Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective

Angela Carpenter

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780567685971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This volume offers an interdisciplinary study of Reformed sanctification and human development, providing the foundation for a constructive account of Christian moral formation that is attentive both to divine grace and to the significance of natural, embodied processes. Angela Carpenter's argument also addresses the impressions that such theologies give; namely either solitude in the face of adversity, or sheer passivity. Through careful examination of the doctrine of sanctification in three Reformed theologians - John Calvin, John Owen and Horace Bushnell-Carpenter argues that human responsiveness in the context of fellowship with the triune God provides a basic framework for a theological account of moral transformation. Her relational approach brings together divine and human agency in a dynamic process where both are indispensable. Supplying an account of moral formation located within Christian salvation, while also being attentive to embodied human nature and the sciences, this book is vital to all those interested in spiritual formation and the human capacity for love.

Chapter 1

CALVIN AND THE SANCTIFICATION OF THE CHILD

The central question which will occupy us in this chapter is quite simple: How does Calvin think sanctification occurs? Contrary to common assumptions about Reformed sanctification, the process of sanctification in Calvin’s thought is neither completely mysterious nor the result of divine agency overpowering the human. Rather, sanctification is a gradual and intelligible process by which the Holy Spirit transforms the whole person. It occurs, moreover, in a manner consistent with Calvin’s understanding of human nature. Calvin achieves this intelligibility and consistency in large part through his use of the traditional Christian metaphor of God as father. Sanctification, for Calvin, can only happen if one recognizes that in God she finds a loving parent, and the transformation that he describes derives much of its intelligibility from observations and intuitions about natural relationships between parents and children.

Before Calvin takes up the discussion of sanctification proper, he highlights the role that parent–child imagery will play in his formulation. In Book II of the Institutes, Calvin writes, “Let the first step toward godliness be to recognize that God is our Father to watch over us, govern and nourish us, until he gather us unto the eternal inheritance of his kingdom.”¹ In order to become godly, one must understand herself to be God’s child and thereby willingly acknowledge that her life falls within the realm of God’s loving concern. This same quotation, however, raises deeper questions for the ongoing viability of the doctrine as Calvin presents it. While the second half of this chapter will examine some of the tensions in much greater detail, I would like, at the outset of the discussion, to flag two broad areas of concern.

First, Calvin’s statement regarding the beginning of godliness suggests that sanctification does not simply rest on one’s status as a child of God, but also, and crucially, on the person’s recognition of this status. Whatever we eventually say about election, union with Christ, and participation in his benefits—all topics of great interest to Calvin—none of this means anything for godliness unless the person recognizes, with firmness, certainty, and rooted conviction, that it is true of her. As I will note in the second half of this chapter, this reliance on subjective awareness will raise a number of questions. Can human subjectivity bear this weight? Does subjective awareness account for the fullness of transformation, or do some aspects of sanctification not flow from awareness as such, but rather from the reality of which the person is aware (i.e., that God really is lovingly active in saving and sanctifying humans)? Calvin is also aware that by placing a strong emphasis on subjective consciousness he will have to address significant pastoral difficulties. How, for example, should the believer deal with doubt or fluctuation in her faith? Calvin believed that the theology of the early Reformation provided peace of conscience, a peace that he often portrayed metaphorically by appealing to God’s fatherly love in Christ. The intelligibility of his account of sanctification rests in large part on the reality of this peace. But, can the persuasive power of the transformation he describes both rely on human subjectivity and simultaneously weather its tumultuous waters?

