§7 Introduction (part 4 of 7)
102. Cf. Wernle, Calvin, 20, who sees here'a personal relation to Christ rather than theology.
103. P. Wernle, Einfithrung in das theologische Studium (Tubingen, 2nd ed. 1911), 225, views a repressed, restrained enthusiasm as integral to Calvin.
Early Years, 1509~1536
not for the people.!°4 There was too much resignation in Calvin’s whole attitude for things to be different. Indeed, resignation was with him from the beginning. For proof enough we have the fact that when he went over to Protestantism he became a theologian, and indeed a dogmatician and ethicist. To become a theologian in the way Calvin did is perhaps the most sober and secular and unromantic thing, the most free from illusions, that anyone can do. Instruction, apologetics, synthesis — these three terms are the distinguishing motifs of his theology. All three denote a descent into the arena. It is easy in contrast to extol the purer figure of Luther or the bolder line taken by Zwingli. A person has to be very open to undertake that descent. For that reason Calvin is at least no less a figure, no mere successor. It is in this connection, it seems to me, that we should read the two last chapters of the first /ystitutes, out of which later the enormous book IV on the external means of salvation would develop.!©
In the first of these chapters we see Calvin with sword in hand hewing away with all his skill at the chief enemy of the gospel, Roman sacramentalism — a veritable slaughter of the innocents as he casts a severe and hostile glance on all the beautiful little plans of ingenious institutions and practices that had flourished under the warm medieval sun, as always happens in religious history, first plucking them up, then digging out the roots and energetically throwing them on the rubbish heap — not perhaps an edifying but a very human spectacle! Those who know in any sense what was at issue can hardly raise any serious objection. On this matter of the sacraments we have a plain either-or. Either friends and foes alike knew what was at stake, or they gained adherents without knowing what they wanted, willing to make a peace with opponents that would be the beginning of the end. A true leader could not be crisp enough in giving the order here to halt and advance. If the need for this is no longer really clear today, if, not without reason, there seems to us to be something nonessential and superfluous in what now passes for the fight against Rome,!° this is more relevant as a judgment on our own age than on that of the Reformation.
104. Barth’s library contained an illustrated account of the July 1909 anniversary in Geneva, Les Jubilés de Genéve en 1909. Cf. W. Niesel, Calvin-Bibliographie 1901-1959 (Munich, 1961), 32ff., for the related literature.
105. The full title speaks of the external means and supports by which God invites us into the fellowship of Christ and keeps us in it.
106. Barth plainly alludes here to the partly political Protestant distrust of ultramontanist Roman Catholicism; cf. K. Scholder, Die Kirchen und das Dritte Reich, vol. I (Frankfurt, 1977), 35f.
That precisely this chapter is so fundamentally and ruthlessly negative undoubtedly made it a liberating and reconciling chapter for hundreds and thousands at that time who were not clear about the matter. Behind the no with which Calvin challenged his adversaries his own Reformation position could be seen all the more clearly, the “Glory to God alone” which was the essential message of Luther and Zwingli and Calvin in opposition to the well-graded medieval pathway of grace and salvation. In France and Germany there was certainly special gratitude to Calvin precisely for this chapter because of the perspicacity and care with which he worked out the simplicity, directness, and credibility of the relation to God, if also the unheard-of paradox of it, in contrast to all the ingenious and even profound and certainly sentimental things that in the last resort could only conceal the simplicity, and also because of the energy with which, to use his own expression, he had partly stripped the lion’s hide off the asses,!97 showing up that which was human for what it really was. This chapter unquestionably did much to clarify the situation regarding the opposition. In this context I must refrain from going into details and be content to share with you some of my own inquiries.
The first section ison confirmation.!8 The reference is to the Roman practice, the ostensible equipping of those regenerated in baptism with the Holy Spirit for the battle of life. But where, asks Calvin, did God ever promise any second equipment of this kind alongside baptism? A servant's first duty is to obey. Where is the word of command to which those who call themselves ministers of the sacrament may appeal here?!°? Who has taught them to seek salvation in the oil that plays so decisive a role both here and in the whole Roman Catholic sacramental system? Is not baptism itself an adequate equipment for the battle of life? Is it not a devilish doctrine that so devalues the promise that God has given in baptism?!!° The wisdom of God, celestial truth, all-Christian doctrine, really institutes and anoints a Christian (I, 145).!!! A sacrament is not from earth but from heaven, not of us but of God alone (I, 146).!!2 Away, then, with confirmation! If we are perhaps to retain what the practice was originally,
