§7 Introduction (part 2 of 7)
4, Antithesis to Wantonness.!7 What is the thrust of Calvin’s opposition to Anabaptism? Formally it is this. As is usual with him, his encounter and acquaintance with the Anabaptists had made clear to him that in no case can we understand what in 1533 he called Christian philosophy as a tumultuous, random, capricious thing like this, no matter what fine and
13. CO 5, 173 and 174. Melanchthon’s Loci communes came out in a Ist ed. in 1522 and a 2nd in 1535. Calvin read the Ist ed. in one of the-many impressions that differed textually. He probably had the 2nd ed. before finishing the 1536 Institutes; cf. A. Lang, “Die Quellen der Institutio von 1536,” EvTh 3 (1936), 106f.
1A COMrl/orand. Io?
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 173 and 174, though the reference is to Calvin himself avoiding wantonness.
17. Heading added in the MS margin. profound justification might be offered for it. The aversion came surprisingly promptly in Calvin. It was for him in truth something primary, his first serious step in the world of theology. Of a moment when everything still hung in the balance, when the Anabaptist message seemed to him to be a serious possibility like that he proclaimed as the gospel in the Cop address, of such a moment, at least, we know nothing. When, plunged willy-nilly from Humanism into theology, he considered what he had to do, at once he was constrained to take pen in-hand to refute this thesis. It would never be able to make any appeal to him. He could point out that he had never had anything in common with it.
If the Cop address shows us on what path he was setting out, we now see him striding ahead rapidly on that way. What counts now is not the Lutheran, the Erasmian, nor the sparse Catholic element in that address, but the fourth element that is genuinely Calvin’s own, what he says about the Word and obedience, the element, it seems, that is lying in wait, that has only to be awakened, and it will result in a distinctive life and control everything. The Anabaptists were the ones who brought this element to life precisely by misunderstanding faith and obedience and thus embodying the danger that led Calvin to feel dissatisfaction with Luther and Erasmus and instead to forge his own sword out of what they had given him. Calvin's store of thoughts in the Psychopannychia appears to be much thinner and more one-sided than in the expansive Cop address. In no case wantonness — that is the bass note underlying the whole melody, though there is, of course, much else in the melody — instead God! And if because truly God, then God in his Word, God as the authority over all human conceits, obedience not caprice! By grasping this thought Calvin became a biblicist. He took hold of the Bible as the supreme critical principle and used this principle to distinguish the freedom of God’s children from the freedom of fools. Laying so much store by the fact that knowledge of God is a motivating force, he had to stake everything on ensuring that it had inner force, that is, clarity and certainty. He found the means to do this in the Bible. This is the general formal significance of the Psychopannychia.
5. Opposition to Quietism.!8 But the work also has a special material significance. It seems to me to be clear that its theme is by no means an accidental one. With sureness of instinct Calvin seized on a point that was distinctive for both him and his opponents, and at this one point he not
18. Heading added in the MS margin. only had in mind and attacked all that his opponents were teaching; he also set his own view over against theirs and instructively characterized this view within the Reformation as a whole. What is meant by this abstract-sounding doctrine of sdul sleep?!9 And what is meant by Calvin’s opposing view of the rest of the righteous in Abraham’s bosom? It seems to me that we should not simply overlook the eschatological-metaphysical form of the controversy but also not simply shake our heads over it. I propose first to translate the concepts from the metaphysical into psychological terms. It is then clear that soul sleep or the soul’s night festival is nothing other than what we know from mysticism as Quietism.
As distinct from Luther, Calvin is dealing in the main with mystical Enthusiasts. The doctrine of soul sleep is simply a metaphysical version of the attitude to life that by passivity, renunciation of all things, abandonment of all thinking, willing, and doing, finally thinks that by the mystical death of the soul in God it can attain to the supreme summit of human striving. Commendation of this approach can now come in formulations that confusingly resemble the Reformation insight into the way through death to life as Luther proclaimed it.2° We have also seen that Luther himself in his younger days could hardly differentiate it from his own insight, but hailed it as an ally. In Calvin the distinction between faith and mysticism is the beginning, the starting point. It is so because for him faith must be free at once for life, for ethos, for the glorifying of God in thinking, willing, and doing. Nothing is more intolerable for him than an intermediate religious state where the issue is not obedience. For him faith means putting one’s hand to the plow and not looking back [Luke 9:62].
What is his answer, then, to the mystical thesis? He, too, apparently unfolds a wholly metaphysical-mythological picture, that of the rest of souls in tranquility and assurance of conscience and certain hope of the blessed resurrection.2! But it seems evident to me that in fact he is here
19. Soul sleep was taught in the 16th century by groups and individuals whom it is hard or impossible to identify. It is not certain whether Anabaptists advocated it as Zwingli (Z 6/I, 188) and Bullinger assumed. Bullinger opposed the doctrine in a letter to Paul Beck in the summer of 1526 (Werke III, vol. II [Zurich, 1991], 127ff.). But he was not yet attributing it to the Anabaptists. He did this only in his 1530 work against them (Zurich, 1531). Possibly the Zurich reformers were echoing Wittenberg verdicts on the theme; see n. 26 below.
