John Calvin’S Doctrine Of God
5
JOHN CALVIN’S DOCTRINE
OF GOD
R. A. Finlayson
It has been claimed that the first word in the Calvinistic system is God; that John Calvin began where Scripture begins: “In the beginning God. . . .”
What does that mean? For John Calvin it meant everything, inasmuch as he viewed everything on earth and in heaven, in this life and the life to come, in its light. Calvin relates everything to God, and specifically to the God whom he discovered in the Scriptures.
The central fact of the system called by his name is, therefore, its vision of God. It has indeed been said, with some truth, that Calvin as a theologian is Calvin looking Godwards and telling the world what he sees, and doing it without personal bias or predilection, doing it in a manner that fills his own soul with awe and perhaps with shrinking. That is the distinctive feature of Calvin’s theology that marks it as different, that sets it apart from other systems, that it not only holds that God is God, but that it reckons with the fact in the entire practice of life. Though other systems give prime place to the doctrine of God, Calvinism accepts the implications of the doctrine in every sphere of thought and life more completely and consistently than any other system.
This was strikingly true of Calvin himself. If at any time he arrived at a conclusion from which, for personal reasons, he might shrink, he did not fail to state the conclusion, and, if he found it in Scripture, to stick to it. At the close of his life, shortly before he drew his last breath, he made the moving statement: “I never knowingly corrupted or distorted a single passage of Scripture.”
We make the claim, therefore, that of all the systems of theology, the one labelled Calvinistic seeks to do full justice to all, and not merely a part, of what it finds in its doctrine of God. Others may, and do, stop short when they find that the implications of the doctrine baffle their understanding, or offend their pride, or limit their autonomy. They thus tend to subordinate one truth to some other truth more congenial to their system. Calvin shows no such inhibitions. He constructs his system from the Scriptures with a vigorous logic that leads from consequence to consequence, from postulate to postulate, issuing often in a sense of antinomy, in antithesis and apparent contradiction. These great antinomies, great affirmations in the face of other great affirmations, Calvin holds in balance, recognizing that the seeming contradiction is due to our limited understanding, to our defective intelligence. He accepts the mystery, and holds in correct balance such seeming contradictions as divine sovereignty and human responsibility, God’s predestination and man’s free will, the divine election and the free gospel offer.
This balance introduces into Calvin’s system an invaluable principle, that of conformity within the analogy of faith. If the system is accepted as in conformity with Scripture, then dogma must be formulated, and Scripture itself interpreted, so as not to overthrow or contradict our system of revealed truth. There is thus a rule of faith that is normative for the whole system, and if it does not always teach us what to say, it teaches us what not to say. Modern theology has no analogy of the faith to safeguard, because it has no credal content. Anything goes!
Many attempts have been made to decide on a principle of Calvinism which unifies the whole, whether predestination, or particular redemption, or human depravity, or divine sovereignty. Calvin himself claimed that he merely sought to interpret the Scriptures—“to open up the understanding of the Scriptures” was how he put it in the preface to the first edition of The Institutes—and it is agreed that Calvin’s Commentaries, if not as readily accessible as The Institutes, provide as authoritative a source for the understanding of his theology. We could claim that the motto that dominates the whole Reformation movement, Soli Deo gloria, provides the key to Calvin’s theology. It is the glory of God that He is God and cannot be less than God. It is this that has led so many to discover the principium of Calvin’s theology in divine sovereignty. It were perhaps more truly described as the God who is sovereign—sovereign in all His manifestations and relationships.
We claim, however, that if divine sovereignty be accepted as the formative principle in his system, it is because the Church and theology needed Calvin to restore the doctrine of God’s sovereignty to the fundamental position it holds in the Bible. However we define it, it is God, the centrality of God, that is pre-eminently the basis of Calvin’s system.
Count Zinzendorf of the Moravians referred to Calvin’s theology slightingly as “the theology of the Father,” owing to the supreme place that it gave to the First Person as the representative of the honor and majesty of the Deity. Too often the demand for what is called a Christocentric theology has been but an attempt to evade this centrality of God. It is done in the spirit of compromise as a means of getting rid of some of the less comfortable aspects of the doctrine of God. The Apostles’ Creed confesses: “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” before it confesses: “And in Jesus Christ His Son.” That was the true Christian approach in every age. The theology of Schleiermacher was the first to be labelled Christocentric, and it soon became apparent that it was in reality anthropocentric. It forgot that man exists for the glory of God.
