Introduction

merely in morals but also in relation to God. This is not something given. It has to take place. We have to agree with Calvin, too, that the Bible must be viewed as the great, unique proclamation of this event. But perhaps we have to make the distinction rather differently so as to bring out the fact that the biblical history only proclaims the sacred history, salvation history, the history of God, the history that is the meaning and content of all history, and that seeks to speak in and above and beyond all so-called secular history.

Calvin himself did not keep consistently to the line of distinction that he usually drew. Thus in his 73rd sermon on Job (34, 145f.) he expressly said that we must not only profit from what is contained in holy scripture but also have the wisdom, when we read what pagan writers have to tell us, to apply to ourselves what God did there. As we see from the context, he had in mind only divine judgments on the ungodly; and in the many passages in which he ascribed to pagans some knowledge of the good, and indeed of eternal life and even of God himself, he always insisted that this served only to make them inexcusable. Yet he fully integrated world history into the history of God even though, unlike Zwingli,4 he found salvation history, and the community of the elect, only in biblical history and the related history of the Christian era. The latter point involves breaking through the mythological biblicism that in Calvin — I have in mind especially his view of the relation between the OT and the NT — points everywhere beyond itself. In discussing his concept of holy scripture we shall have to speak expressly of the way in which he looked ahead in this regard.

But that is not now our concern. We are looking at the rule that history is life’s teacher in the light of which Calvin could view secular history also as sacred history. For my part I would like to make this saying the methodological principle of all the semester’s work. That we should learn from history Calvin argued at the end of sermon 79 on Deuteronomy (28, 682-83 [on 32:5-7]) on the simple ground that we humans are not oxen or asses that know only the present but have a reason that embraces things past and things to come.> We have, then, a sense of time. For Calvin this meant at once that we are able to “dispose of things ourselves.”¢ Again,

By (IR Sve MSE 4. Cf. Zwingli’s On Providence (1530), Z 6, 3, 182, 15-16, and 224, 30.

5. CR 28, 682.

6. Ibid.