by W. Robert Godfrey, Ph.D.
First published in Evangelium, Vol. 7, Issue 1
There can be no serious doubt that Calvin once mattered.
Any honest historian of any point of view and of any religious
conviction would agree that Calvin was one of the most important
people in the history of western civilization. Not only was he a
significant pastor and theologian in the sixteenth century, but
the movement of which he was the principal leader led to the
building of Reformed and Presbyterian churches with millions of
members spread through centuries around the world. Certainly a
man whose leadership, theology, and convictions can spark such a
movement once mattered.
Historians from a wide range of points of view also
acknowledge that Calvin not only mattered in the religious
sphere and in the ecclesiastical sphere, but Calvin and
Calvinism had an impact on a number of modern phenomena that we
take for granted. Calvin is certainly associated with the rise
of modern education and the conviction that citizens ought to be
educated and that all people ought to be able to read the
Bible. Such education was a fruit of the Reformation and
Calvin.
Others have insisted that the rise of modern democracy
owes at least something to the Reformed movement. One historian
said of Puritanism that a Puritan was someone who would humble
himself in the dust before God and would rise to put his foot on
the neck of a king. Calvinists were strongly persuaded that they
must serve God above men, and that began to relativize notions
of superiority and aristocracy. King James I of England, who was
also James VI of Scotland, once remarked as he looked at
Presbyterianism in Scotland: “No bishop, no king.” If the Church
is not governed by a hierarchy, certainly the political world
does not need to be governed by a hierarchy either. Such
Calvinist attitudes toward kings helped contribute to modern
democracy.
Calvinism contributed to modern science with an empirical
look at the real world. Calvin contributed to the rise of modern
capitalism in part by teaching that the charging of interest on
money loaned was not immoral. He was the first Christian
theologian to do so.
When we look at that list—theology, church, education,
science, democracy, and capitalism—here was a man that mattered.
He had a profound influence on the development of the history of
the West. But does he still matter? Should we care today
to revisit John Calvin—who he was, what he thinks—and believe
that what he taught is still significant, still valuable? Yes,
he still does matter. John Calvin matters still above
all because he was a teacher of truth. If truth matters, then
John Calvin still matters because he was one of the great
teachers of truth, one of the most insightful, faithful teachers
of truth, one of the best communicators of truth. He was a
teacher who had taken to heart the words of Jesus: “You will
know the truth and the truth, and the truth will set you free”
(John 8:32).
Mr. Leon Panetta was interviewed on television recently
when it was announced that he was going to be appointed by
president-elect Obama to be the head of the CIA. In his brief
remarks, Panetta commented intriguingly that in the entrance of
the old CIA building were the words, “You shall know the truth,
and the truth shall set you free.” That verse from Scripture has
probably been wrenched out of context and been misused more than
most verses of Scripture. Often people who are concerned about
the truth and quote this verse are interested only in an
abstraction about truth, or only interested in turning this
verse into a poetic slogan. It sounds great: “You shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free.” They seem seldom to
quote the verse in context, where Jesus said, “If you abide in
my word, you are truly my disciples, and you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free.” John Calvin knew the
context of that verse. He knew the only way to know the truth
was to know Christ’s word. And it was because he knew Christ’s
word—because he studied Christ’s word, because he treasured
Christ’s word—that Calvin was such a great teacher. John Calvin
was a teacher of the truth of God’s Word.
A great teacher has two prime characteristics: first, he
knows what he is talking about, and second, he can communicate
what he knows. Calvin was extraordinary in both of those areas.
Calvin knew what he was talking about in part because he had a
naturally brilliant mind. John Calvin received a fine education.
He lived in the providence of God in a period when young
scholars were able not only to become fluent in Latin, but also
in Greek and Hebrew. Calvin was marvelously educated in Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew. That ability in language prepared him to be
an extraordinarily sensitive interpreter of the Scriptures. The
biblical commentaries of Calvin remain highly regarded and
respected to this day.
