformed tradition to clarify beliefs and identities. Calvin was pulled from the crowd of sixteenth-century reformers on account of his stature as a founding father of the Reformation.

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Oppression and Liberation: South Africa Chapter 10

When Allan Boesak visited my seminar on Reformed Christianity in spring 2013, he spoke of how as a young black Christian in South Africa he, like most of his generation, associated Calvin and Calvinism with the racist oppression of apartheid: a theological justification for a racist state. When he went to the Netherlands to undertake doctoral studies, however, Boesak encountered the work of Karl Barth and discovered a different John Calvin, a voice against tyranny and injustice. The students in my Yale seminar, many of whom were born after the end of apartheid, were bowled over that Calvin and his Institutes had been important to those in the Reformed churches leading the struggle against white supremacy. Such was their astonishment that many changed their paper topics. Born in 1945 in the Northern Cape, Allan Boesak’s life tells the story of the emerging black Christian and, in particular, Reformed, resistance to an official Calvinism that had been enlisted to the service of racial segregation. Boesak is a minister of the South African Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), and through print,

from the pulpit, and in demonstrations was, alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leading Christian voices against apartheid. From 1982 to 1991, he was head of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. In his books and lectures, he continues to offer a view of Calvin and his Institutes in which, in Boesak’s words, the Genevan reformer is “reminding us in radical terms where God stands in the struggle and longing for justice in our world.”1 He continues, “it is as if [Calvin] is speaking to our imperial reality today.” Almost twenty years after the end of apartheid, John W. de Gruchy addressed the Calvin Congress gathered in Geneva in 2009 for the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth. He spoke about the influence of this Frenchman in South Africa, telling his audience that “by the 1960s, Calvinism was widely understood, whether on the part of black South Africans, white English-speaking liberal Protestants, or Catholics both Anglican and Roman, as the creed that legitimized apartheid.”2 Then, “for the vast majority in South Africa, Calvinism means bad religion, and Calvin, in his own right, is little known except as someone who, it is assumed, taught a perverse racist understanding of Christianity.” Indeed, the struggle in South Africa to claim the authority of John Calvin was a minority issue, largely limited to the black Reformed churches, and a littleknown story, but one of considerable consequence. Theologian Lebakeng Ramotshabi Lekula Ntoane observed in 1983 that because apartheid “in its defence

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and justification of atrocities it perpetrates in partnership with the state, leans heavily on The Institutes . . . we therefore have no option but to restrict ourselves to intensive analysis and interpretation of The Insti­ tutes.”3 As Allan Boesak told my Yale students, apartheid was a theological construct that had to be dismantled theologically. The history of Calvinism in South Africa is a complicated narrative beyond our reach, but the story of the Institutes cannot be told without some attention to this background. We need to know that by the middle of the nineteenth century (1857) the Afrikaner Reformed churches had decided to create separate white and “coloured” congregations on the grounds that Afrikaners found it increasingly difficult to share the Lord’s Table. Calvinism had arrived with the Dutch colonists, but other adherents from England and Scotland diversified the religious character of South Africa. Converts among slaves meant that Protestantism was no longer wholly white, a change that forced the question of equality among Christians. Unable to distinguish themselves from blacks on the basis of religion, the Afrikaners of the Dutch Reformed Church (and from 1860 the Gereformeerde Kerk, which regarded itself as more authentically Calvinist) increasingly turned to racial segregation. During the nineteenth century, under leaders such as the Scot Andrew Murray, the church turned its face against the liberalism that dominated mainstream Reformed churches in Europe. The theological seminary

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established at Stellenbosch in 1859 became the fortress of a Calvinism that repudiated what was seen as the theological apostasy of liberal Reformed churches. There were others in southern Africa who saw themselves as Reformed in theological orientation but did not share the extreme conservatism and racial views of the Afrikaner church. They were reluctant to use the name “Calvinist” on account of its dark associations. In particular, it was Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinism that inadvertently provided the Dutch Reformed Church with a theological basis for racial separation. NeoCalvinism took hold in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s and was closely associated with growing nationalism in the country. A young generation of pastors went to study at the Free University of Amsterdam, a stronghold of Kuyperian thought, where they imbibed the teaching of the Dutchman and his successors who argued for separate spheres and the role of diversity in the order of creation, both of which, while not so intended, were amenable to a racial interpretation.4 Matters did not stop there. Kuyper had taught a doctrine of “common grace,” incorrectly attributed to Calvin, in which all people have a certain knowledge of God. The elect have been given an enhanced grace sufficient for salvation. Kuyper, a figure of his age, believed that common grace was shared but not equally possessed. He closely linked it to civilization, which meant that Europeans, unsurprisingly, possessed it in abundance, while Africans, on account of their primitive culture, did so to a lesser degree. The combination

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of separate spheres and a hierarchy of divine grace was manna from heaven for those looking to part white and black Christians. In the person of F.J.M. Potgeister, a theologian who taught at Stellenbosch from 1946 to 1977, the DRC found a forceful exponent of Kuyper’s sphere-sovereignty as the basis for racial separation. Potgeister provided the theological argument for apartheid, which was implemented in 1948. In 1981, John de Gruchy, then professor of religion at the University of Cape Town, wrote that Kuyper’s “sphere-sovereignty has certainly been misused in South Africa in a way which parallels the misuse of the ‘orders of creation’ by Lutherans during the Third Reich.”5 Kuyper, although black African writers often considered him a racist, could not be held to account for what was done in South Africa. Yet his influence was far more significant than Calvin’s in official “Calvinism,” as Douglas S. Bax demonstrated in his 1979 searing indictment of apartheid theology. Bax wrote a booklet to challenge “the Dutch Reformed Church’s teaching about race relations” in order to demonstrate that it “misinterprets the scriptures and betrays the theology of the Reformation, especially the theology of John Calvin.”6 Having distinguished between Kuyper and apartheid, Bax was in little doubt that the Dutchman had opened a door: “At the same time [Kuyper] did regard the children of Ham as lacking ‘impulse for any higher life,’ so he apparently disapproved of mingling blood with them.”7

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Historian W. A. de Klerk, whose influential 1975 book The Puritans in Africa was an attempt to justify the status quo, described how the Afrikaner Reformed churches in the 1950s accepted that apartheid was “the healthy basis for the happy co-existence of Whites and Bantu.” Here again was the twisted language of Kuyper: God has ordained a multiplicity of languages and nations (Genesis 11:6, 9—Tower of Babel—and Acts 17:26 were once again relied upon), and Christ had sanctified these different spheres of authority (gesagskringe), which God had ordained.8

While some South Africans returned from Europe with Kuyper in their luggage, others unpacked Karl Barth, who had opened their eyes to a different understanding of John Calvin and his Institutes. Barth and his student Wilhelm Niesel (1903–1988), author of Theol­ ogy of Calvin (1956), greatly contributed, as we have seen, to the restoration of the reformer as a theological voice in contemporary culture. Barth’s opposition to the racial ideology of National Socialism, and the resistance of the Confessing Church with its Barmen Declaration of 1934, offered a new generation of Reformed opponents of apartheid a radically different vision of who Calvin was and what their tradition might be. Their Calvinism, their Calvin, could be a creed of resistance against those who denied the sovereignty of God. Karl Barth was unequivocal in his rejection of the perverse use of Kuyperianism in South Africa. In 1952,

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when Ben Marais, author of Colour: The Unresolved Problem of the West, wrote to a number of leading theologians with a series of questions, Barth responded concisely: Q: “A policy of enforced racial segregation with the Christian church can be justified on the ground that God will separate races and nations, each with a different language, culture, etc., and therefore racial segregation (even within the Christian church) so as to keep races intact, is not only permissible, but a Christian duty.” Do you agree with this statement? Briefly comment, please. Barth: “No! Nazi-Theology!”9

Barth was no recent convert to an awareness that racism stemmed from the depths of human depravity. Almost twenty-five years earlier, he had written, “I myself may not have harmed a single hair on the heads of Africans or Indians. I may be friendly toward them and I may be a supporter of missions. Yet I am still a member of the white race which, as a whole, has obviously used very radically the possibility of appropriation in relation to them.”10 While a theological revolution was beginning among some Reformed Christians, the situation in South Africa remained quiet, and Calvin was largely ignored. At Stellenbosch and other institutions, students read nothing of the Institutes or Calvin’s biblical commentaries. That neglect ended in the 1960s. The formation of the Christian Institute following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 gave voice to those 172

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within the DRC who opposed their church’s support of apartheid. De Gruchy and other opponents remember the transformative influence of André Biéler’s The Social Humanism of Calvin (1964), which taught a young generation that the Frenchman “was not a defender of the status quo and somehow responsible for the rise of capitalism. . . . [W]e discovered that [Calvin] was a champion of refugees, the weak, and the poor, and critical of the powerful and wealthy.”11 Biéler belonged to the group who had been profoundly influenced by Barth’s and Niesel’s readings of Calvin’s rejection of any theology of culture that used the Gospel to justify political or racial agendas. This different Calvin, however, was known only to a few. The problem was that for most people in South Africa Calvin meant Calvinism, and little effort was made to distinguish the two. Often, in academic and popular writings, professors at the universities would use Calvin’s name in the title of a work but quickly shift their focus to Calvinism, paying little if any attention to the Institutes or the reformer’s other writings. In 1969, a powerful rejection of this convenient conflation appeared in the Rand Daily Mail newspaper under the title “What Calvin Really Stood For.” The author was Beyers Naudé, an Afrikaner antiapartheid campaigner. The purple passage from the article continues to be quoted: Calvin did not proclaim or support an exclusive ideology based on the domination of any group, culture or race over others. . . . If he were to come alive and be Oppression and Liberation: South Africa

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in South Africa today, he would be the first to protest against and combat many of the concepts proclaimed by and posturing as Afrikaner Calvinism.12

Naudé was a former pastor of the DRC who had resigned his post in 1963 on account of his opposition to church support of apartheid. His interest in Calvin was not primarily dogmatic, and he was not inclined to use the Institutes in battle. Rather, he looked to the historical Calvin as a man with an ecumenical spirit who had worked to reconcile the churches of the Reformation.13 His concern was to provide “another Calvin,” and he concluded his article with the following prophetic words: “If only South Africa were to heed the true message of Calvin, how vastly different our whole ecclesiastical and political life would be.” Naudé was banned in South Africa in 1977 and rebanned five years later, on account of his relentless opposition to apartheid. He was a leading force in the decision by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches gathered in Ottawa in 1982 to declare apartheid heresy. To honor Naudé, a collection of essays was published in 1983 with a foreword by Allan Boesak, in which he related how Calvin’s Institutes had been quoted in the Ottawa discussions on the threat to the church heresy and schism posed.14 The collection of essays, called Apartheid Is Heresy, contains contributions by the principal figures of the Christian opposition (including Desmond Tutu), each devoted to careful analysis

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of the theological errors of racial separation. The Insti­ tutes appears at key moments in several essays by Reformed writers eager to claim Calvin purged of the racist “ism.” Within the South African churches during the final decade of Apartheid, there were few signs of surrendering racial separation as un-Christian. In the 1984 Our Reformational Tradition, W. J. de Klerk conveyed his ugly ideas in ugly prose: Calvinism, with its balanced distinction between “volk” and nation moving along next to each other and within each other without identities being threatened can here utter the clarifying word and by its testimony offer a significant contribution towards the continued existence of the Afrikaner nation and the promotion of the essential White unity within one national context, which could also in a wider context carry the stamp of Calvinism.15

Calvin and Black Theology While Barth and Niesel had inspired a new generation of church leaders to find in Calvin and their tradition the foundation for a radical critique of apartheid, what of the people who had actually suffered and continued to worship in Reformed churches? This had been the question the black Reformed theologian Ntoane asked in 1983:

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Is “Calvinism” truly and genuinely representative of Calvinian tradition? Are the views espoused in it a reflection of the teachings and intentions of its initiator? Are the views expressed both in “Calvinism” and Calvinian tradition reconcilable with the message of Jesus Christ? Is it worthwhile for black Christians who have adopted and embraced this tradition to remain loyal to it?16

The emergence of black theology in the United States under leading figures such as James Cone had a transformative effect in South Africa, where all discussions had previously been in terms of European Christianity. Boesak found in Calvin a very big God whose sovereignty covers creation and who demands justice for all. New questions were asked and different approaches taken. A new generation of black church leaders emerged whose interests were not limited to matters of theological correctness but extended to the transformative power of the Gospel in questions of race and economic inequality. The Sendingkerk emerged as one of the most dynamic bodies of black Reformed Christians, and its leader was Allan Boesak, who was dedicated to reconciling the tradition with the daily concerns of its members. In 1983, the Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa declared its purpose: In the light of our rejection of the false interpretation of the Reformed tradition, and in relation to our situation as blacks, we commit ourselves to come to a

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truer understanding of the Reformed tradition and accept the challenge to articulate our faith in terms which are authentic and relevant.17

In 1979, in response to a warning to the South African Council of Churches from the minister of justice, Alwyn Schlebusch, that its statements “posed a threat to the stability of South Africa,” Boesak wrote an open letter defending the rights of Christians to engage in civil disobedience against apartheid. An ordained minister in the DRC, Boesak wrote in Afrikaans to the minister in Pretoria, offering a defense drawn from Calvin. After quoting Augustine’s famous line “What is worldly government if justice is lacking?,” he turned to the Institutes: Calvin echoed this sentiment when he wrote to King Francis in the letter published as the prologue to his Institutes: “For where the glory of God is not made the end of the government, it is not a legitimate sovereignty, but a usurpation.” And Calvin added, “where there is no vision, the people perish.” Calvin also stated clearly that “worldly princes” lose all their power when they rise up against God. Christians should resist such a power, not obey it.18

In his address to the Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa in 1981, Boesak demonstrated that he was fully capable of using the Reformed tradition against the government, the DRC, and apartheid. “For Reformed Christians, government is

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not ‘naturally’ an enemy. We believe with Calvin that governments are instituted by God for the just and legitimate administration of the world. . . . In terms of any modern concept of democracy, as well as in terms of Calvin’s understanding of legitimacy, the South African government is neither just nor legitimate.” At this inaugural meeting in Hammanskraal of the Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa, Boesak quoted Kuyper and Barth as hostile witnesses against apartheid and the regime, but the force of his wide-ranging account of the Reformed faith came from the fourth book of the Institutes. It was to Calvin that Boesak returned in his writing and speeches to provide the most damning indictment of the South African government. Boesak wrote: Obedience to earthly authority is only obedience in God. On this point, John Calvin is clear: “But in that obedience which we have shown to be due to the authority of rulers, we are always to make this exception, indeed to observe it as primary, that such obedience is never to lead us away from obedience to him to whose will the desires of all kings ought to be subject, to whose decrees all their commands ought to yield, to whose majesty their scepters ought to be submitted. . . . The Lord, therefore, is king of kings, who when he has opened his sacred mouth, must alone be heard, before all and above all men; next to him we are subject to those men who are in authority over us, but only in him.” (Institutes 4.20.32)19

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Boesak takes Calvin’s final exhortation as a call to courage and obedience: “We have been redeemed by Christ,” Calvin wrote, “at so great a price as our redemption cost him, so that we should not enslave ourselves to the wicked desires of men—much less be subject to their impiety.”20 The charter of the alliance linked the emerging black theology in South Africa with the Reformed tradition, drawing not only on Calvin’s Institutes but also on the confessions of the church. The effort to deconstruct the theology of apartheid was grounded in linking the struggle with the Reformed tradition. Frequently, Calvin was cited as encouraging the struggle, as charging the people “to have courage and comfort in life and death,” but his voice was united with a passage from the sixteenth-century Belgic Confession that promised “the faithful and elect shall be crowned with glory and honour; and the Son of God will confess their names before God and his Father. . . . All tears shall be wiped from their eyes; and their cause which is now condemned by many judges and magistrates as heretical and impious will then be known to be the cause of the Son of God.” The charter adds, “This is our tradition. This we will fight for.”21 A year later, Boesak addressed the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Ottawa, declaring that within their “family” racism has made it virtually impossible to share with one another that most significant act within the

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community of the faithful, a natural expression of the unity of the body of Christ: the Lord’s Supper. And so both white and black Reformed Christians are deprived of the meaning of the sacrament that Calvin so much wanted to impress upon our minds.22

Never shy about providing his audiences with lengthy quotations, Boesak returned to book 4 to mine some of Calvin’s most beautiful words, which include: We shall benefit very much from the sacrament if this thought is impressed and engraved on our minds: that none of the brethren can be injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any kind offended by us, without at the same time injuring, abusing and despising Christ by the wrongs we do: that we cannot disagree with our brethren without at the same time disagreeing with Christ; that we cannot love Christ without loving him in the brethren. (Institutes 4.20.32)

