Reflecting and Responding
John Calvin
Knowing God and Knowing Ourselves
Knowledge of God and knowledge of man are inextricably linked; one cannot be had without the other.
THE INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
NO OTHER SINGLE BOOK FROM THE sixteenth century does more to define the nature of our life with God than The Institutes of the Christian Religion, a handbook on piety written by John Calvin (1509-1563). Massive in volume and compelling in impact, the Institutes set the agenda for Protestant theology and spirituality for the next three hundred years.
In the Institutes, Calvin begins with the same question as Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther: How do we recover our knowledge of God? “Knowledge of God and knowledge of man are inextricably linked,” Calvin begins. “One cannot be had without the other. But out of respect for God, let us begin with knowledge of God.”
Calvin introduces this polarity to establish the foundation for his entire work. We cannot know God without knowing ourselves and we cannot know ourselves without knowing God. As with so many great Christian thinkers, Calvin frames this pursuit as a threefold process: first we gain knowledge of our salvation, then we grow in our knowledge and, finally, we determine the ultimate destiny of our spiritual life.
Three Primary Sources
According to Calvin, our knowledge of God comes from three primary sources. First, we enjoy an innate sense of God originating from being made in his likeness. Every human being is made in the image of God. This is God’s divine stamp on each one of us. Unfortunately, this image is corrupted because of sin. Consequently, many of us ignore our innate sense of God and misunderstand his presence in our lives.
The same is true when we consider the second source, God’s created universe. Everywhere the design of nature bears witness to God. His providential formation of the created order reflects his majesty. It also inclines the sensitive heart to seek the cause of this order and majesty. Calvin’s confidence in the beauty, order and design of creation is striking. Just as he recognizes the miserable condition of creation and humanity, he also exudes an overriding confidence in the ultimate goodness of God and his redemptive plan.
The third and final way we recover knowledge of God is through Scripture. Scripture is God’s divine word. It teaches us about God, reveals his plan of salvation and identifies his activity in creating and sustaining the world. Scripture helps us understand what our life is like without God and what awaits us as our destiny if we are joined with him. It helps us gain a deeper understanding of God’s nature by reflecting on his activity in the created universe. Finally, Scripture teaches us God’s providential activity in history and his specific activity in creating his people, first as the children of Israel and then as the New Testament church.
Inward Knowing
Once we realize we can know God through Scripture, Calvin demonstrates how we can cultivate confidence in the reliability of our knowledge. Here he introduces a principle that will become a hallmark of his work. It is neither human reason nor even the authority of the church that establishes the authority of Scripture, but the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit. This is the hinge of Calvin’s entire system. The Holy Spirit’s work confirms the reliability of Scripture, our knowledge of God, the provision and acceptance of salvation through Christ, the election of God, the ability of leaders to discern who should be ministers and the viability of our Christian faith.
This inward testimony of the Holy Spirit is how we recover knowledge of God lost in the Fall. This confirmation does not occur apart from Scripture but in conversation with it. In fact, in opposition to the religious enthusiasts who misunderstood this Augustinian principle, Calvin insists that we cannot know God properly without the Holy Spirit confirming our knowledge of God in the context of reading Scripture.
Like Augustine in The Teacher, Calvin provides an outstanding example of how we come to understand the inward work of the Holy Spirit. The work of the Holy Spirit and the inward confirmation by Christ’s spirit are essentially the same thing. Christ as inward Teacher illuminates our understanding and convinces us of the certainty of our faith. This illumination allows us to know supernatural and eternal truth even while still constrained to our natural and temporal world.
Law and Grace
Also like Augustine, Calvin believes that Christ is not only the inward Teacher but the author of our faith. Becoming like Christ and realizing the fruits of our salvation are the twin focuses of his theology. His emphasis on the person and work of Christ originates in his recognition that humans need redemption, that our attempts to find redemption within God’s law are futile, and that without Christ and his willingness to meet our needs, we cannot make up for our lack.
In considering the person and work of Christ, Calvin shows how Christ’s work is necessary because of our estrangement from God. To overcome this estrangement, God initially provides the law and eventually gives the gospel. The two are related but not equal. Both play a role in the work of Jesus Christ as God’s scheme of redemption is ultimately completed. But they are strikingly different.
The law was given to teach us God’s moral imperatives for life. These are timeless principles that we are all obligated to follow. The gospel does not replace the law but works to complete it through Jesus Christ. Although the ceremonial and judicial aspects of the law have been set aside, the moral aspects continue. The importance of the law is that it educates us concerning God’s expectations for us as humans. When we realize we cannot live up to the expectations of the law, it makes evident our need for Christ.