Calvin had great natural ability of mind which he
linked to hard work. Calvin really did not become a very
famous man until he turned 30, and when he turned 30, he had
only another 24 years yet to live. The period of his great
productivity was only 24 years. He died in part because of
over-work. His collected works from those 24 years fill 58 large
volumes—about 600 pages each—which is most but not all of what
he accomplished in those years of work and dedication. As he
neared the end of his life and as ministers of the church came
to visit him, knowing that his strength was ebbing away and his
health was failing, they found him, unable to get out of bed,
but still dictating his last commentary on Joshua to a
secretary. His close friend and associate Theodore Beza pled
with him to rest and to conserve his energy, and Calvin’s
response was, “What? Would you have the Lord find me idle?” That
was the dedication to which he gave his life; that was the will
that drove him in spite of the fact that most of those 24 years
he was not in particularly good health. He suffered from
terrible headaches—probably from reading all the time—had a
malaria-like fever and kidney stones, among other illnesses. So
here was a man who was able to be a great teacher because of
what he knew from his amazing studying, bringing together
his natural brilliance and his will to work.
Calvin knew that it was not enough to know the truth only
in the mind. The truth must also be in the heart. He wrote, “We
are invited to a knowledge of God, but not such as, content with
empty speculation, merely floats in the brain, but such as will
be solid and fruitful, if rightly received and rooted in our
hearts” (Institutes, 1.5.9). People can have information
that floats in the brain, even information about God. That
information may even be true, but does it have any impact? Does
it connect? Does it matter? Is it the passion of life?
Truth for the mind and heart was the knowledge that
Calvin wanted to teach, and he was convinced that all Christians
always need to be growing in that kind of knowledge. In his
commentary on John 8:32 he wrote, “Whatever progress any of us
has made in the Gospel, let him know that he needs fresh
additions. The reward that Christ bestows on their perseverance
is to make them more familiar with Himself. By doing so, He
merely adds another gift to the former, so that no man may think
that he has repaid anything by way of reward. For He who puts
His Word in our hearts by His Spirit is the same who daily
chastens from our minds the clouds of ignorance which obscure
the brightness of the Gospel.” That is a wonderful promise, that
as we study Christ’s word, we are always drawing closer to him,
and that as we draw closer to him, then the more the clouds of
ignorance are dissipated, and more and more the brightness of
the gospel shines in our minds and hearts. This was a living
knowledge for John Calvin.
Calvin was no remote academic, even though such a life
may have been initially his desire. Early in his career he had
felt that he was really not cut out for the ministry. He
believed that he was too shy and sometimes became too angry. He
really thought his talent should lead him to be a scholar
separated from the world. But the Lord called him to the
ministry. And he labored as a minister faithfully because he was
persuaded that Christians need to be fed the Word of God, need
to grow in the Word of God, so that they can grow closer to God.
He knew that the source of all of that knowledge, the
source all of that feeding, the source of any progress that we
are to make in truth would come from knowing the Bible. For
Calvin, the Bible was not some abstract source of authority or
knowledge, but the living Word of God—a vital, necessary, daily
authority in the Christian’s life. Calvin, in one of his brief
autobiographical statements in his preface to his commentary on
Psalms noted that as a young man he had been obstinately
attached to the superstitions of the papacy. By that he meant
that for a long time he resisted thinking on his own about
religious questions and just stuck with what he had been taught
by the medieval church, thinking that that church was
authoritative, that church was a source of true knowledge, that
church could be trusted. And he did not easily break with that
training. But as a young man in his twenties he did finally
come to the conclusion that what the church had taught him was
not reliable and true. And after that break, it was then to the
Scriptures that he looked with confidence to be his authority.
Calvin exemplified in his life and work a determination
to seek to bring every thought captive to Christ. That was his
passion, such was his confidence in the Word of God. That is
also what he wanted to teach others. To quote Calvin, “Whoever,
therefore, would desire to persevere in uprightness and in
integrity of life, let them learn to exercise themselves daily
in the study of the word of God; for, whenever a man despises or
neglects instruction, he easily falls into carelessness and
stupidity, and all fear of God vanishes from his mind” (Commentary
on the Psalms, on Ps. 18:22). Calvin was certain that many
people tended very naturally to carelessness and stupidity. That
is surely a lesson that does not need to be taught from
Scripture; it is a lesson that pastors learn by experience!
Calvin recognized, and we should recognize because it is even
truer today, that we are surrounded by voices that are blaring
lies. The only way to sort that out is to be sure that the Bible
is constantly speaking to us, that the Bible is in our hearts
and in our ears and in our mind so that that authority of the
Word of God is a living and vital authority for us. The Bible
must constantly challenge the way we look at the world, the way
we look at our fellow men and women, the way we think about God
and his world.
