E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Horton / Taylor Calvin on the Christian Life
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3959-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Reihe: Theologians on the Christian Life
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3959-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Michael Horton (PhD, University of Coventry and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford) is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary in California. In addition to being the author of many popular and academic books, he is also the editor in chief of Modern Reformation magazine, a host of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast, and a minister in the United Reformed Churches.
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CALVIN ON THE CHRISTIAN LIFE: IN CONTEXT
Some misunderstandings of Calvin’s theology and piety are due to friends, not just foes. The first step in disentangling Calvin from the many uses that we have made of him, then, is to examine Calvin’s piety in his own context.1
The Catholic Calvin
First, there is the “Catholic Calvin.” Here “Catholic” encompasses the consensus of all Christians everywhere. It is broader than the term Roman Catholic. Although we know what people mean when they say, “I was raised Catholic, but I’m a Christian now,” Calvin would have been baffled by this way of putting it. He always considered himself more Catholic than his Roman critics. Indeed, he was hardly the first to have thought so, since the Christian East has long pointed out the oxymoron in “Roman Catholic.” After all, “Catholic” means universal, and “Roman” refers to a part rather than the whole. The bishop of Rome was originally one among other key leaders. Even the sixth-century Roman bishop Gregory the Great said that “universal pontiff” was “a form of proud address” and that any bishop who assumed that title was “a precursor to Antichrist.”2 The current pope was schismatic, in Calvin’s view, and the Reformers were simply calling the church back to its sources.
Although Calvin’s father, Gerard, had destined him for the priesthood, it was a course that young Jean enthusiastically embraced. At the age of twelve he was the local bishop’s secretary and even received the monk’s tonsure (distinctive haircut). His gifts and zeal won the patronage of the distinguished Montmor family, allowing him to attend the most prestigious colleges of the University of Paris (Sorbonne). At the Collège de la Marche he acquired his celebrated command of Latin under the distinguished teacher Mathurin Cordier, who would eventually come to evangelical convictions and to teach at Geneva’s Academy. Calvin then studied theology and philosophy at the Collège de Montaigu, after Erasmus and just before Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Here the “new learning” (classical humanism) was breathing new energy into the conservative university. Although his memories of the strict regimen were as unpleasant as Erasmus’s, Calvin became a student of classical Greek and Roman literature while at the college and also began his Hebrew and Greek study of Scripture.
When his close friend Nicolas Cop, son of the king’s surgeon, became the president of the University of Paris, Calvin helped to draft the inaugural speech. Peppered with calls for evangelical reform, the address provoked the ire of university and royal authorities, and the pair narrowly escaped. Their libraries were burned, they fled to Basel together, and Nicolas’s brother Michel—a noted Hebraist—made Calvin proficient in Hebrew.
Alongside his close study of Scripture in the original languages, Calvin devoured the writings of the ancient church fathers, especially Irenaeus, Chrysostom, and the Cappadocians in the East and Ambrose, Hilary, and Augustine in the West. He even called upon the testimony of “the better theologians” of the medieval church, such as Thomas Aquinas, Bernard, and Bonaventure. They left an indelible stamp on his exegesis and theological formulations, as well as his liturgical and devotional writings. In fact, he frequently swayed audiences in favor of the Reformation with his arguments from these sources, cited nearly verbatim from memory.
Writing to the French King Henri II, whose policy of persecution was even more violent than his father’s, Calvin said, “We have here laid down with simplicity a brief confession of the faith we hold, which we trust you will find in accordance with that of the Catholic church.”3 Richard Muller reminds us that although the Reformation provoked controversy over justification, the sacraments, and the church, “the doctrines of God, the Trinity, creation, providence, predestination, and the last things were taken over by the magisterial Reformation virtually without alteration.”4 Later Reformed pastors and theologians would identify themselves not as Calvinists but as “Reformed Catholics.”5
Radical Protestants—particularly the Anabaptists—did not appeal to antiquity. As contemporary Anabaptist scholar Leonard Verduin notes, “They were not interested in any continuity with the Church of the past; for them that Church was a ‘fallen’ creature.”6 Calvin, on the other hand, was eager to maintain every possible connection with the ancient church and the best heritage of Christian faith and practice down to his own day. Far from anticipating the Enlightenment ideals of progress and individual autonomy, Calvin upbraided the pope for having an itch for novelty—creating doctrines and forms of worship without scriptural warrant and the example of the ancient church. Luther and Calvin were Catholic Reformers, not radical modernizers.
