Calvin for Armchair Theologians

Christopher Elwood

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781611644043
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this concise introduction to Calvin's life and thought, Christopher Elwood offers an insightful and accessible overview of Calvin's key teachings within his historical context. The trials and travails Calvin encountered as he ministered and taught in Geneva are discussed, with special attention given to theological controversies associated with the Trinity and predestination. Elwood indicates the ways that Calvinism developed and its influence in today's world. Illustrations are interspersed throughout the text and humorously illuminate key points providing an engaging introduction to this important theologian.

Written by experts but designed for the novice, the Armchair series provides accurate, concise, and witty overviews of some of the most profound moments and theologians in Christian history. These books are essential supplements for first-time encounters with primary texts, lucid refreshers for scholars and clergy, and enjoyable reads for the theologically curious.

CHAPTER ONE

Forming a Reformer

On July 10, 1509, Gérard Calvin and Jeanne Le Franc had a baby boy, their second. They were a middle-class family in Noyon, a small city in the northern French province of Picardy. Gérard was a notary in the employ of the Cathedral chapter of Noyon. This position gave him useful contacts with the most influential institution in the region—the church—and with some of the more influential families of the city. The baby boy, Jean, turned out to be smart, and when the time came, his father used his connections to get him a good education. In Noyon he learned alongside the children of the aristocratic Hangest family and formed lasting friendships and a lifelong affinity for cultured society. His education continued at the University of Paris. Gérard intended the bright boy for a career in the church, where he would likely make a name for himself. (As a bishop? Or cardinal? Perhaps pope?!). We don’t know what Jean’s mother intended for him. She died when he was about five years old.

It was in Paris that the young Calvin first encountered the wider world of ideas that would so profoundly shape his way of thinking. He began the basic course of studies in Latin grammar, ending up at the Collège de Montaigu, which had a reputation for being especially hard on its students. Its pedagogy featured regular beatings and the formation of character through bad food, unhealthy water, and squalid living conditions. Calvin never complained. As a model student, he probably escaped the harshest treatment meted out to those less fortunately endowed.

In the early 1520s, when Calvin began his studies, the University of Paris was one of the main centers of theological conservatism in Europe. When the ideas of a certain Martin Luther (1483–1546) began to filter into France from Germany, the Paris Faculty of Theology was one of the very first to denounce them. This faculty—known as the Sorbonne—was the protector of a traditional form of theology called scholasticism. In addition to Luther, the Sorbonne also was quick to denounce other reformers whose writings either directly or by implication rejected traditional forms of theological thinking. Although Calvin was not a theology student in Paris, he certainly must have been exposed to some of the Lutheran ideas that had made their way into the city, as well as to the attacks the Parisian theologians made on this new heresy.

Since he was bound for the priesthood, it would have been natural for Calvin to make his way to the Sorbonne and a course of theological study. But his father, who was in the midst of a quarrel with the church authorities back home, changed his mind about his son’s career and saved him from ordination. Instead, Gérard decided that his son would go into law. So, always obedient to his father’s wishes, Calvin took the main road south from Paris to Orléans where he began to study law under the celebrated scholar Pierre de l’Estoile (1480–1537). Then he headed further south to the Academy of Bourges. Andrea Alciati (1492–1550), an Italian humanist teacher of the law and a star to rival l’Estoile, had just arrived in Bourges, and Calvin wanted to see firsthand what all the fuss was about. At this point, his studies were as much literary and historical as they were legal, which is to say that Calvin had been bitten by the bug of Renaissance humanism.

What Was Humanism?

The Renaissance humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not what most people think of when they use the term humanism today. It was a movement of cultural and intellectual reform that started in Italy with the teachers of the studia humanitatis—the liberal arts—and gradually moved northward. When Calvin was in school, humanism was a strong force in intellectual circles in France. It was favored by the king, Francis I (1494–1547). His sister Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549), who protected humanist reformers in her court from their conservative opponents (such as those at the Sorbonne), was a special enthusiast. The most famous humanist of Calvin’s time was Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536). The most celebrated French humanists of the period were Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (c. 1450–1536) and Guillaume Budé (1468–1540). Both Erasmus and Lefèvre were well-known for their biblical scholarship.

Humanists were interested in reviving the literary values of classical antiquity. They believed that the medieval period had been a time of decline. The Latin language had become corrupted, along with public institutions such as the church, and the moral life both of the clergy and of ordinary laypeople left a good deal to be desired. Humanists thought that by reforming language and the process of education and promoting eloquent expression they would improve spiritual and moral life as well. They championed the study of classical rhetoric—the art of eloquent expression for the purpose of persuasion—in order to improve their society on many fronts.

The humanist slogan was ad fontes—“back to the sources”—meaning the original sources of European, classical culture. Humanist legal scholars such as Alciati intended to go back to the sources by using sophisticated literary and historical methods to establish the original forms of Roman law and to show how the law had changed and developed. For those who saw themselves specifically as Christian humanists, going back to the sources meant returning to the earliest Christian writings, particularly the texts of the Bible; not the Vulgate—the Latin translation that had become the standard Bible of the West—but the original texts in their original languages. The oldest manuscripts needed to be studied, and new translations and interpretations needed to be produced using the best literary methods available.