Some theologians have remarked that there were many “Calvins” in South Africa. In Europe, America, and, as we will see, Asia, the Institutes was constantly mediated by various theological and ideological traditions. In South Africa, Kuyper and Barth were deeply influential for how Calvin was read, but they were not alone. Other voices and other movements arose, such as those of James H. Cone and the leaders of Black Theology. The sensitivity of remembering Calvin in South Africa was painfully apparent in 2009, when the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth coincided with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the 180

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theology faculty at Stellenbosch, the bastion of Afrikaner Calvinism. The battle for Calvin was the battle for the legacy of the Reformation, fought by diametrically opposed parties. Robert Vosloo has spoken of “the complex and fragile process of remembering Calvin in South Africa today.”23 Boesak and De Gruchy, like Hodge, Doumergue, and Barth before them, understood that in claiming the Reformation much of John Calvin had to remain in the sixteenth century, the world in which he lived, preached, and wrote. The Institutes is not a book of the twentieth century; it does not contain handbook-like answers for issues Calvin could never have imagined. Yet it is a big book with big ideas: revealed in every aspect of creation is a God beyond human imagination. Far from Reformation Geneva, Calvin’s opening words of the Institutes, linking knowledge of God with human self-knowledge, inspired black and white South Africans to transform a nation. A quarter century after the end of apartheid in South Africa, leading theologians continue to debate the role of Calvin and the Institutes in the future of the African continent. In 2009, during the anniversary, Julius Gathago of the Bishop Hanngington Institute in Mombasa, Kenya, wrote an article specifically addressing the urgency of reading the Institutes as the major statement of Reformed theology. He concluded: To this end the emergence of John Calvin who was one of the key thinkers of the time is critical. He led not only in the reformation of socio-religious life Oppression and Liberation: South Africa

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but, more importantly, in the education system in particular. This compares well with the reconstruction project in Africa, where the proponents of the theology have treated education as one of their key concerns. Other key concerns include tribalism and xenophobia, poverty, democracy, human rights, environment, violence, patriarchy and HIV AIDS. Clearly Africa has to address these challenges as she seeks to position herself globally, in view of globalization. A re-reading of John Calvin’s reforms is thus critical as we seek to reconstruct neo- Calvinists’ (mis)interpretations. Only then will Calvinism be relevant to Africa.24

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Change and Dissent: China Chapter 11

As churches across Europe and North America empty, narratives of Christian decline continue to reveal a Western bias. As Lamin Sanneh and others tell us, the heart of the Christian religion daily shifts east and south, away from what Joseph Conrad once described as the “white sepulchre” of the European city.1 Membership in mainline Presbyterian churches in America and Scotland, for example, continues to plummet. In contrast, over 700,000 men and women belong to the Reformed Church in Brazil, a rapidly growing figure greater than the number of adherents to the conservative Reformed churches in the United States. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Christianity continues to spread in many forms, from the charismatic to the Calvinist, with plenty of Catholics and Anglicans along the way. The election of the Argentine Pope Francis I in 2012 has signaled a recognition of irreversible change. Astonishing is the role John Calvin continues to play in the growth of Asian Christianity, although, as we will see, that role is not entirely clear. The emergence of distinctive theological voices has included

serious engagement with the Frenchman and his Insti­ tutes of the Christian Religion, as Reformed Christianity has become a significant presence in China, Indonesia, and above all Korea. In Korea and Indonesia, the legacy of Western missionaries is evident in forming the foundations for vibrant Christian communities that long ago shed colonial domination. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese Christians were most effective in spreading the Gospel. Christianity has only reemerged in recent decades after brutal suppression. The nature of that Christianity, however, is hotly contested as scholars and writers today struggle to characterize a movement that by all accounts is rapidly expanding. Crucial is the question of the relationship between Western, largely European, theology and Asian thought and culture. Among those Christian theologians and leaders who look to the West, Calvin is an increasingly important figure, though the number of Reformed/Presbyterians remains small and limited to the urban elites. The prominence of Calvin in contemporary Asian Reformed churches forms an intriguing tale—in particular on account of how the Institutes is being read in the current climate of tense relations between the state and the churches. We encounter authors who advocate Calvin’s book as a guide for Christian living and church renewal, as a link to Western culture, as part of modernization, and as support for political dissent. The force of the reformer’s prose and the clarity of his arguments in the Institutes have led some Chinese

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Christians to find him preferable to other reformers, such as Luther, as exemplary of godly ideals, a symbol of the integration of church and society, and a critic of corruption. Nevertheless, it must be added that Calvin is most often paired with Luther as a great figure of the Reformation.

Early Missionaries As Europeans in the nineteenth century were beginning to make a serious return to Calvin’s theology to deal with Enlightenment rationalism, their missionaries were reaching China, Korea, Indonesia, and India. Many were members of Reformed churches; Korea was almost entirely evangelized by American Presbyterians, while predominately Scots arrived in China. Among numerous accounts was that of the Reverend Wm. C. Burns, professor of divinity at the Free Church in Glasgow, whose missionary work in China was recalled in a memoir by his son, the Reverend Islay Burns. The book was popular in the United States, and a fifth edition was published in New York.2 Did Calvin travel with the missionaries? Yes, in a limited sense. It is often remarked that Calvin was not much of an inspiration for ministry, and that the Insti­ tutes offers meager support for those seeking to convert. This perspective on Calvin prevailed among nineteenth-century missionaries to Asia, who knew little Reformation history. Consequently, those who

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traveled from Great Britain and America had limited use for the Frenchman and his Institutes, which was largely treated as an instructive and devotional work.3 Rev. Burns, the good Scottish Presbyterian, makes no mention of Calvin in his Memoir. We have abundant evidence from letters and libraries, however, that Calvin’s book was read by the men and women who journeyed to Asia, and that they found it a valuable theological resource. No particular claim, however, can be made for its importance in efforts to effect conversion. By the late nineteenth century, vast numbers of missionaries were arriving in China. Over the next 120 years, thousands came from Great Britain and the United States alone, many of whom were women. The Chinese Recorder (1868–1941) in Shanghai indexed more than 11,000 names, an astonishing figure.4 As Jonathan Seitz has recently shown, finding Calvin in nineteenth-century missionary literature is possible only because searchable literature has been made available electronically. Without this advance, the task would be hopeless, particularly as references to the Genevan reformer are so scarce. Even scarcer is mention of the Institutes. Calvin’s role in missions to China was not as a decisive theological voice, or at least not directly. There was, however, a particular service Calvin could render for Presbyterian and other Reformed missionaries. His was an exemplary life for both Europeans and those they sought to convert. In this respect, Calvin’s character, faith, and zeal proved

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imitable, and various popular accounts of his life appeared in missionary papers and journals. What was it that made Calvin attractive? It was not the content of the Institutes but Calvin’s emergence as a model Victorian figure, a representative of the nineteenthcentury ideal for converting Asians.5 He was the very embodiment of Victorian industry and purposeful activity, a man who had transformed a society in Geneva through hard work, thrift, and moral improvement— all thoroughly practical. The few references to Calvin among European missionaries should not be overinterpreted. The Genevan reformer remained a marginal figure in the vast body of missionary literature of the age, and no effort was made to produce a Chinese translation of either the Institutes or any other of his writings. The few references to Calvin must be seen in the context of a sea of letters, tracts, and journals in which he was not to be found. Certainly, his “holiness” and “stature” placed him in a chain of witnesses, and Calvin appeared in genealogies that included a wide variety of figures from Augustine, Luther, Knox, and the Wesleys to David Livingstone.

After the Cultural Revolution Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the expulsion of foreigners in the 1950s, Christian churches fared badly. There have been,

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however, extraordinary developments in recent decades in which a complicated relationship between a communist regime and the Christian churches has emerged. Religion has been closely interwoven with China’s opening to the West and plans for modernization. The subject of John Calvin in China is so recent and so hotly contested that no clear story is discernible. During the 2009 celebration of Calvin’s five hundredth birthday, conferences were held in Taiwan and China, and a flood of literature appeared. A new translation of the Institutes of the Christian Religion into Chinese was printed in Shanghai in 2010.6 Many, though not all, of the articles and books were concerned with the question of Calvin’s relevance for contemporary Chinese Christians: what did Calvin say about preaching, church organization, education, and so on? A variety of responses found expression. Some emphasized the need for Chinese Protestants to embrace the classic Reformation doctrines, above all those of Calvin. Others argued that Calvin’s importance lay primarily in his role as a builder of churches. Without a doubt, numerous views on the reform of the church were mapped onto the iconic figure of the Genevan reformer. What is striking is how for many Reformed Chinese Christians Calvin is the singular focus of study among the sixteenth-century reformers. He has become an exemplary figure, a defining character for theology and practice. As in Europe, America, and Africa, however, there are numerous Calvins, and while there

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is agreement that interest in Calvin and Calvinism has grown exponentially in China, there is little consensus on why. There was no “pure” Calvin, but only constructs mediated through others, such as Barth and Brunner. These German speakers have been important among Asian theologians, but perhaps most important has been sociologist Max Weber.7 Aiming Wang from Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, a prolific writer on the relationship of John Calvin to Chinese Reformed Christianity, has argued that there are currently three distinct views of the French reformer in China. First, he is the hero of the Reformation and founder of a tradition; second, the theologian of predestination and religious tyranny; and third, the founder of modern capitalism.8 Part of what complicates the subject for an outsider is the vague relationship between Calvin and Calvinism in the literature by Chinese scholars available in translation. Not infrequently, Calvin appears in the title of articles only to disappear in discussions that are primarily about “Calvinism” or the “heirs of Calvin.” The precise nature of this “Calvinism” is difficult to determine: some regard Calvinism to mean the theology of the Institutes, others less so.

Emergence In the 1950s, the first Chinese translation of the Insti­ tutes appeared in Hong Kong.9 While the Cultural

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Revolution (1966–76) seized the mainland, Christianity continued to grow in other Chinese-speaking lands. Christians in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore began to find in Calvin new ways of expressing theology. By the 1990s, Calvin’s biblical commentaries were available in Chinese and the first textbooks of church history appeared; Lin Hung-Hsin in Taiwan wrote a theology of Calvin in Chinese. Jonathan Seitz has observed in China that growing interest in Calvin, noting, “Given Protestant sensibilities, it is perhaps not surprising that Calvin acts as a sourcebook to which one turns in times of trouble.”10 Since the opening of China in the period after the Cultural Revolution, one can begin to speak of Calvin scholarship in China. Between 1949 and 1978, only forty-eight papers were written in the field of church history, but since then the numbers have risen exponentially. The study of Christianity had suffered from being associated with European imperialism, but in 1981 the first course on church history at a Chinese university was offered. Students developed an interest in the Reformation, particularly the thought of Luther and Calvin, and by the mid-1980s Chinese scholars were studying Christianity as the core of Western culture.11

Contemporary Questions How can we account for this resurgence following the Cultural Revolution? And why John Calvin?

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One emerging interpretation of the French reformer already noted linked him with Max Weber. This connection was made in the work of the noted theologian Ke Yu, who studied Calvin’s principal doctrines, such as predestination, and drew close connections between faith, success, and morality. Ke Yu understood Calvinism as a lifetime battle for worldly success, and religion was a force to drive social progress. He stressed Calvinism as promoting capitalism.12 Tracking information on Google, one can easily determine the vast interest in Max Weber in China, where both his Protestant Ethic and The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism have been translated several times since 1985. Calvin came to be seen as the opposition to Chinese socialism—an anti-Mao or anti-Marx. The studies of Weber introduced John Calvin to Chinese intellectuals’ minds, especially those open to modernization of the Chinese economy.13 The popularity of Weber as a prophet of economic and social modernization profoundly affected the manner in which John Calvin was read and interpreted. The reformer was treated as a prophet of modernity, an exponent of a well-organized, vigorous Christianity that is very much “this-worldy,” and thus most helpful for a nation in transition. “One attraction of Calvinism in contemporary China,” Fredrik Fällman has recently observed, “is the view that Calvin inspired modern democracy, both through his theological writings and also through the social order and system set up in Geneva during his time there.”14

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This perception does not exhaust the story, for the Calvin of economic transformation is also the revered father of the Reformed tradition, and his works form part of the evolving curricula of Chinese seminaries. Aiming Wang, who has been heavily involved in curricular development, has written on the necessity of theological education for the growth of Chinese churches. Wang argues that church structures remain a weakness among the burgeoning Christian communities and examines the curriculum model of the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, in which the “systematic theology of Luther and Calvin” is a requirement for students. The report concludes: “Only in this direction, the reconstructing of churches is possible through reconstructing the theological education, which has been testified by the practical initiatives of John Calvin at the time of the Reformation in Geneva and the other reformers in the later centuries in the world.”15 Wang has forcefully argued for the importance of the Western tradition in the development of Chinese theology. The reformers of the sixteenth century, he writes, paved the way with the essential doctrines of Christianity that Chinese Christians need to learn. Calvin, above all, including Luther, is the great teacher: When we study his theological work Institutes of the Christian Religion about the basic doctrines which become later the fundamental system of the Protestant theological tradition, we could find out that each doctrine and dogma is proved or interpreted

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with the words and spirits according from the texts of the Bible.16

While many people inside and outside the churches in Europe and North America are perplexed by the enduring popularity of Calvinism in certain quarters of society, the rapid growth of the number of Asian Christians associating themselves with the Reformed tradition has truly astonished many in the West. Andrew Brown’s article “Chinese Calvinism Flourishes” appeared in the Guardian in 2009, during Calvin’s five hundredth anniversary. Brown commented on the extraordinary growth of house churches in the country and the reasons the Reformed faith was drawing so many adherents.17 Much of the article is a conversation with May Tan, who teaches at a seminary in Singapore. Tan reflected on why Calvin had acquired such a reputation in Chinese Christianity: So when the Chinese house churches first emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution in the 80s and 90s “They began to search what theology will support and inform [them]. They read Luther and said, ‘not him.’ ” So they read Calvin, and they said “him, because he has a theology of resistance.” Luther can’t teach them or inform them how to deal with a government that is opposition.

The extraordinary nature of the growth of churches within China has surprised most observers. Brown writes:

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Calvinist Christianity has a culture of phenomenal industry. . . . In China now, this kind of Christianity is seen as forward-looking, rational, intellectually serious, and favourable to making money.

In a statement contested by Chinese scholars and Christians, Tan claims that “very soon, Christians will become the majority of university students  .  .  . that could happen.” In a 2009 lecture at the University of Basel, Aiming Wang put the argument clearly: Calvin arouses the attention of Chinese intellectuals and elites in the current period of transition to its modernization. In the Chinese world, i.e. the continent, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diasporas in the USA and other places, Calvin’s inspiration and spiritual, ethical and practical legacies have become the sources and forces for the future of the Christian nation. The very existence of a connection between Calvin and China’s modernization may sound astonishing given the fact that there is no recognized influence of Calvin in the Chinese world, be it his person, his works, his spiritual dimension, or the activities of his disciples in the Western World.18

Wang, who is Swiss trained, has pursued a line in which Calvin is influential as representative of a Western tradition. He has spoken of the importance of the Reformed faith for politics, economics, ethics, commerce, and history while at the same time he has

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considered how the Chinese Christian communities have tried to discover Calvin’s historical contributions outside the ecclesiological and missiological domains. In the remarkable growth of recent Chinese scholarship on Christian theology, work on Calvin is significant, but he is but one subject. A sense of proportion is necessary, for we find also extraordinary interest in Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and other Western theologians. Nevertheless, the relevance of Calvin is found in numerous journals and learned publications that have appeared in the last decade. Around the 2009 anniversary of Calvin’s birth, a series of articles appeared in the Taiwan Journal of Theology that indicate a concern with finding ways to look to Calvin as more than a guide to economic prosperity. Tzu-lun Tsai, for example, published “Rethinking the Preaching and Worship of the Presbyterian Churches in Taiwan Today in Light of John Calvin’s Theology of the Word of God,” in which he makes extensive use of the Institutes, arguing that following Calvin’s theology of preaching, “the Reformed preachers today should affirm that God has already spoken and still speaks today, revealing Himself to people by means of the Scriptures, preaching, and Sacraments.”19 The renewal of the churches in Taiwan, the author argues, will be through preaching, and for this art, Calvin has provided sure guidance. One of the most exciting interpretations of Calvin and Calvinism in China has come from Alexander Chow, who has recently explored the troubled

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relationship between the Reformed churches in China and the political authorities. In an article titled “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” Chow argues for the significant voices of those well-educated Christians who draw on Calvin and Calvinist traditions in voicing dissent and influencing policy debates.20 Drawing attention to the Beijing Shouwang Church, which has more than a thousand members, Chow argues that such “urban intellectual churches” have shown great interest in the thought of Calvin and his followers. Chow’s conclusions about the contemporary situation are surprising, indicating that Chinese Christian interest in Calvin has moved away from issues relating to salvation: In contrast, these younger urban intellectual Christians focus on building a strong ecclesiology; which is, of course, a subject discussed in great depth in the fourth book of John Calvin’s Institutes. It can be recognized that the Chinese revival in Calvin’s thinking has resulted in a heavier emphasis on the sacraments, the nature and the polity of the church, and the church’s relationships with the magistrate, the state and the civil society.21

Unlike other writers, Chow does not share the optimism that interest in Calvin among Chinese Christians is a given that will inevitably lead to extraordinary growth. He cautions that the situations in South Korea and Taiwan reveal that churches can also

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rapidly decline. The situation in China, he argues, is extremely volatile and unpredictable. At the moment, however, Calvin’s Institutes is an integral part of the emerging Christian struggle in a dramatically changing nation.

