Calvin, Scripture, Church

I have been reading and studying Calvin for a while. From a pastoral perspective, I am amazed by Calvin’s pastoral endeavor towards the church. How could someone preach so many sermons, write so many commentaries (except the Book of Daniel and Revelation), and write a book like Institutes to prepare future leaders in theology? Especially, there was no such thing as type-writer or computer? Against the Roman Catholic Church, Calvin downplayed the authority of the church and held the formal principle of the Reformation in high esteem.

“Here we have a classic statement of what is technically called the ‘formal principle’ of the Reformation: that the Bible alone is the norm and criterion for thought and life. Calvin’s own theological work was carried out in loyalty to this principle. The man who labored to interpret the Scriptures in commentary and preaching to his contemporaries regarded himself as ruled by this everliving voice of God.”[1]

The way Calvin preached and wrote commentaries proved the fact that he followed this reformed principle strictly and wholeheartedly.

For Calvin, salvation came not from the authority of the church, but from the authority of Scripture. All believers rested on the authority of Scripture, not the church.

 “For Calvin, the church is primarily a visible community…Calvin followed Augustine and distinguished ‘belief in the church’ from ‘believing the church.’ He argued that the latter correctly showed the church to be the means for salvation, while the former attributes salvation to the church and not to God. It was in this context that Calvin first used the expression ‘visible church’ in a positive sense; he described the church as the ‘mother’ of the faithful through whom one has rebirth and salvation.”[2]

However, Calvin looked at the church as the mother of all believers as well as school to nurture and sustain believers. For Calvin, it was disastrous for believers to leave the church, for she, as mother of believers, conceived them in her womb, gave them birth, nourished them at her breast, and kept them under her care and guidance.[3] Calvin’s theology was not defined by the church, but never apart from the church.

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[1] T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), pp. 44-45.

[2] Veli-Matti Karkkainen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical and Global Perspectives (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 2002), p. 51.

[3] See Institutes, IV.1.4.

Calvin's Reformed Preaching

Calvin’s preaching is first and foremost theological. John H. Leith said, “Calvin understood preaching to be the will of God for his church…Preaching is rooted in the will and intention of God. The preacher, Calvin dared to say, was the mouth of God. God does not wish to be heard but by the voice of his ministers.”[1] The preacher preaches the Word of God as if God himself spoke in person in front of the congregation. That’s why the reformers emphasized the importance of the proclamation of the Word.

Preaching “is not simply the preacher’s discourse about Christ...Rather, as Bayer summaries, ‘the preached Word that comes to us by word of mouth is Jesus Christ himself now present with us.’”[2] Calvin said, “The preaching of the heavenly doctrine has been enjoined upon the pastors…But as he did not entrust the ancient folk or angels but raised up teachers from the earth truly to perform the angelic office, so also today it is his will to teach us through human  means.”[3] Human ministers have been entrusted with “the preaching of the heavenly doctrine.”

For the reformers, preaching the Word was teaching, but it was more than that. The reformed preachers preached as if God spoke to the congregation here and now. Human ministers were God’s accommodated means of grace to reach down to the congregation. Preaching the Word was a holy encountering.

Nowadays, the pulpit is often turned into a place where preachers talk, share, and teach. Preaching, for the reformers, was a life-and-death matter, for “the Word not only describes salvation, but also conveys it.”[4]

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[1] John H. Leith, “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Proclamation of the Word and Its Significance for Today,” in John Calvin and the Church: A Prism of Reform. Edited by Timothy George (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), p. 210.

[2] Michael S. Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), p. 47.

[3] Institutes, 4.1.5.

[4] Michael S. Horton, People and Place: A Covenant Ecclesiology, p. 48.

Calvin's Double Knowledge

John Calvin begins his theology with the knowledge of God and of self. It’s Calvin’s “double knowledge” in relationship. It is in a relationship where the Self finds a place in God’s goodness and benevolence. For Calvin, God’s goodness and benevolence is always towards us. The God as he is to us compels us to say Amen to him. As sinners we turn to him with confession, repentance, and praise. Calvin’s “double knowledge” of God and of self is not therapeutic in nature: heal me, comfort me, and fill me. “Calvin understood this knowledge of the self to be moral in nature rather than psychological, however, and held that its import was soteriological rather than therapeutic. To know one’s self in truth was to know one’s need for God’s redemption.”[1]

For Calvin, God is not defined by our religious experience. Rather, we interpret and re-interpret our religious experience according to the Scriptures revealed to us. The former is self-centered approach to Christianity; the latter, God-centered and Scripture-based. True knowledge of God and of self comes not from the inside (our experience), but from the outside (the centrality of God and the revelation of the Scriptures).