20. Cf. Luther's Romans Lectures of 1515/16, WA 56, 375, 21f; LW 25, 365; and his 1519-21 Psalms, WA 5, 167, 40-168, 4.
21. CO 5, 188, 213. describing a specific approach to life that he wants to set over against the mystical approach. It is no accident that more than once he finds it hard to give cogent reasons for distinguishing the state of deceased believers from that of those still living. The righteous in Abraham’s bosom who are awaiting the last things are Calvin’s devout, whether in this life or after it. The alert conscience, wakefully waiting on God, still imperfect yet with a sure and clear sense of the peace and glory of God, the peace of the living (5, 190),22 this is what Calvin wants to proclaim in the work in opposition to that which in mystical waiting, silence, and absorption seemed to him to be simply indolence, sleepiness, and intoxication. The soul does indeed bear within it the image of God, but his image equips it with the knowledge of God (5, 180).73
We have to ask, then, whether there is any such thing as a sleeping knowledge of God. That this possibility is mooted, that pious Anabaptists let themselves call the sleeping soul the essence of Christianity and the climax of piety, is what arouses Calvin's aversion as though a slug were touching him. For him this was the summit of what is wanton and exotic and poisonous, almost as though he foresaw the invasion of silent worship of God from India that we witness today.24 No psychopannychia, no soul night festival, is his battle cry. To say nothing against this is to betray the truth. In opposition to it he finds himself forced to resort to God’s Word and to do biblical theology.
Why specifically in opposition to this? I would say: Because he is scared to death that this possibility, the soul sleep of the devout, might replace knowledge and obedience, and because in the Bible he found nothing about soul sleep but very much about knowledge and obedience. This aversion had to follow his understanding of Luther’s thinking as thunder does lightning. Luther’s gospel could not be construed as a pointer to a comfortable indolence that shames God afresh and even worse. There
22. Ibid., 190.
23. Ibid., 180.
24. Barth is alluding to a concept promoted by R. Otto in his essay “Schweigender Dienst,” CW 24 (1920), 561-65. The form of this worship is described (col. 562) as kneeling in silence until the prayer bell has sounded three times. Inner speech replaces the outer Word, with prayer as dedication to him who is present. Inner silence of the soul corresponds to the outer silence, a quiet sinking into the eternal ground, the lofty wonder of union. Cf. also Barth’s Vortriige und kleinere Arbeiten 1922-1925, ed. H. Finze, part III of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1990), 31, 81, and 172, along with Barth's criticism in CD III/4, 111f., esp. 112.
$8 Psychopannychia
can be no eternity of idleness and inaction. Otherwise the kingdom of God will be taken from you [Matt. 21:43].25
In this saying we catch the Reformation concern of Calvin that never left him his whole life long. He iy the man who, appropriating the know1- edge of the God of judgment and mercy, at once feels the need to express and confirm this knowledge as wakeful expectation, as will and action; who at once fears the very worst, the loss of this knowledge, if there is a pause, a religious siesta, between death and resurrection, that is, between justification and sanctification, between faith and life. The peace of the conscience that is comforted by forgiveness is the peace of the living and not for a single second anything else.
In this strange work then, if my interpretation is correct, we have decisively important evidence of Calvin's starting point and his whole position in the Reformation. And if, as I now hear from Hirsch, Luther, who also knew the doctrine of a soul sleep, agreed with it, or at least did not expressly disagree,2© then we have, if not proof, at least a further indication that this interpretation is right. Although Luther was not a Quietist, as I constantly repeat, it is here that the first and second roads of the Reformation part company.
6. Time and Eternity.2” We still have to ask why Calvin had to clothe his opposition to Quietism in the garb of what seems to be so totally a metaphysical-eschatological issue. Of primary importance in this regard is that Calvin himself chose the field of battle. According to his own testimony he does not seem to have had any attack from the other side, any opposing Anabaptist work advocating the doctrine of soul sleep. He expressly says in the preface that he had heard of the matter only through murmurings and suppressed mutterings, that he had heard of relevant schedulae but never seen them (and none from that time is known), and that he knew the teaching only from what friends told him they had learned from the spoken addresses of Anabaptist teachers.”®
Support for this statement may be found in an undated letter from
25. See n. 14 above.;
26. E. Hirsch (1888-1972) was a Gottingen colleague, professor of church history. See WA B 2, to N. Amsdorf, 1.13.1521 (no. 449). Later Luther often made positive statements about the doctrine, e.g., WA 10/I, 117f€; 10/III, 191; 11, 70; 12, 456; 15, 475; 17/1, 169; 17/1], 235; but he did not seem to think that soul sleep involved a long night for the soul, or its complete decay until the judgment day, as Calvin understood it.
27. Later marginal heading in the MS.
28. CO 5, 169f.
Early Years, 1509~1536
Capito of Strassburg to Calvin (10/II, 45f.) in which he said that he had read the manuscript, was somewhat put off by how unreadable it was, and advised against publication, particularly as we cannot fight such errors unless we first really know them. In his view the matter lies outside the analogy of faith and dealing with it can only create strife and be a temptation for many uncertain people. Calvin should devote his literary zeal to a more plausible argument. Capito is plainly of the view that Calvin replies to in his preface of 1536, namely, that the enterprise is contrary to love and in any case superfluous. He does not see the need to say precisely that at any time.