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Contemporary Voices Chapter 12

The five hundredth anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, in 2009, told several narratives about the French reformer, some old and familiar, others distinctively of our time. On the whole, the remembering of Calvin received limited attention in the media, although all the major papers ran at least one article. The questions that interested most were hardly new: Was Calvin as dreadful as popularly imagined? Did he damn innocent babies and murder those (Servetus) who disagreed with him? Such were the prevalent discussion points for public consumption. The Servetus trial and execution were unearthed by research assistants and unfailingly mentioned, though I was asked on one radio program why Calvin killed Savonarola, a Dominican priest who died in Florence eleven years before the Frenchman’s birth. Naturally, the one theological doctrine to make it into the public sphere was the embarrassingly unmodern and reviled teaching of double predestination. However, to show that Calvin was not as bad as one might imagine, there was the comfort of the Weberian Calvin. Surely he could not be so bad if he gave us modern capitalism.

Yet Calvin and Calvinism had a surprise that left many secularists scratching their heads. Journalists looking for a sellable story about a dreary, nasty reformer were astonished to learn that in Asia, South Africa, and mirabile dictu, pluralistic American culture, Calvinism was enjoying a flowering. The BBC reported in July 2009 that in a Dutch magazine Calvin had been described as the “Barack Obama of the sixteenth century.”1 It did not hurt that the anniversary followed closely on the heels of the financial meltdown of 2008, when greed, venality, and incompetence were uncovered everywhere in our financial systems. The supposed moral certainty of Calvinism was presented as a compass in dark days. Coverage, however, was fickle, and by 2013 the media had changed its tune, with an article on economic austerity fatigue in the Netherlands titled “Not So Calvinist Anymore.”2 The only similarity between the two discussions, by different authors, was that both identified “Calvin,” the plaster saint of parsimony, with thriftiness, not doctrine. In many respects, Calvin and the Institutes have never been more present. In academia, the book is widely studied in seminaries, colleges, and graduate schools. In America and Asia, and to a lesser extent in Europe, leading scholars and doctoral students continue to pour forth books, articles, and dissertations. David Steinmetz (emeritus, Duke University) and his many students have been leaders in the field of Calvin’s theology for many decades. Richard Muller at Calvin College, Randall Zachman at Notre Dame, and Max Engammare in Geneva are among the current leaders Contemporary Voices

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of Calvin scholarship. In the United States, the Calvin Studies Society flourishes, while every four years the International Calvin Congress gathers. Together with Luther, Calvin is the most studied figure of the Reformation. Books, articles, and conferences abound, and although scholars no longer treat the Institutes in isolation, Calvin’s work remains central and its character debated. Perhaps the most influential scholar in this discussion has been Richard Muller. A forceful writer, Muller has roundly denounced attempts to pull Calvin out of the sixteenth century to “appropriate” him to modern theological ideas or theological agendas. Instead, he has focused on revealing the influences that shaped the evolution of the Institutes: Calvin never retracted any of his original positions, and he virtually never set aside any materials. Nearly the entire text of the 1536 Institutes remains within the 1559 edition—indeed, as does the larger portion of the 1539, 1543, and 1550 texts. . . . Calvin worked, in short, by the elaboration and augmentation of his arguments. He modified primarily by addition and rearrangement and did so in a way that lost virtually none of his initial insights. This manner of wording extends also the organization of the Institutes and to Calvin’s quest for the ordo recte docendi.3

A different approach is found in a collection edited by Amy Plantinga Pauw and Serene Jones in 2006 titled Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed

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Dogmatics. It opens with a claim that although John Calvin should not be singled out as representative of the tradition, his position is rightly acknowledged. Indeed, contributor after contributor approaches a range of subjects in conversation with Calvin and the Insti­ tutes, and by no means merely as a negative foil. What the authors present is a radical figure who in his views on God and humanity opens many new ways of thought within the Reformed tradition. Serene Jones rereads Calvin’s treatment of creation in book 1 of the Institutes to arrive at an interpretation that is not of a God who controls people like puppets on a string—a view, she argues, feminists must reject. Calvin presents a God in whom the faithful can trust, not a spiteful, fearsome creator. “When I read this way,” Jones writes, I discover in Calvin a refreshing realism about the trepidations, harms, and tragedies of our daily and historical lives. The doctrine of creation was designed not as a context for making points about human agency and divine morality but rather as an imaginative context designed to fashion selves and communities who are capable of being faithful in the midst of painful, incomprehensible reality.4

Alongside the wealth of scholarly debate, the Insti­ tutes remains for laypeople a devotional work. Starting around 2009, several cybercommunities have been dedicated to prayerful readings of the entire book in one year. Members posted reflections and took part in daily

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chat sessions. For the less ambitious, Donald K. McKim, a distinguished scholar of the Reformation, produced Coffee with Calvin: Daily Devotions, which offers eightyfour passages from all parts of the Institutes together with reflections.5 Approaching the Institutes as a book of prayer and reflection is by no means new to our day. Femke Molekamp’s study of women and the Bible in early modern England points to the influence of the following passage from Calvin’s third book of the Insti­ tutes: “The assent to which we give the divine word . . . is more of the heart than of the brain, the more of the affections than the understanding . . . faith is absolutely inseparable from a devout affection.”6

Literary Voices Attempts to find a common thread among contemporary readings of Calvin are doomed to failure. Notable figures such as John Updike, John Piper, and Marilynne Robinson, all thoughtful thinkers and writers about Calvin, cannot be reduced to single ideas or perspectives. Their approaches are as diverse as the media in which they appear. All, however, have brought Calvin to mass audiences; all have stirred profound and penetrating conversations about the ways our society encounters a towering Reformation figure and how his voice is heard to articulate an otherness that draws women and men out of contemporary assumptions to consider what was and what might be.

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Yet perhaps a little like the cynical journalists, we might ask how the Institutes can be relevant in a society that endlessly valorizes human effort and worth, even if the privileged treat much of that society with contempt. Such questions, dichotomies, and longings have provided certain modern writers with ways to reflect on the intersections of Calvinism with the most troubled of human lives. One of the most extraordinary novels engaging with Calvinism is John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), regarded by numerous critics as among his best works. Updike, who died in 2009, tells a multigenerational story of a clerical family, of faith (its loss and recovery), of the world of film, and of the complexities of American life. Julian Barnes in the New York Times wrote, “It is a novel that insists that the presumption of past innocence, the conviction of a fall, the gaudy lures and ashy disillusions of both religion and Hollywood, are all part of a wider if doomed American quest: for a better reality, for a world elsewhere and above.”7 Calvin and his “ism” appear regularly throughout the novel and often at the most heart-rending moments. Clarence Wilmot, the doomed Presbyterian minister who loses his faith only to die having failed to find anything, encounters Thomas Dreaver, who in solace turns to the Institutes: “Our vines have tender grapes, Mr. Wilmot,” said the young man. “Not every hand can pick them. And

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what did Calvin himself say—‘It would be a very serious accusation against us to have rejected God’s call’?” . . . Clarence interrupted. “I could hardly bear another year of going through the motions. Giving communion, preaching, trying to console the sick and dying—it would be, I can’t say blasphemy, but a travesty. And the parishioners would know it. Already, they sense how hollow I am.”8

Calvinism has long found a place in American literature and art, from the theater of God’s glory in the Hudson Valley painters of the nineteenth century to the providential meditations of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It. Even the noir novels of James Ellroy, in particular The Black Dahlia (1987), have been read as set in the bleak universe of Calvinism populated by lives without grace. When asked about his own Reformed background and faith, Ellroy offers an intriguing interpretation of Calvin and his tradition: Yeah, well, Calvinism is misused as well, there’s nuances to it. There’s the Protestant Eucharist as expressed by John Calvin in Geneva, Switzerland, an acolyte of Martin Luther, and there’s Calvinists who denote a Protestant personal faith within the parameters, that’s driven by stern, stern moral boundaries. And it’s the second definition that I use to describe myself. Being a human being, as the Bible will tell you, it’s a battle between dark and light of the human appetite. And I’m writing a memoir now about the eternal struggle. You figure this shit out later on, and

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I’m enjoying figuring it out, enjoying both the fight and succumbing to it.9

The most influential novelist of recent times to engage seriously with themes of Calvin and with the In­ stitutes is Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize– winning author and professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In her novels Gilead and Home, as well as in her essay collection Death of Adam, she has explored the depths of Calvin’s concept of piety, the human experiences of providence, loss, and reconciliation. The sheer beauty of Robinson’s prose has been praised as she explores the Calvinist soul without either sentimentality or censure. In Gilead, the Congregationalist pastor John Ames speaks of his troubled relationship with Jack Boughton, confessing great guilt because “I have never been able to warm to him, never.” Yet it is a relationship he knows to be true; Jack is “another self, a more cherished self. That language isn’t sufficient, but for the moment it is the best I can do.” The strain is between Ames and Jack, the no-good son of his friend, who is a prodigal-son figure in the novel, though one witnessed not by his father but by an outsider. This outside perspective creates much of the tension. In this moment, Ames finds words in a book that appears at various moments in the novel: I fell to thinking about the passage in The Institutes where it says the image of the Lord in anyone is much more than reason enough to love him, and that the

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Lord stands waiting to take our enemies’ sins upon Himself. So it is a rejection of grace to hold our enemy at fault. Those things can only be true. It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness, but because God their Father loves them. I have probably preached on that a hundred times.10

In her collection of essays The Death of Adam (1998), Robinson devotes much of her attention to Calvin, arguing his voice is a witness relevant for the modern age, which has little sense of how to hear him. Her love of the Institutes, as well as of Calvin’s biblical commentaries, fills the pages: Any reader of The Institutes must be struck by the great elegance, the gallantry, of its moral vision, which is more beautiful for the resolution with which its theology embraces sorrow and darkness. Again, if we looked to Calvin, we might perhaps understand why he engrossed so much of our culture for so long, and we might even have grounds for a new understanding of our tradition.11

When delivering a lecture on “The Freedom of a Christian” to the Lumen Christi Institute in 2011, Robinson quoted the Institutes at length, reading the whole of book 3, chapter 7.6, which opens: “Moreover, that we may not weary in well-doing (as would otherwise forthwith and infallibly be the case), we must add the other quality in the Apostle’s enumeration, ‘Charity

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suffereth long, and is kind, is not easily provoked’ (1 Cor. xiii. 4.).”12 Robinson spoke of the passage as deeply influential on New England writing and as drawing together many biblical themes. In particular, she found in Calvin’s words the “beautifully articulated idea that every encounter is a sacred encounter” and, further, that Calvin’s thought is “profoundly incarnational because of God’s profound and generous identification with people.”

Leading Voices Arguably, the most effective communicator of Calvin’s teaching through online media has been John Piper, pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 1980 to 2013. A prolific author and compelling preacher, Piper has emerged as a leading voice of American Christianity with an enormous and diverse following. Although he has written and spoken about Calvin for many years, in the lead up to the 2009 anniversary he was particularly prominent. The Institutes, for Piper, expresses most clearly the theology of the Bible. At a 2009 conference in Minneapolis titled “Desiring God,” he remarked: When you read The Institutes they are so densely biblical it doesn’t read like Barth, it reads like a Bible exposition systematized in helpful ways. He was the theologian, the systematiser among the reformers.13

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Piper is careful to claim Calvin not as a particular authority but as an especially valuable witness, the core of whose message remains transformative: So the impact I want us to get from Calvin whether reading a book or reading his sermons or going to a conference is the weight of the importance of God, there’s a God, he made the world, he holds the world in being, he is the central reality in the universe and we take him so lightly.14

Although Piper has garnered considerable criticism and draws detractors as well as admirers, his ministry has flourished and his books sell prolifically. His influence on those who identify as “New Calvinists” has been immense. The same can be said of another polarizing figure who is not only an acclaimed author and preacher but also a master of media. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan has taken very strong views on human sexuality, evangelical Christianity, and the business culture in which many of his urban congregants work. His book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction in 2008.15 Keller has been associated with the emerging church movement, an approach to Christianity that eschews traditional institutional structures to engage in dialogue in a postmodern world. Within that context, Keller has emphasized “orthodoxy” in terms of biblical witness.

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In Keller’s work, the tradition of Christian theology is crucially important, and in The Reason for God the reader is confronted with the work of Jonathan Edwards and C. S. Lewis, together with a host of others. John Calvin is not an author of prominence, which makes all the more remarkable a November 2012 posting by Keller on the website of the Gospel Coalition in which he describes his resolution to read the whole Institutes, admitting that previously he “treated the [four] books like an encyclopedia or dictionary that one dipped into to learn about specific topics.” What surprised Keller was that the Institutes was by no means a dry textbook but “a masterpiece of literary art, sometimes astonishing in its power and eloquence.” Further, he was taken aback by Calvin’s constant references to the Bible, arguing that even if one did not agree with the reformer, one was confronted with a dazzling range of scriptural material with which to grapple. Themes important to Keller’s ministry and writing are prominent in what he finds to admire in Calvin— conversion and the engagement with the intellect as essential to biblical witness: Last (and here our modern evangelical terminology fails us) Calvin’s writings are astonishingly “doxological.” We might be tempted to say “inspirational” or “devotional” or “spiritual,” but to use such Hallmark greeting card phrases doesn’t do them justice. Calvin’s

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writings don’t read at all like a theological treatise, but like a man’s meditating on the Scripture before God. The language is filled with reverence and awe, and often tenderness. That means that, despite the close reasoning of so many parts of the material, Calvin was all about the heart.16

The influence that Piper, Keller, and others have had on many young people was examined by journalist Collin Hansen in his 2008 book Young, Restless, Re­ formed. The title of the book coined a phrase that Calvinists love. Hansen made a wider public aware of the revival of tradition thought moribund. As the title suggests, Hansen was interested in finding out what attracted young people to an austere theology preached at length. Answers varied greatly, but most were highly aware of their countercultural act. Respondent Laura replied to Hansen’s query: “The only exposure I had was High School textbooks that teach about John Calvin as this crazy guy who burned people.”17 The negative assessment of Calvin in the public sphere remains common enough, but it was given prominence in a hostile article by Molly Worthen in the New York Times, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?,” which focused on the Mars Hill church of Mark Driscoll in Seattle. Driscoll is not a figure whom many of those who identify themselves as “New Calvinists” would wish to claim. To good rhetorical effect, Worthen draws a close comparison between Calvin and Driscoll, two men who clearly had little in

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common theologically or in any other way, even if one takes account of chronological difference. The arguments are familiar. For Worthen, Calvin is the very embodiment of intolerance, for he “had heretics burned at the stake and made a man who casually criticized him at a dinner party march through the streets of Geneva, kneeling at every intersection to beg forgiveness. Mars Hill is not 16th-century Geneva, but Driscoll has little patience for dissent.” The selectively unflattering presentation of Calvin’s thought continues: While John Calvin’s 16th-century doctrines have deep roots in Christian tradition, they strike many modern evangelicals as nonsensical and even un-Christian. If predestination is true, they argue, then there is no point in missions to the unsaved or in leading a godly life. And some babies who die in infancy—if God placed them among the reprobate—go straight to hell with the rest of the damned, to “glorify his name by their own destruction,” as Calvin wrote.18

Back to the Students From his second Institutes in 1539, Calvin was clear that the Latin editions were primarily for the education of pastors. Without a doubt, throughout the history of Reformed churches, theological students have continued to study the Institutes in part or whole. It is

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only fitting, therefore, to close this life of a religious book by returning to the setting for which it was envisaged: the classroom. Yale Divinity School is at some remove from the Academy in Calvin’s Geneva, but in the spring semester of 2014, twenty-one students came together for a course titled Reading Calvin’s Institutes. We made it through most of the four books, though not entirely, and discussions were lively and good-natured. The group was fairly diverse; although white males predominated, the class was mixed in ethnicity and gender. It also represented a broad spectrum of theological positions. Almost all members were either divinity students or doctoral candidates in Yale’s Religious Studies Department. A major theme of the course was the contemporary encounter with a classic work of the Reformation by those considering various forms of ministry or careers in teaching and writing. What follows is a selection of views from women and men who would not claim to be representative of anything but who were willing to share assumptions about, responses to, and reflections on a book that almost all were reading in extenso for the first time. Margaret Fox, who studies divinity and law at Yale, is a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA), and like most of the students had limited previous exposure to the Institutes but “wanted to read Calvin because I wanted to know how a lawyer reads the gospel.” Then:

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What surprised me was his creativity. I found in Calvin a mind that was at once orderly and playful. The Institutes represent both the desire to put together a work of doctrinal pedagogy and reference, and an attempt at an almost narrative account of how an individual and a community come to know of God.