Calvin found that challenge and living authority
in his study of the Bible. He was a man who certainly spent time
with the Bible every day. Calvin preached probably around nine
times every two weeks, lectured on the Bible to students, wrote
commentaries on the Bible throughout his life—commentaries on
all the books of the New Testament except Second and Third John
and Revelation, and on most of the books of the Old Testament.
Here is a man whose life is lived in the Bible and with the
Bible, and the fruit of that was that the Bible became all the
more precious to him. There really is a building up, as Calvin
put it, of “fresh additions” from the Scriptures in life and
heart. The more time he spent with the Bible the more it
impressed him as unavoidably true and utterly reliable.
In addition to his preaching, to his letter-writing, to
his commentary-writing and to his treatise-writing, one of the
great works of his life was to try to perfect his Institutes
of the Christian Religion. He worked at the Institutes
through most of his adult life. He published the first edition
of the Institutes when he was about twenty-six years old
as a small book. It contained six chapters and was immediately
recognized as brilliant. It was intended to be a book to help
common people understand the basics of the Christian faith. But
he kept working on it, kept expanding it, and reshaped it so
that it would be an introduction to theology for theological
students. And he finally brought it out in the form with which
he was satisfied in 1559, only five years before he died. It was
then five times the size it had been when it first came out. He
divided it into four books, following roughly the Apostles’
Creed. The first book was on the Father and his work, creation,
and providence. The second book was on the Son and his work of
redemption and the gospel. Book Three was on the Holy Spirit as
the giver of faith, and Book Four was basically on how Christ
helps us in nurturing our faith, a book basically on the church
and the sacraments. And so in this marvelous work, Calvin begins
to lay a foundation for theological students of what they need
to know about what God’s Word has taught them. If you look at
each of those books, you’ll find amazing treasures. We do not
have time to look at them all, but I want to mention a couple of
things from each of the books.
First of all, in the first book on the Father, one of the
great themes of Calvin’s teaching comes through, one of the
great themes of the Bible, and that is the theme of providence.
God is in charge. God is in charge of everything. God works all
things according to the counsel of his will. And for Calvin,
this is not a philosophical concept. Calvin was a kind of
practical lawyer deep in his soul. He was not all that
interested in philosophy, and providence was certainly not a
philosophical nicety for him. It was the most practical truth
you could have—to know that whatever happens in your life, God
is behind it. God is working it out. God is accomplishing his
purpose. There is nothing meaningless in life; there is nothing
accidental in life; there is nothing that happens while God is
looking the other way. Calvin found this truth in many biblical
passages: “Not a hair falls from your head,” “Not a bird falls
from the sky.” Calvin rightly argued religiously, if God keeps
tracks of every one of those little insignificant things that
none of us keeps track of, how much more does he keep track of
everything happening in the lives of his people? Calvin felt
that providence was such an important doctrine for daily living.
It is a doctrine that is humbling when things are going well so
that we dare not think that it is by our own strength that we
have accomplished what we have accomplished. What do we have
that God has not given us?
The doctrine of providence is humbling, but it is also encouraging and
difficult. It is easy to say God loves us when all is going
well. It is harder to think God loves us when things are going
badly. Calvin said you have to cultivate in your Christian life
a confidence that God is your Father in the good times and in
the bad times.
In one of his most remarkable statements, which again he
wrote in the preface to his commentary on Psalms, was, “We
renounce the guidance of our own affections, and submit
ourselves entirely to God, leaving him to govern us, and to
dispose our life according to his will, so that the afflictions
which are the bitterest and most severe to our nature, become
sweet to us, because they proceed from him.” Since God is in
control of all things, then all things that he brings into our
lives are ultimately good. If we believe that, we can embrace
even the bitterest afflictions because they come from him. Now
this was not a statement Calvin made from an ivory tower.
Rather he made it as a man who late in his life every year
handed graduation diplomas to graduates from his seminary and
heard students joke as they walked away that their diploma was
their death certificate. Many of them went off to preach the
gospel in France and died as martyrs for the faith. Their
Calvinist confidence in God bore remarkable fruit in their lives
because they lived in confidence that God was their Father.