[1] David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 103n.

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Calvin's Limits and Possibilities

The teaching of justification is outside of us. It’s beyond any human reach, for we are justified by Christ alone.  Being justified indicates that we need external help to have a right standing before God. “The theology of justification is saying that sin and death set limits to our lives, and the only way to overcome them is by relying on a source of deliverance outside ourselves—the grace of God.”[1] The teaching of justification shows us that we are limited in the first place. When we face what it seems impossible, we can have hope because our hope has been rested on the One who justified us. When we meet our limits, we are assured by the external reality, which is Christ’s righteousness.

The teaching of sanctification reminds us that life is filled with possibilities—what is not yet to come. The concept of sanctification indicates that “every situation, no matter how difficult, also contains some opportunities to act. When we act in these circumstances, we create possibilities where there were only limitations before. When we do this, we are living by sanctification.”[2] Thus, the path of sanctification is the path of exploring new possibilities. I call this “sanctified spirit.” When we stop to explore what is not yet to come, we stop making progress in the path of sanctification. Without a “sanctified spirit,” we are stagnant. However, the concept of sanctification is meant to encourage us to continue to search in the midst of searching, not to discourage us to stop searching in the midst of waiting and confusion.

“In all of life there are things we cannot do for ourselves, as well as things that only we can do.”[3]

This is Johnson’s application of John Calvin’s doctrine of twofold grace of God.[4]

[1] William Stacy Johnson, John Calvin, Reformer for the 21^st Century (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 28.

[2] Ibid., p. 28.

[3] Ibid., p. 28.

[4] John Calvin wrote, “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, 3.11.1)

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Calvin's Idea of Accommodation

Friday, January 28

Tonight on our way to visit Sue’s grandmother in the hospital, I picked up a new book in the mailbox. It’s Paul Helm’s Calvin: A Guide for the Perplexed (T & T Clark, 2008). He is a Teaching Fellow in Theology and Philosophy at Regent College. In Beth Israel Medical Center, we stayed there for 4-5 hours. Sue was busy talking and explaining things to her grandmother. I was drinking my coffee and finished reading a few chapters. Chapter 2 is titled “The Knowledge of God and of Ourselves.” In this chapter, he starts off with Calvin’s idea of accommodation. It is the idea that God accommodates Himself for us so that we can know Him, understand Him, and receive Him. According to Helm, Calvin is not very interested in God as He is in Himself. Rather, Calvin is interested in God as He is towards us. God is not against us, but towards us. God is not only above us, but towards us. The knowledge of God and of ourselves is possible because the inner love of the Trinity is towards us. I find this old teaching somewhat new.

God accommodates His language to us in Scripture. It’s God’s accommodated mode of lowering and communicating Himself to us. Helm said, “He comes down to our level by disclosing himself to us in language that is suited to our condition, to our straitened circumstances as time-bound and space-bound creatures. For Calvin ‘accommodation’ is usually a term of grace, the sovereign grace of the gospel as it is made known in the word of Scripture and the Incarnate Word.” It’s God’s own choice to show Himself to us. But it’s God’s “choice of grace” (pp. 21-22).

Reading the Scripture is an act of responding to His choice of grace. It’s an act of appreciating His accommodation to us. We pay attention to Scripture reading and biblical studies because He chose this mode of communication to reveal His thoughts and wills to us. Our faith is grounded in and shaped by the Scripture. Thus, to read the Scripture is to be spiritually unformed, formed, and reformed. Knowing the Scripture is to know God towards us. That’s why Christ is the key to unlock the Scripture, for the Incarnation of the Son is the apex of God’s accommodation. The downward mobility of the Son embodies the God whose intrinsic nature is towards us.