107. OS I, 223; BI 170ff.
108. OS I, 163ff.; BI 170.
109. OS I, 163; BI 172ff.
110. OS I, 165; BI 172f.
111. OS I, 166; BI 174.
112. OS I, 168; BI 176.
we might put catechetical instruction in its place, teaching children the main points of religion in a short formula, and thus doing something that can only be useful in view of the general ignorance.!!3 I might note in passing that with a few slight alterations what Calvin says about confirmation might still be said against the great abuse that from the days of Pietism and Rationalism has gained a footing even in Protestant churches. Apart from oil and bishops, there is really nothing missing of the things against which Calvin inveighs here. For the rest his friend Bucer seems to bear some guilt for the development of this Protestant confirmation.!!4 The second section is on penitence (penance).!!5 Like few passages in the whole work it breathes a Lutheran spirit. The enemy here is the idea that penitence can be a single act which as such effects forgiveness of sins. Plato comes in at this point with his thesis that the life of the philosopher is a meditation on death. Even more truly one might say that the life of a Christian is a constant striving and training in the mortification of the flesh until it is fully destroyed (I, 150).!!© We thus learn not to dwell upon our own contributions and penitential tears but to direct both eyes to the mercy of God and to give him the glory in true humility (I, 152)!!7 — the surest way to avoid the despair and the lightheartedness between which we vacillate when we make penitence a sacramental act. Penance has to go. We have sinned against God alone, God alone can help us. Io him alone we can and must confess our sins.!!8 The power of binding and loosing is either the power of God’s Word in the preaching of the gospel, which God acknowledges and in which we hear God himself speaking with his Word of judgment and grace, or it is the authority that the church has been given to discipline its members, and that has nothing whatever to do with the remission of sins.!!? Ideas about special priestly powers, a treasury of good works that the church can draw on, works of satisfaction that must follow absolution, mortal and venial sins, and pur-
115. OS-1 169; BIT76:
114. For Bucer and the church orders influenced by him confirmation still had sacramental significance; cf. Martini Buceri Opera omnia, ed. F. Wendel et al., series 1: Deutsche Schriften, vol. VIL (Giitersloh and Paris, 1964), 313: Laying on of hands and prayer as an act of blessing.
115. OS I, 169ff; BI 177.
M6, OS 1, 172; BIAS 1.
IN7. OSA, 175P BL 18s.
1TSHOSS W/O eBiEI83:
119: OS i, 186s BI L968
gatory (a “deadly invention of Satan”) are all human and misleading fabrications.!20 Penitence as an act is not a sacrament. It does not have the sign and promise that alone make a sacrament. The true sacrament of penitence is baptism, which offers sufficient comfort to the penitent.!?!
We then move on at once to extreme unction, ordination, and marriage.!?* An important point here, stressed in the case of ordination, is that in place of the hierarchical omnipotence that had thus far instituted and deposed ministers Calvin envisions at least some powerful cooperation on the part of the congregation itself,!23 something, as we well know, that even the Protestant church has not yet fully achieved. Dearest to Calvin was the appointment of pastors by the civil authorities on the advice of tested older ministers.!24 He had no objection to the laying on of hands at institution, but it ought not to have any religious, that is, sacramental, character. !2> The enemy again was cultic materialism — the relating of oil and spirit (I, 190), inept gestures (I, 189) — in presumptuous imitation of the appointment of the apostles by Christ.!26 With savage scorn Calvin calls this an ingenious fabrication, trying to show historically how the priesthood developed out of Christendom, Judaism, and paganism patched together to make one religion (I, 190).!27 He does not regard the anointing of the sick in the Epistle of James [5:13] as a basis for extreme unction, nor the story of the Samaritans in Acts 8 [v. 16] as a basis for confirmation, for even though the latter were baptized, and had yet to receive the Holy Spirit, the apostolic age had gifts and needs that are no longer present, !?8 a thesis that the churchman accepted with remarkable rashness. His conclusion is the triumphant statement that in part he has torn off the lion's hide from the asses.!??
In reading all this we do not really know whether to laugh or to cry, to go along with the powerful attacks or to hold somewhat aloof from them. Calvin does a successful and convincing job for us in the chapter
120. OS I, 187, 190ff., 200; BI 200ff.
121 OS. 201; BI21G.
122. OS I, 202ff; BI 216ff; OS I, 205ff; BI 219ff; OS I, 220ff.; BI 2366. 1ID32O0S 214: BI229:
124. Ibid.
IDS, OSI, PUB TIE DSBie
IDG OSs yale 2333 OS 2163 Bl 232,
12
72O Sala eZ 338
128. OS I, 203; BI 217f; OS I, 164; BI 171.
129. See n. 106 above.
only to the degree at least that he makes his own strong position clear through all the negations and proposals for amendment. As regards the negations I believe that we may in good conscience vacillate between the thesis that once we are caught in the wasps’ nest of Romanism we have to attack vigorously and uninhibitedly!3° and the thesis that we certainly cannot do real justice to the Roman Catholic problem along these lines. On our lips Calvin’s polemic would undoubtedly not sound good. Both theses are true. It seems that one of the evils, either slackness in principle or injustice in principle, can hardly be avoided. May we decide carefully which of the two we choose!
