The Catch-22 of Calvinism

Episcopal scholar Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., has done a good job expressing the historic catch-22 of the Calvinist understanding of salvation. Describing Puritans in early America, Shattuck writes:

Calvinists believed that God would inevitably awaken faith within the hearts of the predestined elect, while those predestined to damnation would simply never experience a conversion. Yet if conversion were solely a divine action, indeed an event foreordained by God before creation itself, there would seem to be little justification for pressing a sinner to repent. To stress the importance of the human will in conversion was not only inappropriate, but might even signal a lack of faith in divine grace.

In other words, if the Calvinist understanding of grace and salvation is true, then what could be the need or justification for calling sinners to repent? Why tell people to do something you're convinced they're going to do anyway--and that by divine decree? This inconsistency, and the attempts by Calvinists to remedy the problem or to explain it away, is a major theme of Reformed history. Those who take a higher, dare I say biblical, view of the love of God for all humanity still wait for, but do not expect, a convincing answer to such questions.

Source: Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., "conversion," in The Encyclopedia of American Religious History, eds. Edward L. Queen II, Stephen R. Prothero, and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Jr., (New York: Facts on File, 1996), 1:161-62.

Karl Barth on "Double Predestination"

At the moment, I can't document the following quote from Karl Barth. But it's just so juicy I had to pass it along:

If the teachers of predestination were right when they spoke always of a duality, of election and reprobation, of predestination to salvation or perdition, to life or death, then we may say already that in the election of Jesus Christ which is the eternal will of God, God has ascribed to man the former, election, salvation and life; and to Himself He has ascribed the latter, reprobation, perdition and death. If it is indeed the case that the divine good-pleasure which was the beginning of all things with God carries with it the risk and threat of negation, then it is so because the Son of God incarnate represents and Himself is this divine good-pleasure. The risk and threat is the portion which the Son of God, i.e., God Himself, has chosen for His own.

Been Readin'

Cold War Fever

So maybe you've guessed by now. These days I'm focused on the Cold War; especially that episode called the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in October 1962. My previous two posts are short reviews of some important sources about the crisis. One, Robert F. Kennedy's Thirteen Days, is an early, first-person report that was polished up and published not long after his assassination in 1968. The second, Sheldon Stern's The Week the World Stood Still, is based on the author's transcripts of the tape recordings of meetings held in the Cabinet Room and in the Oval Office during the crisis. In addition to those two books and a few others I'm currently reading, I've recently come across a few articles you might find interesting. . . .

The Calvinists are Coming!

Something I've noticed about Religion majors at Amarillo College: many of them are Calvinists of sorts. A recent issue of the Economist magazine contains an article about how this phenomenon is impacting the Southern Baptist Convention: Southern Baptists: the new Calvins.

The Sunday-Night Slide

I always enjoy taking a look at Christian Century magazine. For many decades now, it's been the voice of mainline Protestantism in America. It's like the Christianity Today magazine for people who are to the left of evangelicals. Anyway, a recent issue contains an article about something I've mentioned here before: Sunday night services a fading tradition.

A Scholar of the Classics Reads Paul

I can still remember the shock. I had just started reading Philo. He was a Jewish leader who lived in Alexandria, Egypt about the time Christianity first began. My Greek wasn't good enough to read Philo in the original. I had to settle for an English translation. But even then, on nearly every page I came across phrases and expressions that reminded me so much of Paul. It was overwhelming evidence of something I'd never really understood before: Paul's rhetoric was hardly unique. In fact, in many ways it was typical. Wanna see? Check out Philo for yourself. Anyway, more recently, a real scholar of the Classics, Sarah Ruden, has published a book on the Apostle called Paul Among the People. I haven't read the book yet, but enjoyed John Wilson's interview with Sarah Ruden, which showed up in a recent issue of Christianity Today. The article is titled The Apostle of the Golden Age.

So, what are you reading these days? Anything especially good? . . .

Article on John Calvin

I'll wind up revising the following article a hundred times between now and this weekend when I finally send it to the paper.

I actually came in well under the maximum word count. So there's still space for me to add a paragraph if I want. I've thought about putting in a section about Calvin's consent to the executions of convicted heretics, most notably Michael Servetus. Besides predestination, that's the other big thing Calvin is often remembered for. How do I include that and give it the context it deserves? Anyway, give this a read if you want and make any suggestions that come to mind. Thanks!

