Calvin. History and Reception of a Reformation Week 2. Calvin's Thought Sequence 4. The Goodness of God Today's theme is the goodness of the Father, the goodness of God. Calvin confesses the goodness of God, which he sees as evident in God's creation in particular. The work of Brian Gerrish, a leading Calvin scholar, has helped to elucidate this aspect in particular of Calvin's theology. Gerrish's work has been carried on by one of his students, Randall Zachman, who has become a leading figure in the field of Calvin scholarship. Calvin wrote: "In every part of the world, in heaven and earth, He has written and virtually engraved
the glory of His power, His kindness, His wisdom and His eternity." All of creation -- and not just certain parts of it, human beings for example -- conveys the goodness of God. Glory and goodness are not opposed to power and wisdom. All of these attributes or qualities of God, in Calvin's mind, go together. The goodness of God does not exist apart from God's power or omnipotence. "The reverence due both to a father and to a master pertain to God." Thus God's goodness -- the title of today's sequence -- is always defined as going hand in hand with God's glory, power and wisdom. Here's another quote by Calvin: "what is more agreeable to faith than to feel assured that God is a kind and benign Father,
when Christ is acknowledged as a brother and propitiator [...], than to rest in the sure hope
of salvation and eternal life whenever we conceive that Christ, in whom such treasures
are hidden, was given to us by the Father?" This passage is taken from Calvin's 1535 epistle to king Francis. God is He who creates and gives -- who gives us life. He is a kind and benign Father. He gave His Son, whom he left in the hands of humans. His love is even greater than a mother's love for her child, according to Calvin. God is goodness itself. And both the Old and New Testaments testify to this. Nonetheless, "Christ has given a fuller illustration of the Father's mercy," writes Calvin in the "Institutes." Yet is God's will greater than his goodness? Calvin's answer: "For the will of God is the supreme and sovereign standard of justice, so that
all that He wills, by virtue of being what He wills, must be taken as just. Such that
when we ask: Why has God done as he has done? we must answer: Because He so
willed. If, going beyond that, we ask: Why has He so willed? we shall be asking for
something greater and more sublime than God's will, and no such thing can be found." In the same passage, Calvin writes: "We do not approve of the reveries of Popish theologians as regards God's absolute power:
for what they say on the matter is heathenish, so ought justly to be loathed by us.
We do not imagine a God who is lawless, since He is law unto Himself." There is no absolute, unrestrained power unrelated to the will of God. It is not possible to conceive of God's power as somehow superseding God's will, as something manifesting itself independently of any law or direction. Thus the will of God acts in such a way as to give order, or direction, to His power. Again, the power of God is not abstract; it does not exist independently of, or supersede, God's will. God has made Himself known to human beings everywhere, in all places and in all things. For Calvin, there is a general revelation. To quote Calvin directly: "That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct some sense of Deity, we
hold to be beyond dispute. [...] God has endowed all human beings with knowledge of Himself." There is a general revelation; a "sensus divinitatis" -- a sense, a feeling, an intuition of deity or divinity. Our lives, our movements, our very beings come from God; and this is something we sense instinctively. According to Calvin, "the entire human race has confessed the existence in its heart of some sort of sense of divinity." "This sense of divinity has been engraved so deeply in the human mind that it can never be erased." There is a "seed of religion" -- in his sermons, Calvin used this expression far more often than "sensus divinitatis" (sense of deity/divinity) -- that has been planted in the hearts of all men
by the secret inspiration of God. But -- for there is a "but" -- very few humans nourish the seed in their hearts and allow it to properly sprout. And this is, for Calvin, the meaning of human responsibility, of human culpability -- that which makes us inexcusable. Here Calvin echoes a theme present in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Where do we see God's goodness, according to Calvin? As we've seen, it is visible to us in God's creation, in God's works -- but also in food, clothing, wine, flowers, colors etc. I'd like to read you a very long quote -- probably the longest quote of the entire course, but one that seems necessary to me if we are to correct, at least a little, the image Calvin has
acquired as someone who was austere, a killjoy who didn't enjoy life, a sad and, quite frankly,
unbearable kind of person. This quote is taken from book 3 of the "Institutes": "Now then, if we consider for what end he created food, we shall find that he consulted not only for
our necessity, but also for our enjoyment and delight [Latin: "hilaritati"]. Thus, in clothing, the end
was, in addition to necessity, comeliness and honor; and in herbs, fruits and trees, besides their
various uses, gracefulness of appearance and sweetness of smell." "Were it not so, The Prophet would not enumerate among the mercies of God 'wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face shine,' (Ps. 104:15). The Scriptures would not
everywhere mention, in commendation of his benignity, that he had given such things to human beings.