Historically the following points are to be noted regarding this controversial chapter. (1) The direct impression it leaves is that here is a man who can handle Roman Catholicism well, really well. He shows no sign of devotion to the world of its piety, or love for it. At every point he looks pitilessly only at the ancient and evil foe. Again and again he calmly puts the stereotyped question: Where is the sign for this supposed sacrament? or: If you have a sign, where is the divine promise that makes the sign a sacrament? He does not say farewell to the opposing position that he fights as one might to a dear friend who has, perhaps, become unfaithful — Luther's attitude to the Roman Catholic church. He does so as a judge who dismisses a convicted and condemned malefactor. This mood cannot have been of recent origin. A sudden conversion in 1533 thus seems to be ruled out completely. His abandonment of medieval Catholicism must have taken place much, much earlier. His stubbornness in clinging to error, to which he refers in the Psalms commentary, cannot have gone that far, or it must not be regarded as a serious adherence to Romanism. Who knows, the seeds of his break with the church might have been sown already in his parents’ home in Noyon.
(2) Nowhere except in the Seneca commentary of 1532 does Calvin speak so plainly as a Humanist as in this chapter. Naturally that does not detract from its value, but we have to take note of it for the sake of understanding. Nor does it mean that in the chief point at least Calvin does not launch his polemic wholly from the center. Especially in the great chapter on penitence, which is typical of the whole, a grim seriousness holds sway, a constant recourse to the final and profoundest arguments. But the subject meant that the battle front here was in many ways similar
130. Cf. M. Claudius, Asmus omnia sua secum portans oder Simmtliche Werke des Wandsbekker Bothen (1775; new ed. Munich, 1968), 551.
LZ
to that's! of contemporary il/uminati. Hence we can well imagine that some portions were read favorably by those who rejected the Reformation gospel but approved of the fight against Rome and joined in it. In contrast, serious and thoughtful Roman (Catholics would hardly be reached at all by the work. The method of proof is biblicist, more so than in other parts of the book. But formal biblicism was originally a Humanist achievement. The simple way in which the question: What is written? rather than other questions is used against tradition may sound orthodox in our ears but there is something of the Enlightenment and liberalism about it. In large part it goes with the eternal conflict between Romanticism and rationalism, and it is only that which hides from us a little the significance of the fact that in this case, unlike a century ago, rationalism is the younger and fresher and more vital of the two contestants. The crisp fighting style and the irony and mockery which often enough break through all the seriousness point in the same direction. Finally, the polemical arguments themselves, at least in some passages, hardly differ from those of a decided rational skepticism vis-a-vis the Roman world of miracle. At this point we plainly see an intersection of the two lines of the movement of the time. This was unavoidable in Calvin. It was he who was really, and would increasingly become, the chief fighter against Roman Catholicism, never clearly distinguishing for himself the difference of motifs in the conflict. This was both the strength of his polemic and its weakness. Calvin would not have been Calvin if there had not been this side to him, too.
In the chapter on false sacraments we see Calvin with sword in hand. Unique to him there is the energy with which, more like Zwingli in this respect than Luther, he burns his boats behind him and says farewell to everything medieval, to all that goes along with consecrated oil. Note that without the antagonism expressed in the chapter one might perhaps be a good Lutheran but one cannot be a good Reformed. Reformed Protestantism has two problems: the glory we must give the Lord God (thus far it is only a sharpened Lutheranism), and the demonstrating of this reverence by a corresponding attitude in secular life in the world (a concern not so strongly on the heart of Luther). There was no place for an independent third thing between the two, both sacramental and cultic. The cultus, even in the form of the sacrament, can only be instruction on the invisible relation to God and its visible implications, not an objectifi-
131. The MS incorrectly had denen here. cation or reification of what is divine. It is not an end in itself but only a means. It is not basically a tarrying but a hastening. There is no relation between oil and spirit.132 In this spirit the Heidelberg Catechism could later call the papal mass “an accursed idolatry,”!33 displaying a fierceness that was never known in Lutheranism because this knew nothing of that hastening from the sacred to the profane, but in its own way, if perhaps in a spiritualized manner, it cultivated a tarrying in the sphere between the two. This spirit impresses on Reformed Christianity a certain nonreligious, sober, and in some sense critical and openly or secretly aggressive character from which it cannot and should not break loose so long as it understands itself. Precisely this chapter on false sacraments is thus a primary Reformed note. We can calmly contemplate and accept its humanity and human questionability but in no case should we suppress or overlook it if we are to understand what is at issue.
Christian Liberty
In the sixth and last chapter Calvin took tools in hand with the aim of showing in outline how he thinks about the Christian attitude in secular life in terms of reverence for God. He suggests three themes: (1) Christian liberty; then more narrowly (2) ecclesiastical power, and (3) political government.!34 In the three titles we find expressed both the borrowing from Luther and the difference. When at the end Calvin seeks to speak expressly as an ethicist in the more precise sense, we do not have an added second or new thing, nor the law as a second thing alongside the gospel. His concern is simply for a right use of the freedom that is opened up for us by the gospel. The statements that speak about life in terms of faith and the world in terms of God are not synthetic but analytical. No new factor emerges. The aim is to understand the one old factor aright and to put it into action aright. The Enthusiasts, who are here the enemy, misunderstood and misused Christian liberty. A violent, chaotic, and capri-
132. See n. 123 above.
133. Heidelberg Catechism qu. 80.
134. Chapter 6 has the three headings in its title, but Barth puts the break between the first two sections at a different point from the editor of OS I. See n. 139. On ecclesiastical power see OS I, 234ff; BI 252ff; on political government, OS I, 258ff.; BI 284 ff.