A further aspect of Calvin’s emphasis on the subject is a turn to the inner life as a privileged locus of moral effort. If recognition of God’s parental love is so essential and primary to the moral agent, if it is the source of her transformation, shouldn’t she focus her psychological energy on the direct pursuit of such a recognition? The priority that Calvin assigns to piety and transformation of the heart would seem to indicate just such a starting point. We will have to ask if such an interpretation of his moral psychology is warranted and if it could lead to a kind of moral passivity, or inattention to external action, as the moral agent scrupulously analyzes the purity of her heart.²

The second area of concern in Calvin’s description of sanctification involves the ambiguous status of intra-human relationships, as these relate to gracious transformation. The quotation above relies on a human relationship to give intelligibility to the transformative power of the divine–human relationship. But does Calvin’s metaphorical use of the parent–child relationship displace the literal one, rendering it either expendable or suggesting that as part of fallen humanity it is actually in opposition to sanctification? On the one hand, the human parent–child relationship must do something for the metaphor to work. Yet, the formation of children in the care of parents cannot simply be equated with sanctification. I want to argue that a fully human account cannot dismiss intra-human formation and that a genuinely Christian account does not dismiss this dimension. Is Calvin an ally in this endeavor?

Calvin did acknowledge both of these issues in some form, and his efforts to address them will be considered in due course. To begin, however, we must take several steps backward. In the first section of this chapter, I will sketch some of the basic contours of Calvin’s theology. This discussion will not simply provide background material, however, because aspects of his theology that fall outside of sanctification can ultimately help alleviate some of the anxieties we face when reading Book III of the Institutes. Next, I turn to a description of the process of sanctification and argue that despite some of the common assumptions about Calvin, his use of two metaphors—the “child of God” and “death and rebirth/resurrection”—enables him to portray this transformation as deeply human and intelligible. The “how” of sanctification has a definite logic, one that roughly parallels Calvin’s understanding of the formation of children in the natural parent–child relationship.³ When we consider contemporary studies of children in Chapter 4, we will then have occasion to observe that while developmental research would challenge Calvin on several points, it also confirms some of his central insights. In the third section, I will draw out some of the tensions inherent in Calvin’s description of sanctification and consider the responses he offers. I conclude that his analysis leaves open the possibility for his theology to be developed in problematic ways. Lastly, I will consider Calvin’s direct thought about actual children, including his discussion of infant baptism and his pastoral approach to children’s education and childrearing. If we rely on this evidence, we will have reason to believe that Calvin’s emphasis on subjectivity is not an intractable problem and that his doctrine of sanctification can incorporate, rather than displace, the kinds of moral formation that occur in the development of real (as opposed to metaphorical) children.

Before turning to Calvin, I should lastly mention two methodological concerns. First, it must be noted that it is neither surprising nor unproblematic that Calvin’s parent–child analogy is decidedly gendered. While Calvin will occasionally liken God to a mother, his ordinary preference is to speak of God as father. Since this project is not strictly exegetical, but also moves in the direction of constructive claims, I will not follow suit. On the other hand, as the debate among contemporary feminists indicates, the question of gender and God language has no ready solution.⁴ Feminine pronouns, particularly in the context of maternal imagery, merely beg the question of gender essentialism, and gender-neutral language risks reinforcing subconsciously gendered assumptions. Among these unappealing options, my own choice will be to use father-language only when the task of exegeting Calvin’s own words would make it awkward not to do so and elsewhere to speak of God as the divine parent. In some ways, the book as a whole will employ a third strategy of unexpectedly juxtaposing masculine and feminine imagery.⁵ The preference for “father” language in Calvin will stand in contrast to standard assumptions within child development and attachment theory that it is the affective relationship between mother and child which exerts the most profound influence in moral formation.

Second, a chapter of this scope cannot pretend to treat Calvin’s writings comprehensively, nor to comprehensively engage Calvin scholarship. Because the intent of the broader project is to explore the ongoing relevance of the doctrine of sanctification for Christian ethics, this chapter will be primarily concerned with Calvin as a formative figure and will thus focus on his most widely read and influential work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Given the topic, most of the analysis will center on Book III of the Institutes, which treats the mode of receiving grace. As my engagement of the secondary literature will demonstrate, the reading I provide will not fall outside the scope of those defended by scholars attentive to the whole of Calvin’s corpus.