Humanism was very exciting to many educated people in Europe as it seemed to herald a new time of enlightened thinking. But, since it implied a criticism of the prevailing theological and ecclesiastical culture (one that, according to the humanists, had perpetuated superstition and ignorance), it posed a threat to those who were wedded to the older, scholastic forms of theology. This is one of the reasons conservatives in the University of Paris were suspicious of the humanists.

In catching the fever of humanism, Calvin was clearly not a conservative Catholic. But being a humanist did not mean that one was not a Catholic at all. His father had gotten into trouble with the church authorities in Noyon, but there is no strong evidence that Calvin himself had become disaffected with traditional Catholic faith in his student years. Of course, some of his associates had Lutheran ideas, including Melchior Wolmar (d. 1561), who taught him Greek at Bourges. And it is possible that Calvin had come to entertain some of these ideas himself. Certainly by his early twenties, when he had completed his legal studies and was moving in humanist circles in Paris, he had come to be very familiar with Martin Luther and a number of others who were talking about a movement they called a reformation of the church.

Luther and the Reformation Movement

Luther was an Augustinian monk in Germany who, beginning with criticisms of scholastic theology and current church practices such as the granting of indulgences (which forgave church-imposed works of penance required to satisfy the terms of sacramental confession), came to reject entirely the power of the pope to direct what Christians should believe. Luther and his followers insisted that the Bible alone should determine right belief. When Luther read the Bible, and particularly the writings of Paul, he found the key to the Christian message: the teaching of justification by faith alone.

Luther’s schema went something like this:

• We are all sinful.
• God justifies, or saves, those who have faith in God, through the work of Jesus Christ.
• This justification is not a reward for the struggle to be good.
• So being a Christian is not, first and foremost, a matter of what one does.
• It is about accepting what God has done for you.
• That acceptance is faith.

For Luther, this was what the Bible taught. Human beings are saved by God’s grace, not by their own meritorious works. Of course, Luther drew on sources other than the Bible, including the writings of Augustine (354–430). Augustine, the great doctor of grace, had insisted in the early fifth century (against the British monk Pelagius) that humans have no capacity to will and to do what is good unless God reorders their will. Luther’s understanding of justification reflected his and a number of his contemporaries’ rediscovery of Augustine’s emphasis on the priority of God’s grace.

Luther also taught the priesthood of all believers (or all baptized Christians). Christianity should not create a spiritual elite—the priesthood as opposed to laypeople—because all Christians are part of Christ’s body and can pray for one another, hear another’s confession of sin, preach, and teach one another about the good news of God’s grace. Ministers or preachers of the word hold an office the church still needs, but the clergy are not superior to or set apart from the laity.

These teachings (but particularly his challenge to the pope’s authority) got Luther excommunicated, declared a heretic by the church and an outlaw by the secular government in Germany. Nevertheless, many people were won over by his ideas, including a number of local governments and rulers within the many, more or less autonomous, territories of Germany. In Switzerland, similar ideas were being taught by Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and some other reformers (who combined Luther’s emphasis on the centrality of the Bible and the priority of grace with their commitments to humanist values). In addition to the territories won over by Luther’s teachings, a number of prominent Swiss and South German cities, closer to Zwingli’s sphere of influence, were converted to a movement that would in time come to be called Protestantism or (because of its emphasis on the gospel) the evangelical movement. People at this time thought of it as a movement to reform the church according to the word of God. Most did not think they were creating a new church. They simply wanted to reform a church whose abuses (the buying and selling of church offices, the holding of multiple offices by single individuals, poor clergy preparation and performance of basic clerical duties) had, in their view, compromised its claim to represent adequately the body of Christ. But, in fact, adopting these reforming ideas effectively involved breaking relations with Rome and with the church headed by the pope.

An Unexpected Turnabout

Just when Calvin came over to these views of reformation is not terribly clear. Possibly when he was a law student and possibly in the period after his studies were completed he experienced what he later called “a sudden conversion” or “an unexpected turnabout” (depending on how you translate his Latin). If this is a conversion experience of the sort the apostle Paul experienced on the road to Damascus (flashes of light, a voice from heaven) or of the kind effected by later revivalistic preaching during the Great Awakening (warmings of the heart, intense emotionalism), Calvin never told anyone about it. A more likely scenario is that over time he came to be aware that God was turning him away from one kind of religious orientation (one that he would later associate with the ignorance and error of popery and idolatry) and toward another (the evangelism that was preached by Luther and others). When Calvin later spoke about a “conversion” or “turnabout” he was less interested in specifying the character of an interior experience than in conveying a message that had come to be at the heart of his mature theology: What happens to us in life is the result of God’s working. Calvin came at some point in his youth or young adulthood to the truth taught in the Bible and its good news of God’s grace, and he left behind the practices of popular Catholicism and the religious thought forms in which he was reared. To his thinking, it was not Calvin that caused this; it was God.