§9 1536 Fania:
cious relation to the historically evolved world and its forms of life was for them the consequence of the new knowledge of God. A situation threatened that we today know only too well, namely, that those who came down from the newly discovered mount of transfiguration [Mark 9:9 par.] into the depths of everyday life, as they had to do, would wander around in an intoxicating mist of Enthusiasm, all of them as seemed best to them [cf Judg. 17:6] adopting a basically negative attitude to everything that might have any claim to represent valid order in daily life.
Calvin, like Luther and Zwingli, did not think that this had to be, that this was real Christian liberty, nor did he take this view merely as an apologist for Protestantism to Francis I, who feared revolution. He could do so because nothing was more alien to his approach from the outset than that cloudy freedom. For a synthesizer, who tried to see antitheses together, what could Christian liberty mean in practice but discipline and order, just as in practice the number of the elect was identical to the militant church of the saints, the voice of the holy God was one with that of the written Word, and the divine gift and fulfillment was one with the promise that is all we can have? The remote, the divine, the wholly other was in fact so remote, so divine, so wholly other for him that he could not fail to do justice to what is near and human and ordinary. In contrast to all intermingling of heaven and earth, he had now for the first time to show the near and the human and tthe ordinary in their own true light, in their unavoidability but also in their crisis. So radical and sudden was his conversion that the usual confusion in conversions between overcoming the world and greater or lesser withdrawal from it or fighting of it, between Christian freedom and some other freedom, could never find any place in him. So radical was it that he did not have to give up his Humanist and juristic leanings and interests; we find no trace of this in Calvin. Instead, he could at once find a place for them in the resoluteness of a Christian who was not ready to put his light under a bushel in the human and properly ordered world.
Two things are true and call for notice. Calvin was wholly Lutheran when he did not put his ethics under the rubric of good works, fulfillment of the law, or the new obedience, but under that of Ghristian liberty. In view of this fact we can hardly say that he did not rightly understand or adequately value the intention of Lutheran ethics, which is best summed up under the phrase “Christian liberty.” Christian life is life in the liberty of the children of God [Rom. 8:21]. All that might seem to have to be added to faith as life, good works, obedience, keeping the commandments, or however else we might put it, has substance and truth only in the atmosphere of this freedom. Hence nothing has to be added to faith. Faith has simply to come into action. This is what Calvin expounded so powerfully here.
But then we must note the second truth. Calvin is not at all Lutheran when he associates or, more precisely, interrelates Christian freedom and ecclesiastical and political order. Could we really imagine Luther's famous Freedom of the Christian having a second and third part on these themes? As Calvin tried to grasp Christian freedom both specifically and positively, his eye fixed on church and state as the two great forms of life on and in which we must practice and demonstrate it. Decisiveness unrestricted by any asceticism is the distinctive feature of Calvin’s ethical approach to the relation here. Or, in other words, we might find the distinctive feature in the fact that the concept of love, which plays so big a part in Lutheran ethics, has for Calvin no role at all, or only a subsidiary role, in this whole context. If love is precisely the great step out of world renunciation and false freedom toward the neighbor, the world, and orderly action in the world, one might argue that it was something that Calvin took for granted. But one might also argue that when Calvin the lawyer and Humanist at once fixed his eye on church and state in making the step, he had good reason to handle the concept of love with caution and restraint. The latter interpretation is probably closer to the truth. Realism is the strong side of all Reformed ethics, love perhaps the weak side. No one can have a strong side without some penalty.
But let us now turn to the details. th a first section of the chapter Calvin deals with Christian liberty as such, that is, in its negative significance. As he sees it, the gospel means liberation for us in three ways. (1) While not challenging our obligation to make our lives a meditation on piety, it does challenge the idea that by such efforts we can achieve the righteousness that counts in the judgment of God. So, then, without weakening the seriousness of the divine commands, it turns our gaze away from ourselves to Christ, that is, to the mercy of God.!35 (2) Without hiding the fact that what is perfect is demanded of us, and that the imperfect obedience that even the best of us renders is reprehensible disobedience, it tells us that God in his fatherly leniency accepts even our imperfect practice, that in Christ we are not household servants but children, and that in spite of, no, because of our basic insight into the
135. OS I, 224; BI 242. judgment under which we stand, we may meet and obey the divine summons with great and joyous alacrity.
36 (3) It frees us from an anxious conscience in our use of God’s earthly gifts, though not concealing from us the truth that conscience, and regard for the consciences of others, obviously limits our freedom, afd yet in such a way that we might have to give offense to Pharisees, and that there is no place for a vacillation of conscience, for its being torn in different directions.!37
If we look at the three negative descriptions of freedom together, it is evident that nothing, absolutely nothing but faith is made the basis of ethics here, a relentless looking past oneself to God, a good will that stands totally under judgment and finds its possibility precisely therein, a certainty, finally, that has its footing and its natural limit in that eternal foundation. Christian liberty is in every part a spiritual thing (I, 199).138 The truly free person is the one who is captive to God. For this very reason there can be no confusion between the freedom that is grounded in God and the freedom that we assert in relation to others. This is where the themes of the second and third sections come in, that is, distinguishing and relating the spiritual government of the church and the political government of the state.