Although not entirely persuaded by Calvin’s attempts to find order, Margaret reflects that “Calvin has left us with an incredibly useful map for our journey. But ultimately Calvin’s work shows—in its content and in its form—that we know God because that is what God desires for us.” Another class member took to the blogosphere after the Institutes course to write “ ‘Dear John’: An Open Letter to John Calvin.” Zack Hunt, who describes himself as a “Wesleyan, who has read far far too little of what Wesley actually wrote,” opined, “ ‘Dear John’ letters are usually written between former lovers and we were never even friends. But, John, I tried. I really, really did.” The substance of Zack’s rejection of Calvin puts him in good company: And as if to drive your point home at just how much God hates us, you claim that it’s not just adults that God despises, but infants too because they “cannot but be odious and abominable to God” (2.1.8). John, you go to great lengths to establish the total depravity of man, and I agree that we are indeed sinful people. But in the end, based on your own argument, the one

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looking the most depraved is God. For it is God, not humanity, who ordains evil and institutes eternal torture regardless of act or decision.

Toni Alimi, a British master’s student at Yale Divinity School who has been living for a while in the United States, describes himself as “Reformed,” coming from “a broadly evangelical context,” and spoke of the continuing importance of Calvin’s book for Reformed churches today. “One place I think the Institutes can take in a modern church context,” he reflects, “is that it can help churches appreciate how that rigorous and serious theology must be historically situated.” Andrew Schuman, who is doing a joint degree in divinity and in the School of Management, is heavily involved in the arts and edits a magazine about literature and religion. A graduate of Dartmouth, he referred to his struggle to hold together intellectual inquiry and an evangelical love for Jesus. Upon reading the Insti­ tutes, he commented: I found little about Calvin’s theology new or surprising. His argumentation was driven by the same vision of a world saturated with God’s sovereign grace that I had come to cherish as a member of an evangelical church with Calvinistic theology. What I did find surprising was the scope, rigor, and historicalrootedness of Calvin’s argument. In the Institutes, Calvin draws liberally from both the canons of classical learning and the breadth of the Christian intellectual tradition, blending the Scriptural exegesis of

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an exacting legal mind with the pastoral sensitivities of a seasoned minister.

Like Andrew, Awet Andemical, who is a lecturer in sacred music and a doctoral candidate in theology at Yale, was drawn to Calvin through her study of Jonathan Edwards and contemporary theologians such as David Kelsey. While not entirely convinced by many of the arguments in the Institutes, she also admitted to being struck by Calvin’s book. Having expected dry dogma and rigid ethics, I was surprised by Calvin’s pastoral concern, realistic yet often sympathetic insights into human nature, and warm and nuanced Christian humanist approach to culture. I was moved by the moments of lyrical doxology, pleased to come to understand that Calvin’s notion of the sovereignty of God is less a theological sledgehammer than the shining forth of his delight in the shimmering divine glory that seems to drive the whole endeavor.

A Southern Baptist with considerable pastoral experience, Steven Harris is concerned with African Americans and the Reformed tradition, arguing that although the major figures of the Reformation are “foreign” to African American Christians, there is growing interest among young people in the Reformed tradition. This interest is reflected in increased numbers of black students at traditionally Calvinist institutions and the growth of Reformed hip-hop.19 Harris drew

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my attention to a discussion of TULIP among popular hip-hop artists.20 Calvin is the name under which many of these young people, white and black, identify their attachment to the Reformed faith. That faith, however, is broadly interpreted as Baptist, and Steven readily admits that he does not hold with Calvin’s teaching on either infant baptism or the Lord’s Supper, and that parts of the ecclesiology in the Institutes leave him uneasy. Steven spoke of a considerable presence on the Internet of organizations committed to raising awareness of Calvinism among African Americans, naming the Reformed African American Network and The Front Porch. “These websites, institutions, and movements comprise my theological world,” he said, “and they all look to Calvin as a spiritual father of sorts. The Institutes legitimate my theological identity.” The initiator of the course was Justin Hawkins, a master’s student at Yale Divinity School who describes himself as “an insufferable dilettante, [who] had begun to declare myself a Calvinist without any more than flirting with the substance of the Institutes.” The experience, however, was transformative: “I was told this was a glorious construction, but like the queen of Sheba beholding the riches of Solomon’s treasury, ‘the half was not told me.’ ” As a Baptist and a student of philosophical theology, Hawkins did not feel all was well: But mine is not some sycophantic admiration. I find Calvin’s treatment of the Incarnation and the Trinity

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quite weak, especially when compared to the medieval treatises that devoted hundreds of pages of Scholastic metaphysics to those most difficult problems.

Finally, a student who had not grown up in a Christian family but who had become a Christian as an undergraduate expressed a very different voice. Having become involved with Calvinists attached to the theological positions of TULIP, the student started to raise questions, having grown dissatisfied with answers received. A move toward Catholicism was, in part, driven by intense study of early Christian and medieval theology, and the student approached the Institutes because he regarded Catholicism and Calvinism as the two most compelling (though clearly different) narratives of Christianity: Thus, reading the Institutes this semester has been an intensely personal experience as I’ve carefully gone through Calvin’s arguments and considered his positions in light of Scripture and his claimed support from the Christian tradition. Ultimately, this has been a very fruitful experience, but it has pushed me only closer to Catholicism.

Such an unscientific sampling of the views of students fully aware of the privileges they enjoy in studying at Yale reminds us of the power of Calvin’s Insti­ tutes to surprise. One of its enduring strengths has been to defy expectations, even among those unwilling to accept its conclusions. On the whole, the class

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readily spotted parts of the Institutes where arguments were weak and less persuasive, and the students often argued about why Calvin ordered his subjects in the manner he did, sometimes suggesting that they could not make sense of his logic. What brought the class together was Calvin’s profound sense of the sovereignty of God, of God’s goodness in creation, and the reformer’s continuous concern for the pastoral consequences of Christian doctrine. They found the Institutes to be, above all, about God’s relationship with Christians, Christian living, and the Church. As Susan Schreiner has recently written, “in The In­ stitutes, Calvin set out to destroy the traditional belief that one could have only conjectural but not the final certainty of salvation.”21 Ultimately, Calvin’s book is about certainty, the most basic of human desires, and his claims are unambiguous. Few have made the case so boldly, beautifully, and controversially as John Calvin.

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Afterword

Few religious books have stirred such passion as John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, even when read selectively or not at all. In its evolution over almost twenty-five years, the Institutes emerged as the most comprehensive summary of Protestant doctrine during the Reformation. It never existed in vacuo. Calvin’s book mapped both the growth of a theological mind and the developing controversies of sixteenthcentury Protestantism. The four-book structure of the 1559 edition reflected Calvin’s understanding of the orders of salvation, doctrine, and teaching. As a book, the Institutes was entirely a product of its time, created in conversation and polemical exchange with allies and opponents, as well as with the medieval and patristic traditions of theology. A book about Calvin’s book will necessarily overemphasize the singularity of the Institutes, but there is no doubt that it remains the best-known theological work of the Protestant Reformation. Its “life,” as we have seen, has been complex and contradictory. Since its creation, it has remained an integral part of the theological legacy of the Reformed tradition, a marker of Calvinism. Its contents would have been, to

varying degrees, familiar to most educated persons in that branch of Christianity and caricatured by many outside it. The life of the book, however, has not been confined to those who read and studied it. The Institutes has always lived in the imaginations of those who identify with Calvinism as well as those who find it repugnant. Like few other books, the Institutes has over the centuries possessed a symbolic value often only slightly connected to its contents. To the critical eye, it represents a system of thought in which God is all-powerful and determinative, while humanity is crushed by the weight of its sinfulness, unable to will the good. For those drawn to Calvinism, the book has an almost totemic quality. The Institutes, by its very existence, provokes questions about divine arbitrariness, human liberty, and the nature of good and evil, and its life forms part of an account of how cultures have negotiated their relationships with those ultimate questions. As we have seen, the Institutes could be and was interpreted to mean entirely contradictory things, depending on different assumptions and perspectives. A key to interpretation, however, was the relationship of the book to its author. Throughout history, Calvin and the Institutes have been linked, with at different times one determining the interpretation of the other. Most prominently, however, Calvin’s reputation had a profound influence on how the Institutes was received. The Reformed tradition, as the celebrations in 1909 and 2009 demonstrated, continues to claim Calvin as

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a founding father and guiding (though by no means sole) influence. That tradition, however, has wrestled with how to deal with the Genevan reformer and his thought. It has been a troubling and difficult relationship, for Calvin rarely provides the answers sought by prooftexters. The Institutes expresses a theological vision for its day, a relationship between divinity and humanity framed by the mental and belief world of the Reformation. Nonetheless, it speaks powerfully to the present and offers some of the most exquisite renderings of Christian beliefs and experiences by one of the faith’s greatest authors. Calvin knew the past tradition with which he rigorously and critically engaged, but he understood the delusion of a return to Eden, of refuge in history. The Institutes of the Christian Religion points to the future, and was written in 1559 by a man who knew he would not live to see the influence of his book on new churches. Calvin wrote a book for a torrid age, a book that projects forward, challenging others to take up the charge. As he saw it, future generations would think and express themselves differently and not be bound by his Institutes. They would continue to read his work and write their own. The bond that united them would be fidelity to the Word of God.

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Burning a Man and His Books Appendix 1

Michael Servetus and John Calvin On October 27, 1553, Miguel Serveto Conesa, better known in English as Michael Servetus, was burned at the stake in Geneva with his offensive book chained to his leg. John Calvin was not present, but his colleague, Guillaume Farel, reported the events to him. Calvin had petitioned that Servetus be decapitated rather than suffer a horrific fate in the flames, but the magistrates were determined to impose their will. There was no doubt, however, that the reformer thought the heretic and blasphemer should die. Servetus was accused of denying both the Trinity and infant baptism. He was put to death under the Edict of Theodosius (380 CE), which made second baptism (Donatism) and anti-Trinitarianism (Arianism) punishable by state execution. It was a sensitive subject for Calvin, because when during the 1530s he was accused of being anti-Trinitarian, it raised the real possibility he might be executed on these grounds. No Christian magistrates of the sixteenth century, whether Catholic or Protestant, could be seen to harbor a person who rejected Christian doctrine, in

particular the nature of God. To let Servetus go would have, in the eyes of many Genevans, confirmed to the world that their city condoned heresy and protected heretics. Calvin and Servetus had a long history dating to the 1530s, when they nearly met in Paris—the Spaniard did not show, as Calvin later reminded him. Certainly, Servetus had an obsessive relationship with Calvin, writing extensive letters and sending his comments on the Institutes. The Frenchman tried to ignore the Spaniard until Servetus inexplicably showed up in Geneva in late summer 1553. It was not a good time for Calvin, who was fighting for his life against hostile magistrates. The reformer believed that he might have to leave the city again. Calvin’s role in the arrest and trial of Servetus is fairly clear. The story is best told in Roland Bainton’s Hunted Heretic. Calvin did not lead the process but willingly participated by preparing the theological case against Servetus. There was little doubt that the Spaniard’s views were heretical—one need only read a few pages of his Errors of the Trinity. The Genevan Council, where Calvin had few friends, was determined to control the case and ensure that the Frenchman’s role was constrained to that of theological adviser. The views of those in the other Swiss churches were sought, as were those of leading reformers, such as Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich and Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg. All responded that the presence of a heretic was intolerable and that capital punishment

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was justified. This gave the Genevan rulers the validation they required, and the convicted Servetus was dispatched in flames. According to Farel, the last words of the Spaniard were, “Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me,” a refusal of the Trinitarian form of the eternal Jesus. Why at a time when Catholics and Protestants perished at each other’s hands in great numbers has the story of Calvin and Servetus become emblematic of an intolerant age? The reasons are complex, but most significantly the opponents of the Genevan reformer, who hated his doctrine of double predestination and other aspects of the Institutes, including his insistence on a rigorous Trinitarian theology, used the printing press for slander. Calvin was quickly and effectively turned into a monster, and Servetus his victim. The Spaniard embodied those who suffered the torments of the age, the Frenchman the perpetrators. Both were cast in symbolic roles where they remained for centuries.

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Calvin’s Editions of Institutes of the Christian Religion Appendix 2

1536 1539 1541 1543 1545 1550 1559 1560

Latin Latin French Latin French Latin Latin French

Basel Strasbourg Geneva Geneva Geneva Geneva Geneva Geneva

Notes

Introduction Remembering a Man and His Book 1. John Calvin to the reader, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), 4. 2. Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511–1553 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953). 3. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Calvin: Fifth Latin Doctor of the Church?,” in Calvin and His Influence, 1509–2009, ed. Irena Backus and Philip Benedict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33–45. 4. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 5. Later reprinted in Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self­Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 23–24. Chapter 1 A Book Emerges 1. Calvin to the reader, Institutes (1559), 3. 2. Herman J. Selderhuis, “Calvin and Wittenberg,” in The Calvin Handbook, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 57–59. 3. See Max Engammare, “Calvin the Workaholic,” in Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 67–83. 4. On the Institutes, see Jean-François Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book, trans. Karin Maag

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

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(Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2005), esp. 39–44. Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). Institutes 1.6.1. Timothy Wengert, “ ‘We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever’: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon,” in Melanchthon in Europe: His Work and Influence beyond Wittenberg, ed. Karin Maag (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 19–44. Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 57. Institutes 3.7.1. Gordon, Calvin, 1–17. Helpful summaries of the successive editions of the Institutes are found in François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought (New York: Collins, 1975), 112–22. Calvin, “Prefatory Address to King Francis I of France,” in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. and indexer Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 12. Muller, Unaccommodated Calvin, 104. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1536 Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 143–44. Carl R. Trueman, “Divine Election: Calvin’s Theology and Its Early Reception,” in Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes, Developments, and New Directions, ed. J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 97–120.

Notes to Chapter 1

16. Very helpful on Calvin’s doctrine of predestination is Wendel, Calvin, 263–84. 17. Now available in translation with notes and commentary. See Elsie Anne McKee, trans., Institutes of the Christian Religion: The First English Version of the French Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009). 18. See Irena Backus, “Roman Catholic Lives of Calvin from Bolsec to Richelieu: Why the Interest?,” in John Calvin and Roman Catholicism: Critique and Engage­ ment, Then and Now, ed. Randall C. Zachman (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008), 25–58. See also Jon Balserak, Establishing the Remnant Church in France: Calvin’s Lectures on the Minor Prophets, 1556–1559 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 19. Francis Higman, “Calvin’s Works in Translation,” in Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620, ed. Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 82–99. 20. Francis Higman, “Calvin and the Art of Translation,” in his Lire et découvrir: La circulation des idées au temps de la Réforme (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 371–89. 21. On Calvin and printing, see Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book, 179–244. 22. Ibid. 23. An excellent treatment of this topic is found in Olivier Millet, “Calvin’s Self-Awareness as Author,” in Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 84–101. 24. Ibid. 25. The most important recent treatment is Arnold Huijgen, Divine Accommodation in John Calvin’s Theology: Analysis and Assessment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011).

Notes to Chapter 1

231

Chapter 2 1559: The Year of the Book 1. Muller, Unaccommodated Calvin, 118–39; and Randall C. Zachman, “What Kind of Book Is Calvin’s Institutes,” in his John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor, and Theologian (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 77–102. 2. Calvin to the reader, Institutes (1559), 4. 3. Institutes 1.2.1. 4. Leland R. Grigoli, “Institutionis Christianae religionis liber primus, capitula prima, partes una et dua.” Latin 1559 Edition with Facing Translation and Running Commentary, 2. Unpublished paper available on Academia.edu. I am grateful to the author for permission to use his work. 5. Ibid., 4. 6. Ibid. 7. Institutes 1.2.1. 8. John L. Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah (Geneva: Droz, 1989), 21. 9. Grigoli, “Institutionis,” 4. 10. Institutes 2.6.1. 11. Ibid., 2.15.6. 12. See the helpful discussion in Cornelis P. Venema, Accepted and Renewed in Christ: The “Twofold Grace of God” and the Interpretation of Calvin’s Theology (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007), 40–52, 264–65. 13. Ibid. 14. Institutes 3.6.5. 15. Matthew Myer Boulton, Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant The­ ology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 127.