The situation, as so often in the life of Calvin, is that like the alert dog, if we may use his own comparison, he senses an enemy at a time and place where no one else is aware of any need to see danger, and to the alienation of all others, he lunges in this unexpected direction to give warning of the enemy that only he himself has noticed until at last all are awake to the threat. The initiative in the fight against soul sleep is all on his side, and it must be something in himself that impels him to fight this fight against what is only a murmuring and muttering. He is obviously not of the view of many that in the last things all may hold their own arbitrarily chosen views without peril or penalty. It is not for him an indifferent matter whether souls sleep or are awake after this life, whether they are at rest inactively or in tense expectation of fulfillment. Everything depends precisely on this question.
We finally come back here to the point we touched on in our general account of Calvin's theological character, to the essentially eschatological orientation of his Christianity, to the sharp and never to be ignored antithesis and connection between time and eternity on which all his thinking rests. Already here I would draw your attention to two works of Martin Schulze, of which at least the first is for me the most important and the most valuable of all the works on Calvin that I know. The two works are Meditatio futurae vitae... (Leipzig, 1901), and Calvins Jenseitschristentum in seinem Verhdltnis zu den religiésen Schriften des Erasmus (G6rlitz, 1902). Here Schulze works out instructively and convincingly - this side of Calvin in a way that is one-sided but that contributes essentially to our understanding of him. In a much more pregnant and emphatic way for Calvin than for Luther, the real life is the future eternal life. We might put it this way: For him the thought of death and the hereafter was much more directly linked than it was for Luther to the concept of salvation that Luther’s doctrine of faith and justification had clarified for him.
We first ask with astonishment how that can be so when his theology is marked specifically by a turning to this world, by a stress on obedience and the glorifying of God in the present life. In reality the two things go together. The thought of eternity is taken strictly. Eternity is seen as the negation of all time and the position that underlies time, hence not as a second and different thing in a moment of time, but as the primary-finite thing of every moment of time, its meaning, its transcendental content. This concept cannot devalue time or empty it out. Or rather, it does this completely, but only in order to fill it to the full. It makes time serious and important as the place of training where nothing, nothing at all is eternal, but everything, everything is judged and determined by its relation to the eternal, full of meaning, full of tasks.
I cannot agree with Schulze when he thinks that by way of Erasmus he can claim Calvin as a Platonist,?? though there can be no doubt that Calvin knew Plato fairly well and valued him above all other philosophers, and though it can also be taken as proved that the one who directly led him to an understanding of the world of Platonic thinking was in fact Erasmus. The truth seems to be rather that for the new version of Luther's insight that was hovering before him in the Cop address, namely, an ethicizing version, Calvin found the right lever in the formulas in which Erasmus understood Platonic philosophy.
But much more important than this thesis of formal dependence is, I think, that of the material identity of Calvin’s meditation on the future life and Plato’s meletan apothnéskein.® Facing Luther’s doctrine of grace on the one side and the need to relate this vertical in all its unheard-of character to the horizontal of human life and striving, that is, truly to set the latter in the light of grace, Calvin forged ahead to the point where a theological view of life and a philosophical view have always met and always must. He saw in the thought of death the standard by which all things living are measured. He became the strict essential thinker who sought what is truly positive and existent, not in greater proximity to, but precisely beyond the negation of, all that is apparently and provisionally positive and existent, but for which this infinitely distant thing, just because it is the true thing, becomes what is most, close and immediate and serious and important, the most urgent concern and the most compelling motive in everything present.
29. Schulze, however, also sees a direct derivation of Calvin’s thought from Plato (Calvins Jenseitschristentum, 1f. n. 1).
30. Phaedon 67e; see also above, 64.
Calvin is an eschatologist as an ethicist and an ethicist as an eschatologist. The meaning of the next world is this world, and the power of this world is the next world.3! Looking to eternity seriously and taking time seriously are for him one and the same thing, two sides of the same coin. Just because he sees here connections that escaped the excellent Capito and so many others, the state and life of souls after this life — as the subtitle of Psychopannychia runs3* — cannot be for him a matter of indifference. Those who speak about what follows this life are speaking, whether they realize it or not, about what is true and primary. Those who are in error here are in error about God, and those who know here know in God. It is precisely the departed soul, the soul after this life, the soul that we think of only eschatologically, that has to be thought of as motivated and feeling and strong and knowing; otherwise it is not the immortal soul, the bearer of God’s image, and all that we say about the fellowship between God and us is not true because it is not authentic or solidly based (5, 182 and 184).%3 If life after death is a night festival, a pannychia, then so is all life. But if life after death is an alert and lively waiting for God, then we know what we must think about all life.