The second section deals with ecclesiastical power (I, 205, 208).19? Calvin’s purpose is indubitably to show that in contrast to fanatics who misuse Christian freedom, discipline and order are unavoidable and good even in the church of the gospel. What is remarkable, however, is the way that he takes to reach this goal. He arrives at it only at the end and deals with it only briefly. He devotes the main part of the section to showing that there is no ecclesiastical power that fixes our relation to God or binds our consciences. Freedom itself, true freedom, must overcome false freedom. It must do so by showing that it is itself at the same time captivity to God. And so again he gives centrality to what can be described only in negations. The authority and dignity of prophets, priests, apostles, or the successors of apostles is not their own, not a human authority and dignity, but the authority and dignity of the ministry they fulfill, or rather of the Word that this ministry serves (I, 205f.).!40 But there is only one Word
136, OS 1 225; Bl243; OS I, 225t; BI 245.
137. OS I, 226ff; BI 246ff
138. OS I, 234; BI 254.
139. OS I, 234ff; BI 252ff
140. OS I, 234; BI 254.
Early Years, 1 D0P= | 536.
of God. From this source all those have drunk to whom God gave the honor of knowing him: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all like them. The time of the NT, however, the time of Jesus Christ, is called the last time because it brought the conclusion of revelation, the revelation of the unity, exclusiveness, and definitiveness of the Word of God (I, 207).!41 What kind of other human authorities come into consideration now that the Word has become flesh, the age of many and varied prophecies and revelations has been brought to a close, the one Word to which all revelations point has been spoken? Every’ human mouth must stay closed now that he has spoken in whom the heavenly Father willed to hide all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.... The one Christ must speak and all others be silent — the one must be heard and all others ignored and even despised.!42
On this basis, however, there is an authority that is given to the church and indeed to all its pastors: the power confidently to venture all for the Word of God as whose ministers and administrators they are instituted; to make all worldly power, glory, and greatness bow to its majesty and obey it; to rule all, from the highest to the lowest, by the Word; to build the household of Christ; to destroy the kingdom of Satan; to feed the sheep; to slay the wolves; to admonish and instruct the obedient, to correct and upbraid and oppose the rebellious and arrogant; to loose and to bind them; and finally to deal with them with thunder and lightning; but to do all these things with the Word of God, whose spiritual power is as different from that of bishops as Christ is from Belial (I, 280f.).!43 This saying stamps the character of Calvin and Calvinism as few others do. By both outer and inner necessity imperialism and militarism are here made a likeness — a likeness, be it understood — of the kingdom of God.
But let us hear more. When people do not bow before the Word of God but before something human, then ecclesiastical authority is a deception and illusion, contrary to Christian freedom and indeed to God himself. Nowhere does God recognize anything as his except where his Word is heard and very carefully (religiose) obeyed (I, 211).!44 Nothing injures God so much as to be venerated in a new form of religion that is
141. OS I, 235; BI 256.
142. OS", 2368 BE 2575
143, OST, 257; BE253:
144. OS I, 240; BI 262.
§9 1536 Tens
of human invention (I, 212).!45 Hence there can be no appeal to the authority and tradition of the church. What is the church? The Holy Spirit makes Christians, makes the church. This is always true considering the imbecility to which even the most gifted are always subject.!46 But the Spirit's presence is guaranteed only by humble attentiveness to the Word. The church is certainly that church that must be heard.!47 But it is the company of those who are united in Christ and it dare speak only out of God’s Word. This company is to be heard, and no other church.!48 The truth does not always flourish in the bosom of pastors, and the wholeness of the church does not depend on their state (I, 216).!49 A pastorate that is not based on obedience to God is a matter of caprice (licentia).!>9 Against it may be brought all that Jeremiah and his like had to say against the priests and prophets. But that is how it is with the pope and bishops and councils. The royal rule of Christ puts an end to all human dominion.!>!
But what about the order that Calvin did not wish to give up but sought to maintain and establish against the fanatics?!>* He himself admits that at a first glance it is not easy to distinguish this order from the clericalism he was opposing (I, 225).!53 It can be justified only if we see its totally human and temporal and earthly character and divest it of any religious character. For the sake of peace and concord and seemliness and humanity, he says, every human society is of necessity a politia. Without order and decorum and observances and “bonds of humanity” the church could not survive in view of the great number of different people in it.1>4 These things are not necessary to salvation. They do not bind or loose consciences. They do not serve God. We cannot even claim their detailed necessity or validity.155 But they are useful if they are not pressed too hard and if the instruction of good pastors protects them as far as possible against misunderstandings. Among the bonds of humanity Calvin lists not
145. OS I, 241; BI 262.
146. OS I, 242ff; BI 264ff
147. OS I, 244; BI 267.
148. Ibid.
149. OS I, 245; BI 268.
150. OS I, 245; BI 269.
151. OS I, 245ff; BI 268ff
152) OS Li253 BI 2778.
