§6 Calvin (part 1 of 2)

Not only historically but also materially Calvin was relatively independent of Zwingli, though he represented with him the second or Reformed turn in the Reformation. Calvin was also manly, of course, but with a different kind of manliness from what we find in either Luther or Zwingli, and I would not venture to use such terms as healthy or simple of Calvin. If we are looking for these qualities let us stay with Luther and Zwingli. And in the long run let us see to it that we are not wrong about them, too. For Calvin, who was neither healthy nor simple, perhaps did no more than bring to light a pain and problem that was the deepest secret of the other two.

We best illustrate the relation between Calvin and Zwingli that we now need to clarify by an obvious concrete example, namely, by looking at the epistles with which the two dedicated their main systematic works, the 1525 True and False Religion and the 1536 Institutes, to the same typical Renaissance prince, Francis I of France.! If the way of relating the new knowledge of God to the reality of the world was the great critical problem of the Reformation, the point of division, then here — where Zwingli and Calvin addressed to a worldly judge the considered result of their Christian thinking, where externally, by human judgment, the further advance of their movement depended mostly on the attitude of that judge,” on the man whose judgment, by reason of his position and outlook, was typical of the prevailing political and cultural opinion — here what is common to the two will be particularly plain but will also decide what it is that divides them.

A few words about the third party on the stage are called for in this connection. Francis had come to the throne in 1515. He had won the battle of Marignano, with the Swiss for the first time on the losing side,

13 Z3;.628-37; OS1,.21; 36; BI 1ff- 2. MS ankam, corrected by the editor to abhing. including a Glarus contingent with Zwingli as their chaplain. He had been defeated by Charles V, even though he had papal support, in the imperial election of 1519; and in 1525, when Zwingli dedicated his work to him, he had just lost a war against his more successful rival. After the manner of rulers of his day, he loved art and learning, and in this field, though in this alone, it would seem, he won an honored name in history and did real service to his country. He was himself a worldling, but he had a mother and sister who sincerely supported the Reformation.3 He protected the biblical scholar Lefevre d’Etaples [Faber Stapulensis], who was intellectually akin to Erasmus even in abhorrence of all religious radicalism. For a time, it seems, he was not totally opposed to the idea of a spiritual Lutheranism that would remain within the church, so that in 1535 he could invite Melanchthon and Bucer to a disputation at Paris even though burnings were then in progress there. For though he was a most unreliable supporter of the papal church, for fear of the revolutionary tendencies that he suspected in his evangelical subjects he was ready to persecute anything that went beyond the innocuous evangelism of Faber Stapulensis.

When in 1534, giving vent to his annoyance at the policies of Rome, he threatened the papal nuncio with a break from Rome after the manner of Henry VIII of England, the nuncio told him frankly that he would be the first to be duped, for a new religion among the people would later demand a change of prince (Henry, I, 99).4 This warning was too much in line with what he himself suspected. Enraged by the publication of some very radical pamphlets aimed at the church and the clergy, at the end of January 1535 he ordered a so-called lustration in which he himself and his three children went through Paris carrying white candles while six adherents of the new teaching were burned alive on the main city squares. With this pious atrocity came even wider persecution of the Protestants. This was the period, in the mid-1530s, when Calvin's Institutes was written. Francis I died in 1547. The optimistic view of Beza ([CO] 21, 125)> that in spite of everything he was really “not alien to us” seems to me to be totally refuted by his physiognomy alone. Judge for yourselves!

3. His mother, Louise de Savoie (1476-1531); his sister, Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549).

4. P. Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins des grossen Reformators, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1835).