232

Notes to Chapter 2

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Institutes 3.11.17. Ibid., 3.21.1. Ibid., 3.21.7. Ibid., 3.23.2. Ibid., 3.6.5. Boulton, Life in God, 162–64. Ibid., 164. Institutes 3.6.5.

Chapter 3 The Inheritors 1. Théodore de Bèze, A discourse vvritten by M. Theodore de Beza, containing the life and death of M. Iohn Caluin vvith the testament and last will of the said Caluin . . . (Middelburg: R. Schilders, 1578), sig. E3v. 2. Irena Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples, and Foes (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008), 125–86. 3. Christopher Howse, “Was John Calvin Really a Monster?” Telegraph, July 25, 2009. 4. Francis M. Higman, The Style of John Calvin in His French Polemical Treatises (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). See, more recently, Millet, “Calvin’s Self-Awareness.” 5. On the theological development, see Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark, eds., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), xi–xix. 6. See Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 13–50.

Notes to Chapter 3

233

7. Karin Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995). 8. See William Joseph Sheils, “Bunny, Edmund (1540– 1618),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com /view/article/3943; and Andrew Spicer, “Delaune, William (ca. 1530–1611),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, January 2008, http://www .oxforddnb.com/view/article/7452. 9. John Calvin, The institutions of Christian religion, written by the reuerend father, M. Iohn Caluin, com­ pendiously abridged by Edmond Bunnie Bachellour of diuinitie. Imprinted at London, 1580. 10. Olivier Fatio, “Presence de Calvin à l’époque de l’orthodoxie réformée: Les abrégés de Calvin à fin du 16e et au 17e siècle,” in Calvinus Ecclesiae Doctor, ed. W. H. Neuser (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1980), 192. 11. Kaspar Olevianus, Epitome, from Henry Beveridge’s translation of the Institutes, available at http://www .ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.txt. 12. One of the most influential catechisms of the Reformed tradition. 13. Olevianus, Epitome. 14. Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities between the Reformation and Orthodoxy,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995): 345–75. 15. Andrew Pettegree, “The Reception of Calvinism in Britain,” in Calvinus Sincerioris Religionis Vindex, ed.

234

Notes to Chapter 3

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Wilhelm H. Neuser and Brian G. Armstrong (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1997), 267–89. See Jane Dawson, John Knox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). Andrew Pettegree, “The Spread of Calvin’s Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210–11. J. C. Whitbrook, “Calvin’s Institute of Christian Religion in the Imprints of Thomas Vautrollier,” Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society 12 (1933–36): 199. Marie Axton, “Norton, Thomas (1532–1584),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20359. Thomas Norton, The institution of Christian religion vvritten in Latine by M. Iohn Caluine, and translated into English according to the authors last edition, by Thomas Norton . . . (Imprinted at London by Thomas Vautrollier for William Norton, 1578), sig. iiiv. Keith D. Stanglin and Thomas H. McCall, Jacob Arminius: Theologian of Grace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44. John Yates, Gods arraignement of hypocrites with an inlargement concerning Gods decree in ordering sinne. As likewise a defence of Mr. Calvine against Bellarmine; and of Mr. Perkins against Arminius (Printed by Cantrell Legge, printer to the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, 1615), sig. jj2r. Richard A. Muller, “Reception and Response: Referencing and Understanding Calvin in Seventeenth-Century

Notes to Chapter 3

235

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

Calvinism,” in Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 182–201. Samuel Rutherford, The Divine Right of Church Gov­ ernment and Excommunication (London, 1646), fol. 45. Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, vol. 5, Assembly Papers, Supplementary Material, and Indexes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Ibid., 71. Thomas Goodwin, “Life,” vi, cited in Mark Jones, Why Heaven Kissed Earth: The Christology of the Puritan Reformed Orthodox Theologian Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2010), 57. Andreas J. Beck and W. den Boer, eds., The Reception of John Calvin and His Theology in Reformed Ortho­ doxy (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 121–33. Theodor Zwinger, Theatrum sapientiae coelestis ex Joh. Calvini Institutione Christianae religionis . . . (Basel, 1652). Olivier Fatio, “Presence de Calvin à la fin du 16e et au 17e siècle,” in Neuser, Calvinus Ecclesiae Doctor, 202.

Chapter 4 Enlightenment Ambivalence 1. Two important works on this subject are David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

236

Notes to Chapter 4

2. Quoted in Jennifer Powell McNutt, Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlighten­ ment, 1685–1798 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 189. 3. See Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 205. 4. James M. Byrne, Religion and the Enlightenment: From Descartes to Kant (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 213. 5. McNutt, Calvin Meets Voltaire, 52–59. 6. Quoted in ibid., 157. 7. On Vernet’s theology, see Sorkin, Religious Enlighten­ ment, 76–85. For the most recent work on Vernet, see McNutt, Calvin Meets Voltaire, 194–228. 8. Quoted from Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16. 9. Herman Paul and Bart Wallet, “A Sun That Lost Its Shine: The Reformation in Dutch Protestant Memory Culture, 1817–1917,” Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008): 35–62. 10. Quoted in David Nii Anum Kpobi, Mission in Chains: The Life, Theology, and Ministry of the Ex­Slave Jacobus E. J. Capitein (1717–1747), with a Translation of His Major Publications (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekcencentrum, 1993), 51. 11. Ibid., 66. 12. Ibid., 99. 13. Ibid., 204. 14. Ibid., 114. 15. See Lamin Sanneh, West African Christianity: The Religious Impact (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983).

Notes to Chapter 4

237

16. Kpobi, Mission in Chains, 180. 17. Quoted from John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema, eds., A Jonathan Edwards Reader (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 193. 18. William S. Morris, The Young Edwards: A Reconstruc­ tion (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 267. 19. Frans Swediaur, The Philosophical Dictionary (London: Benbow, 1822), E4r. 20. William Reeves, The Apologies of Justin Martyr, Tertul­ lian, and Minutius Felix, In Defence of the Christian Religion (London: W. B. for A. and J. Churchill, 1709), xxxii. 21. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 22. John Aitkin, William Enfield, and William Johnston, eds., General biography; or, Lives, critical and histori­ cal, of the most eminent ages, countries, conditions, and professions, vol. 5 (London, 1804), 13. 23. Quoted in Thomas Jackson, The Life of the Rev. Charles Wesley: Comprising a Review of His Poetry. Sketches of the Rise and Progress of Methodism, vol. 1 (London, 1841), 249. 24. I am grateful to Jonathan Yeager for this information. 25. Quoted in Kenneth J. Collins, John Wesley: A Theo­ logical Journey (Nashville: Abington, 2003), online edition. 26. Albert C. Outle, John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology (Nashville: Abington, 2010), online edition. 27. John Wesley, The Works of John M. Wesley, vol. 4 (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1856), 203. 28. Samuel Wilton, A Review of Some of the Articles of the Church of England (London: J. Buckland, 1874), 186.

238

Notes to Chapter 4

29. John Emory, ed., The Works of the Reverend John Wesley A.M. (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 141. 30. John William Fletcher, The Whole Works of John Fletcher, vol. 2 (London: S. Thorne, 1835), 279. 31. William Arnell (Solomon Abrabanal), The Complaint of the Children of Israel: Representing Their Grievances under the Penal Laws (London, 1736), 18. 32. Institutes 3.23.2–3. 33. Ibid., 3.23.13–14. 34. John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions, vol. 1 (London: Thomas Tegg, 1829), 579. Chapter 5 Fashioning a Reformer 1. See André Encrev, “Lost Then Found: Calvin in French Protestantism, 1830–1940,” in Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 224–54. 2. Herman Paul and Johan de Niet, “Issus de Calvin: Collective Memories of John Calvin in Dutch NeoCalvinism,” in Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000, ed. Johan de Niet, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 85. 3. Hugh Ross Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 60. 4. B. A. Gerrish, “Schleiermacher and the Reformation: A Question of Doctrinal Development,” Church His­ tory 49 (1980): 147–59. 5. Suzanne MacDonald, “Calvin’s Theology of Election: Modern Reception and Contemporary Possibilities,” in John Calvin’s Theology and Its Reception: Disputes,

Notes to Chapter 5

239

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

240

Developments, and New Possibilities, ed. J. Todd Billings and I. John Hesselink (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 126–28. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. Hugh Ross Mackintosh (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 940 (para. 108). English translation of second edition (Berlin, 1830). Ibid., 140. Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008), 49. R. Bryan Bademan, “ ‘The Republican Reformer’: John Calvin and the American Calvinists,” in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 288. Michèle Sacquin, “Calvin’s Image in Catholic France during the Nineteenth Century,” in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 23. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 30. Émile Doumergue, Jean Calvin, les hommes et les choses de son temps, par É. Doumergue: Ouvrage orné de la reproduction de 157 estampes anciennes, autographes, etc. 7 vols. (Lausanne: G. Bridel, 1899–1927). Émile Doumergue, “Calvin: Epigone or Creator?,” in Calvin and the Reformation: Four Studies, by Émile Doumergue, August Lang, Herman Bavinck, and Benjamin B. Warfield (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1909), 52. Émile Doumergue, Le caractère de Calvin; l’homme, le système, l’église, l’état (Neuilly: “La cause,” 1931), 55.

Notes to Chapter 5

16. Patrick Cabanel, “French Protestants and the Legacy of John Calvin: Reformer and Legislator,” in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 60–62. 17. Henry’s book was titled in English The Life and Times of John Calvin: The Great Reformer (trans. from German by Henry Stebbing) (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1859). 18. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 117. 19. Thomas Henry Dyer, The life of John Calvin compiled from authentic sources, and particularly from his cor­ respondence (New York: Harper, 1850). 20. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin, a new translation by Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845–46). 21. William McGavin, ed., The History of Reformation in Scotland by John Knox (Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton, 1831), li. 22. Ibid., lviii. 23. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 12. Chapter 6 America’s Calvins 1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing (London: Penguin, 1999), 215. 2. Nancy Koester, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 214–19. 3. R. Bryan Bademan, “ ‘The Republican Reformer’: John Calvin and the American Calvinists, 1830–1910,”

Notes to Chapter 6

241

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

242

in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 270. Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reforma­ tion in Europe in the Time of Calvin (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1863), 1: iii. Ibid., 2: 322. Albert Rilliet, Calvin and Servetus: The Reformer’s Share of the Trial of Michael Servetus (Edinburgh: J. Johnstone, 1846), 18. Bademan, “Republican Reformer,” 274. John Fiske, The Historical Writings of John Fiske, vol. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1889), 67–68. Ibid., 68. Bademan, “Republican Reformer,” 280. Available at https://archive.org/details/reformerof geneva00shie. Ibid., 35. Bademan, “Republican Reformer,” 284n59. BBC Night Waves, May 21, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk /programmes/b01hq373. See D. G. Hart, Calvinism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 250–56. George M. Marsden, “Reformed and American,” in Reformed Theology in America: A History of Its Development, ed. David F. Wells (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 6. N. L. Rice, Ten Letters on the Subject of Slavery, 2nd ed. (Saint Louis, MO: Keith Woods, 1856), 7. Benjamin Morgan Palmer, ed., The Life and Letters of James Henley Thornwell: Ex­President of the South (Richmond, VA: Wittet and Shepperson, 1875), 534.

Notes to Chapter 6

19. John Williamson Nevin, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1846), 67. 20. Ibid., 162. 21. Archibald Alexander Hodge, The Life of Charles Hodge (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1880), 458. Chapter 7 “A Very Calvinist Professor” and His Dutch Friends 1. Benjamin B. Warfield, “Introductory Note,” in The Work of the Holy Spirit, by Abraham Kuyper (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1900), xxxiv. 2. Benjamin B. Warfield, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowl­ edge of God, in Calvin and the Reformation: Four Studies, by Émile Doumergue, August Lang, Herman Bavinck, and Benjamin B. Warfield (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1909), 30. 3. Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Literary History of Calvin’s ‘Institutes,’ ” Presbyterian and Reformed Review 38 (1899): 193. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 205. 6. The literature on Kuyper is enormous. I recommend James D. Bratt’s recent biography, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). On Neo-Calvinism, see the essay by James Eglinton, “To Transcend and to Transform: The Neo-Calvinist Relationship of Church and Cultural Transformation,” in Calvinism and Culture, ed. Gordon Graham (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 163–64. 7. Quoted from Bratt, Abraham Kuyper, 46. 8. Ibid., 187.

Notes to Chapter 7

243

9. Herman Paul and Johan de Niet, “Issus de Calvin: Collective Memories of John Calvin in Dutch NeoCalvinism,” in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 67–96. 10. Eric D. Bristley, Guide to the Writings of Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008), 19. 11. Printed in Doumergue, Calvin and the Reformation, 99–130. 12. Ibid., 111–12. 13. Ibid., 117. 14. Ibid., 129. 15. Ibid., 86. Chapter 8 Titans: Barth and Brunner 1. Time magazine, April 20, 1962. Cited from http:// deus-det.blogspot.com/2012/09/karl-barth-1962 -time-magazine-interview.html. 2. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1976), 138. 3. Quoted in Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 244. 4. Karl Barth, The Theology of John Calvin, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 201. 5. Ibid., 39. 6. Ibid., 287. 7. Peter D. Anders, “Calvin at 500: Does He Still Matter?” Modern Reformation 18 (2009): 14–15. 8. Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 87. 244

Notes to Chapter 8

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

Ibid. Busch, Karl Barth, 210–11. Ibid., 438. Ibid. Ibid., 439. Ibid., 491. On Brunner, see Alister E. McGrath, Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). Karl Barth, “No! An Answer to Emil Brunner,” in Natural Theology: Comprising “Nature and Grace” by Emil Brunner and the Reply “No!” by Karl Barth, by Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (London: Geoffrey Bles, Centenary Press, 1946), 71. Ibid., 74. John W. Hart, Karl Barth vs. Emil Brunner: The Formation and Dissolution of a Theological Alliance, 1916–1936 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2001). Emil Brunner, “Nature and Grace,” in Brunner and Barth, Natural Theology, 48. Ibid., 38. Emil Brunner, The Misunderstanding of the Church, trans. Harold Knight (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002), 6. Ibid., 10. Quoted from “Interview with I. John Hesselink,” Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought (October 2007). http://www.rca.org/page.aspx?pid=3445.

Chapter 9 Prophet of Modernity—Prince of Tyrants 1. Williston Walker, John Calvin: The Organiser of Reformed Protestantism, 1509–1564 (New York: Putnam, 1906). Notes to Chapter 9

245

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

246

New York Times, November 24, 1906. Walker, John Calvin, 368. Ibid., 369. Ibid., 343. William W. Fenn, “The Marrow of Calvin’s Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 2 (1909): 323–39. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 339. Richard Taylor Stevenson, John Calvin, the States­ man (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1907), 31–32. Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predesti­ nation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1932). Ibid., 24. Roland Bainton, “The Present State of Servetus Studies,” Journal of Modern History 4 (1932): 78. Ibid. Stefan Zweig, The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin (New York: Viking Press, 1936). Roland Bainton, “The Struggle for Religious Liberty,” Church History 10 (1941): 95–124. Ibid., 102. Clarence Bouma, “Calvinism in American Theology Today,” Journal of Religion 27 (1947): 34–45, here 34–38. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37–38. Joseph Haroutunian and Wilhelm Pauck, “Replies to Dr. Bouma: Calvinism Is Not Fundamentalism,” Journal of Religion 27 (1947): 46–54.