One important aspect of Book Two of the Institutes
shows us that God comes to be our Father and to be reconciled to
us through Jesus Christ. In the second book, Calvin marvelously
develops the work of Jesus Christ in terms of his three offices:
prophet, priest, and king. Calvin is the first in the history of
the church to develop the work of Christ in terms of those three
offices. Martin Bucer had talked about it but had never
developed it. Calvin is the pioneer here. What has Christ done
for us? He has been our prophet—he has told us the truth, the
full truth of God’s saving plan. What has Christ done for us? He
has been our priest—he has offered himself as a sacrifice in our
place to cover our sin, that we might belong to him. What has
Christ done for us? He has been our king—he has promised us an
eternal kingdom that will never pass away and never be shaken
into which he will take us by his power. He has also promised us
right now that we are citizens of that kingdom. Right now we
enjoy his kingship and his care for us. That is his promise to
us.
Book Three of the Institutes is above all about
faith. B.B. Warfield once said that John Calvin was the
great theologian of the Holy Spirit. Warfield was certainly
right, but Calvin was an even greater theologian of faith. To
read the third book of the Institutes seeing what Calvin
has to say about faith in those chapters is to come as close as
any uninspired author has ever come to making clear what true
faith is: how it rests in Christ, how it is a gift of the Holy
Spirit, how it was planned from all eternity in God’s electing
purpose, and how the Holy Spirit draws us to Christ and fills us
with confidence that for Christ’s sake we are saved now and
forever. Probably Calvin’s most distinctive teaching is this,
that we can know not only that today we belong to Christ,
that today we have true faith, but that we can know
because of the promise of God that tomorrow we will
belong to Christ, and forever we will belong to Christ.
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” It
was not John Calvin who said this, of course, but John Calvin
quoted it and believed it. If Jesus Christ is our savior today,
he will be our savior tomorrow. This conviction is a great
source of Calvinist confidence. Calvin gave us a genuine
biblical religion that knows that what God has begun in the
hearts of his people he will bring to fruition.
In Book Four of the Institutes we can look
particularly at the great attention Calvin gave to the
sacraments. Why did he do that? In part he did it because
Christians are so good at fighting about the sacraments: how
many, who should receive them, what exactly do they do. These
are all important questions. But at the root of Calvin’s passion
for the sacraments was his conviction that God gave us the
sacraments because we needed them. Really great teachers say
very simple things. Many of us get so embroiled when we think
about sacraments and all the controversies that we may miss this
simple point that Calvin stressed: God gave us the sacraments
because we need them. And why do we need them? We need them
because we are so weak in ourselves that we regularly forget the
most basic truths. The sacraments come to minister the most
basic truths of the Bible to our souls. Baptism ministers to us
the truth that only the blood of Jesus Christ will cleanse us,
and the Lord’s Supper ministers to us that only the body and
blood of Jesus Christ will be our food for everlasting life. We
need that helpful reminder and strength in our weakness, Calvin
said. We need that reassurance. We keep forgetting that true
religion is all about Jesus. We keep being distracted by
ourselves: what we are doing, and how we are doing. For Calvin
the sacraments always draw us back to Christ. No cleansing
except by the blood of Christ. No food for everlasting life
except his body and blood.
In this brief look at the Institutes we can see
Calvin was a great theologian and a great teacher, motivated
above all by his concern to be a faithful pastor. He was
concerned that people not be able only to answer theological
questions, but that their hearts and lives would be changed by
the wonderful truth of who God is. By God’s grace he
accomplished that. He still matters because he was and is such a
great teacher. The Institutes is still one of the great
books to read in theology, and part of its greatness is the way
we experience a Christian, pastor, longing to communicate the
truth that sets us free.
Calvin was a great teacher because he knew so much and
because he was an effective communicator. He was an effective
communicator as a preacher. People heard him gladly in his own
day. He was also an effective communicator because he was a
powerful writer. He helped refine the French language in his
French writing; he helped refine elegant writing in his Latin
writing. He was an effective communicator also because he
thought of the people who were hearing him. Various audiences
evoked different kinds of communication from him.
Calvin was not only a great communicator in his preaching
and in his writing; he was a great communicator in recognizing
that truth needs to be transmitted through institutions that
would carry that knowledge on from generation to generation. In
our modern world where the individual is so important, we often
think too individualistically. Calvin was better than that,
realizing that part of effective communication would be
developing ways in which the truth would be transmitted through
institutions from generation to generation.
This institutional sensitivity is part of the reason that
Calvin was very concerned about the church and its organization.