In relation to Scripture, Calvin wrote,

“So Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God. This, therefore, is a special gift, where God, to instruct the church, not merely uses mute teachers but also opens his own most hallowed lips. Not only does he teach the elect to look upon a god, but also shows himself as the God upon whom they are to look. He has from the beginning maintained this plan for his church, so that besides these common proofs he also put forth his Word, which is a more direct and more certain mark whereby he is to be recognized” (Institutes, 1.6.1).

We can say that, in the first place, the nature of biblical inspiration involves humility and benevolence. He accommodates Himself through the Scripture in order to make Himself known to us, for we sinners cannot know Him because of our own dullness. The proud and the selfish cannot understand His word. Thus, when we encounter the Word of God, our pride and selfishness must be confronted and condemned. God’s accommodation towards us through Scripture ties into Calvin’s knowledge of God and of ourselves. The knowledge of God leads to the knowledge of ourselves, and vice versa.

“Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. For we always seem to ourselves righteous and upright and wise and holy—this pride is innate in all of us—unless by clear proofs we stand convinced of our own unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity. Moreover, we are not thus convinced if we look merely to ourselves and not also to the Lord, who is the sole standard by which this judgment must be measured” (Institutes, 1.1.2).

“And this standard is now to be founded fully set forth in Holy Scripture and nowhere else” (Helm, p. 25).

John Calvin's Double Grace

In Calvin’s theology, there is a concept called a doctrine of double grace. The doctrine of double grace means that justification and sanctification are both one gift of God. The former one is Christ’s imputed righteousness for us in faith; the latter, we are made righteousness gradually from time to time by grace. Justification (right with God) indicates that we are in Christ. Sanctification (living rightly with God) means that we are to be like Christ.

“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, 3.11.1).

We receive Christ’s blamelessness in faith; we cultivate His blamelessness by grace.

“Why, then, are we justified by faith? Because by faith we grasp Christ’s righteousness, by which alone we are reconciled to God. Yet you could not grasp this without at the same time grasping sanctification also…Therefore Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify. These benefits are joined together by an everlasting and indissoluble bond, so that those whom he illumines by his wisdom, he redeems; those whom he redeems, he justifies; those whom he justifies, he sanctifies” (Institutes, 3.16.1).

The gifts of justifying and sanctifying are bonded as one single gift.

William Stacy Johnson, professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, notes, “Although Christ’s righteousness is an external reality that is attributed to us, we are also engrafted into Christ in an authentic spiritual union that grows internally. We not only receive the benefits of Christ but we begin to grow in grace, becoming increasingly like him. Such are the benefits of being united to Christ.”[1]

During the time of Reformation, the doctrine of justification was the center of discussion. Martin Luther, as the first generation reformer, got caught by the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17a. God’s own righteousness, for Luther, meant God’s justice that He always punished sinners for their sins. Luther then found out “The righteous shall live by faith” (1:17b). That concept of earning God’s favor was gone and destroyed by this verse. For Luther, he was then driven by the doctrine of justification. By faith, we are declared righteous in God’s sight.

Calvin, 26 years younger than Luther, was a second generation reformer. He was able to keep a distance from the debate and looked at the whole reformed movement from a distance. In order for the Reformed Movement to go further and deeper, the Reformed understanding of the Christian faith must be organized in a systematic way. He wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion. He did not write this “textbook” to speculate Christian faith. He did it to help reformed Christians to understand their new emerging faith.

In his Institutes, Calvin addressed the doctrine of sanctification first (Book 3: chapters 3-10), then the doctrine of justification (chapters 11-19). Calvin was very careful to tackle a double grace because there was a thin line between working for one’s salvation and working it out. The topic sanctification preceded justification because Calvin might see the reality that cheap grace was so prevalent in Christian life.

As William Johnson comments, “It is interesting that Calvin presents his theology of sanctification, or regeneration, before discussing justification. Given the centrality of justification in the sixteenth-century Protestant movement, this is not what we would expect. By discussing repentance and renewal first, Calvin seemed to want to avoid any implication of ‘cheap grace.’ We can receive the gospel, in Calvin’s view, only by obeying it.”[2] Even though I have a hard time to read through these chapters, I admire Calvin’s theological ability to analyze this single gift in such details.