Notes to Chapter 9

22. Ibid., 48. 23. Charles C. Brown, Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992), 84. 24. Richard Crouter, Reinhold Niebuhr, Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. 25. John T. McNeill, “Editor’s Preface,” in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. and indexer Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), xxi. 26. François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Develop­ ment of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 27. Ibid., 121. 28. New York Times, May 8, 2003. 29. Edward A. Dowey, Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 41. Originally published 1952. 30. Stephen D. Crocco, “Whose Calvin, Which Calvinism? John Calvin and the Development of TwentiethCentury Theology,” in John Calvin’s American Legacy, ed. Thomas J. Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 167. Chapter 10 Oppression and Liberation: South Africa 1. Allan Boesak, Dare We Speak of Hope? Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 82. 2. John de Gruchy, “Calvin(ism) and Apartheid in South Africa in the Twentieth Century: The Making and

Notes to Chapter 10

247

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

248

Unmaking of a Racial Ideology,” in Backus and Benedict, Calvin and His Influence, 310. Lebakeng Ramotshabi Lekula Ntoane, A Cry for Life: An Interpretation of “Calvinism” and Calvin (Kampen: Uitgeversmaatschappij J. H. Kok, 1983), 2. Robert R. Vosloo, “Calvin and Anti-Apartheid Memory in the Dutch Reformed Family of Churches in South Africa,” in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 224. See also Robert R. Vosloo, “Calvin’s Theological Heritage in South Africa: Engaging an Ambivalent, Contested, and Promising Legacy,” in Restoration through Redemption: John Calvin Revisited, ed. Henk van den Belt (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 247–70. John W. de Gruchy, “Bonhoeffer, Calvinism and Christian Civil Disobedience in South Africa,” Scot­ tish Journal of Theology 34 (1981): 245–62, here 251. Douglas S. Bax, A Different Gospel: A Critique of the Theology behind Apartheid ( Johannesburg: Presbyterian Church of South Africa, 1979), 1. Ibid., 30. Willem A. de Klerk, The Puritans in Africa: A Story of Afrikanerdom (London: R. Collings, 1975), 252. Charles Villa-Vicencio, ed., On Reading Karl Barth in South Africa (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 142. Ibid., 144. De Gruchy, “Calvin(ism) and Apartheid,” 313. Beyers Naudé, “What Calvin Really Stood For,” Rand Daily Mail, April 29, 1969, quoted in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 219. Ibid., 229. John W. de Gruchy and Charles Villa-Vicencio, eds., Apartheid Is Heresy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), xii. Notes to Chapter 10

15. Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, Our Reformational Tradition: A Rich Heritage and Lasting Vocation, ed. B. J. van der Walt (Potchefstroom: Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1984), 548. 16. Ntoane, A Cry for Life, 124. 17. De Gruchy and Villa-Vicencio, Apartheid Is Heresy, 182. 18. Allan A. Boesak, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Lib­ eration, and the Calvinist Tradition ( Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers, 1984), 18. 19. Ibid., 93. 20. Ibid. 21. Charter of the Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa, 1981. 22. Boesak, Black and Reformed, 107. 23. See Robert R. Vosloo, “Remembering John Calvin in South Africa Today? Calvin 500,” Dutch Reformed Theological Journal 51 (2010): 423–37. 24. Julius Gathogo, “Reading John Calvin in the African Context: Any Relevance for the Social Reconstruction of Africa?” Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 35 (2009): 219–35, here 233. Chapter 11 Change and Dissent: China 1. Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Todd Johnson and Kenneth Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2009). 2. Islay Burns, Memoir of the Rev. Wm. C. Burns, M.A., Missionary to China from the English Presbyterian Notes to Chapter 11

249

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

250

Church, 5th ed. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1870). Jonathan Seitz, “Calvin in Missionary Memory and Chinese Protestant Identity,” in Niet, Paul, and Wallet, Sober, Strict, and Scriptural, 196–97. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 201. Jiaerwen (Calvin), Jidujiao jiaoyi [Institutes of the Chris­ tian Religion], trans. Zhen Yaocheng et al. (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 2010). On Barth’s reception in China, see Aiming Wang, Church in China: Faith, Ethics, Structure; The Heri­ tage of the Reformation for the Future of the Church in China (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 449. A. M. Wang, “The Importance of John Calvin for the Protestant Church in China,” in Calvin Global: How Faith Influences Societies, ed. C. Stückelberger and R. Bernhardt (Geneva: Globethics.net, 2009). Seitz, “Calvin in Missionary Memory,” 212. Ibid., 213. Long Xiuqing, “Developing a Discipline: The Recent Study of Western Church History in the People’s Republic of China,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2005): 514–28, here 515–22. Ibid., 522. Wang, “The Importance of John Calvin,” 124. Fredrik Fällman, “Calvin, Culture, and Christ? Developments of Faith among Chinese Intellectuals,” in Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio­Cultural Perspectives, ed. Francis Khek Gee Lim (London: Routledge, 2013), 153–68, here 160–61. Aiming Wang, “Reconstructing Churches by Reconstructing Theological Education: A Case Study on Notes to Chapter 11

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

Theological Education in China: A Case Study on NJUTS,” http://archived.oikoumene.org/fileadmin /files/wccmain/documents/p5/ete/Aiming%20Wang %20%20Reconstructing%20churches%20b. Wang, Church in China, 80. Andrew Brown, “Chinese Calvinism Flourishes,” Guardian, May 27, 2009. http://www.theguardian .com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/may/27 /china-calvin-christianity. Wang, “Importance of John Calvin,” in Stückelberger and Bernhardt, Calvin Global, 182–83. Tzu-lun Tsai, “Rethinking the Preaching and Worship of the Presbyterian Churches in Taiwan Today in Light of John Calvin’s Theology of the Word of God,” Taiwan Journal of Theology 31 (2009): 97–121. Alexander Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in China Today,” International Journal of Public Theology 8 (2014): 158–75. Ibid., 171–72.

Chapter 12 Contemporary Voices 1. Oana Lungescu, “Economic Crisis Boosts Dutch Calvinism,” July 10, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi /europe/8140821.stm. 2. The Economist, September 28, 2009. 3. Muller, Unaccommodated Calvin, 139. 4. Serene Jones, “Glorious Creation, Beautiful Law,” in Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics, ed. Amy Plantinga Pauw and Serene jones (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 19–39, here 30. 5. Donald K. McKim, Coffee with Calvin: Daily Devo­ tions (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013). Notes to Chapter 12

251

6. Institutes 3.3.8. See Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 125. 7. Julian Barnes, “Grand Illusion,” New York Times, January 28, 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/28 /books/grand-illusion.html. 8. John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1996), 73. 9. Steven Powell, ed., Conversations with James Ellroy ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 194–95. 10. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Picador, 2004), 189. 11. Marilynne Robinson, Death of Adam: Essays on Mod­ ern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), 130. 12. The lecture is available at http://www.lumenchristi .org/feb-16-yves-simon-lecture-by-marilynne -robinson/. 13. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po AKCpppa4A, published May 22, 2013. 14. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpXY228nrbY. As of 2015 this website is no longer available. 15. Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton Books, 2008). 16. http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/11/14 /the-counterintuitive-calvin. 17. Collin Hansen, Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journal­ ist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008). 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine /11punk-t.html?pagewanted=all. 19. See musicians at http://reachrecords.com/artists.

252

Notes to Chapter 12

20. http://thefrontporch.org/2013/10/reformed-theology -is-on-the-chopping-block/. 21. Susan Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 98.

Notes to Chapter 12

253

Index

Abraham, 33 Africa, 75, 77 African Americans, 215–16. See also black theology Afrikaner Reformed churches, 168, 171 Aikin, John, General biography, 82 Alimi, Toni, 214 Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa, 176–78 American Civil War, 4, 112, 116–18, 164 American colonies, 78, 79 Ames, William, 79 Anabaptists, 4, 24 Andemical, Awet, 215 Anglicans, 71, 84, 85, 167, 183. See also Church of England Anne, Queen of England, 81 Anselm, St., Why God Became Man, 15 anti-Trinitarianism: and Edict of Theodosius, 223; and Servetus, 49, 223, 225; and

Walker, 150. See also Trinitarianism apartheid, xv, 6, 166–82; and Bax, 170; and Boesak, 166, 167, 168, 178; civil disobedience against, 177; and de Gruchy, 167; and Dutch Reformed Church, 174, 175–76; end of, 181; and Ntoane, 167–68; and Potgeister, 170. See also race Apostles’ Creed, 25, 36 Aquinas, Thomas, 50; and Barth, 135; and doctrine of election, 87; and predestination, 42; Summa theolo­ giae, 15; and Voetius, 65 arbitrariness, divine, 220 Arianism, 223 Arminianism, 82, 85, 111 Arminians, 73 Arminius, Jacob, 60–61 Arnell, William, Complaint of the Children of Israel, 86 Asia: and Barth and Brunner, 142; Calvinism in, 199;

Asia (continued ) conversions in, 187; missionaries to, 185, 186; traditions in, 180 Asian Christianity, 183–84, 193 Asian theologians, 189 assurance: Bainton on, 157; doctrine of, 41; and faith, xii, 27, 33; and predestination, 27, 41, 87 atheism, 127 Audin, Jean-Marie Vincent, History of the Life, Writ­ ings, and Doctrines of John Calvin, 98 Augustine, 45, 67, 187; and Barth, 135; and Boesak, 177; Confessions, 20; and doctrine of election, 87; and predestination, 42; and theology of grace, 27; and Warfield, 123; and Westminster Assembly, 64 Augustinians: Bainton on, 157 Bacon, Francis, Organum, 125 Bademan, Bryan, 113 Bainton, Roland, 155–56; Hunted Heretic, 224; “The Struggle for Religious Liberty,” 156–57 Balzac, Honoré de, “Le Martyr calviniste,” 97 baptism, 25, 93, 216, 223 Baptists, 207, 215, 216

256

Barmen Declaration, 134, 141, 171 Barnes, Julian, 203 Barth, Karl, xvi, 131–32, 133– 40, 164, 175, 181; and Asian theologians, 189; and Bieler, 173; and Boesak, 166, 178; and Brunner, 4, 119, 140–47, 148, 154, 157; and Chinese scholarship, 195; death of, 162; and Kuyperianism in South Africa, 171–72; “No! An Answer to Emil Brunner,” 142–43; as pastor in Geneva, 136–37; and Schleiermacher, 93, 94; and Schweizer, 95; and South Africa, 166, 171–72, 173, 175, 178, 180, 181 Barthian neoorthodoxy, 159 Basel, 22 Bastide, Jacques-Jules, 102 Battles, Ford Lewis, 162 Bavinck, Herman, 91, 122–23, 128–31; “Calvin and Common Grace,” 129–31 Bax, Douglas S., 170 Bayne, Peter, Chief Actors in the Puritan Revolution, 125 Beecher, Lyman, 111 Beijing Shouwang Church, 196 Belgic Confession, 179 Bellarmine, Robert, 62, 67 Bernard of Clairvaux, 19

index

Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, 207 Beveridge, Henry, translation of Institutes by, 105 Beza, Theodore, xvi, 48, 49, 56, 60, 63, 64 Bible, 214–15; authority of, 24; Bainton on, 157; as basis for unity, 18; and Bouma, 158; Calvin’s commentaries on, 2–3; Calvin’s continuous study of, 30; and Catholic Church, 24; doctrine found in, 3; and election, 26–27; God as revealed in, 21; guidance of, 20; higher criticism of, 158; historical authority of, 128; as inerrant, 7; interpretation of, xiii, 8, 13, 16, 17–18; and Keller, 209–10; and knowledge, 70; and Niebuhr, 160, 161; and Piper, 207; promise of, 34; and Reformation, 16; and sola scriptura doctrine, 16; as spectacles, 18; and Swift, 80; topics of, 35–36; translation of, 15; as unreliable, 70 Bible, books of: Galatians, 76; Romans, 21, 26, 27, 33, 36, 42; 1 Samuel, 89 Bieler, Andre, The Social Hu­ manism of Calvin, 173 Bishop Hanngington Institute, Mombasa, Kenya, 181

index

bishops, 81–82, 85 black theology, 176, 179. See also African Americans Black Theology, 180 Boesak, Allan, 4, 77, 166–67, 168, 174, 176, 177–78, 181; address to Alliance of Black Reformed Christians in Southern Africa, 177–79; address to World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Ottawa, 179–80; letter to minister in Pretoria, 177; and Sendingkerk, 176 Boettner, Loraine, The Re­ formed Doctrine of Predesti­ nation, 154–55 Bolsec, Jérôme-Hermès, 49, 98 Boswell, James, 69, 72 Boulton, Matthew Myer, 45 Bouma, Clarence, 159; “Calvinism in America,” 157–58 Boyle, Robert, 73 Bratt, James D., 127 Brazil, 5 Brown, Andrew, “Chinese Calvinism Flourishes,” 193–94 Brown, John, 117 Bruegel, Pieter, the elder, 46 Brunner, Emil, 131–32; and Asian theologians, 189; and Barth, 4, 119, 140–47, 148, 154, 157; and Chinese scholarship, 195; death of,

257

Brunner, Emil (continued ) 162; and Dowey, 163; The Misunderstanding of the Church, 145–46; “Nature and Grace,” 144 Bucer, Martin, 3, 23 Bulletin Historique et Lit­ teraire de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 99 Bullinger, Heinrich, 8, 18, 26, 58, 224 Bunny, Edmund, Compen­ dium, 52, 53, 58 Burns, Islay, 185, 186 Burns, Wm. C., 185 Busch, Eberhard, 138 Calvin, John: as accommodating readers, 32; anniversary of 1909 of, 90, 95, 122, 148, 150, 153–54, 155; anniversary of 2009 of, 49, 188, 195, 198; audience of, xi– xii, 16, 20, 28–30; authorial voice of, 13, 32; in Basel, 22, 49–50; birth of, 22; breadth of studying and reading of, 26; burial of, 31; as businessman, 16; character of, 8; congregation of, xii; control over writing by, 31–32; conversion experience of, 22; death of, 48, 51, 56; education of, 50; as

258

exile, 19–20, 21; father of, 22; and flight from France, 22; and Francis I, 11; as Frenchman, 20; in Geneva, xii, 22–23; historical myths about, 8; household of, 30; illness of, 35; legal training of, 50, 51; models of, 19–21; monument to in Geneva, 14; ordination of, 81; as pastor, 13, 20, 21, 23, 26, 30; prophetic calling of, 32; prose style of, 28–29, 37, 50, 51, 64, 99, 108; and Reformation politics, 23; and refugees, xii; return to Geneva in 1541, 28; revisions of, 19, 20; and scholasticism, 50; self-image of, 13–14; in Strasbourg, 23, 26; as teacher and writer, 26; work habits of, 14. See also Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin) Calvin, John, reputation of, 31, 56, 186–87; as arch-demon of reaction, 91; as church builder, 80; as constitutional lawyer of Reformation, 114; as embodiment of Victorian industry, 187; as founder of democracy, 8, 91, 95, 98, 126, 191; as founding father of Reformation, 87; as heretic, 28,

index

62, 67; as hero from better age, 90–91; as human being, 137; as iconic figure, 80; as intolerant, 8, 9, 49, 69, 86, 88, 105, 108, 156, 211; as lawyer, 80, 137; as liberal, practical, patriotic, and patron saint of progress, 101; as monster, 9, 49, 87, 98, 157, 225; as opposing tyranny, 98, 166; as saint vs. demon, 48–49; as source of modern values, 91; and spirit of age of, 100, 113, 148, 156–57; as spiritual giant, 113; and thought of as diabolism, 114; as tyrant, 62, 72, 81, 87, 98, 155, 189; in unflattering caricatures, 1–2 Calvin, John, works of: autobiographical account of, 22; biblical commentaries of, 2–3, 32, 190; commentary on Isaiah, 57; commentary on Romans (1540), 23, 26; commentary on Seneca’s De clementia, 22; preface to Psalms commentary of 1557, 22; sermons of, 32; tracts, 32 Calvinism, 219; in American literature and art, 204; and Calvin, 6–7; in China, 189; and Chinese theologians,

index

189; and Dickens, 106; and Fenn, 150–51; and moral certainty, 199; and Ntoane, 176; in South Africa, 173; in United States, 111 Calvinist Free Church, 106 Calvinists, 2, 62, 71, 73 Calvin Studies Society, 200 Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 158 Calvin Translation Society, 105–6 capitalism, 7, 9, 104–5, 173, 189, 191, 198 Capitein, Jacobus E. J., 74–77 Catholic Church, 50, 109; and Balzac, 97; and Bible, 24; and first French edition of Institutes, 28; in France, 70, 97–98, 99; and Nevin and Schaff, 119 Catholicism, 217 Catholics, 71, 183; Calvin’s arguments with, 4; hatred of for Calvin, 33; and Norton, 59; and Zwinger, 66 Cervantes, Miguel de, 16 Chalmers, Thomas, 106 Childs, Brevard, 157 China, 183–97; churches in, 193–94, 196; dissent in, 196; economic modernization of, 191, 192; house churches in, 5, 193; middle

259

China (continued ) class in, xv; missionaries to, 185–87; modernization of, 188; political authorities in, 196 Chinese Protestants, 188 Chinese socialism, 191 Chow, Alexander, 195–96; “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” 196 Christ: active and passive obedience of, 64; and Barth, 134; Body of, 46; and Boesak, 179; and Capitein, 76; and church, 45; death of as fully atoning for sins, 26; death of on cross, 40; and doctrine of election, 87; ecclesia as body of, 145; engrafting onto, 41; as ethical, exemplary, and reasonable, 69; face of, 38; freedom of, 40; God’s promises in, xii; and God the Father, 27, 40; humans as companions of, 40; image of, 43; imitation of, 21; knowledge of, 36– 37; likeness to, 20; as Mediator, 40; participation in, 41; priestly office of, 40; as Prophet, Priest, and King, 124; as redeemer, 69; and regenerate life, 20; restoration through, 46; saving power of, 84; and Scottish

