§6 Calvin (part 2 of 2)

49. Marginal note “31, 26!”; cf. CO 31, lohoe 50. Cf. Calvin's letter to Farel dated 10.24.1540 in CO 11, 100; also Henry, I, 379f.; and for a copy of the seal cf. E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin, vol. I (Lausanne and Neuilly, 1899), 569.

51. See above, 44, 46.

I,

Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

obedient, but obedient because they are the recipients of grace. They may and must obey, but they have no rights because they do so. Rights are God's alone. Those ‘who are obedient et have been condemned to

may debate ahechet his concept c:

came to him — Duns Senorheni Luther by way of Bucer. We can be sure, however, of his primary interest in this view of God. He experienced too many human errors and weaknesses and defeats even in those who were supposedly obedient not to have an urgent concern for the safeguarding of the purity of the origin of all obedience, the divine character of grace, against every confusion with our own actions that are always so questionable. Just because Calvin was so much an ethicist, he had to be such a strong dogmatician. His own Reformed, ethical reformation had to raise the question what we are to think of that which actually takes place in time, in the world, in life. His concept of God, which at once puts another great question mark after all human action as soon as it takes place, was Calvin’s own answer. This concept shows us how sharp was the criticism under which he placed himself and his own primary thrust. Neither a religious admiration of his individual genius nor a doctrinaire approach can help us at all precisely at this central point in explanation of Calvin.

In this context I might say a provisional word about the distinctiveness of Calvin's theology. I noted earlier, and it is also an implication of what I was just saying, that I regard his concept of God, insofar as it is characterized by the doctrine of predestination, as a return to Luther for the sake of safeguarding his own ethical thrust, though in the process the Lutheran concept acquired a certain frenetic sharpness that we see only rarely in Luther himself, above all in his Bondage of the Will.52 If, as so often happens, we find the distinctive feature of Calvin in his concept of God as it is characterized by the doctrine of predestination, the thesis suggests itself that his theology is simply a new edition of Luther's with a greater stress on ethics. Apparently supporting this view is the fact that Calvin almost always spoke of Luther in grateful recognition while often ~ to some extent disparaging Zwingli.°> But perhaps we should not attach basic significance to such personal sympathies and antipathies, which in

52. WA 18, 600-787 (1525).

53. Cf. Calvin to Bullinger, 11.25.1544 (no. 586), CO 11, 774; to Farel 2.26.1540 (no. 211), CO 11, 24; and The Second Defence against the Calumnies of Joachim Westphal (1556), CO"; 51. any case find expression, so far as I know, only in his letters. Especially in relation to Zwingli I would hazard the guess that what instinctively offended the aristocratic Calvin was simply the brash, bombastic, even rather vulgar element in him. The two,shared the same starting point in contrast to Luther. What we have just said c cannot a this fact.

oe one dane feature. and i

and_in ener position in the Institutes it was simply a second feature that is dealt with only in book Til'as a corrective designed t

to emphasize and strengthen the “doctrine of justification. The first feature of Calvin's concept of God is “the th

thought of his divine sovereignty, which we also find, of course, in Luther, but not at any rate in the primary way in which it was at once for Calvin the basis of the relation between Lord and servant, the ethical relation between

God and_us. It is here in the first feature that we find ent en Soe that which is common to the starting points of Calvin and Zwingli. It is not, so far as I can see, that Calvin took over Zwingli’s approach directly, just as we cannot prove that he took over Luther’s concept of predestination directly. Why should he not have arrived at both independently, since they were both so important and necessary to him in his own context? It is true that the two concepts were not first thought out by him. Luther was the first to advance the thought of justification by faith alone, and Zwingli was the first, resolutely at least, to advance that of the indirect identity of faith and obedience. Clearly in view of Calvin’s relation to his predecessors, Dilthey allowed himself to call Calvin a powerful but not a creative thinker.>4 The question arises, however, whether we should not regard the way in which Calvin combined the two thoughts as itself very creative.