Calvin paid a lot of attention to explain the importance and necessity of sanctification in Christian life and yet make sure that it’s distinguished from justification. However, they are inseparable. It’s Calvin’s theological effort to respond to his contemporary theological distortion.

In John Calvin’s Stroke of Genius, Paul Helm wrote at the end of his article after analyzing Calvin’s double grace, “This way of thinking preserves the Reformation and biblical teaching of the forensic character of justification, the imputation of an 'alien righteousness'. But it also retains what is the essential truth behind the medieval misunderstanding of justification, that subjective renewal is essential; not essential to justification, but an essential consequence of it, bound inseparably to it, not something which is simply tagged on. The one gift is of two graces in parallel, though the way each gift blesses the recipient is very different.”[3]

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[1] John Calvin, Reformer for the 21^st Century (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 27.

[2] Ibid., p. 66.

[3] http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2007/09/analysis-6-john-calvins-stroke-of.html

John Calvin's Knowledge Of God

For John Calvin, the knowledge of God and of ourselves is intertwined. When we think of God, not only do we meditate upon his greatness, but we also turn to our sinfulness. In our sinfulness, it compels us to turn to Him with confession, repentance, and grace. It’s this dynamic of the knowledge of God and of ourselves that sets the tone for Calvin’s theology.

In the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin starts off with his theology of the knowledge of God:

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves…In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves’ [Acts 17:28].” (1.1.1)

For Calvin, we cannot meditate upon the greatness of God and his benevolence toward us without scrutinizing our own sinfulness. True knowledge of ourselves leads us not merely to turn to ourselves but “arouses us to seek God” (1.1.1.).

On Sunday, January 09^th, I listened to an on-line lecture instructed by Dr. Christopher Morse, a professor of Theology and Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. He lectured on Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He said,

“It’s only from the standpoint of the positive, in Calvin’s understanding, we can confess the negative. It’s only from the positive standpoint of being brought home, that we can face how far from home our lives have truly been…Negativity is only recognizable from the standpoint of how good and God’s benevolence are toward us. In other words, only from the standpoint of grace, we can confess sin. Thus, for Calvin, to refer back to the positive is to reflect the negative.”

I think this is an insight to understand Calvin’s theology. Paul would agree with it. “For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet now God in his gracious kindness declares us not guilty” (Rom. 3:23-24).

In light of it, that is why the goal of Calvin’s theology is to promote true piety/godliness. It is relational knowledge, not theoretical knowledge even though Calvin’s knowledge of the knowledge of God is very rational. In his prefatory address to King Francis I of France, Calvin wrote down the purpose of writing the Institutes of the Christian Religion, “My purpose was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness” [Edited by John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Book I, p. 9.].

As Joel R. Beeke comments, “For Calvin, theological understanding and practical piety, truth, and usefulness are inseparable. Theology first of all deals with knowledge—knowledge of God and of ourselves—but there is no true knowledge where there is no true piety” [“Calvin on Piety” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin. Edited by Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 125.]. Calvin’s concept of knowledge of God is practical knowledge. It not only affects our heads, but also our hearts and hands. I believe when Calvin wrote the Institutes, he was definitely thinking of the people of the congregation. In Latin word Institutio means instruction in or principles of the Christian religion.

Calvin wrote the first edition of the Institutes in 1536 when he was twenty-six years old. Then he was stopped at Geneva and called to be a pastor even thought he wanted to be a scholar at the time.  In 1538, he was not welcome by the city and the church of Geneva. He was sent into exile and went to Strasbourg. He was downcast, and yet he was released, for he could continue to pursue his scholastic dream instead of doing the work of ministry.  Nevertheless, by God’s providence and intervention, he was called to be a pastor of a group of French refugees who went to the city of Strasbourg due to a political upheaval around the same time. As a French, Calvin became the pastor of a congregation of French refugees. The exile ministered to exiles.

He revised his Institutes there in 1539 [The fifth as well as the last revision was in 1559.] Calvin wanted to promote true godliness in the lives of the exiles as he himself sought for true piety as an exilic pastor. The Institutes was written for God’s glory as well as for congregants’ spirituality. Calvin was a theologian as well as a pastor. As a pastor-theologian, his theology was born out of a particular context. He developed his theology of the knowledge of God because of his increasing knowledge of the congregation. His knowledge of the congregation deepened his understanding of God.