Calvin’s soteriology

There is no question that for Calvin, salvation is often described in terms of eternal life or the avoidance of eternal damnation, but we would be distorting his soteriology if we did not proceed to inquire about the content of eternal life.⁶ Assumptions about this content are scattered throughout the Institutes and include human happiness, union with God in Christ, restoration of the image of God, perfect righteousness (described by Calvin as the freedom not to be able to sin), and the glory of God. In order to understand how these relate we must take a brief trip through Calvin’s exposition of creation, fall, and redemption in the Institutes.

Within the realm of creation, Calvin memorably refers to the prelapsarian natural order as the “school of piety” within which human beings were initially meant to learn piety, “and from it pass over to eternal life and perfect felicity.”⁷ The knowledge human beings take from their material existence was intended to inspire worship and nurture their trust in God’s goodness, justice, and mercy.⁸ Thus, for Calvin, even prelapsarian creation, and particularly humanity, had its own teleological development. Even before the fall, human beings were meant to learn and grow into the kind of relationship with God that would constitute their eternal happiness. Calvin draws on a Johannine Christology to emphasize that even this original teleology was Christocentric. All of life was in Christ from the beginning and the fall was in some sense a fall away from Christ, to whom it is necessary to return.⁹ Thus, even from a prelapsarian perspective, the eternal life and happiness of humanity was inseparable from a Christocentric knowledge of and affect-laden relationship to God. And, even from the beginning, humanity’s union with God in Christ was developmental.

As we trace the relationship between natural moral formation and the doctrine of sanctification, this prelapsarian moment is an important frame of reference. Here Calvin confirms that growth in the capacity to know and love God does not necessarily imply the presence of sin and is at least theoretically in harmony with material existence and the intellectual, emotional, and physical growth humans experience as embodied creatures. In other words, the limited capacities of human children for moral reasoning and behavior are not inherently sinful, nor are the processes by which these capacities develop only to be associated with fallen human nature. Human development in the natural world, far from being opposed to true holiness, actually converges with a Christocentric knowledge and love of God.

Sin for Calvin cannot then be equated with the immaturity of children or a capacity for further growth, although he certainly thinks that all human children are in fact corrupted by sin. What then, for Calvin, does the fall signify? At its core, the fall involves the corruption of human capacities by severing them from their created dependence on God. As Calvin states in multiple places, human knowledge, wisdom, piety, and uprightness of heart—in short the perfect ordering of the soul which constituted the image of God and distinguished humans from all other creatures—were designed to enable meditation on the heavenly life and union with God.¹⁰ In his exegesis of Genesis 3, Calvin insists that the fall involved a rejection of this created vocation. The first humans chose falsehood over God’s word and by holding God’s word in contempt, they no longer reverenced him.¹¹ Rejection of God necessarily precluded any authentic worship or communion with God for “unless we listen attentively to him, his majesty will not dwell among us, nor his worship remain perfect.”¹² The term Calvin identifies as the root of the fall is thus not disobedience or pride, which have a strong theological pedigree in discussions of sin, but rather unfaithfulness.¹³ Adam chose to believe Satan instead of God, and by rejecting his vocation of worshiping the God in whose image he was created, the God who loved him, Adam creates space for all other ambitions and desires to control his life. As Wilhelm Niesel describes this change, “Just as his nature was originally moulded by his turning Godwards, so now it is affected to its inmost depths by his estrangement from the source of life.”¹⁴

The primal act of rejecting God has two distinct ramifications. First, at the forensic level, the entire human race has become entangled in this rebellion and each person stands guilty and condemned before God.¹⁵ It is in this sense that Calvin will speak of God’s curse or punishment. God’s infinite goodness can no longer be in fellowship with humanity and this estrangement spe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Calvin and the Sanctification of the Child
• Chapter 2. John Owen and the Pelagian Threat
• Chapter 3. Horace Bushnell on Nurture as a Means of Grace
• Chapter 4. Human Evolution, Cooperation, and Affect
• Chapter 5. Children’s Moral Development in Human Perspective
• Chapter 6. Sanctification Revisited
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint