John Calvin at 500!

John Calvin at 500 -- Faithful and Welcoming Luncheon, General Synod Grand Rapids

presented by Charles Hambrick-Stowe

The preacher starts with a text, and I have a text. I'm here to talk about John Calvin and the possible relevance of his legacy for the church and for the church's mission today. But I have a text. It's a great text, a plumb-line -- yes, the Word is that plumb-line God showed to the prophet Amos -- a plumb-line and a powerful corrective for a church foolish enough to imagine, as social context changes, that the gospel must also change. It may indeed be true that, as the 19th century protest hymn puts it, "time makes ancient good uncouth," but if the gospel is the gospel it's the eternal gospel and it's what brings hope and life as the context changes with time and culture. Here it is, from the book of the prophet Isaiah 51:1-2:

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;

For he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.

Abraham and Sarah . . . and their spiritual offspring, the faithful down through the generations being built into a living temple, in time with Jesus Christ revealed as the cornerstone, and, like Peter the rock, God keeps hewing stones from that quarry of faithfulness to build into that temple. We're here to mark a significant anniversary of one of those living stones, one whose theology played a major role in the shaping of our history. But I must say . . .

How tantalizingly odd it feels for me to be invited to reflect on the legacy of John Calvin at the Grand Rapids General Synod luncheon of this important group in the United Church of Christ.

Now . . . Before I tell you why this moment is so strange, let me introduce you briefly to John Calvin, in this, the 500th anniversary of his birth.

Thinking back to world history in high school or college (or church history at seminary if you're a minister), you may remember the big names associated with the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century -- Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin. While Luther and Zwingli were contemporaries (born in 1483 and 1484 respectively), Calvin was born a quarter-century later. So he was a second-generation Reformer, building on the principles set forth by Luther, Zwingli, and others: Salvation by faith alone through God's grace in Jesus Christ (not by any goodness on our own part); bowing to the authority of Scripture (not papal hierarchy); the sovereignty of God over all of life, with reform of both church life and the civil order (replacing medieval Catholic hierarchies with more dynamic, fluid, participatory social structures under divine authority and biblical moral standards). Calvin implemented the Reformation so effectively by mid-century in the city of Geneva, Switzerland, that the Scottish Reformer John Knox called Geneva "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles." This influence gave rise to an international movement generally known as "Calvinism" -- also and perhaps more properly called "the Reformed Tradition." (Branches of the great family of the church in this tradition: Presbyterian, Congregational, all denominations with the word "Reformed" in their name, most Baptists.) While other names, like Zwingli, Bucer, or Heidelberg Catechism authors Ursinus and Olivianus, among others, played major roles in shaping the movement, Calvin's theological influence is preeminent and persistent.

Calvin was born in northern France in 1509. Unlike almost every other Reformer he did not begin his career as a Roman Catholic priest or monk. Educated in the humanities in Paris, with a Master of Arts degree at age 18, he felt drawn to theology, but his father insisted that he study law. He received his law degree in 1532 but, when his father died, he immediately returned to the Greek and Latin classics, dreaming of a scholar's career. Sometime during 1533 or 1534, however, Calvin's life was re-directed by a conversion away from Roman Catholicism to the theological perspective of Luther and the Reformation. Years later he described his experience this way: "By an unexpected conversion [God] tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years" . . . such that within a year "anybody who longed for a purer doctrine kept on coming to learn from me, still a beginner, a raw recruit." Elsewhere Calvin writes as a theologian of the heart -- and that is how Charles Partee describes him in his new book The Theology of John Calvin (WJK Press, 2009) and the thrust of Herman J. Selderhuis's portrait in John Calvin: A Pilgrim's Life (IVP, 2009). Indeed, the crest Calvin designed for himself depicts a hand holding or offering a heart. But for Calvin the first step is the "taming" of the mind, by God's grace receiving a "teachable mind." All the spiritual gifts that have to do with feeling and behavior -- heart and hand -- flow from a sound, biblical understanding of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

Forced into exile with other French Protestants, in Basle Calvin wrote the first version of his famous Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 -- this brief first edition (a theological handbook) bulked up over the years until the final edition which flexes its muscles at more than 1,500 pages, one of the greatest expositions of Christian theology ever written. Calvin still hoped for a quiet life of scholarship and in the summer of 1536 he was on his way to Strasbourg for that purpose. But hostile Imperial Catholic troop movements forced him to stop over in Geneva -- and, as they say, the rest is history. William Farel, the leading Reformer of that Swiss city believed that Calvin was just the man to guide and shape the church's future. Calvin said no. Farel answered Calvin's refusal with the warning that, if he did not commit to Geneva, God would surely curse his scholarly endeavors. Calvin stayed in Geneva, becoming the leading preacher and theological teacher. He was 27 years old.

