J. I. Packer
7
JOHN CALVIN: A
SERVANT
OF THE WORD
J. I. Packer
It is now four hundred years since John Calvin died. Why should we concern ourselves with him today? Why should we regard him as a man worthy of commemoration at the present time?
It would be answer enough to this question simply to point out that his influence on history was so immense that you cannot begin to explain modern Britain—England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland—nor modern Europe, nor modern America, nor indeed any English-speaking country anywhere, without making reference to him. You cannot leave him out of the story of any part of the Western world.
It is not always realized, but it is true none the less, that for a century and more after his death John Calvin was quite literally the world’s most influential man, in the sense that his ideas made more history than did the thoughts, or actions, of anyone else who was alive at that time. The epoch from the middle of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the age of Newton, in the last quarter of the century following, was in truth the age of Calvin.
For proof of this, think of some of its great men and movements. Think of the shaping of the churches of England and Scotland in the second half of the sixteenth century. Think of Jewel and Knox. Think of the Puritans in England, the heroes of the “second reformation” and the Covenanters in Scotland, the Huguenots in France, the Pilgrim Fathers in New England, the “Beggars” in Holland. Think of the revolt of the Netherlands, the English Civil War, and the continental wars of religion. Think of William the Silent, Gaspard de Coligny, Oliver Cromwell, John Owen, John Milton, and Richard Baxter. Think too of some of the great ideals for which men fought in those days. Think of the ideal of the Christian commonwealth, in which the national church and the civil government stood independent of each other, yet recognized each other’s divine authority and supported each other within their own spheres. Think of the ideals of toleration, of representative democracy, of establishing the rights and liberties of subjects, of constitutionalizing monarchy. Think of the ideal, dear to all the Puritans, of a universal Christian culture, in which the secular is seen to be sacred, and arts, crafts, sciences, and industries, all develop freely, harmoniously, and ethically, to the glory of God the Creator. The inspiration of all these movements and ideals, and of the men whom we have mentioned and many more like them, flowed directly from Calvin.
Without Calvin, Protestantism might well not have survived beyond the middle of the seventeenth century; for it is a matter of simple fact that the only Protestants who were prepared to stand and fight, to the last ditch if necessary, against Roman and Eras-tian tyranny, were the Calvinists. If we look at more recent history, and think of men like Edwards, Brainerd, Whitefield, Howell Harris, Wilberforce, Spurgeon, Carey, Henry Martyn, Moffat, Paton, McCheyne, we see at once that the evangelical movement which began with revival in the eighteenth century, and the social and missionary movements which overflowed from it throughout the nineteenth century, could not have been what they were without John Calvin; for these great leaders, and a host of others who stood with them, were all Calvinists in their basic creed.
Thus we may fairly say that if we are going to understand our religious and cultural heritage in this mid-twentieth century, it is absolutely essential that we should know something about Calvin. And that in itself would be sufficient reason for commemorating him now.
But my main reason for asking you to join me at this time in thankful recollection of John Calvin is that he is in a real sense a prophet for today, a man with a message for us and for our times. In his own life, he was God’s man for a crisis, ministering to a Europe that was in turmoil. And, though comparisons between one age and another are notoriously risky, and can easily mislead those who make them, I think it is quite certainly true that, so far as basic attitudes are concerned, no age since has been more like Calvin’s than is our own. At a deep level, our times are like his, and his teaching speaks directly to our own present need. An American tribute to Calvin, published in 1959, was entitled John Calvin: Contemporary Prophet.1 This estimate of Calvin’s significance for us is, in my judgment, sober truth.
Let me specify some of the main likenesses between Calvin’s day and ours that I have in mind.
First: we live today in a world torn by political unrest, the world of the iron and bamboo curtains, a world of upsurging rival nationalisms directed by absolute rulers. Ours is a world of wars and rumors of wars, a world of strain and tension and unrest and fear. And so was Calvin’s. The Europe of Reformation days was literally torn apart by the disruptive forces of nationalism. The background of the movement was a sequence of international crises, generated by European monarchs playing the Russian-roulette game of power politics. At the Eastern gates of Europe stood the Turks, the heralds of Islam, ready, it seemed, to pounce as soon as the Western states had weakened themselves sufficiently by internal strife. Martin Luther, surveying the times, was convinced that the second coming of Christ was imminent! Such was the world to which Calvin spoke: a world uncannily similar to our own.
Again: we face today a situation in which an inherited pattern of Christian civilization is disintegrating before our eyes. The ideal of a Christian commonwealth is giving way—in some parts of the world, it has long since given way—to that of a secular state. Christianity has come to be classed as a merely private interest, one which none should be hindered from following if they want to, but which has not the least claim to be treated as universal truth for the guidance of rulers and nations, and of public and corporate life. Christian standards and values, both personal and social, are being superseded by a “new morality”—or should we say a new immorality?—based on the essentially pagan ideal of self-realization and living “naturally.” Is this situation unprecedented? Not entirely. John Calvin faced something very similar in the Renaissance Europe of Reformation days. There, too, an inherited form of Christian civilization, that of the Middle Ages, was breaking up, and cultural and moral disorders were flooding in as a result. It is, incidentally, a striking fact that then, as now, impetus toward the break up was coming from members of a class of men who claimed the name “humanists.” I do not suggest that the outlook of a sixteenth-century Renaissance humanist and that of a twentieth-century scientific humanist correspond in detail: far from it. The few Italian humanists of Renaissance days who were forthrightly “secularist” and “new-moralist” in their attitudes were not typical of the champions of the “new learning” as a body. But I do suggest nevertheless that at the level of motivation, the motivation from which their name derives—that is, their anthropocentric preoccupation with releasing the powers and realizing the possibilities of man—the affinity between humanists ancient and modern is obvious.
Then there is a third basic likeness between Calvin’s age and ours. Today we face, in addition to political and cultural tensions, religious confusion which is deep and widespread. Disillusioned with the church as they have known it, and bewildered by a clamor of conflicting voices, all claiming to speak for Christianity, the minds of professed Christians are in a state of utter muddle concerning the things of God. This confusion centers upon three basic issues over which sharp conflict rages: the authority of the Bible, the grace of the gospel, and the unity of the church. John Calvin faced similar confusion, centering upon the same three issues, and it is striking to see how little, at the level of basic principles, the terms of the debate have changed since Calvin’s day.
