Haykin / Robinson Sr. To the Ends of the Earth

Calvin's Missional Vision and Legacy
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2367-0
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

Reihe: Refo500

Calvinist missionaries. If you think that sounds like an oxymoron, you're not alone. Yet a close look at John Calvin's life and writings reveals a man who was passionate about the spread of the gospel and the salvation of sinners. From training pastors at his Genevan Academy to sending missionaries to the jungles of Brazil, Calvin consistently sought to encourage and equip Christians to take the good news of salvation to the very ends of the earth. In this carefully researched book, Michael Haykin and Jeffrey Robinson clear away longstanding stereotypes related to the Reformed tradition and Calvin's theological heirs, highlighting the Reformer's neglected missional vision and legacy.

Michael A. G. Haykin (ThD, University of Toronto) is professor of church history and biblical spirituality at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies. He has authored or edited more than twenty-five books, including Rediscovering the Church Fathers: Who They Were and How They Shaped the Church.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Haykin, Michael A. G.

Robinson Sr., Jeff

Leseproben

Introduction

The Rev. S. L. Morris, on the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth in May 1909, told the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States as it gathered in Savannah, Georgia, to mark the Reformer’s birth, “Calvinism is the most potent agency in the evangelization of the world.”1 At the time, no one would have regarded Morris’s affirmation as outlandish. Today, though, just over one hundred years later, his remark is the stuff of controversy and considered a complete oxymoron.

Calvinism’s Bad Press

In the West in 2013, a sentiment opposite that of Morris’s is more typically heard among evangelicals: “Calvinism is the enemy of world evangelization.” Virtually every admirer of Calvin and his theology has heard the same refrain: Calvin, his fellow Reformers, and their theology were not, are not, and cannot be, logically or theologically, pro-missions or pro-evangelism. The critics and their critiques border on cliché, and most who delight in a theology of sovereign grace can recite them: the sixteenth-century Reformers had a poorly developed missiology; overseas missions were given no thought or attention; Calvinism’s theology of an absolutely sovereign, choosing God has precious little to say to the lost and is anti-missions and opposed to evangelism.

John Calvin wished to be interred, upon his death, in an unmarked grave and asked that his family, church members, and intimate friends avoid any form of memorial service so that no cult of personality might spring up around him.2 In his last will and testament, Calvin’s instructions to those at his deathbed were similarly pithy, the language unadorned: “I desire that my body after my death be interred in the usual manner, to wait for the day of the blessed resurrection.”3 Nearly 450 years after his death, historians still do not know the location of Calvin’s grave, and given his reputation in the twenty-first-century West, Calvin’s anonymous resting place is likely best for all parties concerned. It is quite conceivable that knowledge of his burial location would only incite some of his opponents to make pilgrimage there so as to spit upon it.

John Calvin is a historical figure in desperate need of a public-relations makeover. Of all the Western church Reformers of the sixteenth century, none has been so consistently defamed, none so ruthlessly castigated in both his doctrine and his personality from his own time to the present. For scores of modern-day evangelicals, Calvin is the ultimate megalomaniac, a dark figure, a theological hall monitor, a figure fixated on a wrathful God whose life and doctrines stood firmly opposed to missions and evangelism.

Even the so-called new media of the twenty-first century has been commandeered to wage this perennial war on Calvin. Visitors to YouTube, the Internet dumping ground for everything from home movies depicting stupid pet tricks to Duran Duran videos, will find numerous broadside attacks on John Calvin and his theology. The unsubtle titles include, “How to Defeat Calvinism,” “All of Calvinism Refuted by One Verse” (by one who apparently thinks Arminians hail from the Eurasian republic of Armenia), “Why I Am Not a Five-Point Calvinist,” “Burn in Hell, John Calvin, Burn,” “Calvinism Creeping In,” and “Sovereign Grace Is a Heresy.” Even the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart took an oft-quoted swipe at Calvin, declaring that the Genevan Reformer was responsible for causing “untold numbers to be lost—or seriously hindered—in their spiritual walk and relationship with God.”4 If only his contemporaries had been so kind to Calvin! Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec (died c. 1584), a contemporary of Calvin and one-time Protestant advocate, published a biography of the Reformer after returning to the Roman Catholic Church, which the twentieth-century Calvin scholar Richard Stauffer termed “nothing more than a vile tract.” In it, Bolsec vilified the Reformer as “ambitious, presumptuous, arrogant, cruel, evil, vindictive, avaricious, and, above all, ignorant.”5 Once he commenced, Bolsec kept the fists flying. For him, Calvin was “a greedy man, . . . an imposter who claimed he could resurrect the dead, . . . a gadabout, a Sodomite,” an outcast of God.6