This first effort at leadership in Geneva did not go well -- in two years Calvin and Farel were voted out. Calvin spent three happy years from 1538 to 1541 in Strasbourg teaching at the university, pastoring the church of French refugees, engaging in international and even Protestant/Catholic theological dialogue, and getting married. His writings in defense of Reformation theology were so impressive, and the political climate had changed such, that Geneva invited him back in 1541. And there he served, exercising authority in the church and great influence in the civil realm (though rarely without opposition and never with absolute power) until his death at age 55 in 1564.

In addition to the Institutes, Calvin wrote many volumes of commentaries on the books of the Bible -- so that, in addition to being a theologian of the heart, he must be considered a biblical theologian, far more than a systematic theologian. Calvin's Geneva became the refuge for Protestant exiles from many European countries, including English Puritans when the Catholic Queen Mary was on the throne. Congregationalists in England and New England in the 1600s looked back to Geneva in many ways as a model, although they sought to gather churches congregationally rather than with a Presbyterian polity. There are many good books on Calvin's life and thought, including a number of new publications coinciding with his 500th birthday.

So why did I call this experience of speaking today "tantalizingly odd"?

To a few here at General Synod -- all too few, I'm afraid -- our topic today might not seem strange, but altogether appropriate. After all, during this 500th anniversary year, academic conferences, sermon series, publications, and adult education sessions devoted to Calvin are happening around the world. Calvin and the theological framework associated with his name are stunningly vital forces in today's global church. Perhaps you've read about this resurgence -- not only in publications like Christian Century and Christianity Today but in the secular media. At the end of last year in its "What's Next in 2009" issue Time magazine listed "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now." Number 3 on Time's list is a movement called "The New Calvinism." But most in the UCC (if aware) would be put off by these hard-core "young and restless" new Calvinists (Collin Hansen, Young, Restless, Reformed, CT 2006, book 2008). Indeed, most in the UCC are unaware, or have forgotten, that in our traditions we were ever any kind of Calvinists at all -- or we blush with shame at the thought that we ever were. We may express pride that Jonathan Edwards, known as America's greatest theologian, was one of "us" -- but most in the UCC cringe at the thought of his Reformed theology, his evangelical Calvinism.

Okay . . . in the UCC, we did remind ourselves of our place in that family tree in the 1980s and 90s when we were required to demonstrate our right to be at the Lutheran-Reformed Dialog table and ultimately be included in the Formula of Agreement with the ELCA, RCA, and PCUSA. Our denomination may not have stood very firmly in the Reformed Tradition by that time but -- in that venue -- at least we could say that this was the primary (but not the only) historic Christian tradition from which we emerged. Our claim to that heritage often seemed like double-talk to our dialog partners twenty years ago but we got away with it.

And here we are in Grand Rapids, of all places -- the Mecca of Calvinism in North America with its Dutch Reformed heritage, home of educational institutions and publishing firms that mediate Calvin's influence in the twenty-first century. To come to this city to speak about John Calvin on the one hand is like carrying coals to Newcastle. But this is the national meeting of the UCC, a church with a pretty bad case of amnesia when it comes to history. And I'm a historian and a pastor . . . So: What else would I come here to talk about other than the legacy of John Calvin!

It's so strange because: It's been a long time since Calvin has been regarded as anything like a hero in our denomination. It's been easy to forget Calvin for a number of reasons. Our UCC roots are overwhelmingly Calvinist (e.g., the insignia of the Reformed Church included Calvin's crest, heart in hand, along with that of Zwingli and other symbols). But nobody ever said that John Calvin was the founder of the German Reformed Church or the Congregational movement within English Puritanism. In the United Church of Christ we lack the identity-bestowing advantage of a single founder that Methodists and Lutherans and newer movements like the Church of God in Christ or the Vineyard fellowship can point to. So we are not compelled as a namesake to regard Calvin as a touchstone like a Luther or a Wesley or a John Wimber or a C.H. Mason.

Multiple founders or, we might say, the polygenesis of UCC traditions have made it easy not to remember Calvin. In the German Reformed Church, for example -- as a French-born theologian whose work as Reformer was carried out in Geneva, Switzerland -- Calvin was always esteemed as one foundational influence among others. When John Williamson Nevin at the German Reformed seminary at Mercersburg in the 1840s argued persuasively that the Lord's Supper was not just a memorial meal -- arguing for Christ's real spiritual presence (his "mystical presence") in the sacrament of Holy Communion, he did so by demonstrating that this was the position of John Calvin. No wonder that Nevin's theology has received a warm welcome in Dutch Reformed circles. Still, while the German and Dutch Reformed churches had very much in common, the German Reformed included Ulrich Zwingli in their creation narrative more prominently than did the Dutch. And the German Reformed Church always understood itself as "the church of the Heidelberg Catechism, so that 1563 document infused a certain irenic spirit in the German Reformed Church. Now, the Dutch Reformed also adopted Heidelberg as a theological standard and continues to employ it in worship to a far greater degree than anything we have seen in recent years in the UCC. But the Dutch also adhered to the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-19), a creedal statement that self-consciously sought to establish Calvinist orthodoxy over against the softer tenets of Arminius and Arminianism. Calvinism's famous TULIP acronym (total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints) traces to this Dutch Calvinist document. My point here is that Calvin was important, but only relatively so, in the GRC. As the life of the United Church of Christ developed in more activist and less theological directions after 1957 the influence of John Calvin diminished to the vanishing point.