Calvin’s treatment of the Ten Commandments as the law of God is some of the most exhilarating commentary ever written. He notes that the first four commandments teach us what it means to love God. To love God means loving only God. To love God means recognizing God as a spiritual essence and not an embodied idol. To love God means to speak wisely and accurately. And to love God means to stop, rest and reflect on his nature and activity. In this last action of Sabbath rest, we utilize our aids to salvation by taking the sacraments, participating in Christian worship and listening to Christian teaching.
Then the last six commandments show us how to love our neighbor. Civic order and peace begin in the family. Learning to live under God’s authority in the order of the family helps us accept his order across all areas of life. To love our neighbor begins with learning to honor, love and obey our parents. It also includes honoring one another in marriage. Loving our neighbor means respecting the right to own property, speaking the truth and finding satisfaction with our station in life by not coveting what others possess. Finally, to love our neighbor includes not inflicting violence on innocent people.
In each category, Calvin recasts the way medieval thinkers presented the Christian life. His concern is that people move beyond the legalism of the Roman Catholic Church to understand the spiritual essence of the Ten Commandments embodied in the life and Spirit of Jesus. The ultimate importance of the Ten Commandments is that they capture God’s grand expectations for all people and spell out the responsibilities each one of us bear personally.
As a result, we recognize our need for Christ as communicated in the Gospels. The Gospels teach us that Jesus was fully God and fully man. They accept Christ’s participation in divine activity and his illumination of our divine understanding. They establish why we cannot satisfy God on our own and why Christ as fully human does satisfy God. Because Christ is fully God and fully man, he is perfect in obedience to God. He does not alter the law but fulfills it.
To understand Christ in both his person and work, we need earthly metaphors that communicate in ways we can accept and understand. Consequently Christ is depicted as prophet, priest and king. As prophet, he proclaims the truth and reality of God, our situation as humans and our need to respond individually and collectively to God. As priest, Christ mediates our salvation. As king, he governs universally. Each office reflects a particular aspect and activity.
These activities become callings for us as Christians as we engage our earthly work as well as contribute to God’s work in the world. The inward work of the Holy Spirit depends on what Calvin calls the “effects of faith”: repentance, Christian life in which we exhibit a love of God and a love of neighbor, justification leading to Christian liberty, and a life of prayer. The work of the Holy Spirit is particularly evident in Calvin’s treatment of the life of prayer. In the longest single chapter in the entire work, Calvin devotes nearly one hundred pages to the primacy and importance of prayer. Prayer is the way we adjust all that we are and aspire to be to the ways and will of God. Prayer is neither a rote exercise nor an optional activity. It is absolutely essential if we are to understand the nature and reality of our life with God. Ultimately, the evidence of God’s internal activity in the Christian believer is manifested as a holy life.
The Role of the Church
Finally, Calvin returns to a theme emphasized so often by earlier writers: the work of God, the significance of Jesus Christ and the ministry of the Holy Spirit is best known through the life of the Christian community. In the church, Christians learn to love both God and neighbor. This love is cultivated through the faithful exercise of the sacraments, the core responsibilities of the Christian life and active participation in civic affairs.
The church serves as the one institution placed in society by God to partner with the state in regulating sacred and secular matters. The church’s ultimate aim is to bring people to faith in Christ, to see them grow in Christ, to preach God’s word, to disseminate discipline, to prepare the leadership of God’s people and to administer the sacraments. In this way, the church becomes the body of Christ, perpetuating the will and way of God in the world.
After Calvin, the Protestant Reformation broke into all manner of diverse expression. Some took the Reformation to radical extremes that threatened to undo Christianity. Others, such as the Puritans in England, sought to modify and systematize Calvin, turning his teaching into a rote system of religious authority. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation was firmly entrenched. The Roman Catholic opposition continued and spawned new reform movements that continue to this day. Yet Calvin’s legacy, communicated so effectively through his primer on Christian piety, lives on in the many expressions of the Reformed tradition that are spread around the world.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
From the standpoint of spiritual formation, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is of genuine interest. In the title page he boldly declares that it contains “almost the whole sum of piety” and is “a work most worthy to be read by all persons zealous for piety.” Well, he most certainly delivers.
Calvin’s material on the Ten Commandments, for example, gives us much to work with for life formation. It fits perfectly into his overarching theme of knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves. The first four commandments instruct us in our relationship to God, “to recognize and profess him as the only God, to love, honor and fear him above and before all else, to repose in him alone all our hopes and needs, and always to ask his help.” The remaining six commandments relate to our duties of love toward one another. As Calvin puts it,
Our Lord sums up the law under two heads: we are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. Even though the whole law has been included under these two heads our Lord . . . has willed to proclaim more deeply and explicitly by ten commandments, about everything that pertains to honor, fear, and love of him, and all that has to do with love which, for his own sake, he enjoins upon us toward our neighbors.
