Calvin. History and Reception of a Reformation Week 5. Reading Calvin Today Sequence 10. Calvin: A Prophet? Calvin is not well-liked. Unlike Luther, who is seen as an agreeable, jovial, upbeat kind of fellow, Calvin is seen as solitary, dry, harsh, intransigent. To these images, one might oppose historical fact. Luther's reputation is undoubtedly tarnished by his role in the repression of the peasantry in the German Peasants' War. Though there is no excuse for terrible incidents like the Servetus Affair, there is no such black mark on Calvin's record. Nonetheless, it is a fact that Calvin is not beloved. It is no coincidence that Stefan Zweig, in order to indirectly attack nazism and Hitler, chose Calvin against Castellio as his ostensible topic. Even Max Weber, who, ever mindful of maintaining the sociologist's neutrality, refused to to give personal opinions about those whose ideas he was weighing, could not help but take offense at Calvinist dogma, accusing Calvin (and echoing Milton's famous phrase) of replacing the fatherly God of the Gospel with a mean-spirited God. As I hope this course has shown to some extent, this negative image of Calvin is in fact at odds with the real Calvin, that is, the Calvin one discovers by carefully reading his work. Granted, Calvin says little about himself and his own experiences. Calvin's human side can be difficult to perceive -- it's not always easy to see the man behind the text. Yet, upon studying him carefully, one is compelled to view him as endearing. Endearing in his willingness to detach himself from the interpretations of the Gospel that preceded him, to rediscover the Gospel in its simplicity. From this point of view, he was very modern, particularly in his constant concern with clarity, directness, simplicity. The language Calvin employs is elegant. Writing in French about things previously reserved for Latin speakers, he gives the modern reader a sense of
proximity; he speaks to us in a manner very similar to our contemporaries. Thus there are in Calvin's thought aspects that are interesting, important, profound. This is why, despite having read him extensively, Calvin still moves me today. If there is one thing that stands out, from my point of view, it is Calvin as prophet. Calvin believed, and explicitly claimed, that he was speaking on God's behalf. He acknowledged that, like all prophets, he was nothing without the Word speaking through him. And like all prophets, he admitted that his tendency to be harsh, even ruthless, was a necessary expression of his message of rebuke and redress. In his private prayers, however, he never ceased interceding in favor of the people to whom he preached, pleading with God to manifest God's goodness and compassion towards them. The problem is that we have access only to the words of denunciation, of righteous fervor -- and nothing of Calvin's private prayers. What we do know is this: as the man responsible for settling all sorts of minor disputes (domestic, neighborly, etc.) in the Consistory, Calvin always exhibited leniency and clemency
rather than sternness. One particularly fascinating aspect of Calvin is his attempt to resolve the seemingly irresolvable: universality and particularity; radicality and practicability; the Gospel as justice and the Gospel as love; a systematic doctrine (that is, which attempts to account for every aspect of faith) and the admission that some of God's secrets are off-limits to us, that everything man
represents to himself regarding God can be no more than a metaphor -- never the truth itself. Thus Calvin's work must be undertaken anew by each generation. Each generation must ask itself: what is the meaning of the Gospel? For those in the Calvinist tradition, it is not enough to merely apply the themes of Calvin's theology to new realities. Rather, their task will be to retrace Calvin's steps from the very beginning, that is, to go back to the Gospel as the starting point and ask once again, taking into account all that we know today
about man (knowledge that goes far beyond what was known in the 16th century):
how does Scripture speak to man? How can humanism and Christianity be framed, not as mutually incompatible, but as ideals that that call out to each other, ideals that each, in their own way, express man's search for
truth -- a truth we must always find ahead of us, not in the past?