John Calvin (1509-2009)

“I have lived amidst extraordinary struggles. I have been saluted in mockery at night, before my door, by fifty or sixty shots from guns. Think how that would terrify a poor timid scholar such as I am.”

John Calvin never set out to live a hectic life in the spotlight. “I always longed for repose and quiet,” he said. Much less did he imagine he would change the world. Yet historian E. G. Leonard was hardly exaggerating when he concluded his book History of Protestantism with a chapter entitled, “Calvin: The Founder of a Civilization.”

Born in Noyon, France on July 10, 1509—five hundred years ago this Friday—Calvin was learning to read and speak Latin at the University of Paris by the time he was twelve. At first his father encouraged him to study for the priesthood. But when he had a falling out with the church and recognized the religious turmoil of the day, he insisted that his son pursue a legal career instead. Throughout his teens and early twenties, Calvin studied law and classical literature, solid preparation for the future that lay ahead of him.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg’s Castle Church, launching what would come to be known as the Protestant Reformation. Calvin wasn’t among its early leaders. He was still just a boy. By the time he converted to the new movement in the early 1530s, the term “protestant” had already been coined. Nonetheless, Calvin would eventually contribute to the movement two things it didn’t have before. First, he took the most basic principles of the Reformation—grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—and organized them into a system which he clearly expressed in his most famous book, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Second, through his tremendous influence as a writer, preacher, and church statesman in his adopted hometown of Geneva, Calvin left behind a model of how his version of theology could penetrate and shape a society.

From around 1533 until his death thirty-one years later, Calvin lived as a religious exile from Catholic-dominated France. Most of that time he spent in Geneva. Many other Protestants who had fled their homelands for fear of persecution discovered the city to be a haven. There they found both refuge and a flourishing religious community led by Calvin and his associates. Once they returned to the places they came from, the future growth of the Calvinist branch of the Reformation was certain.

Most people remember Calvin for having advanced the doctrine of double predestination which says that God in his sovereignty has decreed that certain individuals will be saved and that all others will be lost. Americans, big on freedom and a person’s ability to determine his own course, have typically rejected this teaching. But don’t count Calvin out. In March of this year, Time magazine listed “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.” Number 3 was “The New Calvinism,” a movement that has taken hold in large segments of conservative Protestantism in the U.S., especially among young people. The new Calvinists even have a representative Bible, the English Standard Version which was released last October and immediately sold out its first printing of 100,000 copies.

Calvin once called himself “merely a man from among the common people.” On his 500th birthday, he isn’t finished yet.

John Calvin (1509-2009)

July 10th of this year will mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. It's safe to say that he changed the world.

During my undergraduate days, most everything I heard about Calvin was negative. After all, someone named Calvinism after him. And that was bad. One of my classmates was required to read part of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. My assumption was that the assignment was for the purpose of figuring out all the places where Calvin went wrong.

A few years later, when I was a graduate student, I noticed that biblical scholar Brevard Childs rarely missed an opportunity to make some glowing statement about Calvin's commentaries. I wondered how someone I respected so much could say such great things about John Calvin.

My interest at the time was the so-called Pastoral Epistles: 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus. So I started working through an English translation of Calvin's commentary of that part of the New Testament.

Wow! What I discovered in that commentary was nothing short of marvelous. Not only did Calvin offer many great observations about the text, he did something else that modern commentators avoided: He "preached." His comments were at once studious and unabashedly theological. He didn't seem to understand the modern rule that biblical scholars weren't supposed to be preachers as well. To Calvin, one thing naturally lead to the next. I loved it and wished that today's Bible scholars were a little more like him, eager to say something about God in the midst of their serious studies.

Oh, sure. There were parts of Calvin that I didn't like so much. For instance, he sometimes went out of his way to take shots at "the Papists." But those places were easy to overlook when there was so much rich material all around them.

It's been a long time, too long, since I read much of John Calvin. I still reject his predestinarian ideas and wish that they didn't have so much influence. (If you haven't noticed, Calvinism is very popular among twenty-somethings today). But the depth and the warmth of his commentaries cannot be denied. I think I'll revisit some of them this year.

How about you? Ever read much from (as opposed to about) Calvin? What did you think?