7. Evaluation.54 We have said already that in 1534 Calvin did not know how to work out the actual significance of the theme. Among all the Enthusiasts’ topics he seized on this one without even well-meaning people like Capito knowing why. His own counterthesis does not sound credible because the need for it is not clear. It seems to be a product of the study, remote from life, which sets one eschatological notion alongside another. Only in the Institutes does the relation that gave Calvin so lively an interest in the subject become clear, so clear that he can now return to the specific problem only in passing.> But as an exercise preliminary to the /Institutes the treatise is an important part of Calvin’s work, and if we are to understand the genesis of his approach we must go past it much less hastily than Calvin students have thus far done.
31. Cf. Troeltsch, Soziallehren, 979; cf. n. 20 above.
32. On this heading, which follows the two prefaces in the older editions between 1542 and 1565, cf. the editors’ note, CO 5, 177.
335, (GO) Sy, Jy
34. Marginal heading in MS.
35. Cf. the 1559 Institutes III, 9 and 25; in passing, 25, 6.
$9 1536 Institutes
Introduction
Meantime the events in Paris from the end of 1534 to early 1535, of which we have spoken already, had been taking place. Radical Protestant circles made a new push for Reformation and now failed more tragically than in 1533. The placards against the mass came out that called it blasphemy and seduction and described priests as false prophets, deceivers, wolves, idolaters, liars, and murderers of souls, more abhorrent than the devil.! Posters of this type were attached even to the doors of the royal palace. As a result, Francis I was annoyed, decided firmly to oppose the Protestant cause, and initiated the gruesome persecution of 1535 to which Calvin refers in the dedicatory epistle of the Institutes.2 In a statement meant especially for the ears of related German Protestants he can say with some credibility that the problem lies with Anabaptists, madmen, agitators, and people about whom it is best not to speak.
For the moment the situation was a hopeless one in France. Tactically Calvin no doubt knew well why he had attacked the Radical wing of the movement in the Psychopannychia. But it was too late. At the end of the year, to evade persecution, Calvin went by way of Metz over the border to Strassburg en route to Basel. He spent 14 or 15 months in great seclusion in Strassburg, where he lodged with Katharina Klein, a fine woman, in the suburb of St. Alban, which would later boast of his having stayed there.? In a way that would prove important later, he made acquaintance in Strassburg with Simon Grynaeus, rector of Basel, Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, and Pierre Viret, later reformer in the Vaud. For the rest he was wholly claimed by work on his now maturing magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, or rather on the first version known to us,4
1. For an extract from the text of the placards cf. P Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins, vol. I (Hamburg, 1855), 52f, based on the’ edition Livre der martyrs. On the incident cf. Stihelin, I, 34f.; an original example was found in the Bern city library in 1935, cf. H. Bloesch, Un original des placards d’Antoine Marcourt de 1 534 (Musée Neuchatelois, 1943), no. 4. In English see BI 437ff.
DOS, 215) BE ik 3. According to Peter Ramus, who in 1568/69 lived in the same house as Calvin had done in 1535. Cf. PR Wernle, Calvin und Basel bis zum Tode des Myconius 1535-52 (Basel, 1909), 3.
4. OS I, 37-283; BI 21ff.
157,
for work on it in one new version after another, in which it remained the same but was always totally fresh, would continue without a break until 1559, five years before his death. It was primarily this book that made Calvin one of the main factors in the history of older — and not just older —Protestant theology.
A glance at this first version is essential if we are to understand Calvin's life itself. “Institutes” has the sense of “instruction” (not “foundation,” as M. Bossert suggests).° In keeping with this is what Calvin says at the beginning of the dedicatory epistle regarding the first aim of work. In answer to a need, especially in France, he wants to expound certain main teachings that will help those who have a religious interest on the way to true piety.© We have to remember that the man who felt called to this vast task, with no external motivation, for we do not hear of anyone asking him to do it, was then 27 years of age. The urge to present and unfold his insights, to intervene in history as an instructor, and to direct the religious movement must have been a deep and original one within himself. He believed, and in this again he was akin to Plato, that virtue may be taught.” If there is no obduracy, and if the witness of the Holy Spirit speaks the last and decisive Word, it is possible not merely to proclaim the truth of Christianity, but to expound it in a way that enlightens and convinces. At the beginning of the history of the Reformed church that would be so influential historically stood a schoolmaster with his textbook. That is from the very first its strength and its weakness. Those who would be Reformed should not in any event be ashamed of this beginning and this distinctive feature.