But however that may be, it is obvious that as regards originality Calvin stands most improbably in the middle between the pure types, Luther and Zwingli. These two had in fact exhausted the two great possibilities of the Reformation. Only the possibility of synthesis remained. Synthesis, or union in the serious sense of the term, was the original contribution of Calvin. In keeping with the situation of conflict in the later Reformation period he built a structure that ‘was open to fellow believers on both sides. Synthesis is not possible without renunciation. That meant forgoing any further new possibilities. It meant the end of reformation. To have made this act of renunciation was Calvin's theological

54. Dilthey, “Das natiirliche System,” 229.

Calvin, Luther, and Zwinghi

greatness. Undoubtedly connected with this is the fact that his writings and sermons do not, when we read them, make anything like the direct impression of spirit and life that those of Luther particularly do. If we look at this Frenchman for what one might call esprit or pointe we will be disappointed. His originality is for the most part not one of detail. If we do not see it blazing across the whole, we will not see it at all. Present here is something of the renunciation that characterizes his whole life’s work. It is part of his tragedy, a necessity.

Calvin was a man over whose vitality a deep shadow lay. He himself also cast the same deep shadow over the vitality of others. Over his whole life and works we might inscribe the saying in John’s Gospel: “He must increase, but I must decrease” [3:30]. For undoubtedly this deep shadow is the same as his knowledge of God. What did that knowledge mean for him but obedience? And what did obedience mean but subjection, order, discipline, to which the lively and colorful movement of natural life had to adjust itself? “Man is something that has to be overcome” (Nietzsche).>° Thus Calvin as a man became an ascetic, not to gain merit like the usual ascetic, but simply for the sake of his ministry, for how can one give God the glory without strictly disciplining oneself? As a Christian, then, he became involved in politics and organization, not because he had any natural desire for such things — he would rather have become and remained a quiet scholar — but how could he be a Christian without cooperating in the building up of the community of God which to the glory of him who has called it shapes its life according to his commandments in things both small and great, both inward and outward? Hence again, as a theologian, he became a systematician, surely not by inclination, for by inclination he would rather have been a historian, but how can we think and speak about God as we should so long as caprice reigns, so long as a comprehensive survey has not found out of the fullness of the possible that which is true and valid, and given it a self-contained structure?

I need hardly point out how closely this tendency in Calvin is related to the total historical situation of Protestantism between 1525 and 1555. This flame was what was needed now. The older Luther could not be this flame, even less so Melanchthon. Zwingli was dead and might never have blazed up in this way. Calvin was the flame. But the flame necessarily consumed even as it flared up. Not without penalty does one become an

55. E Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-84); cf. Werke, vol. Il, ed. K. Schlechta (Munich, 6th ed. 1969), 321. ascetic, Organizer, or systematician. A man of this kind is the first to feel the pressure he brings to bear on others, and it weighs heaviest on himself. Look at portraits of Luther and Calvin together, and you will see what I mean. Are

we not tempted to think that

it was no accident that all his life Calvin was a sick man, and that at the end he was visited by a whole series of serious illnesses?** This man could not be healthy. It was as if God in all his holiness stood between him and what we call a happy life, taking from him all that is visible in order to be able to give him all that is invisible.>7

He had much the same impact on others. The constraint and threat under which he stood worked as such on those who witnessed this life. On his deathbed he said of the people of Bern that they always feared him more than they loved him.*8 But this was true not only of the people of Bern. After his death the secretary of the Genevan council wrote of him that God had impressed upon him a character of so great a majesty (Staehelin, II, 372).5? Among all the tributes of admiration and respect that have been heaped on Calvin I know of none more profound or powerful, but also more disquieting. Majesty as a human quality! How much else, how much that is beautiful, or worthy of love, or prized by all of us, has to be lacking or given up or sacrificed for matters to be thus and this impression to be left! But again, could we think in any other way of the last reformer, the man of the late Reformation summer?

Calvin became a moralist. I intentionally say moralist and not just ethicist. The way in which he put his thoughts into practice in Geneva leaves us in no doubt that the first of the two terms is appropriate here. Certainly Calvin preached God and grace and faith, and did so unambi uously. Before. God we have no. righteousness, no moral righteousness

But once his

⁵glance nee this height of “knowledge to fall on us — dud |

56. On Calvin’s health and illnesses cf. his letter to the Montpellier doctors, 2.8.1564, CO 20, 252-54.

57. Marginal note: “21, 44!” In CO 21, 21-50, we find Beza’s account of Calvin's life. Barth in his copy at col. 44 underlined the saying of Calvin to Beza: “Lord, you pound me, but it is enough for me that it is your hand.”