Thus, the dispute over biblical authority remains approximately where it was. None of the modern developments in biblical study, important as they are in other ways, have altered the fundamental issues. All affirm that Holy Scripture is in some sense the inspired Word of God; so they did in Calvin’s day. But still, now as then, the Church of Rome tells us that the only way to be sure what Scripture means is to let her interpret it to us by the light of her own tradition. And still the principle of the ancient Anabaptists is maintained by modern liberal and postliberal Protestants. These moderns all hold in some form the position that the divine truth by which we must live consists of those convictions which we reach, or which reach us, when we go to the Bible asking whether its various teachings are right and true, and refusing to commit ourselves to them further than independent experience or reflection has led us to feel that they are valid. This formulation, dynamically interpreted, covers the diverse approaches of Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr, Tillich, and “honest John” Robinson, no less than the more old-fashioned liberalism of such men as Weatherhead, Soper, and Fosdick. But such approaches do not seem to differ in principle from the Anabaptist doctrine of the “internal word,” the word of God revealed in the heart and the conscience, which (it was claimed) is the God-given truth whereby we must judge the external word of Scripture; for, on the Anabaptist view, the external word was no further authoritative than the internal word confirmed it. Thus it appears that the basic terms of the three-cornered debate between what we may call “evangelical,” “traditionalist,” and “subjectivist” views of biblical authority, have hardly changed at all—nor, be it said, have Institutio 1.9 and 4.8 lost any of their relevance and cogency for settling it.
The situation is similar with regard to the second issue, concerning grace and salvation. Still, as in Calvin’s day, those who maintain the Reformation understanding of the gospel, the understanding set forth in the slogans sola Scriptura—solo Christo—sola fide—sola gratia (by Scripture alone—by Christ alone—by faith alone—by grace alone) find themselves obliged to fight on two fronts. Rome stands against them on the one hand, proclaiming, now as then, that the way of salvation in and through Christ is to commit oneself to Rome’s own sacramental system. On the other hand, they also have to counter the Christological inadequacies of such versions of the gospel as were put out in Calvin’s day by rationalists and mystics among the Anabaptists. Moralistic re-hashes of justification by works still pass for Christianity in many quarters, while self-styled radicals dilate on salvation as a state of new and authentic being, springing from some God-given inner illumination which, though linked with the Jesus of history, is not related in any direct way to His atoning work on the cross. This is the “existentialist” gospel of Bultmann and his followers. It is dressed up in Teutonic jargon to look like the last word in uninhibited modernity; yet in fact many Anabaptists in Calvin’s day, using a slightly different jargon, were saying just about the same thing. As John Wesley observed in another connection, we are but where we were.
On the third issue, concerning church unity, essentially the same question is being put to evangelical Protestants today as was put to their ancestors in Calvin’s day. It is asked: Is not all separation between organized Christian bodies sinful and schismatic? Does not the very nature of Christ’s church require immediate reunion?—and does not the duty to reunite require us to shelve our historic doctrinal debates as matters of secondary importance, more especially those which keep “protestants” and “catholics” apart? This, for substance, was the question put by Rome to the Protestant world of Calvin’s day, as she summoned the “separated brethren” to “come home” (see, for instance, Sadolet’s Letter to Geneva, with Calvin’s answer). Nowadays, it is our own fellow Protestants who pose the question; but Rome stands in the background, nodding approval, and it is clear where a journey which begins with an affirmative answer to this question will end.
Note, then, these striking correspondences between the situation which faced Calvin and that which faces us; and note, too, that Calvin coped with this crisis situation successfully, kept European Protestantism steady, and charted a straight course for the people of God amid all the storms and contrary winds that blew. It is no exaggeration to say that he saved Protestantism in his own day. Nor do I think it is exaggeration to say that he can save it again in ours, forlorn though our present prospects are (make no mistake about that!)—if only Protestants today will heed his message. We are going to look in a moment at some of the basic principles which guided Calvin, and by which he would guide us. God grant us ears to hear as we sit under the teaching of our great “contemporary prophet.”
Calvin’s Penetrating Mind and Humble Heart
Calvin held that the hand of God had been upon his life throughout. Reviewing it, one cannot but agree. The providential way in which he was brought to the post which he was so uniquely qualified to fill is particularly striking. The story is well known. In July, 1536, the month of his twenty-seventh birthday, and four months after the first appearance of the Institutio, Calvin, a Protestant refugee, left his native France for good: he sold up, and headed for Strasbourg, a Protestant center, intending to settle there. But a local war compelled him to take a long way around, and travel via Lyons and Geneva. He put up for a night at the Bear Inn in Geneva, meaning to travel on next day. From his language describing the incident, one would gather that he was incognito, and had no intention of making himself known to anyone in that city. But an old Protestant friend bumped into him, and passed the word around that the author of the famous Institutio was in town.
As a result, that evening, as he sat in his room, Calvin had a visitor: a huge red-bearded man, twenty years older than himself, with fierce eyes and a loud voice. This was Guillaume Farel, pioneer of the Reformation in Geneva, and senior minister there. He put it to Calvin quite bluntly that the latter ought to stay in the city and become his colleague in the work of reform. Calvin explained that he was temperamentally unfitted for public life, being nervous and shy, and that he needed leisure from regular employment to pursue academic projects that he had in mind. Farel rose to the occasion with imprecatory prayer, which turned Calvin’s dream of becoming a Protestant Erasmus into a nightmare. “After he heard” (Calvin wrote, twenty years after) “that I had some particular study for which I wished to keep myself free, when he saw that he could get nowhere by appeal, he even ventured upon a curse, that it might please God to curse my rest and the tranquillity for study that I was seeking if in such great need I should withdraw and refuse to give my help and assistance. This word frightened and shattered me so much that I set aside the journey I had planned. . . .” He felt, he tells us, “as if God from on high had stretched out his hand to stay me.” He remained at Geneva, first as Farel’s assistant, until they were both banished in 1538, and then, after his own recall in 1541, as senior pastor, till his death in 1564.