260

thinkers, 106; self as redeemed in, 37; transformation to life of, 21; union with, 21, 25–26; union with God through, 41; and Warfield, 124; and Westminster Assembly, 64; as whole end of faith, 27 Christian, freedom of, 25 Christian Institute, 172–73 Christianity: and antiquity, 50; cultural, 133, 140, 142; historical claims of, 70 church, 36, 45–46, 214; as body at prayer, worship, and care for poor, 46; as body of elect, 45; catechetical needs of, 36; and Chinese Christians, 185; elect and reprobate in, 45; grace of, 152; as rapidly changing, 60; and Rutherford, 63; and salvation, 45, 145–46 church discipline, 107 church movement, 208–9 Church of England, 80, 81, 84, 85. See also Anglicans; Westminster Assembly Cicero, 15, 50, 137 civil disobedience, 177 civilization, 169 civil magistrates, 63 classical literature, 50 clergy, xv; as audience of Insti­ tutes, 16, 109; education of,

index

51; preparation of, xii; and Updike, 203. See also pastors Colladon, Nicholas, 52 common grace, 169 compassion, 11 Cone, James H., 176, 180 Confessing Church, 171 Conrad, Joseph, 183 conscience, 91; freedom of, 74, 156; God’s call through, 39; and Niebuhr, 160 conservative churches, 109 conversion: and Keller, 209; and missionaries to China, 185, 186; and Schleiermacher, 93 Corpus reformatorum, 92 Cotton, John, 64, 82 Council of Trent, 33, 50 Cranmer, Thomas, 58, 85 Crocco, Stephen D., 164–65 Cromwell, Oliver, 64 Crouter, Richard, 161 Cultural Revolution, 189–90 Darwin, Charles, 93 Darwinism, 90 death: immediate judgment at, 34; overcoming of, 40 de Gruchy, John W., 167, 170, 173, 181; Apartheid Is Heresy, 174–75 de Klerk, W. A., The Puritans in Africa, 171

index

de Klerk, W. J., Our Reforma­ tional Tradition, 175 Delaune, William, Epitome, 52–54, 58 democracy, 95; and Boesak, 178; Calvin as founder of, 8, 91, 95, 98, 126, 191; and Fallman, 191; and liberal republicans in France, 98; in United States, 7 depravity, 213–14; and Barth, 172; and Niebuhr, 160. See also sin; TULIP Descartes, René, 73 determinism, 111 Dever, Mark, 2 Dickens, Charles, Little Dorrit, 106 Dickinson, Emily, 108, 116 dissenters, 80 doctrine, 3, 4, 30, 36; and Niebuhr, 161; pastoral consequences of, 218; proper order of, 3. See also theology Donatism, 223 Dosker, Henry, 129 Doumergue, Émile, 100–2, 148, 152, 154, 157, 181; “Calvin: Epigone or Creator?,” 100–1; The Character of Cal­ vin, 101; John Calvin, 100 Dowey, Edward A., Jr., 157, 162; Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, 163–64

261

Driscoll, Mark, 210–11 Dutch Calvinism, 74, 122, 123, 157 Dutch East India Company, 75 Dutch Neo-Calvinism, 127, 131 Dutch Reformed Church, 5, 61, 74, 75, 126–27, 128, 168– 69, 173; and apartheid, 174, 175–76; and Boesak, 177; and Kuyper, 169–70, 171– 72; and Naude, 174; and racial segregation, 168, 170 Dutch Republic, 60, 126. See also Netherlands Dyer, Thomas Henry, 89; Life of Calvin, 105 ecumenism, 119, 174 Edict of Nantes, 96 Edict of Theodosius , 223 Edwards, Jonathan, 2, 5, 79, 83, 111, 139, 159, 209, 215; Religious Affections, 79 Edward VI, 59 elect, 41, 43; church as body of, 45; and Kuyper, 169; predestination of, 26; and John Wesley, 85 election, 86; and Barth, 95; doctrine of, 26–27; and Hogg, 108; and Schleiermacher, 94; and Schweizer, 95; in Stowe, 110; universal, 94; and Voetius, 65; and

262

Wilton, 84; and World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 95. See also predestination; TULIP Elizabethan Settlement of 1560, 81, 82 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 57 Ellroy, James, 204–5; The Black Dahlia, 204 Engammare, Max, 199–200 England, 56–60, 62, 63–65, 104–6; and Afrikaner Reformed churches, 168; and Scott, 98. See also Anglicans; Church of England; Great Britain English: translation of Insti­ tutes into, 17, 58–60, 62, 162; vernacular religious literature in, 61–62 English Reformation, 85 Enlightenment, 68–88, 89, 131, 132; and Hodge, 121; and Schleiermacher, 93; transatlantic world of, 77–88 Erasmus, Desiderius, 15, 20, 22, 30, 31, 32, 49, 50 Erskine, Thomas, 106 ethics, 69, 215; and Barth, 137; and Niebuhr, 160; and Wang, 194 Eucharist, 204; and Barth, 139; and Nevin, 119–20. See

index

also Lord’s Supper; Lord’s Table evil: and Fenn, 151; God as author of, 39, 65; nature of, 220; problem of, 27; responsibility for, 43 evolutionary science, 158 Ewing, James, 107 faith, 40; and assurance, xii, 27, 33; Bainton on, 157; Christ as whole end of, 27; as given by God, 41; instruction in, 1; and Kant, 70; and Niebuhr, 161; spectacles of, 21; and Yu Ke, 191 fallen state, 20, 39. See also sin Fallman, Fredrik, 191 Farel, Guillaume, 22–23, 29, 223, 225 fascism, 133. See also Nazis feminism, 200–1 Fenn, William W., “The Marrow of Calvin’s Theology,” 150–52, 153 Fetherstone, Christopher, 58 financial meltdown of 2008, 199 Fiske, John, 114 Flavel, John, 79 Fletcher, John William ( Jean Guillaume de La Flechere), 85 Fox, Margaret, 212–13

index

France, 95–102; Catholic Church in, 70, 96, 97, 99; evangelicals in, 22, 24; Goddess of Reason in, 70; liberal republicans in, 98; martyrdom in, xii; monarchists in, 98; nineteenthcentury royalist, 96; Protestant clericalism in, xv; Reformed Christians in, 97; religious war in, 35; secular education in, 99 Francis I, King of France, 11, 23–24, 177, 183 Free Church of Scotland, 106–7 freedom, 220; and Capitein, 76; of Christ, 40; of Christian, 25; of conscience, 74, 156; and Fiske, 114; of God, 54; religious, 113 Free University of Amsterdam, 128, 129, 169 free will, 61 French, 28–29, 102. See also under Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin) French Protestants, 96–97, 99, 102 French Revolution, 70, 87, 89 Front Porch, The, 216 fundamentalism, 158–59 Galileo Galilei, 29 Gathago, Julius, 181–82

263

Geneva, xii, 30, 33, 51, 96, 199; Calvin’s conflicts with authorities in, 30; celebration of 1836 in, 99; celebration of 1909 in, 90, 95, 116; celebration of 1959 in, 138; celebration of 2009 in, 167; Consistory of, 17; Council of, 224–25; eighteenth-century, 72–73; and Enlightenment ideals, 89; magistrates of, 11, 14; monument to Calvin in, 14, 126; refugees in, xii; and theocracy, 8; wealthy printers of, 31 Gereformeerde Kerk (Reformed Church), 168 German Protestant theologians: and Hitler, 134, 141 German Reformed Church, 61 German Reformed Protestants, 103 German Reformed seminary, Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, 4, 112, 119–21, 126, 164 Germany, 65, 102–4 Gibbon, Edward, 125 Glasgow, Scotland, 106–8; St. John’s Church, 107 God: as accommodating to humanity, 32; as allpowerful and determinative, 220; as author/cause of sin, 33, 43, 85, 151; as author of evil, 39, 65; and

264

Barth, 134, 135, 136, 139; and Bible, 21; and blame for sin, 39; and Boesak, 167, 176, 178; and Bouma, 158; and Christ, xii, 27, 40; covenant of, 33, 46; and creation, 40, 46, 218; as Creator, 36, 38, 40, 164, 201; displeasure of, 44; and Dowey, 164; faith as given by, 41; and Fenn, 152; fidelity to, 47; forgiveness of, 33; freedom of, 54; goodness of, 38, 47; grace of, 152; and Haroutunian, 159; of history, 33; as inviting and hospitable, 20; of Israelites, 33; journey to, 37; judgment of, 38, 95; justice of, 47, 86, 176; justification and defense of, 47; knowledge of, xiii, 18, 25, 36–37, 38, 40, 70, 71, 124, 141–45, 164, 169, 181, 213; law of, 161; life as journey to, 20; majesty of, 128; mercy of, 39, 55; and Niebuhr, 161; obedience to commandments of, 40; opposition to, 11; and pleasure in damnation, 91; possession of, 11; promises of in Christ, xii; and providence, 43, 44; as reaching out to humanity, 46; receptivity to Word of,

index

41–42; and recognition of self, 37; as Redeemer, 164; and redemption, 40, 46; relationships with, xiii; revelation of, 21, 40, 47; salvation determined by, 42–43; and salvation in Barth, 136; as saving, 12; self-revelation of, 20, 40, 46; sin as life oriented against, 45; as source of all, 136; sovereignty of, 146, 158, 171, 176, 215, 218; as tyrant, 2, 33; union with through Christ, 41; will of, 11, 43, 47, 86, 158, 159; Word of, 44 God the Father, 27, 40 Goodwin, Thomas, 64 grace, 27, 38, 160, 169–70. See also TULIP Great Awakenings, 77, 111 Great Britain, 78; missionaries to China from, 186. See also England; Scotland Great Depression, 164 Greeks, ancient, 126 Grigoli, Leland, 37–38 Gutenberg, Johannes, 15 Hales, John, 82 Ham, Curse of, 75 Hansen, Collin, Young, Rest­ less, Reformed, 210 Haroutunian, Joseph: “Calvinism Is Not

index

Fundamentalism,” 158–59; Piety versus Moralism, 159 Harris, Steven, 215–16 Hart, John W., 143 Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut, 162 Hawkins, Justin, 216–17 Hegelianism, 119 Heidelberg Catechism, 54, 61 Helvetic Consensus Formula, 72 Henry, Paul, 103 Heppe, Heinrich, 104 heresy: Bainton on, 156–57; Calvin accused of, 28, 62, 67; and Dyer, 105; and evangelicals in France, 24; and Servetus, 224–25; and Walker, 150; and Worthen, 211 Herminjard, Aimé Louis, Correspondance des réfor­ mateurs dans les pays de langue française, 99–100 Hervey, James, 83 Hesselink, John, 146 hip-hop, 215–16 Hitler, Adolf, 134, 141 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 67 Hodge, A. A., 158 Hodge, Charles, 3, 119, 120– 21, 123, 158, 181; Discussions in Church Polity, 121 Hogg, James, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justi­ fied Sinner, 108–9

265

Holbein, Hans, the younger, 46 Holy Spirit, 20, 36, 45, 55; Bainton on, 157; fruits of, 40–41; revelation of, 18 Homer, 125 Hong Kong, 190 Hudson Valley painters, 204 Huguenots, 96 humanism, 19–20, 32, 50, 51 Hume, David, 106 Hunt, Zack, 213–14 imperialism, 167, 190 India, 185 Indonesia, 184, 185 industrialization, 89, 90 infants/babies, 115, 198, 213, 223 Institutes of the Christian Reli­ gion (Calvin): 1536 Latin Basel edition of, 17, 23–25, 49, 227; 1539 Latin Strasbourg edition of, 19, 23, 26, 211, 227; 1541 French Geneva edition of, 17, 29, 99, 227; 1543 Latin Geneva edition of, 227; 1545 French Geneva edition of, 29, 227; 1550 Latin Geneva edition of, 227; 1551 French edition of, 29; 1559 Latin Geneva edition of, 1, 13, 16, 17, 21, 35, 36, 51–52, 227; 1560 French Geneva edition of, 29, 99, 227; 1574 English translation of by Norton,

266

58–60; 1576 Latin edition by Bunny, 52; 1590 edition of, 54; 1611 English translation of, 62; 1618 Latin edition of, 62; 1631 Gaelic edition of, 62; 1634 English translation of, 62; 1650 Dutch edition of, 127; 1834 Latin edition (Berlin), 99, 103; 1960 English translation of by Battles, 162; Calvin’s editions of, 227; Chinese translation of, 188, 189; compendia and epitomes of, 52; critical apparatuses for, 51–52; dedication of to Francis I, 23–24, 64, 101; Delaune’s summary of, 52– 54; English translations of, 17; evolution of, 17, 200; expansion of, 129; first version of, 22; four books of, xii; four-book structure of, 36, 219; French composition of, xii; French translation of, 28; Latin and vernacular translations of, 3; Latin composition of, xii; Latin critical edition of, 102; Latin editions of, 29, 58, 211; Neo-Calvinists reprints of 1889, 1912, and 1934, 131; order of, 1; revisions of, 13, 17, 30, 32, 35; vernacular translation of, 16

index

Jones, Serene, 200, 201 Junius, Franciscus, 63 justice, 11; and Boesak, 166, 167, 178; of God, 47, 86, 176 justification, 40, 64, 83–84; of God, 47

salvation, xi–xii; of self, xiii, 25, 36–37, 38, 70, 181; of sin, 38; through revelation, 38 Knox, John, 106, 107, 187; First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regi­ ment of Women, 57 Korea, 184, 185 Kpobi, David Nii Anum, 76, 77 Kuyper, Abraham, 4, 122–23, 127–28, 129, 148, 152, 154; and Boesak, 178; and Dutch Reformed Church, 169–70, 171–72; and separate spheres, 169; and South Africa, 180; spheresovereignty in, 170

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, 70 Keller, Tim, The Reason for God, 208–9 Kelsey, David, 215 Kierkegaard, Søren, 133 knowledge: as awakening from dullness, 37; Bainton on, 157; and Bible, 18, 70; of Christ, 36–37; for Christians, xiii; and Dowey, 164; in Enlightenment, 68; of God, xiii, 18, 25, 36–37, 38, 40, 70, 71, 124, 141–45, 164, 169, 181, 213; journey of, 39; and Kant, 70–71; of

Lactantius, 19 Laud, William, 85 law, 25, 40, 160, 161 laypeople, xi–xii, 16, 29–30, 201 Lewis, C. S., 209 liberal Christianity, 95 liberalism: and Barth, 133, 137; and Barth and Brunner, 140, 141, 144; and Bavinck, 128; and Bouma, 158; Calvin as forerunner of, 91; and Calvin as heritage figure, 9; Calvin as patron saint of, 95; Calvin as symbol of, 96; and Doumergue, 101; and

International Calvin Congress, 200 intolerance, 89; Calvin as figure of, 8, 9, 49, 69, 86, 88, 108, 156, 211; and Dyer, 105; and McFarlane, 108; and Servetus, 86, 105, 148; and Worthen, 211; and Zweig, 156 Irish Catholics, 106

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267

liberalism (continued ) Dutch Reformed churches, 127, 128, 168; and Fenn, 150; and Haroutunian, 159; and Kuyper, 128; in Netherlands, 74; and Niebuhr, 159–60; and Presbyterian Church USA, 158; and Stowe, 111; and Wendel, 163 liberal Reformed churches, 109 liberal republicans, in France, 98 liberal revolutions, in France, 89 Lin Hung-Hsin, 190 Livingstone, David, 187 Locke, John, 73 Lombard, Peter, Sentences, 19 Lord: as Creator, 38; as Redeemer, 38. See also Christ; God Lord’s Prayer, 25 Lord’s Supper, 25, 62, 216; and Boesak, 180; and Nevin, 119–20. See also Eucharist Lord’s Table, 46; and Afrikaner Reformed churches, 168. See also Eucharist Low Countries, 65, 73–74. See also Netherlands Luther, Martin, 7, 18, 30, 56, 74, 80, 96, 187; as apostle, 13; Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 15; and Barth, 139; Bouma on, 157; Calvin