5. Ioannis Calvini Vita (Geneva, 1575). For Beza’s positive evaluation of Francis I cf. Henry, 72.

S6 Calvin

What are we to make of it that it was felt necessary to dedicate a Protestant dogmatics, unsolicited, to so questionable if important a figure. After all, Zwingli, who had been a prominent opponent of Swiss mercenary service on behalf of France, was surely j

just as unwelcome there as Calvin, the even more suspicious friend ‘of the suspicious Rector Cop.° Yet both of them were seriously hoping, it seems, if not to convince, at least to instruct this monarch. It is a situation in which we cannot see Luther, the comparison that Henry (I, 72) makes with Luther at Worms being feeble in every respect.’ It was the more characteristic, however, of these two reformers, both together and individually.

Let us hear Zwingli first. The style is that of a man of the world or of the courtliness of a Humanist. From the very first lines, however, the content is confident, bold, brash, and aggressive. It has a Swiss frankness that plants itself bombastically in front of the royal throne and issues its manifesto. There is something threatening about it, something openly threatening in the superior manner not merely of the religious prophet but of the political adversary who at the time is two moves ahead but is magnanimous enough to break off the game for a time and to give good advice as at a game of chess. Francis I had been put to shame at Pavia. “All is lost save honor,” he is said to have cried when taken prisoner by Charles V.8 The situation at home was also an adverse one. The people were suffering under the burden of his wars, under high taxes, under the oppression of the nobles, under the extortions of a greedy clergy. The king could no longer count for sure on the loyalty of his subjects. Will he accept good advice? What Zwingli commends to him is his own cause, the renewed gospel, as the only thing that can save him in this sorry situation. As once Hilary of Poitiers took the truth from Gaul to Germany, so Zwingli now wants to take it to France in the name of the German Reformation.?

Is it not evident — this is the point of his epistle — that the world

6. See below, 142ff.

7. As Luther once withstood Emperor Charles in defense of his faith, so Calvin and his companions withstood the king of France.

8. Cf. Francis’s letter to his mother after the defeat (2.24.1525) in J. A. Dulaure, Histoire physique, civile, et morale de Paris, vol. III (Paris, 1837), 209. The usual rendering: “All is lost save honor,” is not actually what we find in the letter, which reads: “All I have left is honor and my life that has been saved.”

9. Z 3, 634, 29ff. Hilary dedicated his Liber de synodis seu de fide Orientalium to his brethren and fellow bishops in the two German provinces. In what follows Barth stays closely with Z 3, 628-37.

. Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

and its kings and peoples are sick, that they suffer from one another and all of them from the corrupt church, and that the new proclamation which the Creator of all things has now caused to go forth is the remedy, the only remedy, for this sickness? It is not without punishment that we neglect the Word of God. There is the cause of all the evil. The darkness in which people live has become most intense, but light has now drawn near, for God neither can nor will abandon the world to darkness. Fhe day of the Lord is dawning, not the last day, Zwingli adds significantly, but the day when the Lord will radically improve present ‘conditions.!° We must be ready and willing, then, to let ourselves be helped by the only Helper. Amos [3:8] is quoted: “If the lion roars, who will not fear?” That is why this most Christian commentary is dedicated to the most Christian king, the bold writer dares literally to say.!! It is not that the commentary and Christianity need the king but that the king needs the commentary and Christianity — that is the unconcealed meaning.

Recall the point of the drama. On to a world stage on which the severest of political and economic battles are being fought comes Protestant theology saying that it has the solution, not making a request, not simply craving toleration or recognition, but aware of being a power, a force, having something to offer, yet also something to demand! Let the theologians of the Sorbonne come; for what do they know of language, of philosophy, of the Bible, of things human or divine? If only the king will bring them face-to-face with the Protestant teachers, he will have no difficulty in choosing between them. Is he afraid of revolution because of what has taken place in Germany? Well, if earthly authorities oppose the heavenly Word, itis not surprising if they alienate the very best of their subjects; let them end their opposition and the very best will be on their side. Those who read this book will see for themselves what recovery (quantum respirationis) may be expected from the resolve on moral reform according to the word of the gospel.!* Thus far Zwingli.