The Evangelical Calvin
An earthy, gregarious, and sometimes boisterous son of German peasant stock, Luther peppered his sermons and conversations with homely—sometimes even crude—illustrations that resonated with the average Wittenberger. In his translation of the Bible, he searched diligently for the most familiar word or phrase in everyday German that would communicate the original text. With a larger-than-life personality, which he felt quite at home in divulging, Luther seems especially suited to the role that providence gave him. It is perhaps not surprising that Luther’s informal table-talk conversations were recorded for posterity.
Hailing from an upper-middle-class French home and taken under the wing of a distinguished family for a privileged education, Calvin was more refined. Temperamentally, he was reserved and private—even shy, avoiding autobiography. Contemporaries report the congeniality of a man whose home was often filled with guests. In Strasbourg, he and his wife, Idelette, were at the center of activity in a bustling youth hostel that they founded. However, he was the type of person who would have been uneasy with note takers hovering about over dinner recording the conversation. In short, though serious about the matters at hand, Luther seems at home on the stage of history, while Calvin seems genuinely to have preferred a peaceful obscurity.
Also, many changes had occurred in the two decades that separated the Reformers in age (they never met personally). Luther, the Augustinian monk, was fond of the German mystics and became the pioneering Reformer; Calvin was shaped in student days by the French humanists and early Reformers, who displayed little interest in mysticism. Their contexts were different, too. The Lutheran Reformation was an event in the history of the Holy Roman Empire (basically Germany), with Luther as the central figure who had come under the protection of now evangelical princes. However, Reformed churches emerged primarily in independent cities, whose magistrates embraced the Reformation usually after a public Roman Catholic–Reformed debate. Although Bucer came close, there was no one comparable religious authority to Luther or political equivalent of the united princes. Consequently, consensus was reached more by mutual consent of the cities and their church leaders. Calvin was but a rising star in a constellation of already established leaders. Furthermore, while Luther was at home in Wittenberg, with a free hand even sometimes to meddle in political affairs, Calvin was a foreigner and exile in a city whose leaders often stifled his attempts simply to reform the church.
There were similarities as well. Luther was destined by his father for law and then the priesthood; the reverse in Calvin’s case. Both knew firsthand the most rigorous expressions of late-medieval theology and practice. In fact, far from youthful rebels, both confessed the depth to which they had devoted themselves to Rome. They were censorious of themselves and others who failed to invest themselves fully and sincerely in the form of medieval piety in which they had been reared.
After embracing the gospel Calvin also shared Luther’s concern to pursue reform cautiously. “For it is not possible that the public government of the church can be all at once changed,” he told the king of Poland (Sigismund Augustus), a Reformed monarch known as a pioneer of religious liberty.7 Although he was more concerned than Luther to purge remnants of false worship, he counseled toleration and patient instruction where there were differences of opinion. Like Luther, he never abandoned the church, but sought to reform it by going back to its own source in Scripture. And, like Luther, he was excommunicated by the papacy, he was hunted by the Inquisition, and his writings were placed on the index of forbidden books.
Calvin also shared with Reformers like Luther and Bucer a deep conviction that sound doctrine is the soul of piety, not an intellectual game. He described the dogma of implicit faith (assenting to whatever the church teaches) as ignorance disguised as humility. Surely faith requires knowledge. Nevertheless, faith is supremely trust in a person—namely, Christ as he is clothed in his gospel. This Word of God captures our whole person, not just our mind or will or affections. In fact, “true faith consists more in living experience than in high-flown speculations...