A second aim of the book, as Calvin himself tells us, was to defend the Protestant cause to those outside: before the court of the French king and before the French public.8 We have already discussed the dedicatory epistle prefacing the work and do not intend to come back to it here.? Calvin did not think he had failed to achieve this second goal because the book made no discernible impression on Francis, for later changes and expansions still in large part move in this apologetic direction. He used
5. Cf. Bossert for this rendering of institutio.
60S Fok Bint:
7. Plato discusses but does not decide whether virtue can be learned (taught?) in Menon 99e and Protagoras 319b.
8. See above, 108f.
9. See above, 108-12.
e
the work especially to give a necessary authoritative defense and answer to old and new objections and misunderstandings on the part of illdisposed opponents or fatal friends of the Protestant cause, and to give an authentic interpretation of the Protestant gospel to those who were at a distance from it. He originally planned it as a redoubt with two main fronts but gradually built it up into a fortress with guns trained in every direction. Reformed Protestantism was militant from the first. * We cannot be experts in Reformed theology unless we are aware of Calvin's sense of responsibility, the keenness of his gaze on every hand, his need constantly to sharpen up and delimit his own insights and statements, his feeling that he was always on the watch. If we call this thrust in Calvin apologetic, however, we should note that it is not an apologetics that seeks to justify Christianity before courts outside itself, for example, philosophy or science. The standard by which Calvin’s theology measures itself in justification lies instead within itself. It is its own generating principle, holy scripture, which, of course, is related so closely to reason, and therefore to true philosophy and science, that no need for external vindication can exist. The power of Calvin’s apologetics, so far as it has any, consists of the fact that basically it is simply a conversation with itself. Its initial premise is that there are not two truths but only one, and hence from the very first it feels no temptation to barter. It proceeds with the silent summons: Those who have ears to hear, let them hear! [Mark 4:9].
Calvin himself did not state his third motive, but we need to take note of it because it is the presupposition of the other two, the educational and the apologetic. I refer to the intrinsic need to systematize. Calvin has always been called the born systematician, the great systematician of the older Protestantism and perhaps of all Protestantism.!° A systematician is not just one who wants order and purity of thinking and has some skill in arranging and structuring thoughts. It may be that these qualities are not so essential in a true systematician as is thought. In truth we see little of them in the first edition of the Institutes. They usually develop in time when something very different is present first. This first and very different thing, however, is a profound need for synthesis and an ardent desire for it. |
Synthesis is something original and creative. It precedes all detailed
10. Cf. Tschackert, 394, who calls Calvin “the greatest dogmatician of the Reformation”; and Loofs, Leitfaden (4th ed. 1906), 882, who calls the Institutes the “masterpiece of Reformation theology.” discussion. It is not itself discussion but the subject in every discussion. It is an ability and desire to see antitheses together, no matter whether we are thinking of spirit and nature, the inward and outward, eternity and time, faith and ethos, revelation and history, intuitive and discursive thinking, or whatever. All of us by nature incline to synthesis. Yet there are differences in disposition. Some have a religious bent like Luther. Others have a one-sidedly intellectual or moral or political or aesthetic bent like the great majority in the Middle Ages and today. In both these types the need and the ability to see things together is weakly developed. They can neither debate nor come to terms with one another in any true or meaningful way. They do not understand one another. They can only confront one another as strangers.
But a third group consists of those who are strongly inclined to synthesis. They have a powerful urge to present a total view, to set forth the whole. All that they do presses on toward this whole. They do not perhaps have any specific or outstanding endowment on any one side. For this reason they are the great warriors and at the same time the great peacemakers of history. They are the born teachers and fighters and debaters and soliloquizers. But before that, they are the born systematicians. Whether they actually erect what we call a system is of secondary importance. They are systematicians long before they do so, and would still be even if they never did. Those who succeed in erecting a real academic system with all the chicanery that this entails are perhaps not born systematicians but systematicians at a later stage, like carters who find work where kings build.!! We recognize born systematicians by the fact that they are not wholly successful. Calvin was a systematician in this sense.
Already on a previous occasion J have called the Institutes a primeval forest.!? It is certainly not a real academic system. In its way, however, it is the brilliant work of a synthesizer, of a man for whom synthesis was really the primary and original thing. Remember that the beginnings of work on the Institutes go back to the stay in Angouléme, that is, to early 1534. Already, just a few months after the Cop address, his first improvised Protestant statement, the author felt himself compelled to offer something
11. Cf. Schiller’s poem Kant und seine Ausleger, which includes a line on carters having work when kings build.
12. Cf. 41 above, and Barth to Thurneysen on 6.8.1921, in which he calls Calvin a waterfall, a primeval forest, something demonic, direct from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, marvelous, mythological. total and comprehensive, not just bits and pieces of Christianity, but instruction and training in it;!3 and if our understanding of the Psychopannychia is correct, that work, too, was not simply a bit of specialized dogmatic research but a contribution to fundamental principles. Calvin did not merely synthesize something already there, a mix of his own thoughts with those of Luther, Erasmus, Bucer, and Zwingli. He was first a systematician, and then he saw what was right for him in all these thoughts, then he found them, now here, now there, in the writings of contemporaries. He can always see both sides of the antitheses that crop up, for even before he knows the two sides their connection and unity are there for him. He can contend against the one side in the name of the other because both are reconciled in him. He can bring the two sides together because both are really at odds in him. He can think as Luther does against Zwingli, as Zwingli does against Luther, as Erasmus does against both of them, and as Bucer does against Erasmus. He can do all this, but he also must. He always understands the one through the other.
It is Calvin the systematician who on his own initiative becomes the educator and apologist. For thus understanding naturally produces a need to teach and a need to defend the whole as such, and both are needs that the one-sided on either side cannot know. In 1536 he had certainly not become a systematician in the sense of a system-builder, nor did he really do so in 1559. As a systematic structure the 1536 edition is just as unsatisfactory as Melanchthon’s Loci in 1521 or Zwingli’s Commentary on True and False Religion in 1525. It surpasses both, however, in the synthetic power that distinguishes the born systematician.