Let us compare Calvin, writing similarly to the same man ten years later. He, too, is very correct. He does not give an inch as regards either himself or his cause. He writes with dignity and clarity. But how different is the picture! For the one who now writes is one who on behalf of his faith has been driven out of his French homeland, who is now addressing

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12. Ibid., 636, 31-33.

his own king from abroad, and who is pleading to the supreme judge of the country with all the skill of rhetoric on behalf of fellow believers who are still in France.!3 To this end he originally wrote his Instruction in the Christian Religion as a textbook, he says. He!4 wanted to show the king what those whom he was persectiting really taught and to ask him whether they really deserved such horrible punishment.!5 The charge against them —in the main that of revolution

— should not be accepted without examination. It is not a matter of Calvin’s own return to France, he says with pride, for he can just as well stay where he is. His concern is for the cause of all the devout and of Christ.!© His plea is not that those who espouse this cause should merely be pardoned as poor people who are ignorant and inexperienced. Justice should be done to them. The king’s task is to protect or restore the inviolability and dignity of God’s glory on earth. For in his office the king is either a servant of God’s glory or a robber.!7 Let not the king make a mistake because those who now appeal for justice are poor and abject little people.!8 We know that we are the refuse and offscouring of the world. Before God we may boast only of his unmerited mercy and before our fellows only of our weakness. But our doctrine is very different. It stands sublime and invincible over all the world’s power and glory, for it is not ours but that of the living God and his Christ, whom the Father has installed as king. Christ rules, however, by holding the whole earth in terror, notwithstanding all the power of its iron and bronze and the splendor of its silver and gold, simply by the “rod of his mouth” (Isa. 11:4).

What the king should learn from the book that is dedicated to him is that adversaries castigate the new teaching in vain, for what they find scandalous in it is in keeping with the analogy of faith (Rom. 12:7). It is what it should be as the doctrine of faith,!? making us so small and God so great that precisely in this way it sets us in the peace of sure expectation of salvation and eternal life. It is on account of this hope of the living God — and twice here Calvin sums up the essence of evangelical teaching in the word “hope” (spes)— that adherents of this teaching now have to

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suffer so severely.20 Who are their foes? Who has set the persecution in motion? The clergy, whose basic concern is simply to safeguard their rule, whose belly is their god, whose religion is a kitchen religion, and of whom not one shows the slightest sign of true seriousness.”! They see this teaching as new. The answer is that it is new only to those to whom Christ and the gospel are new, but both can appeal by right to their antiquity. They call the teaching uncertain, but trusting in it we fear neither death nor the judgment throne of God. They ask for new miracles to bear witness to it. But the old gospel needs no new miracles, and in any case the miracles they adduce count for nothing against the truth of God, for Satan, too, can work miracles. They appeal to the church fathers.?2 We freely recognize their authority, but why do our opponents simply honor their errors and mistakes without following, but instead concealing or twisting, the true things that they say. They appeal to custom, but it has never been true of the human race that the majority wants what is better.23 Because we have been accustomed to what is bad, should we reject the one means of salvation from all the sins, pestilences, and disasters from which humanity now suffers (the single passage in which the leading theme of Zwingli’s epistle may also be found in Calvin).?4 This is a mistake that has no place at least in God’s kingdom, where eternal truth holds sway.2> They confront us with the dilemma that either the church has been dead thus far or we are now in conflict with it. Our answer is that the church of Christ lives and will continue to live as long as Christ reigns at the right hand of the Father. But with this church we are not in conflict. To the existence of this church, however, we can never point with a finger

and say: Here it is or there. The Lord knows his own, but the true church is not

not outwardly visible as such.

Tt is a horrible judgment that this is so,2° but a judgment under which we must bow. Where was the true church when Elijah confronted four hundred prophets of Baal alone,?” when Jeremiah’s adversaries were the official priests, or when the lawfully elected pope of the lawful Basel

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Council was simply deposed and a cardinal’s hat was flung around like a piece of meat for a dog? Where has it been during the time when we can trace back everything that is called pope, bishop, or priest to Eugene IV, who unlawfully forced himself in as pope?