Calvin brought to his work at Geneva qualifications of mind and heart which made possible a unique ministry of amazing usefulness. I want to say a little here about the two key qualities which, as I see it, were together the real secret of his power and achievement. The first was his natural gift of penetration; the second, the supernatural gift to him of humility.
A word, first, about the former. Often when I hear and read what people say about Calvin’s outstanding intellectual abilities, I am left dissatisfied; they seem not to stress the right thing. It is not enough to say that Calvin had a razor-sharp mind, ready speech, and a fine literary style, true though all this is. What made Calvin great as pastor, teacher, theologian, controversialist, and church leader, the quality without which he could not have been great in any of these capacities, was his gift of penetration. It is this that needs to be emphasized. Penetration is more than a clear head and a good style. You can have these, and still lack penetration, just as you can be clever without being wise. Penetration is an aspect of intelligence. It is the power to see into people and get inside their minds. It is the power to see into situations and assess them realistically. It is the capacity to get to the bottom of things. This capacity Calvin had in full measure. It was this gift that fitted him for training as a lawyer, and no doubt his legal education at Orleans served to sharpen it. When he became a pastor, his gift of penetration was the first vital factor in his success.
It was this gift which, under God, made him great as an expositor. When he went to the Bible, he was able to see straight into the minds of the writers whose words he was reading, hence he could enter into their meaning, and bring it out, with an accuracy and point that was unsurpassed in his own day, and has given his commentaries an honored place on the shelves of theologians and pastors from that day to our own.
Again, it was this gift which, under God, made him great as a spiritual guide and as a controversialist. When men opened to him their confusion and perplexity of soul and conscience, he could always see what was at the root of their trouble, and speak to their condition, and, as we say, “sort them out” by bringing the Word of God to bear on them at the point of their real need. As his pastoral letters show, he was a superb physician of the soul, unerring in diagnosis and supremely skillful in applying the remedies of the gospel. Similarly, when he was involved in theological debate and, as was often the case, his adversaries were men of hazy minds and muddled thoughts, who put out their ideas in an imprecise and disorderly way, he could always see what they were really driving at and in his reply go straight to the heart of the matter in dispute. The secret of his ability to settle issues was his power to clarify them. He was an adversary to be feared, for he could always pick out the proper target to shoot at, and he never misfired.
Again, it was his gift of penetration that made Calvin great as a theologian. It was this that both prompted and enabled him to analyze every issue of truth in terms of the will and work and rule and glory of God. It was this that kept him consistently theocentric in his thinking, following out the viewpoint of the Bible. These are the first essentials of theological greatness, to which men without the gift of penetration, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, do not attain.
Calvin’s gift of penetration, though sanctified and informed by a regenerate heart, was in origin a natural qualification; his amazing power of insight would have made him a great man, even if he had not been a Christian at all. But this is not true of the second key to his power, the grace of humility. This quality was not natural to him in any sense; just the reverse. He was an intellectual, and as with many intellectuals, the natural temper of his mind was proud and arrogant. He was not humble by nature, but was made humble by grace. He saw his conversion as a humbling. “By a sudden conversion,” he wrote, “God subdued my heart and brought it to docility, though it was more hardened against such things than was to be expected of my youthful age.” Prior to this, he tells us, he was obstinate and opinionated—“passionately devoted to the superstitions of the papacy”—but in his conversion he was humbled and made teachable by sovereign divine grace.
What did it mean for Calvin to be humbled? It did not mean that from then onward Calvin pretended that his natural gifts and abilities were less than they were in fact. There is nothing unrealistic about humility, and such a pose, had Calvin affected it, would not have been humility. In fact, he knew his own ability, and never pretended otherwise. He always found it hard to suffer fools gladly, and to be patient with those who seemed stupid and slow—though the measure of patience which God wrought in him impressed those who knew him best as one of the most Christlike things about him. The mark of Calvin’s humility was not, then, any disclaiming of ability, but rather the submissive and receptive temper which his conversion wrought in him. “God subdued my heart”—the word suggests putting a bridle on an untamed horse. “God brought (my heart) to docility”—that is, God made him teachable. Submissiveness and docility, both in the highest degree, were the essential aspects of Calvin’s humility.
Conversion made Calvin submissive—so that when God called him to the Geneva ministry in 1537, though this call ran clean contrary to his natural hopes and wishes, and his natural ideas as to what he was suited for, he nevertheless submitted. And when, after three years of exile in pleasant company at Strasbourg, he was summoned back to his thankless Swiss pastorate, he submitted again. He did not want to return to Geneva—“I should prefer a hundred other deaths rather than this cross on which I should have to die a thousand times a day,” he wrote when the invitation came. But he did not play Jonah, running away from the call of God. To Farel, who had pressed on him the duty of returning, he wrote: “If I had any choice I would rather do anything than give in to you in this matter, but since I remember that I no longer belong to myself, I offer my heart to God as a sacrifice.” So back he went, for twenty-three more years of unremitting labor, till, worn out with illness and overwork, he died, in harness, as the sun went down on May 27, 1564. His seal showed a heart held by a large hand, with the motto Prompte et sincere—and his life was a sustained display of promptness and sincerity in submitting to the God who had made Himself the master of Calvin’s heart. Without complaint, discontent, or self-pity, he submitted to the rigors of health, circumstances, and the crushing load of spiritual responsibility, that God put upon him, and bore these burdens patiently till God gave him release. This was one side of his humility before God.
