Introduction

keep Calvin to what he once said as though he had nothing more or new to say today! His work did not simply occur then; it still occurs today. In what he once said he still speaks, saying what he once wanted to say. We may not speak merely of Calvin’s historical impact; Calvin himself has an ongoing history into which we insert ourselves when we deal with him, in which we have a part to his honor or dishonor and to our own good or ill. Is not the history of philosophy also the history of Plato? Is not the history of modern Germany also the history of Bismarck? Is not the history of Christian theology also the history of Paul? Is it not true that four hundred years after his own lifetime Paul not merely had an impact but did something really new for Augustine, and that eleven hundred years later he said something really new to Luther? Might it not be that Jesus of Nazareth said things in John’s Gospel and the rule of St. Francis and Griinewald’s “Crucifixion” and the novels of Dostoyevsky that he did not say in the Synoptic Gospels? Is history, or, more pointedly, the historical in history, only a thing of yesterday and the day before and not also of today and tomorrow?

What is in the Institutes was certainly decided when Calvin set his hand finally to the work in 1559. Yet it is decided again in a distinctive way in our own eyes as we read the Institutes today. Let us see in what way it is decided in us and for us. Calvin can run through our veins like electricity so that we become Calvinian and are set under extreme compulsion and for this reason are supremely free, citizens of heaven and hence also resolute citizens of the world, watching and therefore hastening [cf. 2 Pet. 3:12]. But there are those with whom Calvin can do nothing but put them in the fire, and Michael Servetus is not the only one to whom Calvin has done this. You can clearly hear the cries of the burning in more than one book about Calvin, even in books that are brilliant. In power or weakness, for good or evil, and probably both, the work of Calvin is done in us if we give ourselves to him, and it is a different work from what was done four hundred years ago, yet his own original and highly distinctive work. The variety of historical phenomena, the multiplicity of historical individuals, the fact that I am not Calvin nor Calvin I, is undoubtedly a problem that confronts us, very true and very enlightening in its own way, but only as a fact, not as a metaphysical reality. We all indeed come up against this apparently undeniable fact of the absolute distinction between the I and the Thou, and it is in our better and most fruitful moments that we do so, not merely those who in obedience to the commandment love their neighbor as themselves, or would like to do so [Mark 12:31 par.],