Among Congregationalists Calvin's prominence had waned long before 1957 -- to a large extent, more like 1857. In fact, you could think of the 1800s in American Congregational history as a century-long process of de-Calvinization. We tend to forget that John Robinson and William Ames and other English Congregationalists were delegates at the Synod of Dort and New England readily adopted the strongly Calvinist Westminster Confession as its theological standard the Cambridge Synod. New England Congregationalists from the time of Plymouth in 1620 and Massachusetts Bay and the Connecticut colonies from the 1630s on, pretty much through the American Revolution, had understood themselves (and middle-colony Presbyterian cousins) as the leading New World outposts of the international Calvinist or Reformed movement. But by the period of the Revolution, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rationalism, was making headway -- the idea that human reason, science and technology, could solve the problems of the world. At the start of the nineteenth century, in the New Republic, a theological struggle was going on in New England -- some moved away from the classic theology of seventeenth-century Puritanism and of eighteenth-century evangelicals like Jonathan Edwards -- going so far as to reject as unreasonable such essential doctrines as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. As many churches were swept into Unitarianism, orthodox believers were forced to establish new congregations. Several theological schools of thought flourished among these more traditional Christians (our UCC forbears), but they all identified themselves as standing in the Calvinist or Reformed Tradition. As Harvard drifted toward and then embraced Unitarianism, New England's institutions of higher learning -- Yale College, Andover Seminary, Hartford Seminary, Bangor Theological Seminary -- were all established as bastions of orthodoxy, to defend Calvinist theology as it was interpreted in successive generations.

It was Congregationalism's evangelical Calvinism that fueled the social reform movements of the decades leading up to the Civil War. You might think that that would settle the matter, that as the New England diaspora spread west Congregationalism would remain steadily within the Reformed theological family. But no -- over the middle and later decades of the 1800s more theologically liberal ways of thinking emerged. We could chart this in a number of ways if we had time -- e.g., the wording of faith statements from the Burial Hill Declaration (1865) to Kansas City Statement of Faith (1913). As John von Rohr puts it in The Shaping of American Congregationalism: While the Kansas City Statement gave lip service to "the faith which our fathers confessed," its substance exhibited the "liberalization of theology that had occurred" in the denomination. "The older pattern of tracing a personal pilgrimage from sin to salvation was abandoned, and the theme of personal redemption was only briefly mentioned. . . . The statement instead . . . emphasized the churches' striving to know God's will, to walk in God's ways, and to labor for justice, peace, and human 'brotherhood.'" At the tercentenary of the Cambridge Platform, early New England's affirmation of evangelical Calvinism, in 1947 the keynote speaker announced, "Calvinism as a whole is no gospel for today." So quite some time ago John Calvin fell from hero status -- becoming irrelevant and worse.

For many decades now in our denomination, Calvin has been seen -- at best -- as an embarrassment, the crusty old uncle that you wish would stop coming to family gatherings. If Presbyterians still wanted to engage in conversation with Calvin that was their business, we were too progressive-minded for that and it wasn't too hard to ignore him as we adapted ourselves to modern, more supposedly relevant ways of thinking. No surprise then that, by the time the United Church of Christ got itself up and running in the 1960s, the idea of paying homage to John Calvin was the farthest thing from anybody's list of action-items. If anything, Calvin became a pariah, symbol of patriarchal oppression, and Calvinism the bête noir of UCC progressivism -- doctrines of original sin, atoning sacrifice, election, predestination, irresistible grace, the sovereign holiness of God -- even the idea of doctrine itself! -- are seen more as the problem than the solution to the human situation. Okay, the notion of covenant remains very important in UCC polity, but does anybody care what "covenantal theology" meant to the Puritans and to Calvin before them?

What, then, is the legacy of John Calvin for our churches and for our Christian witness today. Is there a legacy that we can embrace? If some of us will be reluctant to go as far as the younger generation of "New Calvinists" and older standard-bearers like John Piper, Tim Keller, Mark Dever, or (God forbid) R.C. Sproul, we should remember that the Reformed Tradition has always been a broad, multi-layered movement. I am suggesting at the very least that we rediscover our place in that branch of the Christian family. But let me be more specific now about where I think Calvin can connect with us directly and theologically.