Calvin’s attitude to this preoccupation with man, even with his salvation, is tersely expressed in his Epistle to Sadoleto: “It savours little of the true theologian to attempt to compare man to himself so much rather than to command and instruct him that the beginning of directing his life aright is to increase and show forth the glory of God. It is for God above all things,” he concludes, “that we are born and not for ourselves.” Not without reason, therefore, was the Reformation spoken of as the discovery of God in His sovereign holy centrality.
It cannot be said that Calvin made any very original contribution to the doctrine of God in general beyond what he had inherited from Athanasius, Augustine, and Anselm. It is in the application of his doctrine of God that he broke new ground, or rather, shed fresh light on ground already traversed. It has to be borne in mind that The Institutes, like the Westminster Confession of a later day, was designed as a manual of religion rather than a textbook of theology. This was the authentic Reformation outlook: it was a “rediscovery of Christianity as religion,” as Warfield expresses it.
In most systems of theology our knowledge of God is generally distributed under the headings of His Being or Substance; His Character or Attributes; His Will or Purposes; and His Manifestation or Works. It is not at all easy to adopt this arrangement in dealing with Calvin’s doctrine of God for the reason, already indicated, that he is concerned with God as the object of religious reverence, rather than as the object of speculative thought, as for example in the case of Zwingli.
The General Doctrine of God
We may look in passing, and it is no more than a cursory glance, at three sections of his doctrine of God—His Nature, His Character, and His Will—that we may be the better able to study how he applied that doctrine to the various spheres of human knowledge and conduct.
God’s Nature or Subsistence
In dealing with the nature of God Calvin disclaims the “presumptuous curiosity to attempt an examination of His essence which,” he adds, “is rather to be adored than curiously investigated.” He regards consideration of the nature and attributes of God as more a matter of the heart than of the understanding. And so he leaves the great topics of the existence, the nature, and the attributes of God without formal or detailed discussion in The Institutes. In the depth of His being God is to man past finding out. “His essence,” he says, “is incomprehensible, so that His divinity wholly escapes all human senses.”
Concerning the essence of God, Calvin mentions only two qualities which Scripture attributes to Him, immensity and spirituality. He speaks of God as “of eternal infinite spiritual essence,” and adds, “who also alone has in Himself the power of existence from Himself and bestows it upon His creatures.”
The depersonalized God of modern theology, however, has absolutely nothing in common with Calvin to whom God is Lord and Father to His creatures. He would be the first to recognize that without personality in God religion would be impossible, and in any case a God who is not a person, who lacks the attributes of personality as we know them, is inferior in the scale of being to man himself: he is a mere impersonal concept which we have generated from our own imagination, an idol of our own creation, Calvin would undoubtedly call it.
It has, however, to be recognized that in the exposition of the subsistence of God Calvin put the finishing touches to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity undertaken by Origen, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. It has been supposed, and often asserted, that the Reformers, and especially Calvin and Melanchthon, were indifferent to the doctrine of the Trinity and passed it over lightly as something of an embarrassment. This is wrong. The doctrine had been inherited from the unbroken Church and was not in dispute.
To Calvin the doctrine of the Trinity meant the completeness and all-sufficiency of God. It meant that God was complete in Himself and required nothing outside Himself in order to have perfect realization and fulfillment. In Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, He possesses the highest form of communion, self-revelation, and self-giving. He is not a unipersonal Being, aloof and alone, but a tripersonal Being in the active life of an eternal fellowship, to which neither the creation of the world nor the salvation of man can add anything.
This is what makes Calvin suggest that vitality is given to God only by the trinitarian conception of Him. And so he insists on teaching the doctrine “vitally” rather than scholastically. To him tripersonality was another “special note” of God to be placed alongside His immensity and spirituality, not as something by way of addition, but as entering into the very idea of God. Hence in Calvin’s opinion there can be no such thing as a monodistic God, for a divine monod is to him less conceivable than a divine Trinity.
Calvin eschewed the speculation and illustration of so many of the Early Fathers, but insisted, in his Catechism of 1532, that “our intelligence is not able to conceive the Father without at the same time comprehending the Son in whom His living image is repeated, and the Spirit in whom His power and virtue are manifested.” To illustrate this, we note that Calvin starts with the creation of heaven and earth as the foundation of all revelation. But he makes this the introduction to two further articles of faith when he asserts for Christ and the Holy Spirit the category of creator. Hence the activities of God in redemption and regeneration partake of the absoluteness of His activities in creation.