The natural qualities of things themselves demonstrate to what end, and how far, they may be
lawfully enjoyed." "Has the Lord adorned flowers with all the beauty which spontaneously presents itself to the eye, and the sweet odor which delights the sense of smell, and shall it be unlawful for us to enjoy that
beauty and this odor? What? Has he not so distinguished the colors as to make some more
agreeable than others?" "Has he not given qualities to gold and silver, ivory and marble, thereby rendering them precious above other metals or stones? In short, has he not given many things a value without having
any necessary use?" "Away, then, with that inhuman philosophy which, in allowing no use of the creatures but for necessity, not only maliciously deprives us of the lawful fruit of the divine beneficence, but cannot
be realized without depriving man of all his sense, reducing him to a block of wood." We are not blocks of wood but people with feelings and emotions; pleasure has its place in human existence -- within certain limits, of course. All that we have has been created so that we may recognize its author and magnify His benevolence through grace. For Calvin, the goodness of God should produce
in us a sense of gratitude. The human response to the goodness of the Father is piety and gratitude. Piety is a rather obsolete word for us. What did Calvin mean by it? "By piety I mean that union of reverence and love to God which the knowledge of his benefits inspires." Thus piety is a combination of reverence and love for God, which Calvin views as united, joined together, and a response to the gifts that God has given us. Who is this God of creation? The Father. And can there be a Father without children? Thus the Father cannot be conceived apart from the Son, nor from His breath/Spirit, through whom he creates. According to Calvin, the Father loves his children even more than a mother loves hers. For Calvin, "Scripture teaches us that Christ, from the very beginning, has been the life-giving Word of the Father, the fountain and origin of life,
through which all things subsist." When God said "let there be light," and when he pronounced the other words of creation, it was through His Word, His divine Verb, that all creation came to be. For Calvin, the Verb and the Word are Christ. We recognize God's goodness not only in that the world was created, but also in the fact that this creation is maintained, that it continues. It is a mistake, then, to focus solely on the initial moment of creation. One of the major problems with creationism -- an absurd doctrine according to which the universe was created in
seven days, just a few thousand years ago --, besides its numerous misinterpretations of
Scripture, is its narrow focus on the original act of creation, or "point zero." For Calvin, God's act of creation is inseparable from the continuous quality of this creation, the fact that it is maintained over time. God's goodness is no less perceptible in the fact that God provides for his creation and his creatures. He sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. God did not become idle after creating the world. This notion of a continuous -- continual, continued -- creation is shared not only among most Protestant theologians of the 16th century, but among most Christian theologians in general. Here we have a noteworthy difference with the Deism of the 17th and 18th centuries, according to which the Creator, having designed the universe and set it in motion, then stepped back and
let everything function on its own. This is the position held, for example, by Rousseau. For Calvin, God supports, feeds and cares for each of his creatures. God operates universally throughout the universe, and specifically, or "specially," in each of his creatures; and in an even more restrained (or "special") way in the minds of
those who trust in God (i.e., the community of believers). The word "trust," for Calvin, means "faith"; it is the equivalent of faith. Faith is the human response to God's goodness, as manifested in God's creation and, even more so, in Christ. Calvin defines faith as follows: "A firm and certain knowledge of God's favor towards us." Knowledge is a central theme in Calvin's theology. Calvin goes very far in his two chapters on providence. He writes: "All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." Modern-day Reformed theologians often struggle with the question of how to speak about divine providence without falling entirely into determinism. Anything that happens is in actuality governed or determined by God. Are crimes, then, determined by God? Are genocides carried out under God's direction? Such a thought is appalling to us, even when a disclaimer is hastily added to specify that the blame always lies with the person -- the criminal, the agent of genocide. We find ourselves unable to simply repeat what Calvin writes, for example: "Thus we must hold, that while by means of the wicked God performs what he had secretly decreed, they are not excusable as if they were obeying his precept, which of set purpose they
violate according to their lust." Calvin is fully aware of the tension -- the contradiction, even -- implicit in these words: namely, that although God carries out God's decrees through the actions of the wicked, the latter
are nonetheless to blame, their responsibility is not nullified. Elsewhere, Calvin writes: "I repeat, I am not unaware of the appearance of absurdity and contradiction in this respect, as concerns heathens and people contemptuous of God." Thus, though aware of this tension, Calvin's position is that people of faith -- i.e., those not contemptuous of God -- realize that the "secret counsel of God" is not given to us
to understand; it is beyond our intelligence. We are here approaching the themes of predestination and divine election, which we'll study in an upcoming video sequence.