Finally there is the charge of revolution. What has Calvin to say to the king who was so worried on this score? “It is a certain characteristic of the divine Word that it never comes forth while Satan is at rest and sleeping.” 28 Was not Elijah asked whether it were not he who was leading Israel into confusion??? Was not Christ a leader of sedition in the eyes of the Jews? Were there not those who said that Paul was leading people into sin? But are we to deny Christ because he is a stone of stumbling and offense, a fragrance of life to life for some and of death to death for others? The king may rest assured that our God is not a God of strife but of peace. What reason for suspicion have we given? When have we talked about overthrowing the state? When have we not made it plain that our only concern is to fear God and to serve him? If there are really some who on the pretext of the gospel stir up trouble — but where are they? — then the law and its penalties must come into play, but the gospel of God should not be blasphemed because of the wickedness of lawbreakers. Calvin concludes:

Your mind is now indeed turned away and estranged from us, even inflamed, I may add, against us, but we trust that we can regain your favor, if in a quiet, composed mood you will once read this our confession, which we intend in lieu of a defense before Your Majesty. Suppose, however, the whisperings of the malevolent so fill your ears that the accused have no chance to speak for themselves, but those savage furies, while you connive at them, rage against us with imprisonings, scourgings, rackings, maimings, and burnings. Then we will be reduced to the last extremity even as sheep destined for the slaughter. Yet this will so happen that “in our patience we may possess our souls”; and may await the strong hand of the Lord, which will surely appear in due season, coming forth armed to deliver the poor from their affliction, and also to punish their despisers, who now exult with such great assurance. May the Lord, the King of kings, establish your throne-in righteousness, and your dominion in equity, most illustrious king.3°

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29. OS I, 34f; BI 16.
30. OS I, 36; BI 18f.

Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

It is immediately obvious that not merely under the pressure of the situation this address to the king is the address of someone who is on the defensive. That is the position of Calvin. That is what differentiates him from Zwingli and defines his position in the Reformation more generally. To be sure, the eternal truth of the gospel is not at all for him a passive thing, an object of meditation or speculation like the God of the Middle Ages. It is a power that breaks in and presses forward. Think of the apocalyptic passage at the beginning in which he speaks of Christ’s kingly rule with the rod of his mouth.3! As the French Calvin scholar Bossert (p. 38)22 rightly stresses, Calvin, too, does not ask for mere toleration for his cause. He, too, presents his church, not as a new one alongside the old, but as itself the old, the one, and indeed the true church in place of that which then obtained. He, too, could offer the threat that God’s kingdom presents to the world’s kingdom (the last extremity),33 and in spite of the inoffensive interpretation, excluding any human threat, that this is at once given, or perhaps because of it, this has a very sinister ring. He too, as I have pointed out already, calls the gospel the remedy for a sick world.34

But his restraint in saying all these things is in marked contrast to the lively and cheerful perrumpamus of Zwingli. Calvin does not frankly tell the king everything that is on his mind. With calm dignity, and without concealing or denying in the least what the gospel itself is and says, he can even put this in a stronger and more unsettling and pointed way than Zwingli. Think only of the paradox of the passage in which he speaks of our human nothingness and the divine mercy, apparently giving up on himself and his clients as poor little people, but then stressing all the more how sublime and invincible and powerful is their cause, their doctrine35 — a passage that in its boomerang effect has no parallel at all in Zwingli’s epistle. Calvin, however, makes the application only to Protestants themselves, whose faith has its basis of assurance in this paradoxical truth. He refrains from making the obvious application to the situation, to the king and his own need to believe, and this is in keeping with the tenor of the

SIEOSiE 23; Bia 32. A. Bossert, Johann Calvin, quoted from the German translation by H. Krollick (Giessen, 1908).