Where Calvin makes a valuable contribution to the doctrine is when he insists, in opposition to the subordinationism introduced by the Eastern theologians, on the perfect and complete equality, of the Three Persons within the being of the Godhead, and the self-existence of each of them as Father, Son, and Spirit, thus attributing perfect and absolute divinity to the Son and the Spirit as to the Father. The doctrine of the Trinity was to Calvin, Warfield says, a “postulate of his profoundest religious emotions and was given indeed with his experience of salvation itself.”
God’s Character or Attributes
With regard to the second head of the doctrine of God—the divine character, or what is commonly called His attributes—Calvin is, in this also, practical rather than speculative.
Though the attributes of God are made the main subject of two chapters in The Institutes, one discussing in detail the revelation of the divine perfections in His works and deeds, the other the revelation He made of them in His Word, it is true that neither in Calvin nor in Zwingli do we meet with a formal doctrine of the attributes or with any attempt at classification. It is significant, perhaps, that in the first edition of The Institutes Calvin did attempt a classification of the ethical attributes, but they fell out of the further editions and were never afterwards developed. Calvin does not so much neglect the attributes as deal with them in a practical way so as to focus attention on what God is to us. As Thornwell has put it in this very connection: “What He is in Himself is past finding out, what He is to us has been made manifest.”
What we call the attributes of God became to Calvin the sum of our knowledge of Him. And so the attributes are rather mentioned in connection with God’s works and manifestations in the world below. For example, He “sustains the world by His immense power, governs it by His wisdom, preserves it by His goodness, rules over the human race especially by His righteousness and justice, bears with it in His mercy, defends it by His protection.”
Two terms Calvin uses frequently of God are “severity” and “clemency,” severity in God’s attitude as Judge of the world, and clemency toward the penitent sinner, inculcating in His creatures the response of fear and trust. Lord and Father are the designations Calvin most frequently applied to God, and it is not too much to say that for him true religion involved the recognition of God, not only as Lord, but as Father also. The sense of the divine Fatherhood is as fundamental to Calvin’s conception of God as is that of divine sovereignty. Indeed his doctrine is outstanding among Reformed statements in the commanding place it gives to the divine Fatherhood. A sovereign is how Calvin conceived of God, and in his view God’s Fatherhood and love did not divest Him of those fundamental attributes which constitute Him the upholder and vindicator of moral law in the universe.
But, let it be emphasized again, Calvin is insistent that God is not properly conceived of unless He is conceived of in all His perfections. This for him preserves the unity of God. While we recognize that God in Himself is more than the aggregate of all His perfections, His revealed attributes tell us what God is to us, and that, according to Calvin, is all we need to know. But God is wholly in each of His attributes. Every attribute of man is limited by the finitude of his nature, so much justice, so much mercy, so much love. But in God each attribute is the perfect and complete expression of His nature. It would be legitimate, even, to conceive of God as just possessing one attribute, say holiness or goodness. Whether it manifests itself in justice or love or compassion or mercy, it is just the holiness or goodness of God manifested in the particular situation that it meets with. It must, therefore, be a legitimate inference to draw from Calvin that whatever attribute in God we may recognize or designate in a given situation, it is the nature of God manifesting itself in circumstances in which a particular aspect of His character comes more clearly to view.
Thus we see that the entire discussion of the character of God is directed in Calvin toward a religious, rather than a philosophical, end.
God’s Will or Purpose
To Calvin, as to the biblical writers, the will of God is the expression of His character. What God is determines what God does and how He does it. In other words, there is nothing arbitrary in any of God’s acts: they are the free expression of His nature and character.
To say, as is frequently done, that Calvin reduces God to the bare notion of arbitrary will without ethical content is, therefore, untrue to Calvin’s teaching and is based, probably, on a misunderstanding of his use of the term “the will of God.” Here Calvin differed from the Schoolmen. The opinion held by Aquinas and Duns Scotus that an expiatory sacrifice for sin, for example, might, if God had so chosen, have been dispensed with, found no countenance with the Reformers who took their stand on the immutable character of the divine righteousness, and on the idea of the Moral Law as founded, not in the mere will of God, but in His essential nature.