John Calvin is known as a theologian but at the start of the Institutes he states that theology is impossible apart from piety, a devoted heart. (It is notable that John Thomas, in his farewell words here at Synod, identified "piety" is seriously lacking in the UCC today and called for its recovery.) Here for Calvin is the root of it all: "I call piety that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces" (I.2.1). He writes that "doctrine" is a matter "not of the tongue but of life. It is not apprehended by the understanding and memory alone . . . but it is received only when it possesses the whole soul and finds a seat and resting place in the inmost affection of the heart" (III.6.4). Here is where we see Calvin as a theologian of the heart and as a biblical theologian -- and as a theologian of the Holy Spirit. It is by the work of the Holy Spirit in our mind, heart, and hands that we can begin to live the life that God intends for us. Here Calvin employs the biblical, Pauline term "sanctification." And Charles Partee writes that, when it comes to sanctification, Calvin's theology "glitters." Calvin identifies the doctrines of justification and sanctification as the heart of the redemptive narrative of the gospel.

I think that today we need to rediscover, reclaim, learn how to preach again the twin doctrines of justification and sanctification. John Calvin can help us do that. This could be John Calvin's gift to us. I learned first-hand at a Lutheran-Reformed consultation at New York back in 1987 -- where Gabe Fackre, Louis Gunnemann, and I represented the UCC -- just how distinctively Calvinist it is to insist on the link between justification and sanctification. In the Reformed tradition we share with Luther's theology the bedrock belief that justification -- being accepted as right with God -- is solely by our trust in God's gracious love in Jesus Christ. There is nothing we can do to merit salvation, we could never be good enough to earn a place in heaven, this is purely a gift from God, in no way a human achievement. Calvin calls this "the main hinge" on which the Christian religion turns (III.11.1). But God does not only accomplish this work of salvation for us -- God also wants to accomplish his will in us. In his "Reply to Sadoleto" (written in Strasbourg in defense of the Reformation), Calvin states: "We deny that good works have any share in justification, but we claim full authority for them in the lives of the righteous. . . . If you would duly understand how inseparable faith and works are, look to Christ, who, as the Apostle teaches (1 Cor. 1:30) has been given to us for justification and for sanctification. . . . Where Christ is, there too is the Spirit of holiness, who regenerates the soul to newness of life. In his Commentary on 1 Corinthians 1:30 he writes: "We cannot be justified freely by faith alone, if we do not at the same time live in holiness. For those gifts of grace go together as if tied by an inseparable bond" (quoted in Partee). In the Institutes he writes: "Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify. . . . we are justified not without works, yet not through works, since in our sharing in Christ, which justifies us, sanctification is just as much included as righteousness" (III.16.1). What I learned in New York at that Lutheran-Reformed dialog is that Lutherans get more than nervous, they cringe, when the discussion turns to "living in holiness" and salvation being "not without works." Deathly afraid of any emphasis on human action, the Lutheran tendency (the Lutheran gift to the church) is to keep the focus on what God does for us in Christ. Calvin, however, insists that when God does something for us by the work of Christ, God also does something in us by the work of the Holy Spirit.

By contrast, the tendency in the UCC since 1957 has been overwhelmingly toward human action, social action, social reform, living your faith in the public arena. Our activism -- our gift -- believing means doing -- most certainly stems from our Calvinist heritage (whether UCC members know this or not). But -- and this, it seems to me, is the spiritual problem of the United Church of Christ -- our commitment to faithful living is no longer rooted in a theology of redemption. In many places and at many organizational levels of the church, the very concept of justification and sanctification are ignored or even rejected as obsolete, meaningless, or hurtful doctrines. Salvation is construed as getting in touch with your true self, perhaps especially your true gendered self, so if there is a theological emphasis at all it is on the doctrine of creation ("God doesn't create junk") and, with regard to Jesus, the doctrine of the Incarnation, God-with-us, validating us just as we are. But . . . the Fall? Atonement? Reconciliation of sinful humanity with the God of holiness? Word that Christ died for our sins? Who in our churches knows what any of this means anymore?

Calvin sums it up this way: There is "one sole means of recovering salvation. . . . Christ was given to us by God's generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ's blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ's spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life" (Institutes, III.11.1).

This is not dry doctrine, not mere dogma. It is a vital expression of the Christian narrative. Our story as believers. God's story of human redemption. As preachers, when we get people into the biblical narrative, that gospel gets into the people. God's story becomes our story. Throughout the world people are finding hope in this gospel and as that happens churches are thriving. That is the hope for our people and our churches, whatever the future of the United Church of Christ as a denomination.

The 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin should prompt us to think again about our theological and ecclesial roots. As God said through the prophet (Isaiah 51:1-2):

Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord.

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

and to the quarry from which you were dug.

Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you;

For he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.