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34. OS I, 30; BI 11.
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whole address. The only exception is when he says that kingly rule that does not serve God’s glory is “brigandage.”36 And even there the conclusion he draws is simply that the king is under an obligation as such to procure justice for the cause of Christ,,to be the protector of its soundness and dignity (incolumitas and dignitas). He does not try to claim or win the king himself for the cause.

For all the Gallic liveliness that can flash forth at times, profound seriousness goes hand in hand in Calvin with restrained politeness. He was the aristocrat among the reformers. In comparison Zwingli’s zealous urging and commending seems like a plebeian casting of pearls before swine [Matt. 7:6]. We might say that Calvin’s approach is more resigned, that it does not grip so energetically. But it is also calmer and more mature, and takes into greater account what is possible. The basic Reformed view is the same, but it is more enthusiastic and utopian in Zwingli, more prudent in Calvin, more adjusted to the world and therefore more viable, a match for the vile reality of this world as a Francis I might see it, and yet at the same time showing more awareness of the distance between God's ways and ours, and not putting up for sale the solemnity of divine things. For Calvin activism meant moderate action after due consideration. He had come to terms with the fact that the world resists the gospel. He did not dream of any dramatic breakthrough or victory for his cause. His concern was to establish the most favorable possible conditions for the conflict. Francis might not understand or even perhaps read the epistle. Calvin had no illusions on that score. From the very first, as an advocate of Christianity, he was reaching beyond the unreceptive mind of the Most Christian King to a broader court, to the whole Christian world. Indeed, as he liked to put it later, he was playing a role in the theater where God and angels make up the audience.37

Who is to say which of the two, Zwingli or Calvin, chose the better part? All we may say is that in the transition from the one type to the other the same basic Reformed view experienced a break. It was still the same basic view. We cannot say that Calvin’s restraint was the same as that of Luther. The church of Calvin, too, was the OT church militant as Luther’s never was. In what Calvin says to the king, for all the moderation, we sense that fundamental lack of respect and reverence for provisional human authority that is only with difficulty concealed by its provisional

36. Ibid.

37. On the Eternal Predestination of God (1552), CO 8, 294. recognition. We sense the political rationalism that recognizes human authority in the first instance only on the condition of its divine appointment, but which only tolerates bad government “as sheep being led to the slaughter,”38 letting it be but holding out before it the threat of coming judgment. Calvin, too, knows only one kingdom, that of God; only one truth, that of God; and only one goal, the glory of God. He is thus at odds with all other kingdoms, truths, or goals.

But his stance in the conflict is different. On earth, though not in heaven, the offensive has broken off. A strong position has been taken up and established. The troops are being mustered. The rear is made secure. Contact with the enemy is being systematically organized. Protestant activism seems all the more vigorous, threatening, and dangerous, however, in this second restrained, concentrated, and organized form, which does not merely face the real world but is aimed at it, adapted to the historical situation. Only in this second form did Reformed Protestantism become a serious force that could no longer be confused in the last analysis with Enthusiasm. In this form it made inwardly necessary on the Roman Catholic side the Jesuit order and Council of Trent.3? Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that the first glory of spring had now passed,9 that with fulfillment the end was plainly coming. Here is a contrast that in its inner necessity has to be explained in terms of the general situation of the Reformation movement on the one hand and its significance in principle on the other, but certainly not just in terms of difference in the situation, character, and so on of Zwingli and Calvin. Though the persecution of Protestants in France had to affect Calvin deeply, in itself this was a local phenomenon and by no means enough to account for the distinctive character of his theology as we see it in the dedicatory epistle. It was simply a storm bird heralding what was to come. What was to come was the visible power of the Reformation movement to expand and the accompanying development of reaction, the Counter-Reformation.