58. Discours dadieu aux ministres (1564), OS II, 404, 6f., with a probable reference to Bern.

59. Stahelin gives as the source of this the council minutes, but it does not occur there in CO 21. For a slightly different version cf. E. Choisy, Létat chrétien calviniste a Geneve.... (Geneva, 1902), 9

AN

_it

is distinctive of ih Reformed to look from the height of God directly at us — nothing 1

remains but a

moraloutlook and accusation and demand. In Calvin, as we see from his sermons, even the proclamation of grace” wears a moral garb. This is what we have to hear and understand and take to heart and believe. For Calvin divine service was a parade ground on which imperatives held sway in every relation. We cannot really learn to know the details of the Genevan system that is so much admired without words like “tyranny” and “Pharisaism” coming almost naturally to our lips. No one who has proper information would really have liked to live in this holy city. But that simply shows that we do not live in a time of Reformation conflict, or in a time of Reformation at all. Without the severity of “Thou shalt” there would never have been a Reformation nor will there ever be again.

It is part of being a prophet — look where we will — to be at least very close to tyranny and Pharisaism. Prophets who want to translate their visions into reality — and those who did not want this in some way would not be genuine prophets — will usually end up, unless they meet an early heroic death like Zwingli, perhaps as tyrants and Pharisees, but at least as moralists. The logically necessary end of the historical path from Luther to Zwingli and Zwingli to Calvin was Calvin’s Geneva, just as the logically necessary end of the path from Moses to the prophets and the prophets to Judaism was the synagogue. Who would have the boldness to argue that this historical path of the Reformation did not have to be taken and trodden to the very end? There is no standing still in history, not even at points like Luther's Wittenberg tower experience, at which one might say to the moment: “Please linger, you are so beautiful.” Or was the worldly post-Lutheran Wittenberg with its carousing in the shadow of the forgiveness of sins the legitimate outcome of the Reformation? Certainly it was a shattering tragedy that the triumphant establishment of Calvin's ordinances should be the necessary and legitimate outcome of what Hutten and Albrecht Diirer had once hailed as the dawn of a new human day.®!

60. Cf. Goethe’s Faust, I, 1700.

61. Cf. Hutten’s letter to W. Pirkheimer, 10.25.1528, in Ulrich von Huttens Schrifien, vol. I, ed. E. Bécking (Leipzig, 1859), 217. No similar saying of Diirer is known, but cf. Dilthey’s “Auffassung und Analyse des Menschen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” in Wéeltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation, vol. II of Gesammelte Schrifien (Leipzig and Berlin, 1914), 51. For a saying of Erasmus like that of Hutten cf. J. Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters... (Stuttgart, 1938), 39f and cf. Schwenckfeld above.

p22

But we can wish this tragic conclusion away only if we do not see that the true goal of all such historical paths lies on the far side of historical reality, so that the end of all such /istorical paths cannot be anything other than tragic, cannot have any ogher meaning than that of a return to the beginning, and beyond the beginning to the origin and goal that within the human and historical and temporal are always and everywhere the concealed meaning and purpose of all such paths. If we see that, then we will certainly not want to varnish over or glorify Calvin’s parade ground, but we can integrate it into the peaceful work of a truly historical view that reckons with the ultimate things and can thus bear it that here and now we encounter only penultimate things. In that case we cannot avoid admitting that in spite of the not unjustified charge of tyranny and Pharisaism this end to the Reformation had its own greatness and worth as compared to other possibilities.

Calvin dealt rather harshly with those who opposed his thoughts and plans, which he equated with the cause of God. In this regard we do not find the. coarseness of a Luther in his writings, but we do find a wholly distinctive sourness and bitterness that give us some idea of what it meant to be harried by him, when once recognized as an enemy, until he had finally made an end either one way or another. We cannot excuse this side of his nature by pointing out how loving and sensitive he was with his friends and with all who were favorable to him. This fact was of little help to a Servetus or a Bolsec or a Castellio. We have to say, however, that Calvin's severity was closely related to the historical situation at the end of the Reformation. Calvin was confronted by Ignatius Loyola, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Council of Trent. In his beleaguered fortress suspicion was rightly or wrongly rife. In the evil 1540s even Luther, as we know, lost for the most part his urbanity and sociability.