153. OS I, 255; BI 280f.
154. OS I, 255; BI 281.
155. OS I, 256ff; BI 281f.
only such things as Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, for example, women keeping silent in the church [14:34] or liturgical order and all that it entails, but also church discipline, which is so important for him. But there must be no clinging to such things at all costs, not even to things that came in long ago by good human right or even by divine command. Thus King Hezekiah had to destroy the brazen serpent [2 Kings 18:4] with the same necessity with which Moses once set it up ‘[Num. 21:8]. God’s Word stands over every yes or no in such matters.
This was Calvin’s last word on ecclesiastical authority in 1536. When we recall how much, as we noted earlier, he was concerned to establish discipline and order in the church, and when we also recall that the struggle with the people of Geneva, which at least outwardly became the main theme of his life and which, all unawares, he would enter upon this same year, revolved around this very point, we can never be surprised enough at the restraint that he exercised in this section. You will certainly be astonished that apart from the remark about the value of church order for decorum and humanity he has nothing positive to say in justification of it. The point of his argument is simply to make plain that it is compatible with Christian freedom, and under what restrictive conditions. For him everything depends on basing ethics on freedom. If freedom is ensured, ensured even against self-misunderstanding, that is, the freedom of the divine Word that itself provides for order in human affairs, then Calvin believes that the order he desires so ardently is secure. In this context he sees no reason to do more than indicate the way in which Christian freedom can and indeed must be used to set up in the human sphere a church law at least as rigorous as that of Rome, and the form that this use should take.
For him everything depends on the grounding of the possibility (not the reality) of what he thought, of course, to be unconditionally necessary as the human side of the church. We thus coarsen and falsify Calvin's thinking if we say that his concept of the church is a revival of that of medieval Catholicism.!5¢ The two look alike but they are not the same. 157 Appearances deceive. In any case Calvin’s church was not at all the same. It rested no less invisibly and spiritually and exclusively on God’s Word
156. Seeberg, 631, sees here a movement back to medieval thinking and away from the Reformation overcoming of this. He put this view even more sharply in the 1st ed., II, 405.
157. Terence Adelphi V, 3, 37. than Luther's. Indeed, it was perhaps even more invisible since Calvin experienced and conceived of faith more paradoxically than Luther, of Christ's eucharistic presence more miraculously, and of the merciful character of justification more keenly. Just because he drew the line on the one side to the very end here, it was natural and necessary for him to continue it on the other side, and to do so with full awareness, with a good conscience, and with no hampering consideration that we have here only the other, human, earthly side of the matter, the visible church with its strict order, the step from heaven to earth. We must not view Calvin's church of holiness as a catholicizing confusion of divine and human commands, at least not as far as Calvin himself was concerned, no matter what misunderstandings might have arisen later among his successors. Calvin himself clearly saw the possibility of such a confusion. Under the pressure of the order and holiness that he found in God, he realized that order and holiness are incommensurable. They cannot be imitated on this side in the human sphere that is not to be confused with the other world, in the little city of Geneva that even at the pinnacle of his success he never truly regarded or described as a Jerusalem. With a certain resigned wisdom and grim humor, if we might put it thus, he spoke only of honoring God by bonds of humanity!>8 so far as this is possible seeing that we live on earth. Calvin did not fall victim to the illusion that gripped the whole of the Middle Ages and that has gained force again in the modern age, the illusion that there is a continuous path that leads step by step from an earthly city of God to the kingdom of heaven. For him the divine was always divine and the human always human.
But precisely this sense of distance that finds such surprisingly strong expression in this section of the first /Institutes makes the human symbolical and plastic for him and full of promise. For this reason it is an object of serious work for him as it can never be when heaven and earth are confused. What was the origin of this insight? We might again pose this question here. Did he derive it from the NT, from Plato, from Luther, or from Erasmus? Did he derive it from all of them? My own view is that we do not derive such an insight from any source. If we have it, we have it. But in any case we must not confuse the insight that he so wonderfully expresses in these deliberations on church authority, both against it and for it, with any of the medieval or modern banalities.
The only remaining section of Calvin's ethics is on political govern-
158. See n. 154 above. ment.!59 I want to go into this rather more thoroughly both because of its relevance and even more so because we really find the theological uniqueness of Calvin with special clarity again in this area. Let us look first at the frame of mind with which Calvin undertook to tackle, in a teaching manual, what was then a dangerous issue, that of the relation between Christianity and politics. It is important that we should be clear about this in order that we may rightly evaluate the surpfising content of this final section of the work. Let us keep the following points in view.
1. As a lawyer Calvin had expert knowledge of the field. Here if anywhere we might expect this to become apparent in the knowledge displayed and the concerns addressed. Yet when we read through the section we are disappointed in this regard — whether pleasantly so or not is a separate matter — at least to the degree that he refrains from introducing anything that is not strictly relevant in this area of his special expertise, or from expressing any thoughts that would not be immediately understood even by those who have no legal training. The reason for this cannot be that he had forgotten his legal knowledge, for he gave ample demonstration of it later in Geneva, and he showed that he knew how to make good use of it in given cases.