To understand Calvin, the /Institutes, and the whole of his theology, it will repay us to see what had happened in the first half of the 16th

38. OS I, 36; BI 18£.

39. The Jesuit order was founded in 1539; Paul III sanctioned it in 1540; Trent met from 1545 to 1563.

40. Cf. the opening of H. Heine’s Tragédie (1829), Werke, vol. Il, ed. O. Walzel (Leipzig, 1912), 83. century. When the /Institutes came out in 1536, the first third of a long series of events had roughly ended, events that in different ways might all be taken as passive markers of the Reformation. In 1525 had come the Peasants’ War, which meant the end of Luther’s true and undisputed popularity. The years 1525-1529 brought the controversies between Luther and Zwingli. In 1531 Zwingli fell at Cappel. The compromising events at Miinster took place in 1534. French Protestants came under persecution in 1535. Later, 1540 would see the bigamy of Philip of Hesse and the founding of the Jesuits. Paul II set up the Inquisition in 1542.4! In 1543-1545 Charles V was successful abroad against France, the Turks, and the Netherlands. Trent opened in 1545. Luther died in 1546, while 1547 saw the hateful battle of Miihlberg, 1548 the Leipzig Interim, and 1549 the beginning of inner doctrinal controversies among the Lutherans.

Under the shadow of these past and coming events Calvin wrote his first version of the Institutes. It is no wonder that he was so different from both Luther and Zwingli. He was Zwingli, one might say, with the vision and the possibilities of the older Luther. Unlike Zwingli, Calvin had to reckon with the bitter possibility, so often weighed by Luther, that the Word of God, having run its course, would be taken away again from the earth.42 The possibility was there in obvious forms. But unlike Luther, Calvin, in confrontation with this danger, could not take comfort merely in the cherished hope of the last day that would make all the damage good by a divine miracle. Like a soldier at a threatened and perhaps lost position, he had to resist desperately, to save what could still be saved, and perhaps even to defy and to regain what could be regained. Here, then, we have a man in bitter and bloody earnest, who like Zwingli cannot refuse bravely to make the Reformation inference that we must set up the Word of God as a force in the world, as an order of life, but who also, like Luther, can wage the war on the innermost line, avoiding all that was so plainly ambivalent and overly hasty in Zwingli, and championing with ruthless self-discipline only the one thing that was essential.

Staehelin (II, 395) quotes a saying of Ebrard to the effect that if Luther and Zwingli depict Reformation hope, Calvin depicts Reformation

41. Paul III reconstituted the Inquisition with his Licet ab initio of 1542.

42. WA TR 4, 151, 9ff,, 34ff., no. 4123, in which Luther saw so much ingratitude, contempt, and arrogance that he feared God’s Word had run its course and hoped the judgment day was near. Cf. also 3, 542, 18ff., no. 3697; 4, 509, 1ff., no. 4788; 5, 469, 31ff., no. 6064.

LS

care.43 | say again that Calvin is the tragic figure of the Reformation, not although, but just because, he was more successful than the others. He represents the most mature and complete and consistent expression of the Reformation, but the expression with which it brought itself to an end, taking on definitively an earthly, ethical, historical form. Evening had come, the day was far spent [Luke 24:29]. The year 1555 tells the whole story in this regard. It was the year when Calvin successfully and finally defeated all his foes and made himself master of Geneva, the year when he had finished building the city of God, the new Jerusalem, as his friends called it, the new Rome to his enemies. It was also the year when the Peace of Augsburg finally made of Luther’s Reformation a recognized confession but in so doing halted its assault upon the church and society.

If we add to the historical facts the principial consideration that Reformed Protestantism, in the situation that Zwingli had put it in and that Calvin represented, was aware of the danger of being politicized and ' secularized, and that without surrendering the position, but rather advocating it the more vigorously, thus putting strong emphasis on the basic theme of Luther that we also often detect in the ethos of Zwingli, in this way strengthening the link of the second phase of the Reformation to the first, then in my view we have the standpoint from which we can and must understand the distinctiveness of the theology of Calvin as compared to that of Luther or Zwingli.