Conversion also made him docile. This, too, was a crucial element in Calvin’s humility. We are thinking of Calvin as a servant of God’s Word—and a man must be divinely humbled before he becomes capable of this service. Proud man naturally leans to his own understanding; he would far rather speculate and follow his own ideas than listen to God speaking in Holy Scripture. Calvin, however, was humbled and made teachable by divine grace, and from then onward his overmastering intellectual concern was to learn the truth taught by Scripture; to function as a faithful echo of Scripture in his own teaching; and to make an accurate application of Scripture to men and situations. There never was a less speculative, less opinionated thinker than John Calvin. No theologian or preacher has ever been more consistently and exclusively dependent on Holy Scripture. Thus, though the Institutio is a work of tremendous power, learning, and ability, a book which reveals a truly staggering intellectual grasp at every point, one cannot read a page of it without realizing that, for all its positiveness of assertion and sharpness in controversy, it is fundamentally a humble book. Though learned, it is the very opposite of sophisticated; it reveals its author as a man of a simple, childlike spirit. For Calvin never says: this is my idea. He only ever says: this is what Scripture teaches. The author of the Institutio displays no other intellectual interest than to echo and explicate the written Word: in other words, to be a loyal servant of the Word of God.
Such, then, was John Calvin, the brilliant boy from Noyon, transformed by conversion into a God-centered, God-mastered, God-honoring man who bowed humbly to God’s will and listened humbly to God’s Word, and whose tremendous powers of penetration and insight were put wholly at the service of the Scriptures. This was the man whom God could and did use to preserve Protestantism.
Calvin’s Greatest Accomplishment
If we ask: What was the greatest thing that Calvin accomplished? our answer must, I think, be: he wrote a book—the Institutio. He never did anything greater or more significant for the cause of God and the welfare of the church than that. Though he produced commentaries on almost all the books of the Bible, and separate tracts and treatises on almost every major issue in theology, Calvin was essentially a one-book man. He worked steadily on the Institutio for nearly a quarter of a century, from the first edition of 1536 to the sixth edition in 1559, revising, augmenting, rearranging, perfecting. All that he knew went into it, in the same way that all Dickens knew went into Pickwick Papers. The final product is a supreme masterpiece of theological and expository writing.
What is the Institutio? It offers itself to us as a compendium of Christianity. Its title proclaims it as not simply a book of theology, but also, and indeed primarily, a course in practical Christian living, a primer on godliness. Here is the full title of the first edition: Instruction (institutio) in the Christian religion, containing virtually the whole sum of godliness (pietatis, “Christian practice”) and all that needs to be known in the doctrine of salvation. A work very well worth reading for all Christians with a zeal for godliness. As Calvin developed it through successive editions, it became, as well as a handbook for the Christian, a textbook for the theological student, an introduction to Calvin’s own commentaries, and an apologia for every aspect of the Reformation. William Cunningham, that great light of the Free Church of Scotland a century ago, whom Charles Hodge regarded as the finest Reformed theologian in the world, called the Institutio “the most important work in the history of theological science”—and it does not appear that anything has happened in the last hundred years to challenge Cunningham’s opinion.
What do we find in the Institutio? Calvin would have answered that question biblically, and told us that we find there a summary statement of biblical theology and biblical religion, presented in order from the Bible’s own point of view. I would not dispute this claim—indeed, I would defend it—but for our purpose it is more helpful to answer the question historically, and to say that in the Institutio we find an integrating and systematizing of the total Ref-ormation understanding of Christianity. In it, Calvin appears less as an innovator than as a consolidator. He comes on the scene as a second-generation Reformer, and he sees his task as the conserving and confirming of the gains of the first generation. To his mind, all the main truths of biblical theology had already been drawn out and dealt with, more or less fully and more or less adequately, by his great predecessors, Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, and their associates. What was needed now was to synthesize their findings. That was what the Institutio set out to do.
The integrating concept which Calvin used to bind all this material together was one which unites in itself the whole of Christian doctrine, experience, and behavior—namely, the biblical concept of knowledge of God. The Institutio offers itself as a treatise on knowledge of God, dealing with both the knowing of God, which is religion, and what is known of God and about God, which is theology. Both these (Calvin holds) are directly correlative to God’s own Word written in Holy Scripture. They belong together; they should be treated together; and Calvin’s great book brings and holds them together.
To the question: What does it mean to know God?—what, in other words, is religion?—the Institutio replies somewhat as follows. Knowing God (it says, in effect) means this: to acknowledge Him as He has revealed Himself in Scripture; to worship Him and give Him thanks for all things; to abase oneself before him as a sinner, and to learn of Him as He speaks of salvation; to believe on the Christ whom He has set forth to be our Savior; to love the Father and the Son with a love answering the love that they have shown to us; to live by faith in the promises of divine mercy which have been given us in Jesus Christ; to sustain the hope of a joyful resurrection; to obey God’s law, and to seek God’s honor in all human relationships and all commerce with created things. This view of the life of knowing God is expounded in detail throughout the book.
To the parallel question: What is the intellectual basis on which this practical knowing of God rests?—what, in other words, do we know about God? the Institutio replies by subdividing the contents of biblical theology under four heads, and expounding them in four books. Book 1 deals with knowledge of God the Creator; book 2 with knowledge of Christ the Mediator; book 3 with knowledge of the grace of Christ in human life, through the work of the Holy Spirit; book 4 with the church, the sacraments, and civil government, which Calvin views as a means of grace. In this arrangement, Calvin is consciously following the order of the Apostles’ Creed—“I believe in God the Father . . . Jesus Christ . . . the Holy Ghost . . . the holy catholic church.” Under these heads, he claims to deploy the whole of biblical teaching. Having lived for fifteen years with the Institutio never far from my desk, and having observed, almost with awe, how constantly Calvin’s exposition anticipates, and in principle settles, theological and pastoral problems which are represented as novel, and peculiar to our times, I have learned to respect Calvin’s claim. The Institutio is emphatically a book for today—more so, I think we may safely say, than most of the religious books that will be published in 1965.
A Concern for God’s Truth
I have said that Calvin has a message for us, and for our time. Let me now focus this by asking: if Calvin were here today, standing where we stand on the Christian battlefield, facing the problems and pressures of the modern world, what are the chief concerns which he would feel, and which he would want to see us share? Our answer to this question can only, of course, be speculative; we can only derive it by reflecting on the thrusts and emphases of Calvin’s historic teaching as he spoke to his own times, and by seeking—as indeed we did earlier in this address—to see our times as he would have seen them. But nonetheless I think we may say with some confidence that Calvin, were he back among us now, would give us counsel on at least the following points.