Time has done little to temper public opinion of John Calvin. In 1951, André Favre-Dorsaz wrote what Stauffer called “the most destructive book about Calvin with which I am acquainted.”7 Favre-Dorsaz contrasted Calvin with Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, calling the Reformer “an acid, negative person” who was a “withdrawn, embittered and unfeeling, coldly committed pessimist; an uneasy, worried, anguished man, alternately sympathetic and cruel; proud, a repressed sentimentalist, truly sadistic; a sick man . . . and . . . a dictator.”8 Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) considered Calvin interchangeable with Adolf Hitler, while Oscar Pfister, Sigmund Freud’s Swiss theological admirer, wrote off Calvin as a “compulsive-neurotic who transformed the God of Love as experienced and taught by Jesus into a compulsive character, a fanatic of hateful cruelty, bearing absolutely diabolical traits.”9 More recently, Will Durant, coauthor with his wife of a multivolume series on the history of Western civilization, offered criticism of Calvin that seems unfit for a historian: “We shall always find it hard to love the man, John Calvin, who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.”10

The Missiology of the Reformers

If John Calvin the man is viewed as something of a theological despot in the Western mind, his theology, particularly as it relates to the area of soteriology and its link to missions and evangelism, has fared even worse. Reformed theology, which has become identified with Calvin’s name—though, to tell the truth, his thinking is only one of a number of springs that produced this theological stream—emphasizes the absolute sovereignty of God in both creation and redemption. This sovereignty entails the doctrines of unconditional election and particular redemption, subscription to which, some have argued, renders Calvin and those who share his theology as logical nonstarters in the church’s missionary task. It has often been maintained that the sixteenth-century Reformers had a poorly developed missiology and that overseas missions to non-Christians was an area to which they gave little thought. Yes, this argument runs, the Reformers rediscovered the apostolic gospel, but they had no vision to spread it to the uttermost parts of the earth.11 Historian Gustav Warneck, for example, has painted Calvin as missiologically anemic because of his belief in the doctrines of predestination and election:

We miss in the Reformers, not only missionary action, but even the idea of missions, in the sense in which we understand them today. And this not only because the newly discovered world across the sea lay almost wholly beyond the range of their vision, though that reason had some weight, but because fundamental theological views hindered them from giving their activity and even their thoughts a missionary direction.12

And Ruth A. Tucker has argued the same: Calvin’s doctrine of predestination “made missions extraneous if God had already chosen those he would save.”13

Possibly the very first author to raise this question about early Protestantism’s failure to apply itself to missionary work was the Roman Catholic theologian and controversialist Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). Bellarmine argued that one of the marks of a true church is its continuity with the missionary passion of the apostles. In his mind, Roman Catholicism’s missionary activity was indisputable and this supplied a strong support for its claim to stand in solidarity with the apostles. As Bellarmine maintained:

In this one century the Catholics have converted many thousands of heathens in the new world. Every year a certain number of Jews are converted and baptized at Rome by Catholics who adhere in loyalty to the Bishop of Rome. . . . The Lutherans compare themselves to the apostles and the evangelists; yet though they have among them a very large number of Jews, and in Poland and Hungary have the Turks as their near neighbors, they have hardly converted so much as a handful.14

This characterization, though, fails to account for the complexity of the historical context of the Reformation. First of all, to answer both a Roman Catholic apologist like Bellarmine and a Protestant missiologist like Warneck, in the earliest years of the Reformation none of the major Protestant bodies possessed significant naval and maritime resources to take the gospel outside of the bounds of Europe. The Iberian Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, who were the acknowledged leaders among missions-sending regions at this time, had such resources aplenty. Moreover, the Roman Catholic missionary endeavors were often indistinguishable from imperialist ventures. It is noteworthy that other Roman Catholic nations of Europe, like Poland and Hungary, also lacked sea-going capabilities and evidenced no more cross-cultural missionary concern at that time...