There is in Calvin, in any case, no reduction of God into pure and naked will. Nor does he teach that the divine will is the only and sufficient cause in the universe, though he does assert that all that takes place must take place in accordance with the divine will. This he explains by saying that whatever God has willed will certainly come to pass, although it comes to pass “in such a manner that the cause and matter of it are found in second causes.” So little is he inclined to reduce the Father in Heaven to bare will that he speaks of “the fiction of absolute power which, as it is profane, so ought to be deservedly detestable to us,” and again he speaks of those who are “profanely safeguarding His righteousness from His power.” Thus the will of God is to Calvin the complete expression of the divine perfection, and for him there is no belief in the true and living God without belief in the predestinating will of God.
This raises Calvin’s treatment of the doctrine of the divine predestination. The doctrine itself is not included in the Geneva Catechism, and it is only at the end of the third book of The Institutes—what may be called the last book of his theology proper—that Calvin discusses predestination. In the first edition of 1536 the doctrine is not dealt with as a special topic: it appears, as if it were incidentally, in three or four passages in connection with the negation of human merit. The first direct exposition of the doctrine appears in 1537 and then as the development a posteriori of an experiential fact. In 1539 The Institutes contain a chapter devoted to predestination—the eighth chapter out of a total of seventeen. The doctrine thus stated met with objections which called for more exact statement, and in the last edition in 1539 he arrives at his doctrine of Double Predestination, that of the righteous and that of the wicked. It is now recognized that if it is not the foundation of his theology, and we hold that it is not, it is certainly the keystone which sustains the edifice. Its affirmations rest firmly and squarely on the sovereignty of God
By the sovereignty of God, we understand, put in very simple terms, that God makes His own plan and carries it out in His own time and way.
If God is intelligent—and He is Supreme Mind—He must plan. That plan Calvin expounds as the decree of God. As all God’s acts constitute one system, so all God’s decrees constitute one purpose. While we are wont to speak of decrees in the plural, because with our finite understanding we grasp God’s plan only partially and in fragments, it is in reality only one decree constituting one plan. God’s decree is eminently rational, the outworking of the Supreme Mind, and the product of all His attributes.
Then, if God is almighty —and He is Unlimited Omnipotence—He must carry out His plan. The sovereignty of the eternal Throne is engaged in the execution of the will of God.
And if God is all-wise—and He is Infinite Wisdom—He must carry out His plan in His own time and way. Any change would be a reflection on the wisdom of His design as well as on His power of execution.
It is, thus, not possible to conceive of anything interfering with the complete and perfect exercise of the divine sovereignty. The least interference or interruption would reflect on His intelligence, or His power, or His wisdom, and He would no longer be God.
The Doctrine of God Applied
I now propose to examine how Calvin applies the ruling principle of divine sovereignty in three spheres that are relevant to our study—the spheres of knowledge, of salvation, and of providence. In the sphere of knowledge, it is the sovereignty of divine revelation; in the sphere of salvation, the sovereignty of divine election; and in the sphere of providence, the sovereignty of divine foreordination.
The Sphere of Knowledge: Revelation
We believe that self-revelation is a quality of the divine nature, and that it is as natural for God to reveal Himself as it is for the sun in the heavens to shine. But we do not have, therefore, to believe that God was under necessity to reveal Himself either in the creation of the universe or in the “garnishing of the heavens.” Self-revelation belongs to the ineffable fellowship of the Blessed Trinity and can be perfectly fulfilled in the interrelations that we believe to exist within the Trinity. God is thus self-sufficient and He does not need to bring any of His ideas into outward realization by means of a universe.
Yet in sovereign grace God chose to let His self-manifestation flow beyond Himself so that the universe now reflects His nature and His character. This is Calvin’s starting point in dealing with the knowledge of God. “There is not an atom of the world,” he says, “in which you cannot behold some brilliant sparks at least of His glory . . . for the exact symmetry of the universe is a mirror in which we may contemplate the otherwise invisible God.” This is what has been called Calvin’s philosophy of nature: It would be better termed his theology of God and of His creature man.
“Our doctrine,” Calvin remarks, “in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom consists almost entirely of two parts, the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” To Calvin the capacity to know God is man’s great spiritual endowment. All men everywhere and at all times, have been endowed with the capacity to understand and develop an acquaintance with God. This is what he calls the semen religionis which is inherent in the very constitution of man’s nature. Thus the revelation and the response are alike of God’s creation. God, who is the fount of being, is also the source of knowledge, and the very principles by which man is capable of knowing anything have their termination in God the Creator. While we could legitimately define religion as man’s response to the self-manifestation of God, Calvin would rather say that the capacity for religion is inherent in man, and is aided from without by the creation in which, as in a mirror, the perfections of God may be contemplated.