First, he would urge us to share his concern for God’s truth—that is, for the inspiration, sufficiency, clarity, and authority of Holy Scripture, the written divine Word of which he was a servant, and which he describes as “the sceptre of God,” whereby God through Christ rules His church. Be jealous, Calvin would say, for Holy Scripture.
How did Calvin regard Holy Scripture? His understanding of this subject has been much muddied and misstated by oversubtle modern scholars, but in itself, as any reader of Institutio 1.6–9 and 4.8–9 will soon see, it is plain and clear. It focuses on two related ideas. The first is os Dei, “the mouth of God,” whereby in condescension He speaks to us, using words which we can understand. The second is doctrina, “doctrine” or “teaching,” the instruction conveyed by God’s verbal utterances. “Teaching from the mouth of God,” or, more simply and dynamically, “God speaking”—“God teaching”—“God preaching”: this is the essence of Calvin’s concept of Holy Scripture.
Commenting on 2 Timothy 3:16 (“all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”), Calvin crystallizes his view as follows:
He (Paul) commends the Scripture, first, on account of its authority, and, second, on account of the utility that springs from it. In order to uphold the authority of Scripture, he declares it to be divinely inspired (divinitus inspiratam); for if it be so, it is beyond all controversy that men should receive it with reverence. . . . Whoever then wishes to profit in the Scriptures, let him first of all lay down as a settled point this—that the law and the prophecies are not teaching (doctrinam) delivered by the will of men, but dictated (dictatam) by the Holy Ghost. . . . Moses and the prophets did not utter at random what we have from their hand, but, since they spoke by divine impulse, they confidently and fearlessly testified, as was actually the case, that it was the mouth of the Lord that spoke (os Domini loquutum esse) . . . we owe to the Scripture the same reverence which we owe to God, because it has proceeded from Him alone, and has nothing of man mixed with it (nec quicquam humani habet admixtum).
With this we may compare Calvin’s reference to the prophets as having “obediently followed as their leader the Spirit, who ruled in their mouth as in his own sanctuary” (commentary on 2 Peter 1:20), and some famous sentences from the Institutio:
“The full authority which they (the Scriptures) obtain with the faithful proceeds from no other consideration than that they are persuaded that they proceeded from heaven, as if God had been heard giving utterance to them” (1.7.1).
“Clear signs that God is its speaker (manifesta signa loquentis Dei) are seen in Scripture, from which it is plain that its teaching (doctrinam) is heavenly” (1.7.4).
“Being enlightened by him (the Holy Spirit) . . . we are made absolutely certain . . . that it (Scripture) has come to us by the ministry of men from God’s very mouth” (ab ipsissimo Dei ore ad nos fluxisse) (1.7.5).
“The apostles were the certain and authentic amanuenses of the Holy Spirit and therefore their writings are to be received as oracles of God; but others have no other office than to teach what is revealed and deposited in the Holy Scriptures” (4.8.9).
Such was Calvin’s understanding of the nature of Scripture and the meaning of inspiration. Did your eyebrows go up at his reference to its being “dictated by the Holy Ghost,” and to the apostles as the Spirit’s amanuenses—that is, secretaries? This language is frowned on today, yet Doumergue, Warfield, and others have shown that when Calvin and other sixteenth-century divines, both Protestant and Roman, used it, it was not intended to imply a psychological theory of the mode of inspiration, but was simply a theological metaphor conveying the thought that Holy Scripture comes to us from God uncorrupted, in just the form in which God meant us to have it: for what is written in Scripture bears the same relation to the mind of God which was its source as a letter written by a good secretary bears to the mind of the man who dictated it—a relation, that is, of complete correspondence, and thus of absolute authenticity. This, as our quotations showed, is the point which Calvin was concerned to make when he employed “dictation” language with reference to Holy Scripture.
What Calvin is saying can be put thus: that all Scripture has the character of the prophetic oracles, in the sense that all Scripture has a dual authorship. The prophets began their sermons by announcing: “thus saith the Lord” (literally, “oracle of Jehovah!”). This was to say, in effect, that the words which they spoke were to be heard and received as words from God: what came from their mouth was actually coming from God’s mouth. So it is, says Calvin, with all Scripture; not only the prophets, and the law, and those other passages where the claim to divine authorship is explicit, but also the psalms and the wisdom writings and the history books of both Testaments and the New Testament epistles, and indeed all sixty-six books of the Bible. All Scripture has the same double aspect: it consists of words of men which are also words of God, and so is to be received, every particle of it, as having proceeded from God’s very mouth. It is God’s doctrina, divine teaching all of it, given for our instruction. Over and over again Calvin uses doctrina as a synonym for “the Word of God,” “the teaching of the Holy Scriptures.”
Affirming the identity of what God said, and says, with what the biblical authors wrote, Calvin could hardly do other than maintain that everything written in Scripture is true, or, putting it negatively, inerrant. Nor in fact did he. It is true that biblical inerrancy is not a topic which he ever discussed directly; but then, he did not need to, for it was a matter of general agreement in his day, and therefore something which he could take for granted. Why should he waste time breaking down open doors? We cannot, therefore, reasonably extract from his lack of emphasis on this issue the conclusion that he was either unclear about it or indifferent to it. This conclusion, however, is drawn by modern scholars. Many since Doumergue have sought to play down Calvin’s identification of the words of Scripture with the Word of God, and to find room in his thought for the possibility that biblical assertions err in points of detail. Such a view, as recent debates have no doubt made us realize very vividly, is the thin end of the “liberal,” “subjectivist” wedge, and involves in principle the abandonment of the concept of inspiration which Calvin set forth; and if we can see that, it would have been strange had Calvin himself been blind to it. The fact that those who have fathered on to Calvin a willingness to admit errors in Scripture have been, without exception, scholars who had already given up Calvin’s concept of inspiration on other grounds, may fairly put us on our guard. But when we look at the evidence, all doubt vanishes. The attribution to Calvin of a willingness to admit error in Scripture rests on a superficial misreading of what he actually says.