268

commended by, 23; Calvin portrayed as disciple of, 102–3; Catechism of 1529, 25; and China, 190; and Chinese Christians, 185; and Doumergue, 100; and Epistle to Romans, 26; faith and assurance in, 27; Freedom of a Christian, 15; German of, 29; and Niebuhr, 160; Ninety-Five Theses of, 15; and predestination, 42; readers of, 32; and Rutherford, 63; and Schleiermacher, 94; and scholasticism, 50; study of, 200; Table Talk, 30; and Wang, 192–93; and John Wesley, 83 Lutheranism: and Wendel, 163 Lutherans: Calvin’s arguments with, 4; and de Gruchy, 170; hatred of for Calvin, 33; hostility of, 3; and Zwinger, 66 Mackintosh, Hugh Ross, 92–93 Maclean, Norman, A River Runs through It, 204 Mao Zedong, 191 Marais, Ben, Colour, 172 Marsden, George, 117 Mars Hill church, 210 Martin, Richard, 53

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Mary Queen of Scots, 57 Mather, Cotton, Magnalia Christi Americana, 82 McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago, Ill., 158 McFarlane, Patrick, 107–8 McKim, Donald K., Coffee with Calvin, 202 McNeill, John T., 162 Melanchthon, Philip, 3, 18, 59, 224; Calvin’s meeting with, 23; and Epistle to Romans, 26; Loci communes, 19, 20; and predestination of reprobates, 26; revisions of, 19, 20 Melville, Herman, 108; Moby­ Dick, 116 Mercersburg. See German Reformed seminary, Mercersburg, Pennsylvania merit, 10, 26, 27, 42, 152 Merle d’Aubigné, J. H., 114, 115–16; History of the Great Reformation, 112–13; His­ tory of the Reformation in the Time of Calvin, 112–13 Methodism, 77, 82 Michelet, Jules, Histoire de France, 97 Milton, John, 5; Paradise Lost, 125 modernity, 95, 131–32, 148, 181; and American Christians of Reformed

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tradition, 165; and China, 191; defense against, 154; and Doumergue, 100–1; and Fenn, 151–52; and freedom of conscience, 156; and Neo-Calvinism, 128; and Niebuhr, 160; and Stevenson, 152–53; and Weber, 104 Molekamp, Femke, 202 moralism, 4, 7, 9 Moravians, 83 Morris, William, 79 Moses, 30, 31, 96 Muller, Richard, 2, 164, 199–200 Murray, Scot Andrew, 168 Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, 189, 192 Napoleon I, 89 nationalism, 89 natural theology, 141–45 Naude, Beyers, “What Calvin Really Stood For,” 173–74 Nazis/National Socialists, 134, 140, 141, 170, 171, 172 Neo-Calvinism, 101, 123, 127, 128, 131, 154, 169 neoorthodoxy, 161–62 Netherlands, 5, 122, 123, 126, 127; and Boesak, 166; celebrations of Reformation in (1817), 74; Neo-Calvinism in, 101. See also Dutch Republic; Low Countries

269

Nevin, John Williamson, 121; Mystical Presence, 119–20 New Calvinists, 2, 8, 208 New England, 79, 110, 111, 116, 158, 207 Newton, Sir Isaac, 73; Prin­ cipia, 125 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 159–61 Niesel, Wilhelm, 173, 175; Theology of Calvin, 171 Northern Renaissance, xi, 50 Norton, Thomas, Institutes (English translation), 58–60 Notre Dame University, 199 Ntoane, Lebakeng Ramotshabi Lekula, 167–68, 175–76 Obama, Barack, 199 Olevianus, Caspar, Epitome, 54–55 Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 154 Osiander, Andreas, 36 Owen, John, 79 Paris parlement, 1542 edict of, 28 Parker, T.H.L., 164 pastor(s): as audience, xii, 29– 30; and Bunny and Delaune, 53; Calvin as, 13, 20, 21, 23, 26, 30; compendia and epitomes (summaries)

270

for, 52; education of, 29– 30, 36, 51, 211. See also clergy patristic writers, 30 Paul the apostle, 76, 87, 138. See also Bible, books of Pauw, Amy Plantinga and Serene Jones, Feminist and Womanist Essays in Re­ formed Dogmatics, 200–1 Pelagians, 73 People’s Republic of China, 187–88 Percy, Walker, “The Last Donahue Show,” 9–10 philosophes, 69, 70 Pietism, 128 piety, 21, 37, 41, 205 Piper, John, 2, 3, 202, 207–8; “Desiring God,” 207 Piscator, Johannes, 55, 63 Platter, Thomas, 23 Potgeister, F. J. M., 170 prayer, 40–41 preaching, 17, 46, 195 predestination, xii, 25–27, 41, 42, 86–87; and assurance, 27, 41, 87; and Barth, 133, 139; and Chinese theologians, 189; and church, 45; and Delaune, 54; double, 26, 33, 42, 49, 56, 198; and Fenn, 151; and Fletcher, 85–86; and Free Church of Scotland, 107; and Haroutunian, 159; and human

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righteousness, 43; and Netherlands, 74; as pastoral doctrine, 27; and Rice, 117; and Schleiermacher, 93, 94; and Schweizer, 95; and Scottish thinkers, 106; seventeenth century debates over, 61; and Stowe, 111; in Swediaur, 80; and Warfield, 123; and John Wesley, 85, 87; and Yu Ke, 191. See also election; reprobates and reprobation Presbyterian Reform and Re­ view, 115 Presbyterians, 58, 63, 154, 163, 165; as missionaries, 185, 186; Old School vs. New School, 116–18; in Scotland, 183, 185; in United States, 111, 112, 114, 116–18, 126, 158, 183, 185 Princeton Theological Seminary, 8, 115, 129, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164; and authentic Reformed tradition, 3; and Mercersburg debate, 4, 112, 118–21, 126; and Warfield, 122, 123 printers and book distributors, 16 printing presses, 15, 29 progress, 95–96, 132, 148; American culture of, 121;

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and Doumergue, 101; and Fenn, 152, 153; and Stevenson, 153; and Yu Ke, 191 progressivism, 95, 96, 119, 152, 153, 154, 160 Protestantism: and Afrikaner Reformed churches, 168; controversies of sixteenthcentury, 219; and scholasticism, 50–51; in United States, 111 Protestant Reformation, 219, 221; and Barth, 135, 138; and Barth-Brunner debate, 146; in Basel, 22; and Bible, 16; Bible as basis for unity in, 18; and Chinese Protestants, 188; compendia for instruction in, 19; and eighteenth century, 69; and Fenn, 151; and Geneva, 8; Institutes as preeminent book of, 60; intellectual world of, 50; legacy of, 165; and liberal republicans in France, 98; and Nevin, 119–20; and Niebuhr, 160; reclamation of, 4; and Scotland, 106; theological debates of, 77 Protestant Theological University, Kampen, 128–29 Protestant work ethic, 131 providence, 25–26, 43, 205 Puritans, 7, 58, 64, 160

271

Rabelais, François, 15–16 race: and Bieler, 173; in South Africa, 166–82. See also apartheid; slavery racial separation: and Dutch Reformed Church, 168, 169, 170; theological errors of, 175 racism: and Barth, 172; and Bioesak, 179–80; and Boesak, 166; and de Gruchy, 167 Ramsay, Chevalier (Andrew Michael), 80 rationalism, 93 rationality, 132 reason, 68–69, 70, 71, 73 redeemed, 160. See also elect; election redeemer, 36 Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 208 redemption, xiii, 5, 40, 46, 179. See also salvation; sin Reeves, William, 81–82, 85 Reformed African American Network, 216 Reformed Christianity, 60, 69, 89–90; in Asia, 184; and Barth-Brunner debate., 157; in England, 58; in France, 97; and Hodge and Warfield, 120; as missionaries to China, 186; and Neo-Calvinism, 128;

272

in United States, 116, 123, 164–65 Reformed Church, 55 Reformed churches, 109; in Asia, 184; in Brazil, 183; and Enlightenment ideals, 89; and missionaries to China, 185; in United States, 112, 183 Reformed faith: and Boettner, 154; in Low Countries, 73– 74; and Niebuhr, 160; in United States, 111 Reformed Low Countries, 65 Reformed Protestantism, 87– 88, 89, 154; and debate over Servetus, xv; in United States, 114 Reformed scholasticism: systematic theology of, 55 Reformed theology: and neoorthodoxy, 161–62; tradition of, 6; and Warfield, 122 Reformed tradition, 179, 219, 220–21; and Alliance of Black Reformed Christians, 176–77; and Boesak, 177–78; as founder of, 66; Institutes as authentic, 3; and Mercersburg vs. Princeton, 119–20; Walker on, 149 religion, 37; in Enlightenment, 68–69; and Kant, 71;

index

and Niebuhr, 161; reasonable, 69 Renaissance, 99, 102, 160 reprobates and reprobation, 5, 26, 85, 86. See also predestination; sin republicanism, 91, 98 revelation, 40, 47, 141 Revue Chretiénne, 97 Rice, Nathan Lewis, “Ten Letters on the Subject of Slavery,” 117 righteousness, 43, 55, 83, 160 Rilliet, Albert, 155; Calvin and Servetus, 113–14 Ritschl, Albrecht, 155 Robinson, Marilynne, xvi, 116, 202; Death of Adam, 205, 206; Gilead, 205–6; Home, 205; “The Freedom of a Christian,” 206–7 Romans, ancient, 126 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, 72 Ruffet, Louis, 155 Rutherford, Samuel, The Divine Right of Church Government and Excom­ munication, 63, 65 sacraments, 25, 94, 196 saints. See TULIP salvation, xii, 33, 219; assurance of, 27; and Barth, 146–47; certainty of, 218;

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and Chinese churches, 196; and church, 45, 145–46; and Fenn, 152; God’s determination of, 42–43; and Kuyper, 169; and Niebuhr, 160, 161; universal, 146–47. See also redemption; sin sanctification, xiii, 40, 45 Sanneh, Lamin, 183 Schaff, Philip, 119 Schlebusch, Alwyn, 177 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xvi, 87–88, 95, 102, 111, 119, 131– 32, 133, 141; Christian Faith, 92–94 scholasticism, 30, 77; as academic and theological method, 50–51; and Bavinck, 130; and Protestants, 50–51; and Voetius, 66; and Zwinger, 66 Schreiner, Susan, 218 Schuman, Andrew, 214–15 Schweizer, Alexander, 95 science, 128, 129 Scotland, 63, 106–9, 168, 183, 185 Scott, Walter, 98; Old Mortal­ ity, 108 Scottish Common Sense philosophy, 119, 121 Scottish Enlightenment, 106, 108 secularism, 5, 89, 90, 127, 150, 153

273

Seitz, Jonathan, 186, 190 self: knowledge of, xiii, 25, 36–37, 38, 70, 181; liberation from, 39; relationship with, xiii Sendingkerk, 176 Seneca, 50; De clementia, 22 Servetus, Michael, 3, 36, 132, 198, 223–25; as antiTrinitarian, 49; and Arnell, 86; arrest and trial of, 224; Bainton on, 155–57; and Bavinck, 130; burning of, 33, 49; Calvin as executioner of, 67; and Calvin as intolerant, 49, 86, 108; and Calvin as monster, 49; Calvin as murderer of, 8, 98; Calvin’s arguments with, 4; and Calvin’s reputation in France, 90; Calvin’s role in trial of, 2; debate over, xv; and Doumergue, 100; and Dyer, 105; and Enlightenment, 71; Errors of the Trin­ ity, 224; and German Protestants, 103; and intolerance, 86, 105, 148; and post-World War I era, 109; and reception of Insti­ tutes, xv; and Shields, 115; and spirit of Calvin’s age, 100, 113, 148, 156–57; Voltaire on, 91; and Walker, 149–50; and World

274

Alliance of Reformed Churches, 95 sexual repression, 7 Shakespeare, William, 16, 125 Sharpeville Massacre, 172–73 Shed, W.G.T., 158 Shields, Charles W., “The Reformer of Geneva,” 115 Simon, Richard, 70 sin, 18, 220; blame for, 39; God as author of, 43; knowledge of, 38; as life oriented against God, 45; and Niebuhr, 160; as obscuring reality, 20–21; overcoming of, 40; punishment of, 46; relationship with God destroyed through, 46; and Rousseau, 72; and salvation, 45. See also depravity; redemption; reprobates and reprobation; salvation Singapore, 190 slavery: and Afrikaner Reformed churches, 168; and Capitein, 75–76; in United States, 116, 117. See also race Smith, Adam, 106 Smith, Henry Boynton, 158 Social Gospel movement, 159 Socinians, 73 sola scriptura, 16 South Africa, 6, 166–82, 199 South African Council of Churches, 177

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South African Dutch Reformed Church (DRC), 166 South Carolina Theological Seminary, 117 South Korea, 196–97 Spinoza, Baruch, 67, 70 Staehlin, Ernst, 103 St. Andrews, Scotland, 51, 63 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 97 Steinmetz, David, 199–200 Stellenbosch seminary, 168– 69, 170, 172, 181 Stevenson, Richard Taylor, John Calvin, the Statesman, 152–53 Stevenson, Robert Louis, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 108 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 108; The Minister’s Wooing, 4, 110–11 Swediaur, Frans, Philosophical Dictionary, 80 Swift, Jonathan, “A Tale of a Tub,” 80 Switzerland, 11, 65, 150 Synod of Dort (1617), 5, 8–9 Taiwan, 188, 190, 195, 196–97 Taiwan Journal of Theology, 195 Tan, May, 193, 194

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Tawney, R. H., 7; Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 104–5 Taylor, Nathaniel William, 111 Teresa of Avila, 32 theism, 150 theology, xii–xiii, 17; and Fenn, 150, 151; and Haroutunian, 159; medieval and patristic traditions of, 219; and scholasticism, 50, 51; and Stevenson, 153; and Walker, 149. See also doctrine; scholasticism Thirty­Nine Articles, 84 Thirty Years’ War, 67 Thomas, à Kempis, The Imita­ tion of Christ, 15 Thornwell, James Henley, 117–18 Thucydides, 125 Timotheus, 131 Toplady, Augustus: Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Cal­ vinism of the Church of England, 84–86; “Rock of Ages,” 85 Trinitarianism, 40, 95, 225. See also anti-Trinitarianism Trinity: and Rousseau, 72; and Westminster Assembly, 65 TULIP, 154, 157, 159, 216, 217. See also depravity; election; grace

275

Turretin, Francis, 65 Tutu, Desmond, 167, 174 Tzu-lun Tsai, “Rethinking the Preaching and Worship of the Presbyterian Churches in Taiwan Today,” 195 Unitarianism, 111, 152 Unitarians, 150 United States, 4, 110–21, 122, 154, 199; black theology in, 176; as commercial and world power, 164; democracy in, 7; founders of, 95– 96, 115–16; literature and art of, 204; missionaries to China from, 185, 186; Presbyterian church membership in, 183; Reformed churches in, 183; and Scott, 98; Southern region of, 116 University of Cape Town, 170 University of Chicago, 158 Updike, John, 202; In the Beauty of the Lilies, 203–4 Vautrollier, Thomas, 52, 58 Vernet, Jacob, 73 Victorians, 187 Villa-Vicencio, Charles, Apartheid Is Heresy, 174–75 Voetius, Gisbertus, 65–66 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 68, 72, 73, 91, 98 Vosloo, Robert, 181

276

Walker, Williston, 153; John Calvin, 148–50 Wang, Aiming, 189, 192–93, 194–95 Warfield, Benjamin Breckinridge, 4, 119, 120, 122–26, 148, 155, 163; and Bavinck, 129; “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God,” 124 Weber, Max, 7, 103–4, 152, 189; and Chinese theologians, 191; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capi­ talism, 104, 191; The Reli­ gion of China, 191 Weber, Otto, German edition of Institutes, 162 Weimar Republic, 137 Wendel, François, Calvin, 162–63 Wesley, Charles, 82–83, 187 Wesley, John, 82–84, 85, 87, 187 Western culture, 184, 190, 192 Western missionaries, 184 Westminster Assembly (1643–53), 5, 63–65. See also Church of England Westminster Standards, 158 Whitaker, William, 63 whites: and Afrikaner Reformed churches, 168; and Barth, 172; and Boesak, 166 will, human, 61, 111. See also God, will of

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Wilton, Samuel, Review of Some of the Articles of the Church of England, 84 women, 202 Word: and Barth, 135, 138, 139; and Niebuhr, 161; preaching of, 46; primacy of, 146 works, 40, 160 World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 95, 167, 174 World War I, 109, 137 Worthen, Molly, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?,” 210–11

index

Yale Divinity School, 212–18 Yates, John, Gods Arraigne­ ment of Hypocrites, 61, 62 Yu Ke, 191 Zachman, Randall, 199–200 Zweig, Stefan, The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin, 156 Zwinger, Theodor, the Younger: Theater of Heav­ enly Wisdom, 66 Zwingli, Huldrych, 7, 18, 43, 94

277