By thus placing the origin of the whole revelational process historically in the creative act of God, Calvin teaches that the sovereignty of God is perfect and absolute. As this applies to the general revelation of God, so it applies to the special revelation. Recognizing that all have “degenerated from the true knowledge of God” and that it is a false God that sinful man now conceives of and worships, Calvin adds: “it remains for God Himself to give a revelation concerning Himself from Heaven.” In Scripture we have this revelation. “It must be considered as a fixed principle,” he says, “that in order to enjoy the light of true religion, we ought to begin with the doctrine of Heaven and that no man can have the least knowledge of true and sound doctrine without having been a disciple of the Scriptures.” Scripture, quite apart from its doctrine of redemption, was necessary even to give us “a just and lively description of God as He appears in His works.” How much clearer is the face of God in Christ the Mediator!
Calvin does not make the sharp distinction that later theologians make between the content of general revelation and that of special revelation. Both are of God, both are equally valid and authoritative, and Calvin asserts that “the qualifications thus enumerated (in the Scriptures) are just those which we saw shining in the heavens, and on earth, compassion, goodness, mercy, justice, judgment, and truth.” He thus takes pains to make clear the harmony of the description of God given in the Scriptures with the conception of Him we may draw from His works, the Scriptures being but a plainer republication of the general revelation of God given in His works and deeds.
This is in line with Calvin’s later teaching which links redemption also with the general character of God. Though he gives soteriology a prominent place, he claims that it is not the whole of theology. The self-revelation of the Infinite must be regarded as the foundation of theology. Even in special revelation, it is still the sovereign Creator that Calvin is speaking about. In order to make the divine revelation effective, God not only presented us with this supreme objective evidence of Himself in Scripture, but He gave the creative Spirit, who acted as the author of Scripture, to enlighten men’s hearts and minds to understand and appropriate to themselves the revelation of Himself. It was needful, he points out, “that the same Spirit who spake by the mouth of the prophets should come into our hearts and touch them to the quick.” Elsewhere he states his position even more clearly: “Accordingly we need not wonder if there are many who doubt as to the author of Scripture, for although the majesty of God is displayed in it, yet none but those who have been enlightened by the Holy Spirit have eyes to perceive what ought, indeed, to have been visible to all, and yet is visible to the elect alone.”
Thus Calvin attributes to the creative sovereignty of God the revelation of Himself, the entire character of Scripture in which the saving revelation is given, and the quickening of the human heart to respond to it. It is this sovereignty, testified by the Spirit in our hearts, that gives supreme authority to the revelation.
To Calvin all revelation bears on its face this mark of the divine sovereignty. This must be so in the very nature of the case. A time-conditioned creature cannot think in terms of eternity: the only source of man’s true knowledge of eternal things is from God, Who alone can think in eternal categories, and so reveal the truth to us in the measure in which, by His enabling grace, we can bear it.
The Sphere of Salvation: Election
It is in the third book of The Institutes that Calvin deals with election and reprobation, and then only as deductions from a consideration of the extent of the Spirit’s work in regeneration. Since the work of Christ is not efficacious for all men, although Christ is freely offered to them in the gospel, the reason for this must be in the predestination of God. This is different from foreordination. The predestination of God is His eternal decree by which He has determined in Himself what He would have become of every individual of mankind. All are not created for the same destiny. Some are predestinated to eternal life, some to eternal death. The election of the one class leads to eternal life by the effectual calling and saving work of the Holy Spirit, the destruction of the other class is secured by their own wickedness. By their faith the one class make evident their election, by unbelief the other class make evident their reprobation. Here we have the clearest application of the divine sovereignty.
Salvation entails on the part of God the full choice of the objects of His mercy, and this choice is an eternal election from God’s side. That means that what God does in time in the salvation of souls, He willed to do in eternity. This is really a tracing of the experience of salvation back to its roots in the sovereignty of divine grace. In this connection it is interesting to note that the term elect is applied to none in the Scripture except those who are in Christ, and Calvin himself, as already indicated, places his exposition of this doctrine in book 3, after he had dealt with the doctrine of salvation in Christ. Election is thus viewed and interpreted in the light of an experience of salvation, the context in which it becomes meaningful.