The handful of passages in his commentaries which have on occasion been taken as affirming or implying that he thought particular biblical writers had gone astray prove on inspection to fall into the following categories. (1) Some are reminders of points where God has accommodated Himself to rough-and-ready forms of human speech, and tell us only that in such cases God is evidently not concerned to speak with a kind or degree of accuracy which goes beyond what these forms of speech would naturally convey. Thus, for instance, Calvin warns us that we must not expect to learn natural science (he specifies astronomy) from Genesis 1, which is written in popular phenomenal language. (2) Others say only that particular texts show signs of having been altered in the course of transmission. Thus, for instance, Calvin tells us that “by mistake” Jeremiah’s name has somehow “crept in” (obrepserit, his regular word for unauthentic textual intrusions) in Matthew 27:9. There is a similar comment on “Abraham” and the seventy-five souls in Acts 7:14–16. (3) Others deal with cases where apostolic writers quote Old Testament texts loosely; Calvin’s point in this group of comments is invariably that the apostles quote paraphrastically precisely in order to bring out the true sense and application—a contention strikingly supported by the modern discovery that this was standard practice among the rabbis at that time. (4) Others deal with a few points of what we might call formal inaccuracy by suggesting that in these cases no assertion was intended, and therefore no error can fairly be said to have been made. The inference is clearly unexceptionable if the premise can be established, for where no assertion is intended the question of falsehood and error cannot arise.
An example of this class of statements is Calvin’s denial that the evangelists meant at every point to write narratives which were chronologically ordered, leading to the claim that since they did not intend to connect everything chronologically, but on occasion preferred to follow a topical or theological principle of arrangement, therefore they cannot be held to contradict each other when they narrate the same events in a different sequence.
Another example (which Professor John Murray, perhaps rightly, thinks unhappy and “ill-advised,” but which clearly comes in this category) is Calvin’s suggestion that in Acts 7:14 (the seventy-five souls) and Hebrews 11:21 (Jacob’s staff) the writer may have chosen to echo the Septuagint’s mistranslation rather than correct it, lest he disconcert his readers or distract them from the point he was making, which was not affected by the mistranslation one way or the other. In these cases, Calvin implies, alluding to the incidents in the familiar words of the Greek Bible would not involve asserting either that the Septuagint translation was correct or that it expressed the true facts at the point where it parted company from the Hebrew. On neither of these issues would the New Testament writer be himself asserting anything, and consequently his formal inaccuracy in echoing the substantial inaccuracy of the Septuagint would not amount to error (false assertion) on his part.
Whether this line of explanation be accepted or not, it is clear that, so far from admitting that biblical authors fell into error, Calvin’s concern in his treatment of all these passages is to show that they did no such thing; and this is what matters for us at present.2
Rupert Davies, a liberal scholar who is not himself in sympathy with Calvin’s basic position, concludes his survey of the passages in question by saying that the most they can possibly prove is that Homer may have nodded—in other words, that in the course of thirty years of theological writing so prolific as to fill fifty-nine large volumes of the Corpus Reformatorum Calvin may on three or four occasions have broached a suggestion about a text which did not fit his doctrine of Scripture quite as well as he thought it did. “The instances quoted by Doumergue,” writes Davies, “are but drops in a bucket of unquestioning reverence for the words of Holy Scripture, and indicate at most that he was very occasionally in a long career untrue to one of his most dearly-cherished ideas.”3 This in itself should be enough to dispose of the assumption, made too readily by Doumergue and others, that these few passages are significant for Calvin’s view of inspiration; at most, they merely show even Calvin could on occasion fail to be quite consistent with himself. And even this may be thought to concede too much. It might be rash to affirm that Calvin’s handling of all four groups of texts which we mentioned was right in every particular, but I do not think it would be hard to maintain that it does involve not the least inconsistency with his doctrine of inspiration.
How, in the light of all this, should the authority of Scripture be conceived? Well, says Calvin, the first thing to be clear on as we approach this question is that the claim of Scripture to be believed and obeyed does not derive from the say-so of the church. When Augustine declares that had he not been moved by the authority of the church, he would not have believed, all he means is that the spectacle of the church’s faith prepared his mind to receive Christian truth on its own terms. Rome’s claim that the proper object of faith is her teaching, as such, and that canonical Scripture is to be received as such on her authority, is no less presumptuous than the parallel claim that canonical Scripture must be interpreted according to Roman tradition. Then, secondly, Calvin continues, the authority of Scripture does not rest on any judgment passed by the inquiring intellect. Rational arguments drawn from the remarkable qualities of Scripture—its majesty, consistency, antiquity, preservation, and so forth—can perform a real service in preparing us to acknowledge its inspiration and authority, and by showing such acknowledgment, which is an act of faith, to be eminently reasonable. But the true ground on which the authority of the Bible rests, Calvin maintains, is its divine authorship, the fact that it came from the mouth of the Lord. Its claim to rule our minds and lives is absolute, just because it is the Word of God.
Scripture is, in the last analysis, self-authenticating, says Calvin, as divine realities always are: those who have faith recognize its divine character in the immediate, unanalyzable way in which one recognizes a color, or a taste, by physical sense. About this perception of the divinity of Holy Scripture no more can be said than that it happens, and that inner certainty on the point is the sure sign that it has happened. If we ask: What brings it about? Calvin’s answer is: The inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Calvin’s conception of the inner witness is not of a particular kind of experience or feeling, as such, but of work of inward enlightenment whereby, through the medium of external verbal testimony, divine realities come to be recognized and embraced for what they are. Thus, it is through this inward enlightenment that we perceive the truth of the deity and mediation of Jesus, as set forth in the external witness of the gospel, and receive Him as the Savior of our souls. And it is through this same inward enlightenment that we recognize the divinity of the Scriptures, as witnessed to by Christ, prophets, psalmists, and apostles, and receive them, according to their own claims, as the Word of God to rule our lives.