Calvin's severity was also linked — and this is the main point — to the great saving or destroying either-or that hung like a sword of Damocles over humanity and over every individual, and that for him resulted directly from the knowledge of God, a thought whose critical significance he felt like no other reformer, and perhaps like no one at all until we come to Kierkegaard, in whom we find the same severity. May I remind you again of the opening of the Geneva Catechism, which tells us expressly that those who do not glorify God in their lives have sunk to the level of the beasts.°2 Those who saw the value and meaning of human life in this way

62. Cf. above, 76; and OS II, 75, 10ff; BSRK 117, 15-17. were engaged in an existential conflict of which they were themselves truly the first and most suffering of victims, but the horrors of which they did not think they could spare others. Calvin was not giving way to passion when even in his Bible commentaries he at once spoke of dogs and swine if he saw the sanctuary of truth violated.® It was instead his calm and well-considered view that those who did such things did not deserve to be called human. On one occasion (Staehelin, II, 377f.) he solemnly protested that it was not out of personal hatred that he dealt with his opponents as he did.°4 Even allowing for every possibility of self-deception, why should we not just as well believe him as not believe him? But he thought — and this is connected with the unity he saw between being a child of God and a servant of God — that he might and should be angry on the basis of God’s own anger. In the short sketch of his life in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms he saw himself in the situation of King David, the type of Jesus Christ, who was constantly burdened with wars against the Philistines and other foreign peoples, but who was even more harassed by the disloyal among his own people. Hardly had he achieved rest before he had to endure another conflict.> And almost always the battles were for that which was for him highest, for the totality. When it was a matter of the glory of God and his truth, he would rather be enraged than not, lest the dishonor staining the divine majesty should fall back on his own head. That was what he said in his fight against Castellio (381).°° Referring again to his anger later, he said that it was as if he could do no other, as if he were caught up by a whirlwind (383).97

We cannot ignore the fact that in such claims, and in the reality behind them, we reach and perhaps pass over the frontier that separates the divine from the demonic. Calvin himself was aware of this frontier and would often at least to some degree restrain himself. We may draw too close to the fire of God from which the average person is too distant. When that happens, what is holy turns into what is definitely unholy. At this point the word “tragedy” suggests itself again, and we must remember

632 OniPsy 1016, CORB1) 119;

64. Calvin to N. Zurkinden, 7.4.1558, no. 2908, CO 17, 235f; and Stahelin, II, 381f.

5), (CO) Bil, BH 66. Calvin to Zurkinden, February 1559, no. 3023, CO 17, 466. Barth quotes from Stahelin, IJ, 381.

67. A 1556 letter, no. 2573, CO 16, 369, quoted from Stahelin, II, 383.

a

that there is no tragedy without guilt. But for all our sympathies with the unhappy victims of this elemental event, we are called to be judges of Calvin only if we, too, consciously stand in the great crisis in which he stood day and night, and if in this crisis we show more humanity than he actually did. Those who live with smaller views of a smaller cause than Calvin's really find it much easier to be less severe than he was.

As a final point I would mention the decided orientation to the next world that governs all Calvin’s life and work. No reformer was more strongly shaped than he was by the antithesis of time and eternity. For him, what we may be and have as Christians was promise and no more. Those who really have the promise have the gift of the Holy Spirit; they have all that we can have here and now. And for him this having was wholly and utterly expectation and no more. The saved are those who stand in this expectation and who, expecting, are obedient servants. It is at this point that we find Calvin's distinctive christology and eucharistic teaching in which Christ, not omnipresent but enthroned at God’s right hand in heaven, is present to his own by the unheard-of miracle of the Holy Spirit in faith, a sign and pledge that is visible to faith. We cannot possibly explain this teaching in terms of the secondary need to mediate between Luther and Zwingli. We find expressed in it an original concern that we find everywhere in Calvin, a concern for the distance that true fellowship between God and us involves. This concern explains why Calvin confronted the whole colorful world of phenomena with such remarkable and painfully serious restraint. Whenever he spoke about the world and humanity as they are, he at once turned with an almost audible jerk to that which is before and above all creation.

Reference has been made to his asceticism in the world, to his pessimism.°8 In him we find as little of the supposedly French joy in the concrete and real as we do of the French esprit, so that Bauke’s idea of the decisive significance of the fact that he was French seems as little illuminating from this angle as from the other.®? Thus far I have been able to discover, along with theology, church, and state, only one field in which with some forgetfulness of self Calvin displayed an affectionate material

68. Cf. M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, vol. I of Gesammelte Aufiitze zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen, 2nd ed. 1922), 118, where Weber argues that Calvin's asceticism differs from that of the Middle Ages by dropping the evangelical counsels and coming into the world.