It is in light of the fact that all are not put in possession of salvation that Calvin expounds the corollary of election, reprobation. On both he is equally emphatic as disclosures of the will of God given in Scripture. “The predestination by which God accepts some to the hope of life, and adjudges others to eternal death, no man who would be thought pious ventures to deny,” he affirms with perhaps a confidence that not all the pious nowadays share. Notwithstanding, he makes an essential difference between election and reprobation. While “unconditional” is a term applied to both, since both proceed from the free and sovereign will of God, the distinction lies in the fact that while men are saved by an act of absolutely free and unmerited grace, without regard to faith or good works, men are condemned on the ground of their own sin. This is in line with Paul’s argument that while the vessels of mercy were afore prepared by God unto glory, the vessels of wrath were fitted for destruction, fitted not by God but by their own character and conduct.
While it is clear that Calvin attributes their reprobation to the decree of God, he does not suggest that the decree is the ground of condemnation, or the cause of their corrupt state. He indeed teaches a positive decree of reprobation involving more than mere preterition, involving a foreordination to damnation, but it must be remembered that Calvin does not present foreordination as the cause of acts in the sphere of human responsibility, even when the decree makes their occurrence certain. In other words, the judicial reprobation need not be viewed as merely a purpose formed in eternity and therefore unconditional, but as having its termination in time as the inescapable sequel to a career of impenitence and sin.
Uneasiness has been expressed by many true Calvinists that in Calvin himself, and in many of the formularies based on his system, notably the Irish Articles and the Westminster Confession of Faith, the decree of salvation is referred wholly to grace, while the decree of reprobation is referred wholly to justice, and to God’s inscrutible sovereignty. Two considerations have to be borne in mind. It must not be overlooked that within the decree of reprobation, so to speak, there is the operation of kindness, goodness, forbearance, and mercy to those who persist in rejecting the overtures of peace, and that there must be somewhere, in the light of their refusal, a place or point where forbearance goes no further and holy equity takes over and the rebel is abandoned to his deserts. And then, as already indicated, the whole nature and character of God must be seen to be expressed in this manifestation of justice, and not merely one attribute of His being. The whole wealth of His nature is poured out in this administration of His justice, and good and gracious and holy ends are, we doubt not, being served by it. It is a vindication of all that He is as a great God and a Savior.
In short, we do not know why the elect are chosen, but we know why the reprobate are condemned, and Calvin would have us rest there. “Wherefore,” he says, “let us in the corruption of human nature contemplate the evident cause of condemnation rather than enquire into a cause hidden and almost incomprehensible in the predestination of God.” Of the doctrine of reprobation he uses words, often quoted against him: “It is an awful decree, I confess,” with the variant renderings of “a dreadful decree,” and “a horrible decree.” The actual words of Calvin—decretum horrible—are capable of a better translation. The Latin horribilis is a derivative of the verb horreo, meaning “to tremble,” or “to stand in awe.” The words of Calvin could, therefore, be appropriately translated “an awe-inspiring decree.” And that eminently suits the subject.
The decree of election, on the other hand, he expounds, not only in the interests of his leading principle, the glory of God, but for the comforting and strengthening of God’s people. In one of his sermons on Ephesians he observes, “There are two principal reasons why this doctrine should be proclaimed and why it has great utility for us . . . one is that God may be magnified as He deserves, the second is that we may be certified of our salvation in order that we may invoke Him our Father in full liberty.” He concludes: “if we have not these two things, woe to us, for we have neither faith nor religion.”
Thus the doctrine of predestination in its aspects of election and reprobation has the double significance that it affirms the divine independence and at the same time assures the believing soul of his salvation.
What is important to note, as we conclude this section, is that the sovereignty of a holy God, showing favor to some, and injustice to none, does not reflect a parsimonious heart, but can be viewed in the wider perspective of the salvation of a multitude which no man can number as the consummation of His sovereign purpose. Calvin somewhere introduces the thought of Augustine approvingly to this effect: “It is judiciously remarked by Augustine,” he says, “that there is the brightest example of gratuitous election in the Head of the Church Himself, that it may not perplex us in the members. He did not become the Son of God by living a righteous life, but was gratuitously invested with this high honour that He might afterwards render others partakers of the gifts which were bestowed on Him.” This would point to Christ the Elect of God as the Head and Representative of a new humanity who should be members of His body and partakers of His gifts.