In a well-known sentence from the Institutio, which we quoted in part before, Calvin writes: “Enlightened by Him (the Spirit) we no longer believe that Scripture is from God either on our own judgment or on that of others; but, in a way that surpasses human judgment, we are made absolutely certain, just as if we beheld there the majesty (numen) of God Himself, that it has come to us by the ministry of men from God’s very mouth” (1.7.5). The inner witness of the Spirit opens the blind eyes of the heart and gives us understanding, and in consequence we recognize and bow to the divine authority—the right to rule, the claim to dominate—which is inherent in the Scriptures, as the Word of the speaking God.
What has Calvin to say about the interpretation of Scripture? This: that, being as truly human as it is divine, it must be understood literally—that is, in the plain natural sense intended by the human writer; for it is by getting into the minds of the biblical authors that we get into the mind of God, from whom ultimately their writings came. We must first grasp their meaning, therefore, and then seek to apply what they say to ourselves and our own situation. In both stages of the interpreter’s task, but particularly in the second, we need the help of the Holy Ghost. Calvin’s handling of Scripture exemplified his principles perfectly. He approached his text asking, first, what its true sense was, and, second, what effect God meant its teaching to produce on himself and his hearers and readers. It was by persistently asking these two questions—surely the right questions—of every passage of Scripture with which he dealt, that Calvin became a biblical interpreter of such supreme quality.
Today, the ideas of biblical revelation, of inspiration, of interpretation, of the authority of Scripture, are back in the melting pot. On these issues, world Protestantism presents a picture of seemingly inextricable confusion. Subjective and skeptical principles effectively hinder many of our fellow churchmen (and chapelmen!) from receiving Holy Scripture as God’s Word and bowing without reserve to its authority. The crowning irony, and indeed tragedy, of this situation is that these Protestant brethren of ours actually invoke the leading of the Holy Spirit as justifying their departure from the teaching of Holy Scripture!
Calvin would answer them as he answered the Anabaptists, whose position was similar, by maintaining that the Holy Spirit does not contradict Himself. The Spirit’s work now, said Calvin, is to lead us to acknowledge the divine authority of the Scriptures which He inspired long ago; to interpret them to us, and to convince us of their truth, and to work in us a response to what they say. The spirit that leads men to disregard and contravene the inspired Scriptures is not the Spirit of God. So if we would be led by the Spirit, we must allow ourselves to be led to the written Word, to believe it, study it, preach it, defend it, and be subject to it ourselves. Contend for the authority of Scripture, Calvin would say to us. Revere Holy Scripture, and learn from it. All that is written is for our profit. Commenting on Romans 15:4 (“whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning”), Calvin wrote: “There is nothing in Scripture which is not useful for your instruction, and for the direction of your life . . . there is nothing vain and unprofitable contained in the oracles of God. . . . Whatever then is delivered in Scripture we ought to strive to learn; for it would be a reproach offered to the Holy Spirit to think that he has taught us anything which it does not concern us to know; let us know, then, that whatever is taught is conducive to the advancement of piety.”
Let Calvin examine us on this point. Do we profess faith in the divine inspiration and authority of Holy Scriptures? If we do, that is good; but in that case, we must ask ourselves: Do we adorn the doctrine which we profess? Do we labor to lay to heart the whole of God’s revelation?—or do we content ourselves with one or two favorite passages and one or two favorite doctrines and never go outside them? If we maintain that the whole Bible is the Word of God, Calvin would say to us, let us show that we are serious in what we say by taking seriously all that the Bible teaches, lest we discredit our own position and injure our own souls.
A Concern for God’s Grace
Second, if Calvin were back among us today, he would urge us to share his concern for God’s grace. Our review of Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture leads on naturally to this, for his view of Scripture was rooted in his doctrine of grace. Scripture was a gift of grace, according to Calvin, for it was precisely God’s means for bringing sinners to know Him and His Son. Without Scripture, there would be no knowledge of salvation. Calvin opposed both speculative thinking about God and self-righteousness before God (“natural theology” and “merit”). To him, both were instances of the same mistake—namely, trust in human ability, in the one case intellectual, in the other moral. Just as (said Calvin) it is a mistake to think that by one’s own unaided effort and free will one can gain righteousness before God, so it is a mistake to think that by one’s own unaided reflection and free thinking one can know truth about God. One effect of sin is to blind our minds, so that we cannot know God truly. But Scripture is given to supply our need.
Calvin’s illustration of this point is well known. We, he says, are like shortsighted people with damaged vision; there is a glorious revelation of the majesty of God in the created order, but we cannot see it without help. Scripture gives us the help we need, for it functions like spectacles. When we put on the spectacles—that is, when we learn of God from Holy Scripture—we find that we can then see the glory of God in creation; but we cannot begin to know God the Creator from our natural experiences and thoughts until we have first come to know Him through the Word.
Calvin calls us away from the delusive by-paths of natural theology, just as he seeks to divert us from the pursuit of self-righteousness and the dream of salvation by works. Realize your impotence and inability, Calvin would say to us; you cannot know God, or find salvation, without Holy Scripture. The Bible introduces us to God and leads us to Christ the Savior, who is its focal point and goal (scopus); and only so can we, as sinners, ever come to know God and obtain righteousness and acceptance with Him. We need the Bible in order that we may know God’s grace which it sets forth. Be jealous, Calvin would say to us, for the biblical doctrine of grace.
If you asked me to put in a sentence the thrust of Calvin’s concern here, I would say this: Calvin wanted men to know the grace of God as it is set forth in Romans, the epistle which he himself described as the key to Holy Scripture. In his own ministry, he was constantly laboring to inculcate this knowledge, as all his writings bear witness, and to remove two particular obstacles to it which he saw to be hindering many from grasping it.