H. Bauke has tried to use the Romance origins of Calvin to explain his theology. He depicts him as a brilliant dialectician and systematician,44 a second Abelard, one might say, who skillfully unites in his thinking disparate elements from the Bible, church tradition, and Luther, and who finally, not without the aid of rhetoric, can put them together in a single doctrinal structure. This suggestion undoubtedly has value in helping us to understand Calvin, just as it helps to remember that Luther was from Saxony and Zwingli from the Toggenburg. Nevertheless, the explanation leaves much to be desired if we are to gain an understanding of the whole Calvin. We may use the unfathomable depths of nationality as a principle ~ by which to explain an author, but we must not make historical theology a subdiscipline of anthropological geography, instead resorting to the latter

43. E. Stahelin, Johannes Calvins Leben und ausgewihlte Schriften, 2 vols. (Elberfeld, 1863). The quotation is from J. H. A. Ebrard, Das Dogma vom heiligen Abendmahl und seine Geschichte, vol. II (Frankfurt, 1846), 406.

44. Bauke, Probleme, 14. only when other possibilities are exhausted, which is by no means the case with a person like Calvin, who is set in plain historical and principial context.

Karlftied Frohlich treated Calvin along the lines of the Otto-Heiler school.4° He took as his explanatory principle phenomenology, which conscientiously notes Calvin’s use of terms like light, fire, lightning, majesty, wrath, sword, battle, and so on whenever he is speaking forcefully, and which then puts together these features drawn from the aesthetic realm to present us with a picture of Calvin's piety or his God — a picture that I would call a gruesome waxwork model from which, having surveyed it with startled interest, we can only turn aside because there can be no possibility of rational discussion with it. As for the famous “numinous” and tremendum that has naturally been found in Calvin too,*° just as Bauke found that he was from Picardy, it is normal and praiseworthy to mention such things, but regrettable to have to refer back to this feature or that instead of achieving a true understanding, and it is a sign of poverty to write whole books about them.

In opposition to these very modern explanations of Calvin I would insist that we must understand him in terms of the inner necessity with which the truth that is the same yesterday and today [cf. Heb. 13:8] and that is not far from any one of us [cf. Acts 17:27], challenged and awakened this specific man at a specific time in its historical movement four hundred years ago. If we could succeed in following the course of this truth with understanding through all the human errors and human confusion, participating as though we were ourselves present, all eyes and ears for what took place then, much better than what we have done or can do now, then we would know in advance and say in advance that no other could stand at this point in history than he who was in fact Jean Calvin, born at Noyon in Picardy in 1509, and with his own specific experience of God, if we want to use that term. Uniting the context of history with that of principle, we could only suspect and not really be surprised that in that context he was the man he was, but would have to say that this is how he

45. K. Frélich, Die Reichsgottesidee Calvins (Munich, 1922); F. Heiler (1892-1967), who with R. Otto's help was appointed Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion at Marburg. Fréhlich’s book was vol. III in the series Aus der Welt christlicher Frsmmigkeit, ed. Heiler.

46. Frohlich, 9f., with a reference to Otto’s Idea of the Holy (1923) (Das Heilige (Breslau, 1920]).

Calvin, Luther, and. Zwingli

had to be. It seems to me that only when we are in some sense aware of this necessity, and therefore do not come up against the block of an astounding fact, are‘we in a position to do justice to Calvin, to be taught by him, and to learn to respect and love him in his individuality, which is the supreme goal of a monograph of this type.