The order of the first Institutes is that of Luther's Catechism; law, creed, Lord’s Prayer, sacraments, but with two powerful appendices, an attack on the five added medieval sacraments in ch. 5 and an exposition of Christian liberty in ch. 6, where unexpectedly under this title the main issue discussed is the form of life in the church and society. This is not the place to follow Calvin in detail, but we must try to work out briefly the dominant themes in the outward chaos of individual thoughts, and therefore the systematic element in Calvin in the true sense.
13. Borrowing from Kierkegaard, Barth used the title “Training in Christianity” for his last two parish confirmation classes in 1920/21 and 1921/22, Konfirmandenunterricht 1909-1921, ed. J. Fangmeier, part I of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1987), 263, 405.
- Early Years, 1509-1536
Knowledge of God and Man
We must begin with the famous opening sentence, which remained the same in every edition: Nearly all wisdom (doctrina) consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.14 We may say fairly definitely that the impulse to adopt this formulation came from Zwingli, in whose Commentary on True and False Religion we read in the second small section that since it is God whom religion strives after and we are those who strive after God in religion, we cannot speak aright about religion unless first of all we know God and ourselves.!> The difference, as we see, is twofold. First, to differentiate between the knowledge of God and ourselves, Zwingli uses agnoscere Deum but cognoscere hominem, there being nothing similar in Calvin. Second, it emerges from the “first of all” (ante omnia), and also from the whole structure of Zwingli’s work, that the two sections 3 and 4 of the work (on God and man) are obviously viewed as a kind of prolegomena, whereas the inclination of Calvin, as we see especially clearly in the later structure, is actually to view the whole (summa) of doctrine from this double angle. The use of the formula is thus much more significant for the one who adopts it than for the one who coins it. We can and even must say that Calvin discusses this twofold theme throughout, that he is always speaking about God and us. Here is the synthesis in which more or less clearly all the theses and antitheses of his theology unfold in their dialectic of opposition and relationship, and to which, when rightly understood, they all seek to point.
If we now look at what Calvin has to say about God on the one side and man on the other on the first pages of his 1536 Institutes, one thing that strikes us is that so far as possible he sets God at once in the light of a full and sufficient knowledge of man, and that he at once speaks of man in such a way that we note that this is the man who is seen and known by God. In neither case is there any trace of a restraint that might indicate that we have here only a first and provisional stage of knowledge, for example, a natural theology and anthropology. Basically, can more be said about God on some higher stage than what we at once read here, namely, ~ that he is infinite wisdom, righteousness, goodness, mercy, truth, meaning, and life, and that there is none beside him? All such things come from him, and all things in heaven and earth are created for his glory. He is the
14..OS 1,37; BI 20:
15. Z 3, 640. judge who is over us all and who puts the fateful question whether we really serve his glory. But he is also the merciful God who takes up the cause of the needy when they flee to him and appeal to his faithfulness, ready to forgive, to help, mugs
to save those who put their whole trust in him (I, 27).!6
And can one basically say more of us than is said there, that we are created in God’s image and likeness for full fellowship with him? But this image is obscured and forgotten as a result of the fall. We are far from God and alienated from him. All that is left as our innermost being is ignorance, wickedness, weakness, death, and judgment; even our holiness that shines brightest is an abomination (I, 28).!7 What we are of ourselves, intellect or will, soul or flesh, is concupiscence (I, 113).!8 From head to foot no good may be found in us (I, 45). If there is anything good, we owe it to God’s grace (I, 45).!9 Yet the unmet obligation remains to serve God’s honor and glory (I, 28).?°
It is plain that in both cases the knowledge rests on an unstated presupposition, a “cognition” that contains the other two “cognitions” in itself and unfolds them. We do know God and God does know us: that is the unstated, primary, synthetic knowledge of God and ourselves with which Calvin begins and in the light of which he has to say all the rest. This original cognition is full, sufficient, and beyond emulation. Everything else that has to be said is simply a development, expansion, and elucidation of this original knowledge. It is simply an expression and naming of it. It is not something new and additional, a further step. Calvin knows no steplike difference between natural and supernatural revelation, no way from the one to the other. If he later makes a distinction, the latter is properly no more than an explanation of the former, its actualizing, one might say, and the Bible, for example, is the pair of spectacles by which to read the Word of God in nature and history, as he will later say expressly.7!
This comparison should not mislead us into thinking that in the final edition Calvin was setting the knowledge of God the Creator and the knowledge of God the Redeemer over against one another in books |
WG sOS) 1k BS el 10)
i7aOSwns Sib 20;
LSeOS esol lels2.
19. OS I, 57; BI 42.
20. OS I, 38; BI 21.
21. Inst. I, 6, 1; OS III, 60, 25ff.
and II. Without the biblical revelation that defines God the Redeemer Calvin sees no real knowledge of God the Creator, and conversely knowledge of God the Redeemer is simply a sharper and clearer seeing of the revelation of God the Creator. Materially the two forms of knowledge are exactly the same. We differentiate them only at once to grasp more truly their essential unity.