2. There can be no doubt that Calvin wrote this last section of his book with a specific material interest. He was not a monk emerging from the cloister and realizing that there was secular as well as spiritual government, so that for good or ill he had to try to wrestle with this alien fact. Calvin was a man of the world who had certainly investigated the questions of public life
— whether anarchism is right or wrong, what is the best form of the staté, whether revolution and tyrannicide are permissible —before he ever took up the question of the content of the NT. We must remember with what profound skill and liking he participated all his life in high politics, even the highest. In fact, if not in form, he was the statesman as well as the pastor not only of his Genevan but also of his international congregation. In a symposium that has just come out entitled Masters of Politics (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922) Calvin is the only theologian represented, and in a brilliant depiction of him H. von Schubert ventures to compare him to Napoleon.!6 Today we
159. OS I, 258ff; BI 284
ff 160. H. von Schubert, “Calvin,” in Meister der Politik. .., ed. E. Marcks and K. A. von Miiller, vol. IT (Stuttgart and Berlin, 2nd ed. 1927), 67ff. On pp. 94ff. Schubert argues that Rousseau, too, saw the importance of religion in Geneva, as did Napoleon, who for
§9 1536 Tnsticuies
might well imagine Calvin as a most industrious reader of newspapers and writer for them, and modern politicians of all parties and countries would probably learn something from him. But if we expect to find anything of this great ability and interest in the section, we will again be disappointed. His thoughts about government and law and society as he expresses them here are perhaps clearer and more acute and consistent than those of other theologians who then dealt with such matters, but they do not show more of the statesman. He had to put a deliberate curb on his interest as well as his knowledge.
3. We may not doubt that to this field as well as that of the church he brought specific insights and goals as well as knowledge and concerns. Behind his exposition of the different possibilities and requirements of public life stands not only an exact knowledge of the subject, and not only abstract attentiveness to what was going on in this theater such as we might have when, as is best for us, we are not committed to any party dogma but for this very reason are forced into the frustrating role of onlookers. As would soon come to light in Geneva, Calvin had specific ideas of what he wanted, very specific ideas, for example, of the best form of government (he was an aristocratic republican),!®! of civil and criminal law, of the European situation and its demands, and even of economic relations and possibilities. In such matters he was anything but an unworldly idealist; he was supremely practical. To mention only one thing, for a good part of his life he flung himself body and soul, and expended much of his energies, in a fight against the policies of Bern, and in this fight he knew how to achieve what he wanted and needed!
But in the Institutes we find no sign, almost no sign at all, of his wanting anything, not even in the later editions that came out in the heat of all the conflicts. He can discuss the most prickly of political issues without playing politics (even by hints) on a single line, without making a plea for or against one thing or another. The more closely we look, the more clearly we see that there are in fact no specific decisions in individual matters, that questions are left open, that even if we regret it, we are not set on a particular course of Calvinist politics. If an uncommitted person were given the section to read without knowing who its author was, such
a moment thought of favoring Protestantism, regretted that it had lost its chance in France in the 16th century, and might well have reached out his hand to Calvin had he lived at that time.
161. See 225f. below. a person would find it hard to identify the man who not unjustly has been called a father, if not the father, of the political and economic ideal of Western European liberal democracy,!®* but would be more likely, perhaps, to see here a North German legitimist who is perspicacious enough to look beyond his legitimism. How self-controlled this author must have been, or, better, how controlled by some other interest, to be able, when giving instruction in the Christian religion, not to say what he, John Calvin, was really aiming at with all the fervor of his heart and the brilliance of his mind!
4. Finally, we have to remember how much the predisposition and thrust of Calvin’s whole theology lead us to expect that he would have to give a plain, down-to-earth statement here. Did he not attempt a synthesis of divine and human knowledge? Did he not aim to supplement the Lutheran systole with the Reformed diastole?!©3 Did he not insist firmly on justification by faith and yet as an ethicist keep both feet solidly on the ground and thus seek to apply the Reformation insight (as a crisis) to the horizontal problem of the Middle Ages and our own time? Why, then, is there no program of a theocratic state or Christian Socialism? Why are there not at least precise and unambiguous indications of Calvin's view of the way in which Christians should approach the problem of society? Why does he not at any rate pacify us with an attempt to derive from the gospel a way of fashioning life and the world that is in keeping with the gospel, and thus lead us to the goal to which with some impatience we want to be led when someone undertakes to give us instruction in the Christian religion? Is it not the agelong weakness of theology and theologians that the moment we expect them finally to redeem the promise they have long since given and say to us: “Do this and do not do that for such and such reasons,” they leave us in the lurch again on fresh dialectical pretexts? At least on the basis of some writings on Calvin and Calvinism, do we not look for better things from him?
Yes, we do have here a weakness of theology, at any rate of Protestant theology, if we want to call it a weakness. I myself would, of course, say that it is the venture of Reformation and Protestant theology, which distinguishes it from medieval and modern theologies, that it neither can
162. Cf. M. Weber, Spirit of Capitalism (London, 1940), 43ff, vol. I of Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie (Tubingen, 2nd ed. 1922), 17ff.