Unlike many older Calvin scholars, then, I would not try to understand Calvin in terms of a single thesis in the Institutes such as the glory of God, predestination, providence, or meditating on the future life,47 then using this as a master principle from which to derive all else. Nor would I begin with a contingent fact of history or psychology like the theologians’ to whom I have referred. Instead, I want to try to evaluate Calvin the man and the theologian in terms of his place in the historical and principial context. For this double place is the vital individual factor, that which points us to God in his work. I also note that we cannot distinguish here between the man and the theologian, and for this reason I cannot in principle approve of Wernle*8 when he separates the faith of the reformers as far as possible from their theology. What would be the reaction if we tried to separate the man Michelangelo as far as possible from his art? But again, how can we understand a person’s work without understanding the person? We must not insult theology by giving the impression that in this field differentiating the person from the work is especially necessary or profitable. At the end of this section then, and before passing on to a survey of Calvin’s life, let us provisionally sketch the man and the theologian as he had to be at his own specific place.

I have pointed out already that we cannot expect anything other than that we will have to do here with one who was zealous for the Lord like Elijah [cf. 1 Kings 19:10]. The Reformed turn in the Reformation included this implication from the outset. But in Calvin there is a note

47. Cf. Bauke, Probleme, ch. Il, 1, pp. 21ff. On the centrality of the glory of God in Calvin cf. E C. Baur, Geschichte der christlichen Kirche (Tubingen, 1863), 405f.; also Ritschl, Gesammelte Aufsétze, vol. II (Leipzig, 1896), 94ff.; E. E K. Müller, Symbolik... (Erlangen and Leipzig, 1896), 445f. On predestination as Calvin’s central doctrine cf. Kampschulte, Calvin, I, 263; A. Schweizer, Die protestantischen Zentraldogmen.. ., vol. I (Zurich, 1854), 17. On providence as Calvin’s central doctrine cf. J. Bohatec, “Calvins Vorsehungslehre,” in Calvinstudien, ed. Bohatec (Leipzig, 1909), 339ff; A. Lang, Der Evangelienkommentar Martin Bucers (Leipzig, 1900), 365. On the centrality of meditation on the future life cf. M. Schulze, Meditatio futurae vitae (Leipzig, 1901).

48. Wernle, Glaube, Preface, iii, who notes Calvin's increasing encapsulating of his faith in a system of biblical theology, and his own desire to draw it out again. of melancholy irritation about this zeal that we do not find in Zwingli. He has become almost wholly a man of the OT, a Jeremiah. There is nothing wooing, inviting, or winning here. It is almost all proclamation, promise, threat, either-or. His is truly a consuming zeal. Calvin is not what we usually imagine an apostle of love and peace to be. If what he represents is love and peace, then these things must be very different from what we think. What we find is a hard and prickly skin. The blossom has gone, the fruit has not yet come. An iron age has come that calls for iron believers. To have dealings with God one must be fully in earnest. God overtook Calvin like a robber — remember how at the decisive hour G. Farel kept him in Geneva by threatening him with the curse of God.4? The strong and jealous God wanted him totally. His signet ring depicted a heart lying in an open hand. His motto was: “My heart I offer as though slain in sacrifice to God.”°9 The seriousness that was alive in this man and that emanated from him was a bitter and almost unbearable seriousness. But recall how earnestly Luther described the point at which the path opens up to God as desperation, humility, fear of God.>! In what Calvin thought and said we have the path that leads from God. Are we really surprised that he immediately and powerfully fixed on the same point? Could he really be a different person from the one he was?

Calvin’s God is the Lord, and to go with God he had to be God’s servant. God’s will is a will for power; therefore obedience to it is a will for subjection. What is manifest in Christ, too, is the royal dominion of God. If we are God’s children in Christ, we have to know what we must do. If God has glorified himself in us, and caused us to be what we are, then there is no point in asking what is the meaning of what we are. This was Calvin’s response to the question of the Lutheran Reformation regarding what has to be done in time, in this world, in life, in the secular sphere. Could he have given any other answer? But his God is also the Lord in the sense that the grace with which he calls us is itself a sovereign act. In a way that we can never fathom God is majesty, freedom, supreme over every human yes and no. Those who are obedient should never forget for a moment that they are not the recipients of grace because they are