This is the thought elaborated by Abraham Kuyper and B. B. Warfield. “The sovereignty of God,” says Warfield, “lays the sure foundation for the salvation of the world. God and God alone saves now, and in His own good time He will bring the world in its entirety to the feet of Him whom He presents to us as the Saviour of the world, of whom He has disclosed that He has made propitiation, not for our sins only, but for the sins of the whole world.” Warfield concludes in these heart-lifting words: “Christ has been made head over all things to His Church, and the rate of the Church’s progress to its goal, the nature of the progress, the particular individuals who are to be brought into it, are in His hands and under His control. . . . His people may be few today, the world will be His people tomorrow.” Calvinism can accept this, in the face of every evidence to the contrary, because it rests utterly and completely on the sovereign grace of Almighty God, not as a parsimonious gift to the few, but as the outpouring of the bounty and unlimited wealth of the divine nature.
The Sphere of Providence: Foreordination
Calvin explains his doctrine of providence thus: “By providence we mean, not an unconcerned sitting of God in heaven, from which He merely observes the things that are done in the world; but that all-active and all-concerned seatedness on His throne above by which He governs the world which He Himself has made.” And so he concludes: “That Providence, therefore, which we ascribe to God, pertains as much to His operating hands as to His observing eyes.”
Here, then, the transcendence and immanence of God meet in the history of the world and the experience of individual men and women.
The transcendence of God means that God unceasingly rules by His providence in pursuance of a purpose. There we enter the field of foreordination, rather than that of predestination. The world in all its parts and processes and stages and forms of life is the outcarrying in time of one divine plan, conceived in the eternal reason of the Godhead and realized by creative power, wisdom, and love. The relation of this divine purpose in eternity to its execution in time is the dominant thought in Calvin’s theology in general, and in His doctrine of providence in particular.
On the other hand he proclaims the immanence of God who, as he puts it, “everywhere diffuses, sustains, dominates, and quickens all things in heaven and in earth,” who “circumscribed by no boundaries, by transfusing His own vigour into all things, breathes into them being, life and motion.” Thus God acts in all things, acting from within outwards, from the center of every atom and from the innermost springs of life and thought, of feeling and will, a continuous sequence of cause and effect.
Calvin’s doctrine of providence singles out what he terms “three distinct elements in regard to the government of the world.” These he calls, respectively, general providence, particular providence, and special providence.
By general providence Calvin means that by which “God directs all creatures according to the condition and property which He has given to each in forming them.” This direction is no other, Calvin adds, “than that which we call the order of nature,” which gives to human nature itself its plenitude and completion.
Particular providence, by which God works in His creatures to subserve His goodness, justice, and judgment, directs the effects of general providence on human nature.
Special providence is the operation of saving grace, so that human nature is restored and brought into obedience.
In all this the action of God is absolutely sovereign, for all the means to execute His desires and to accomplish them in and through His creatures are at His disposal. God having fixed the laws of the universe, and given life to His creatures, makes use of these laws and these creatures to accomplish His will and realize His plan.
If it be conceded that, in the familiar words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, God “foreordains whatsoever comes to pass,” or in Calvin’s own words, that “He so overrules all that nothing occurs without His command,” and that nothing in heaven or earth falls outside His ordination, then there must be some explanation of evil and its entrance into and operation in the world, that shall safeguard the divine character. Calvin deals with this. The will of God he holds to be the necessity of all things, yet God is not the author of evil. The wicked can do nothing without His appointment, yet His holiness is not tarnished by their evil deeds. Calvin’s statement is clear in itself, if not in its application: “God works His purposes by means of the wicked, so that the sanctity which is in Him does not justify them at all, while the infection that is in them does not contaminate Him at all.”
Lecerf has stated the Christian position tersely thus: “For the Christian who has been apprehended by the sovereign God, there is no such thing as the problem of evil; there is only the mystery of evil.” This I presume means God’s sovereignty solves or evaporates the problem, but does not illumine the dark mystery.
There is the further difficulty of reconciling the expressions of God’s desire for men with God’s absolute decree concerning man. It would seem clear that God wills with genuine desire when He does not will by executive purpose. This has led theologians to make use of the two terms, the decretive will and the preceptive will of God, or, His secret and His revealed will. For example, it is revealed that God would have all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth, while He has not decreed universal salvation. Commenting on 2 Peter 3:9, Calvin says: “But it may be asked, If God wishes none to perish, why is it so many perish? To this my answer is, that no mention is here made of the hidden purpose of God according to which the reprobate are doomed to their own ruin, but only of His will as made known to us in the gospel. For God there stretches out His hand, without a difference, to all, but lays hold only of those, to lead them to Himself, whom He has chosen before the foundation of the world.”