163. Barth crossed out a further sentence in the MS: “You know, of course, these medical terms for the two functions of the mechanism of the heart.” nor will do anything but leave us in this predicament, or, rather, make it fully plain to us that the final word: “Do this and do not do that,” must, of course, be spoken (the “must” is specifically Reformed), but that it can be spoken only by God himself as his own Word; and if Reformed theology, when addressing ethics, wanted things to be different, this would mean apostasy from the Reformation! Those who look for a program, or even simply a system of directions, in instruction in the Christian religion must turn to Thomas and not to Calvin. (I already pointed out to you on an earlier occasion that we modern Protestants of all trends can probably fare better with Thomas than Calvin.)!°4 Longing for the smooth and welllighted paths of medieval and Roman Catholicism is a very understandable emotion, and it is too much alive in us Protestant theologians for us to take offense at others when they accuse us of leaving them in the lurch at the most relevant point in our expositions. But it is not we who do it. It is the Reformation that leaves us in the lurch the moment we think: This is it! Or, rather, it leaves us to God. It shows us clearly that all else that has been said can only be an experience that helps us discard all other possibilities of salvation and leads us to the point where we must hand over ourselves — our conscience, insight, and will — to God.
We should not expect anything else from Calvin, not even in his ethics, otherwise he would not be Calvin, but Thomas, or Bernard of Clairvaux, to both of whom he was in fact related in some ways, though we should not fail to see that he was so under a changed sign, that is, with the Reformation knowledge of God, with the theology of the cross that is also the point of his ethics. Everything becomes totally different in him. It cannot be, then, that in his synthesis he again wants either peacefully or stormily to point to a way from earth to heaven, or even to a heaven on earth, as though the parallel lines were again meeting in the finite sphere. No, God is still God, and we are still human. Calvin felt this antithesis, or at least expressed and emphasized it, much more sharply than Luther, and he thus worked out much more sharply than Luther the thesis that God is our God, the God of real people living in the real world, that there can be no fleeing from his presence to another world, that there is no world that even as it is, is not God’s world, that precisely in this world we stand under the command of God. Yet under the command of God. The burden that is laid upon us by the fact that God is the Lord who issues the commands cannot be lifted from us by anyone, not even by a
164. See above, 40f. good Christian lawyer, no matter how great his political interest may be or how well he knows what he wants. If anyone were to take the burden from us, even an angel from heaven, and if we were gratefully to exalt that one into heaven as the being that had finally, finally brought us clarity and given us directives
— that one would be the most dangerous and abominable deceiver.
Calvin was not a deceiver of that kind. He was not Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor.!©5 Often he might almost seem to have been so. I myself have sometimes thought that he was more dangerous than all the popes and generals of the Jesuit order put together because, under the Reformation banner, he was doing the work of the worst kind of Counter- Reformation. But precisely the surprising thing in this last section of the Institutes shows us, if nothing else has yet done so, that he was not a deceiver, he who knew better than any others the temptation of the Grand Inquisitor and indeed the justifiable concern that he had. This is why he does not set up any Christian state or Christian Socialism or Christian civil or criminal code, even though he is obviously not lacking in ideas and plans in that field, and even though, once the time comes for him not to instruct but simply to live, he will regard the most far-reaching experiments in that direction as not merely legitimate but divinely commanded, and will for this reason conduct'them with incomparable historical success.
Yesterday we saw how he would make no exceptions in his criticism of all ecclesiastical power that does not have the force of the Word of God itself even though he really knew what he wanted in this regard and also sought and achieved what he wanted (church discipline). The decisive point is, however, that he set the specific and well-considered and to him truly important content of his willing and striving and achieving fundamentally on a very different human level, where also, of course, God has to be heard and obeyed, but where human imbecility rules as well, where face-to-face with the eternal majesty of God there can be no human eternities, where, as we saw yesterday, the brazen serpent that Moses set up may be destroyed again by order of the same God. Human willing and striving, even when obedient to God, and especially then, has to have specific content. We cannot obey God without willing and seeking something, this or that. But what we human individuals will and strive after, even though it be ever so important and significant, even though it be a
165. See E M. Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, Il, 5.
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whole city of God, always stands as such under the shadow of the relativity of all things human. It neither can nor should become a theme in instruction in the Christian religion if it is not to have the force of a new enslaving of conscience. This instruction, if it is to remain pure and true, can provide only a basis for the possibility of what can and must happen on the human side in obedience to God, at the creature’s infinite distance from the Creator yet also with a view of the Creator. It cannot provide a basis for the reality. For this reality is always human, temporal, this-worldly. If God in his paternal leniency will accept it as well-pleasing to him, that is his affair.!6¢ But we neither can nor should count on making it, as though this were for us to decide. Not making this distinction is a feature of Roman Catholic theology. I say yet again that not unrightly we have the feeling we would be better off not having to make it. But Calvin did make it. Hence his great silence precisely where we are most curious. Calvin's synthesis is the synthesis between God in his majesty and us in our imbecility, between the holy God and sinners. No other! Since we are Protestant theologians, we must try in some way to accept this.