The church is one of those critical institutions that are
responsible to teach the truth and see to its transmission. So
Calvin set up in Geneva expressions of the church with different
sorts of responsibilities relative to the truth. He established
what was known as the Venerable Company of Pastors, whose work
was to teach sound doctrine and to ensure that the truth was
being maintained in the church.
He set up the Consistory, or church council, which was
primarily a meeting of elders chaired by a minister supervising
the moral life of the community. Calvin was very concerned that
Christianity make a difference in the lives of people. People
guilty of any number of public sins would be called before the
Consistory so that the elders could press upon them the duty of
repentance. Part of the reason that they had communion only four
times a year in Geneva was because the elders had to visit every
family before every communion.
Calvin established a diaconate. Geneva, in the years
Calvin was there, almost doubled in size because of religious
refugees. Many people arrived, having left everything behind,
having very little to support themselves. The deacons took on
themselves the resettlement of thousands of refugees to help
them find housing and work. Calvin had taught the people who
followed him that if they were being forced into false worship
and false religion, they only had two choices. One was to stay
and be persecuted, even enduring martyrdom. The second was to
flee into exile. He rejected all compromise. For exiles who
came to Geneva, the church was ready to help. People lived out
the truth.
Calvin also sought an institutionalization of truth
through his catechizing. When he returned to Geneva after his
time in Strasbourg, one of the things that he was most eager to
do was to prepare a catechism so that young people could be
instructed in the truth. And when the city council finally gave
him permission to write and publish and use a catechism, he
began to write it as fast as he could because he knew that the
city council was unreliable and might change its mind. He wanted
to get it done before they could withdraw permission. The story
goes that he literally sat at his desk writing the catechism and
every time he got about two questions and answers written, the
material would be taken off to the printer so it could be
typeset. Later in his life, Calvin said that he wished he could
have read it over once and revised it before it was printed.
There are some wonderful things in that catechism, but it
is not one of the great Reformation catechisms. It reflects the
haste in which it was written. Although probably some of the
students in Geneva liked it because several times the question
gives a long theological statement which ends with, “Isn’t that
right?” And the catechumen is to memorize the response, “Quite
so.”
Calvin also wanted to encourage his fellow ministers, so
he established a weekly Friday night gathering of ministers
where one minister would preach, usually Calvin but others as
well, and then there would be a discussion of the sermon. It was
a way of not only deepening religious knowledge, but also of
helping ministers becoming better preachers. It was an
institutionalization of his teaching.
Finally and very importantly Calvin established schools
in Geneva. The function of the school was two-fold. First of
all, Calvin wanted the people of Geneva to be taught to read. We
tend to take reading for granted. We do not realize that for
much of the history of the western world, many people could not
read. The century before Calvin, probably the vast majority of
people couldn’t read. But Calvin and other leading Reformers
were passionately committed to the notion that if they were to
promote a Bible-based religion, people must be able to read the
Bible. If it is really true that reading the Bible every day is
a defense against the devil and a defense against those clouds
of ignorance and a way in which the brightness of the gospel
will shine in our hearts, then people ought to be able to read
the Bible.
The second function of the school was to prepare educated
ministers. Calvin really believed that ministers needed to be
able to read Greek and Hebrew so that they could draw as close
to the Word of God as possible. By drawing close to the Word of
God, they would be more effective in feeding the people the Word
of God.
Calvin was a great teacher, because he really knew the
Bible, and because he found ways to communicate effectively what
he learned. As a teacher he was eager to lead others to a sense
of certainty about the truth. He believed that the Bible was not
only true and reliable and helpful, but he believed it was
understandable so that people could come to a knowledge of the
truth, a certain knowledge of the truth, an undoubted knowledge
of the truth, so that they would not be tossed about by every
wind of doctrine, but that they would know the truth and the
truth would set them free. Free from what? Free from sin, free
from the devil, free from ignorance, free from the lies of false
religion. And it was with that confidence in that truth that
those graduates from Geneva went forth to preach in France and
often to die. It was with that confidence that the Reformed
church was able to spread throughout Europe and later the world.
Calvin still matters because the church still needs
truth communicated effectively so that we might be sure that we
know the truth, that we have been set free by the truth, and
that we will live forever in Jesus who is the truth. John Calvin
still matters because while he has many spiritual children, he
remains in my judgment one of the greatest teachers the church
has ever known in his balance, as well as in his insight and his
passion. Time spent with John Calvin is time still well spent,
and still a blessing for the church today.
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Westminster Seminary California All rights reserved
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