Thus it cannot be said that God merely desires the ultimate salvation of all men without also desiring their repentance and faith and sanctification: for, as Calvin says, that would mean “to renounce the difference between good and evil.” The position could thus be more clearly put as meaning that God desires all men to be righteous in character and life and to use the means He has appointed to that end. It is in harmony with the revealed will of God that without the use of the means appointed by Him the end shall not be attained. As a holy God, the Creator commands all His moral creatures to be holy, and He cannot be conceived as in any way obstructing their pursuit of holiness by His decree.
There is room left, also, for the full exercise of human responsibility in regard to one’s own salvation and that of our fellow men. Calvin affirms in clearest language the reality of human freedom as a natural endowment of man, and of man’s responsibility for his voluntary actions.
But this freedom is only one factor in the complicated web of human life. There is always the other factor of external providence which has a profound bearing on human choices and often decides the line of action which man deems it right to take. And providence is the sphere of divine foreordination. There is thus in every human act a concurrence of two lines, divine sovereignty and human responsibility, appearing to move along parallel lines, but meeting, as all parallel lines do, in infinity. God is the highest cause of everything that happens. In His plan He uses angels and demons, sinful men and regenerate men. In His infinite wisdom He treats every agent according to its nature, doing violence to none, predestinating and preserving man’s responsibility and accountability. “It does not prevent,” as Calvin puts it, “each creature whether in heaven or on earth from having and retaining its quality and nature, and following its own inclinations.” Thus each realizes his nature and his destiny fully, in accordance with eternal law. This is as true of the wicked as of the righteous, of angels as of devils. An angelic nature brings forth angelic fruit and enters upon an angelic destiny; a devilish nature brings forth devilish fruit and enters upon a devil’s destiny. It is so because in the nature of things it cannot be otherwise. God is responsible for the law that governs the case in each instance; He is not responsible for the fruits.
In the light of all this, it may perhaps be legitimate to sum up, as A. A. Hodge does, that God can determine any action without causing it, and that while His decree determines everything, it causes nothing.
Modern indeterminism would seem irreconcilable with Calvinistic foreordination. But indeterminism, as now proclaimed, merely goes to say that events are not predictable because the laws of behavior are not determinable. But that brings us only so far as human knowledge and observation and experiment go. They do not reach as far as the law and will of God go. To human observation and experiment many phenomena are indeterminable, but that is because observation and experiment cannot penetrate far enough. It is true that this argument of indeterminism may be pressed into the service of the autonomy of man and the freedom of human will and action as uninfluenced by anything outside man himself.
While Calvin accepts the freedom of man to make his choice and determine his course of action in the line of his personal choice and, therefore, of his nature, that does not leave him truly free. He is still at the command of his nature and very often its mere slave, and in the doing of evil the nature is not uninfluenced by forces from without. Christian liberty, however, is of a different order since grace acts from within. It is a misconception to suppose that by irresistible grace is meant an ab extra coercing influence. Calvin, like Augustine, delights to present it as the law written on the mind and the heart, indicating that grace acts from within, so that there is no longer any resistance or any desire to offer it. To be made willing in a day of God’s sovereign power is the highest liberty, enlisting all the faculties of mind, heart, and spirit. As a bird is free in the air and a fish in the sea, each in his own native element, so man is truly free in the will of his God.
Thus divine providence presents to us the only constant and immutable thing in the universe, the will of God. What is known to us as natural law, or the law of human thought, is constant only insofar as it is an expression of the will of God. The will of Almighty God is the dominant factor in every situation, the only source and pledge of fulfillment for the entire nature of man, and for the destiny of the universe.
It is true, as the late Daniel Lamont once pointed out, that the word sovereignty does not fully define the gracious relation of God to man. That is, he thought, why so many shy at the word, and rest content with the assurance that God is love. But, as he pointed out, the love of God detached from the conviction of His sovereignty, wields no power. It is in the context of sovereignty that the Bible speaks of His love. It is the love of the Lord God, of the Sovereign Father. That sovereignty in its many-sidedness sweeps the entire moral universe and shall one day sweep it clean of all taint of moral evil. True, it does not in the here and now shed light on everything we want to know. There are hidden depths, as Professor Lamont remarked, in the counsels of the Godhead. The greatest Christian thinkers in every age have tried, not to probe the mysteries of the divine will—Calvin has sufficiently warned us against that presumption—but to find a resting place for their minds in the presence of these mysteries. And like Paul the Apostle they found rest at the place of wonder, adoration, and praise, as with him they exclaim: “Oh, the depth both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out. For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things, to whom be glory for ever and ever, Amen.”