The first obstacle, in Calvin’s day as in our own, was a shallow view of sin. Calvin saw that shallow views of sin destroy knowledge of the glory of Christ as Savior of the helpless and the unworthy. If fallen man thinks that despite sin he is still good at heart, still free for good, free to please God, he will trust his own works for salvation, and never learn to look to Christ as his righteousness. Therefore Calvin never tires of laboring the biblical insistence on the radical damage which sin has done to human nature. Constantly he stresses the wretchedness of the fallen human condition. Men think that Calvin was malevolent and misanthropic, because he regularly made so much of human wretchedness in his preaching and teaching. But why did he do it? Simply to make men humble before God, knowing themselves to be under sin, in order that they might then go out of themselves to find salvation in trusting the blood of Christ. In other words, Calvin’s motive was to 1ead men from Romans 1:18ff. through to Romans 3:21ff. This is not misanthropy, but true evangelism and pastoral care. All grace is found in Christ. Full atonement, plenteous redemption, perfect righteousness, is laid up for men in Him. But none receive it save those who are driven through self-despair to the Savior’s feet. Calvin therefore labored the seriousness of sin in order to engender self-despair, and so shut men up to faith in Christ, the perfect Savior.
The second obstacle, then as now, to a true knowledge of divine grace was a speculative view of predestination. How ironical it is that Calvin should be thought of as the great speculator about predestination! For he actually spent much of his ministry fighting speculative views of predestination—scholastic speculations, which reduced it to ineffective foreknowledge, on the one hand, and Anabaptist speculations, which reduced it to fatalism and obscured the universality of the gospel promise and the sufficiency of the atonement, on the other.
The keynote of his own treatment of this theme is his recurring demand for reverent submission to scriptural teaching. It is supremely important, he insists, that we should resolve to know no predestination save that which Scripture teaches. Where Scripture leads, we must follow; but where Scripture is silent, we must be content not to know.
Why is it that in the Institutio Calvin treats of predestination and election not in book 1 where he handles divine sovereignty in creation and providence, but later on in book 3, after dealing with the cross and the gospel and faith and repentance and justification and the Christian life and prayer? The answer seems to be: Because he wants the theme to appear in the same evangelical context in which it appears in Romans. Where does the theme of election enter in Romans? In Romans 8:29–30 (“whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son . . . whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified”). And what is the purpose of the declaration contained in these verses? Not to start a controversy; not to provoke speculation and academic debate; but to encourage the people of God, by confirming the fact that their justification and salvation sprang from the free grace of God, and therefore that God’s gracious purpose will stand, and they will be preserved to the end.
If God eternally resolved on their salvation before ever they repented and believed, He will certainly not abandon them now that they have repented and believed. This is the unspeakable comfort which the doctrine of election brings in Romans 8:29–38; and it is in order that it may bring this same comfort to his readers that Calvin holds it back until he can set it in an equivalent context in the Institutio. A glance at the opening paragraphs of Institutio 3.21 shows Calvin drawing out this “unspeakable comfort,” and justifying his onslaught against speculative conceptions—or, rather, misconceptions—of predestination by the need to keep this comfort intact for the people of God.
This is simply to say that the knowledge of election and predestination which Calvin sought to inculcate was not a theoretical knowledge, but the practical knowledge expressed in Murray McCheyne’s words:
Chosen, not for good in me;
Wakened up from wrath to flee;
Hidden in the Saviour’s side,
By the Spirit sanctified;
Teach me, Lord, on earth to show
By my love, how much I owe.
It is a knowledge of election as the family secret of the children of God—an open secret, certainly, but one which brings no comfort or benefit, because it has no application, until a man has come to faith in Christ and been adopted into the divine family. It is a knowledge of election which thrills and humbles, and drives a man to his knees to praise the God of his salvation as never before.
Were Calvin here today, he would tell us, I think, that most of our teaching about grace is pathetically shallow, and he would counsel us to seek a deeper view of sin and a truer view of the saving plan and action of God, and so get more realism and vigor into our Christianity, more life and more praise. And this leads straight to our final point.
A Concern for God Himself
Third, Calvin would urge us to share his concern for God Himself: God the Creator; God the Lord, God the Sovereign; the holy One about whom the Bible is always talking. At the heart of Calvin’s Christianity there was a vision and a passion. The vision was of God on the throne, God reigning in majesty. How often Calvin uses the words “majesty” and “glory”! How often he dilates on the greatness of God! The passion corresponded to the vision. It was the passion expressed in that great phrase which has become the slogan of Calvinism—soli Deo gloria! It was the longing that the Almighty Creator and Redeemer, the Source and Stay and End of all things, should receive the praise and worship and adoration that were His due.
Warfield insists that this passion, with the vision from which it derives, is the formative principle of Calvinism. He stresses that the focal center of the Calvinistic outlook is not justification, or predestination, or the “five points,” crucial though all these things are, but something greater still—not just a view of salvation, but first and foremost a view of God. What view of God? Well, Warfield puts it in better words than I can muster, so let me simply quote to you what he says.
It is the vision of God and His Majesty . . . which lies at the foundation of the entirety of Calvinistic thinking. . . . The Calvinist is the man who has seen God, and who, having seen God in His glory, is filled on the one hand, with a sense of his own unworthiness to stand in God’s sight as a creature, and much more as a sinner, and on the other hand, with adoring wonder that nevertheless this God is a God who receives sinners. He who believes in God without reserves and is determined that God shall be God to him, in all his thinking, feeling, willing—in the entire compass of his life activities, intellectual, moral, spiritual—throughout all his individual, social, religious relations—is . . . by the very necessity of the case, a Calvinist.4
And if Calvin could come back, he would tell us, I think, that our God was too small; and he would ask us whether we had ever seen the vision of God on His throne; and he would ask us to let him show it to us. “In your world that is shaken to its foundations by political and cultural convulsions, in days when your churches are weak and starving, in a time of fear and depression and discouragement,” Calvin would say to us, “this is the vision you need; and it is a vision that God will give you from His Word, as He gave it to me; all that you need is to learn to listen to what He says.” And then perhaps Calvin would point us to such a passage as Psalm 93, where the whole Calvinistic vision, and with it the whole Calvinistic confidence and the whole Calvinistic passion, is summed up:
The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty;
the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself;
the world also is established, that it cannot be moved.
Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.
The floods have lifted up, 0 Lord,
the floods have lifted up their voice;
the floods lift up their waves.
The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters,
yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.
Thy testimonies are very sure:
holiness becometh thine house, 0 Lord, for ever.
And let all the people say, Amen!