Calvin, Luther, and. Zwingli

interest. That, strangely enough, was everything connected with astronomy and meteorology, a field that by its nature was adapted to serve as a parable at least of his great “Lift up your hearts.” We have to search his works with a magnifying glass to find any traces that he could laugh. He did not play the lute like Luther and Zwingli. He once took a modest six-day vacation in the environs of Geneva. He liked to play with house keys in what is described as a rather doleful way. But these seem to have been his only pleasures.71 He apparently saw little of the aesthetic charm of Lake Geneva over which his windows looked. He was totally devoted to his cause. He resembled very closely one who was spiritually akin to him in the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux, who once rode the whole length of Lake Geneva without being able to remember that he had seen it.”* To this day Reformed Protestantism has not been able totally to rid itself of this dedication. It will not and should not. Yet we are surprised.

We may well ask why there was this turning from the world when the Reformation became Reformed and sought to turn zo the world. We will try once again to apply our double principle of explanation. When Calvin looked back on his decisive years, he finally saw the burnings under Francis I in Paris. Throughout his life his daily thought was to care for the persecuted, for those languishing in prison or the galleys, for those anywhere in the world who for the sake of the gospel were threatened with death or were the victims of it. He was also concerned for the pressure and threat under which the cause of God itself stood. Calvin felt that he had a part in all this, that he bore responsibility. No other reformer felt the burden of responsibility so keenly. Can we be surprised, then, that he could not live lightly; that he quantitatively restricted his attention to and affection for this-worldly things; that he concentrated all his energies on the minutest point, for theology is indeed the most minute of this-worldly things; that he found in looking at eternity not only the comfort but also the courage to work and not despair73 in evil days? Yes, that is how it is

69. Bauke, Probleme, 14.

70. On Gen. 1:16 (1560), CO 23, 22; also Advertissement contre l’Astrologie quon appelle judicaire... (1549), CO 7, 513ff.; and on meteorology, CO 38, 78, on Jer. 10:13 (1563), and CO 28, 376, on Deut. 28:12a. Barth refers here to the eucharistic Sursum cordato denote a main concern of Calvin; cf. his La Forme des Priéres et Chantz ecclesiastiques of 1542, CO II, 48, 24-32; cf. Tracts and Treatises, Il, 121£.

71. Stahelin, I, 402, and the whole section 393ff.

72. Ibid., 397F.

73. The familiar title of a Carlyle selection by K. R. Langewiesche (Diisseldorf, when a person really turns from God to the world in order to understand the world in relation to God, and to win it for him. Basically at least there will then usually be that jettisoning and disparaging of this-worldly things. For there can be no understanding or winning of the world without an overcoming of the world, and no overcoming of the world without abstinence from the world.

The point of asceticism, of the attempt to win freedom from the world, is the attainment of the assessing and shaping and controlling of the world that this freedom alone makes possible. Already in the Middle Ages this necessary link had brought two apparent antitheses, the papacy and monasticism, into alliance. Precisely in Platonism, too, we find the strictest turning aside from the world of sense, and even a death wisdom,”4 alongside the world-affirming founding of logics and ethics. And beyond both monasticism and Platonism we find in primitive Christianity a link between eschatology and ethics by which both take on the significance that we find again in Calvin. Whether and how far there is a direct relation between Calvin and the contemporary Humanism, to which yearning for eternity and the thought of eternity were by no means alien, is a separate question. We need not assume this, for the decisive juncture at which the power of the next world becomes the power of this world?> lies in truth along the line of Christianity’s own logic. This logic reached a climax in the theology of Calvin. It need not astonish us that meditation on the future life crowns and defines this theology. With the doctrine of predestination this i

is the basis of Calvin’s-ethos-that protects its authenticity and secures it against the danger of superficiality which threatens every.ethos. It is not a foreign body in Calvinistic teaching. It is the true whence and whither of its way.

1902): Arbeiten und nicht verzweifeln, based on the last sentence of Carlyle’s rectoral address at Edinburgh in 1866, in which he quoted from Goethe’s Symbolum, using “work and despair not” for the original: “Wir heissen euch hoffen.” Cf. T. Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 1V (London, 1899), 481f.

74, Barth took the term “death wisdom” from K Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur _., ed. C. A. Bernoulli (Basel, 1919), 2379; cf. his Epistle to the Romans (Oxford, 1933), 424

fF.

75. See 73, n. 6 above.

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