The way for this conversion had been prepared by his intellectual interests in humanism. It had been prepared by some of those Lutheran ideas he had absorbed. It had also been prepared by France’s own homegrown version of reformation, a movement influenced by the humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. Lefèvre was a somewhat more sedate personality than the more notorious German reformer. And, unlike Luther, he was never declared a heretic, and so his followers were not forced to choose between reformation and the papal church—at least not at first. Calvin eventually did have to choose—and his choice was forced by some uncomfortable episodes in Paris in the years 1533–1534, when Calvin was a young Christian humanist about town and probably also a recent convert to the reformation movement.

Humanist Scholar or Reformer on the Run?

It was in this period, when Calvin was in his early twenties, that he had to make some momentous decisions. Who was he going to be? Here he was, with his law degree and some pretty good scholarly credentials. What was he going to do with these? He tried his hand at some writing and published a commentary on the Roman philosopher Seneca’s treatise On Clemency, but it didn’t make a tremendous splash in the world of letters. It seems Calvin’s hand began to be forced by his associations. In 1533, his good friend Nicholas Cop was installed as the new rector of the University of Paris. In the All Saints Day service (on November 1), Cop, whose humanist and reform-minded orientation reflected Calvin’s thinking at the time, gave an address that sounded just enough like Luther, or maybe Erasmus or Lefèvre, to make the conservatives in Paris angry. In the wake of reactionary attempts at retribution, Calvin (who might have had a hand in writing the address) got out of town quickly. The atmosphere in Paris was becoming a little too hot for anyone whose ideas might be labeled Lutheran. Even Francis I, who had initially supported the humanists, seemed to be turning decisively against anything that smacked of heresy.

And so Calvin began a period of moving about, lying low, and keeping a good distance from Paris. He visited with the reformer Lefèvre at the court of Marguerite of Navarre, perhaps to discuss the steps he ought to take. In May 1534, he went back home to Noyon to resign the last of the church appointments (which were what we might think of as scholarships) whose earnings had helped to support his education and his scholarly pursuits. It may be that this is the point marking his decisive break with his Catholic past.

A break of an equally decisive sort happened because of what occurred on the night of October 17, 1534. In Paris and several of the larger cities and towns of France, a network of Protestant activists secretly posted placards that denounced Catholic “abuses,” focusing on the central Catholic rite, the Mass, and denouncing as idolatry the Catholic theology of the eucharist. Francis I, who woke the next morning to find one of these posters on his bedroom door, was not amused. The content and the tone of the placard signaled a much more militant approach to reform than he was comfortable with. The king was not inclined to tolerate what he regarded as a sacrilegious assault on the church and the faith of his kingdom. Because several of the usual suspects were rounded up and burned as heretics, Calvin felt it would be wise this time not merely to get out of town but to remove himself to another country. He arrived in the Swiss city of Basel in January 1535.

Exile and a “Short Little Book”

Basel had adopted the Reformation in 1525 and was a favorite haunt of a number of humanists. (Erasmus lived there on and off in the 1520s and 1530s.) It was a good place for Calvin to do some writing. And now that he had clearly broken with the conservative orthodoxy that was currently being enforced in France and had moved into safe territory, he could write openly about his newly formed religious orientation.

And that is what he did. He set to work on a short (six chapters) summary of evangelical faith that would bring to light the essence of the Christian message contained in the Bible, a message he believed had been obscured by much of the institutional practice of the church and that now was being recovered in the Reformation movement. He dedicated the work to Francis I and addressed a letter to him that served as a preface to the text. In the letter, Calvin argued that the Protestants or evangelicals in France, who were currently being persecuted, were not dangerous to the state and were not corrupters of the church and Christian faith. Instead, they followed the true, biblical faith, the faith that the ancient catholic and apostolic church had held. The body of his text can be read as a continuation of the argument he began in the letter of dedication. The title Calvin gave to this book, Christianae religionis institutio, has come down to us in English as Institutes of the Christian Religion. But a more accurate translation might read something like Formation in Christian Piety.

This first major work of Calvin’s gave him a favorable reputation among the international community of reform-minded people because it seemed to be a highly literate, comprehensive, and theologically adept presentation of the evangelical faith. With the elegance of a writer trained in humanist styles of effective communication and eschewing the dense philosophical method of scholastic theology, the young scholar had shown a capacity to bring clarity to the complexity of Christian truth. Calvin argued his points persuasively to his many audiences:

• to the opponents of the Protestants in his native country;
• to Francis I and others in power responsible for a policy of repression;
• to the community of Protestants suffering under the effects of this policy;
• and to a larger audience of persons not yet committed to one or another religious position but who were searching for a window on truth in disorienting times.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’”

Like many of his contemporaries, Calvin believed that the time he lived in was “a most unhappy age.” Throughout his life he reflected on the state of the world in terms like the following: “Look at how nothing in the world ever lasts. Look at how everything is in constant turmoil. Look at how people are sudde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Forming a Reformer
• Chapter Two: Struggle for the Light
• Chapter Three: Orienting Theology
• Chapter Four: Trials and Travail
• Chapter Five: Calvin’s Children
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Index