Hence I think it is wrong to say that Calvin did not gain his insight into God and us from Christ or that he simply forced Christian elements into a general metaphysical, philosophical view.?* We need to note above all else that for Calvin there is no basic distinction between the elements of knowledge, but that Christ is from the first the key with which he unlocks the whole. Christ is that unspoken original presupposition in terms of which we see God a priori as the ground and goal, the one who judges us and shows us mercy, and in terms of which we see ourselves a priori, when measured against God, as sinners, and are thus pointed to grace. Looking from Christ at God, we have knowledge of God, or, as it is put later, knowledge of God the Creator. Looking from Christ at us, we have knowledge of ourselves, out of which arises later knowledge of God the Redeemer. It is the same light, however, that shines on both sides. The Christian element in Calvin is not a special higher possibility of knowledge, but the first and only possibility by means of which we may establish and say what is essential about God and us. Calvin does not try to do honor to Christ by putting him on one side, by putting him, as it were, on a higher lampstand, and then putting out all the other lights so as to let this light shine triumphantly; he sees all the other lights from the very first in the light of this one light.23 We have seen already that this does no harm to the radicalism of his thinking about God and us — quite the contrary. It is true that in the process the borders between philosophy and theology become fluid, but that is perhaps not the least advantage of his theology.
We note the same trend and synthesis when we look at his thinking on law and gospel, that is, on the biblical revelation. Strictly, says Calvin, God’s law is written in our hearts. It is the same thing as conscience (I, 29).24 But because of our arrogance, which prevents us from finding it in ourselves, God
22. Cf. R. Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 1V/2 (Erlangen and Leipzig, 3rd and 4th ed.), 571.
23. Cf. the later Barth on the relation between Christ the one light and the lights and truths of the creaturely world and the cosmos, CD, IV/3, §69.2.
24:.OS 1, 39; BI.22.
§9 1536 Institutes
had to give it to us in written form as well. Here again, then, the primary thing that Calvin never lost sight of is the unity. The same relation repeats itself on a higher stage when the law is written in its double form as the threatening unmasking of our sin and misery and the comforting promise of our deliverance from both. In fact Calvin cannot recognize at all any real distinction in principle between law and gospel. Christ is not a second Moses,” he says with Luther. But as distinct from Luther he does not mean by this that Christ was something totally different from Moses, for Moses already preached Christ. Increasingly in later editions2® Calvin sees law and gospel together. The whole of the OT is full of promise, full of Christ, so that the NT is in the OT. Conversely the NT does not set aside but confirms and purifies the law that the Pharisees had perverted.2” Both apostles and prophets preached the same unchangeable will of God both to judge and to save. Few thoughts were so much on Calvin's heart in his own time as that of the primary unity of the biblical revelation both with itself, and then further back, and less evident, with what God has said and still says to us in nature, history, and conscience.
In Calvin the thought of revelation is freed from all historical caprice and contingency. The one God meets us majestically, if more or less in concealed form, all along the line.28 We can none of us make the excuse that we do not know the law or are not under its authority. Again, we none of us should regard ourselves as lost for not knowing the promise that always accompanies the law. There is no escaping divine judgment, but also no total distance away from divine mercy for those who can and will hear God’s voice. Christ once more stands between the contradictions or rather above them, as the principle of knowledge, showing us both the full terror of judgment and the full depth of grace, yet not accepting the fact that these two both are and always will be two things. Calvin has been charged with Judaism because he would not let go of the essential relation of the OT and the NT but like the early church upheld their unity.?? He has also been charged with rationalism3° because for him God’s revelation
25. OS I, 54; BI 39.
26. Inst. I, 9f. OS TI, 398ff.
27. For this thought cf. already in 1536 OS I, 54; BI 39.
28. Cf. esp. Inst. I, 5, and II, 12-17; OS III, 173ff; 254
ff.
29. Seeberg, 566, thinks Calvin's legalism inclines him to erase the boundaries between the OT and the NT.
30. Bauke, Probleme, 13ff., thinks the first feature of Calvin’s theology is dialectical rationalism. is simply his bringing to fulfillment our most profound and compelling human disposition. In spite of Marcion and Harnack,3! we may regard the first fault as an advantage, and in view of the hints that Calvin gives us we should perhaps think more cautiously about the relation between reason and revelation in him. At any rate, no special gains accrue from cutting the threads between the OT and the NT.
If we now turn to what Calvin thinks about Christ when speaking about him expressly, we see at once that we have here the seat and origin of these and all the other tensions and antitheses that characterize his theology. The first thing he has to say in 1536 is that Christ, one with the Father, assumed our flesh and thus concluded the covenant with us, drawing us very close to God, from whom our sins had greatly estranged us (I, 30).32 He has been made righteousness, sanctification, and redemption for us [1 Cor. 1:30]. This means for Calvin two things that are always distinct yet never separate. Christ died for us and thus freed us from the curse and judgment that lay upon us. In our flesh, and therefore in our name, he went up to heaven and is there at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us, our only hope, by participation in whom we are already in heaven even though on earth. That is the Godward, not the manward, side of Christ. He places himself in front of us, covering and justifying and liberating us, because in our flesh he is so wholly other than we are, the Son of Man who is the Son of God, and in whom, even though we are so far from God, we can put our trust.