You notice the strong stress throughout his teaching here on love—love of God and love of neighbor. Indeed, in summary, Calvin writes, “It is easy to fathom the direction of all these things, namely, to teach love.” Hence, under Calvin’s skillful pen the Ten Commandments move from being harsh, rigid laws to becoming perceptions into the royal law of love. I find that most instructive.
Then, too, we are instructed by the theme of God’s sovereignty that weaves its way throughout the Institutes. We cannot fathom God on our own, Calvin says. The gulf between God and us is too vast. God is above all, the sovereign Lord of all. And it is this sovereign God who sovereignly reveals himself to humanity. God, out of divine love and mercy, takes the initiative; we cannot.
Now, all of this sovereignty language does not play well in contemporary society. It strikes us as an insult. After all, don’t we have the ability to take the initiative to frame our own future? Aren’t we in charge of our own destiny? Can’t we become anyone we want, do anything we want, go anywhere we want? Independence and autonomy are the watchwords of our day, not dependence and submission. And this is precisely why we need to hear Calvin’s accent on the sovereignty of God. We have bought into the lie that we are the captains of our salvation, the masters of our fate. And we need once again to place ourselves under the mighty hand of God. This kind of holy surrender and holy obedience is a necessary part of the formation of our souls.
Another thing: Calvin’s work on prayer is a corrective to our egocentric ways. For him prayer is not so much a transactional matter by which we get things out of God. Rather it is first and foremost a transformational matter in which we learn to adjust ourselves to the divine will. Calvin writes,
Now, let this be the first rule of right prayer, that we abandon all thought of our own glory, that we cast off all notion of our own worth, that we put away all our self-assurance, in our abjection and our humility giving glory to the Lord, so as to be admonished by the prophetic teaching: “We do not pour forth our prayers unto thee on the ground of our righteousness but on the ground of thy great mercies.”
This forming of the heart and mind in a Christward direction is a major burden in prayer. Commenting on the Lord’s Prayer, Calvin writes, “When, for example, we pray that ‘his name be hallowed’ we should, so to speak, eagerly hunger and thirst after that sanctification.” Once, however, we are oriented body, mind, heart and soul toward Christ and his righteousness, we are to come boldly with our requests knowing that we have “a promise to assure us we will receive whatever we ask.” This then is that interactive life of prayer with God whereby we are constantly receiving into ourselves the divine loves and joys and aspirations as we learn to ask in faith for what we need. This is how we develop a life “zealous for piety.”
Allow me to mention one final observation. It was John Calvin who brought the threefold office of Christ as prophet, priest and king into dogmatic theology. This holds the most profound implications for our spiritual formation. The threefold office of Christ is a way of speaking about Christ’s continuing action among his people. He is alive. He is here. He is active. He is our prophet to teach us. He is our priest to forgive us. He is our king to rule us.
The threefold office of Christ is the divinely revealed solution to the threefold disease of sin: ignorance, guilt and corruption. Christ by prophetic light overcomes our ignorance and the darkness of error. Christ by priestly merit takes away our guilt and reconciles us to God. Christ by kingly power removes our bondage to sin and death. The prophet enlightens the mind by the spirit of illumination; the priest heals the heart and soul by the spirit of compassion; the king subdues our rebellious affections by the spirit of sanctification.
The threefold office of Christ reminds us that in the person of Jesus is summed up the whole of the biblical narrative. Calvin is here offering a compelling way to make sense of a large block of diverse biblical data. It captures in one phrase the offices of ancient Israel and underscores Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic hope.
And for us today? Well, it shouts loud and clear that Jesus Christ is fully sufficient. In his roles as priest and king, Christ is the one who is both king and priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. As prophet Christ fulfills the messianic longing for the coming of the prophet like Moses: “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me [Moses] from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet. . . . I [the LORD] will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command” (Deut 18:15, 18). Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophet like Moses who will teach his people himself. He is our ever-present, ever-living teacher. We are to listen to him.
Heavenly Father, we hate to admit it, but emotionally we take a step back when we hear the word piety, not to mention the idea of being “zealous for piety.” Everything in the culture and (dare we admit it?) everything within us draws back from the idea. It sounds bland and uninteresting and slightly sanctimonious. Everywhere we’re told today to seek intelligence and cleverness and shrewdness. Not piety.
Yet, what is piety but all goodness and grace and devotion? In our best moments it is what our hearts long for. O Lord, incline our hearts toward bona fide, sterling piety. May we even be zealous to seek it out. In the holy name of the triune reality—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.