Nevertheless, we cannot follow through this side of the matter to the very end without at once coming upon the other side. If Christ represents us in this way, then we are no longer afar off. In him we, too, are in heaven, chosen before the foundation of the world according to the same good pleasure of God that has made him ours, redeemed, accepted, reconciled, put under his protection, planted in him, in him already entering in hope the kingdom of God. There takes place here the wonderful participation that we who by our own works could never be justified or capable of justification are now what he is, a new creation, and we
31. The 1st edition of Harnack’s classic study of Marcion had just come out in 1921 (Leipzig); cf. Marcion (Durham, North Carolina), pp. 134ff., where Harnack argues that the early church was right to retain the OT but the OT became a fate overhanging the Reformation in the 16th century and in the 19th keeping it in the canon weakened the Protestant church and religion. Barth's evaluation of Marcion was much influenced by this work.
32. OS I, 40; BI 22. cannot be anything else when we deny ourselves and take up the cross, giving active expression to our heavenly calling by the good works that God gives (I, 49-52).33 We have here, we might say, the opposite manward and not Godward side of Christ. But always Christ is in reality both the one who justified us without uy and the one who dwells and works and initiates within us as the giver of the new life in us. The two can never be separated, yet the union is also true only insofar as each is on its own side the whole. Always in Christ we are those who are afar off, sinners, poor, ungodly, referred only to grace. Yet in Christ we are always close, God’s children, hoping and already attaining, inseparably related to God. This is a secret and hidden philosophy that we may not know by syllogisms but that God makes known by opening the eyes of some, so that in his light they may see light (I, 82).54 Always in fact Christ is the covenant and the one who concludes the covenant between God and us, the enacting of the inconceivable and impossible thing that when enacted is also the most simple and most natural.
The place where God’s revelation comes to us is holy scripture. We all know that with special strictness Calvin stresses scripture’s objective validity and authority. Already in the 1536 Institutes it is plain that he handles the Bible like a legal book whose wording must always have the final decision. Calvin forged the dogma of inspiration. Yet we cannot be content merely to say that. He never spoke about the inspiration of the Bible without also advancing the principle of its opposing highly subjective character. I refer to the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit,>> the voice of truth that makes itself heard not merely in the Bible but also in the believing reader or hearer. Hence the process by which the content of the Bible becomes certain and authoritative is not merely an enforcing of the dictate of the letter and the subjection of the human understanding to it, but, if we take Calvin in the living sense that he had in view, it is also a conversation of the truth with itself. As the Holy Spirit is in the letter and also in the hearts of believers, the truth only seems at first to be twofold. In reality it is one, and inevitably it will find and know itself again on both sides. Precisely here, to do justice to Calvin, we must see that in his thinking he moves from but also toward a single point that is above the antitheses of objective and subjective or outward and inward, and that he
33. OS I, 60fF; BI 46ff.
34. OS I, 96; BI 42.
35. Inst. 1, 7, 4; OS Il, 65ff.
can now very specifically speak of the one, now of the other, only because primarily he always has their unity, the totality, in view.
The same may be said about the thinking of Calvin on the appropriation of revelation, on faith. More strongly than the other reformers Calvin stresses the purely other-sided basis and content of faith. Faith does not come from us, not even as the recognition of our need. Even when we believe, and precisely when we believe, we have nothing good in us; our treasure is in Christ in heaven. It is the nature of faith to pierce the ears, close the eyes, wait upon the promise, and turn aside from all thoughts of human worth or merit.36 For, he hammers home tirelessly, the object and goal of faith is the Word of God as such, and for us, then, it is the divine promise that we cannot see or touch. By nature faith is a mystery and always will be. It is something that we have in hope. We cannot possibly have it without self-renunciation, without ever new humility. The only guarantee of its truth and reality is the truthfulness of God, which no experience can attain to, which comes to us only in God’s Word, and which can be accepted by us only in the trust in God’s Word that the Holy Spirit creates in us. Faith is acceptance of God’s truthfulness, namely, that he cannot deceive us. But this is always the truth of God, the invisible thing, the mystery, the promise, that which we accept in Christ, and precisely in Christ, when we believe. At its core faith is always by nature hope. All this, however, does not mean for Calvin any uncertainty, hesitation, or doubt. The very character of faith as hope is its character as certainty. For where is there certainty except beyond ourselves in God? Where can we rest except in what we cannot see or touch? Where is the Archimedian point for our life on earth except in heaven? Just because we have here only promise, only hope, we have certainty, assurance, undoubted possession. Hope, not having, is true having vis-a-vis God. All having must again and again be understood as hope. Those who would boast, let them boast in the Lord [1 Cor. 1:31]. But those who can boast in the Lord can and should boast.