§7 Introduction (part 7 of 7)
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The mass in particular is a blatant encroachment upon the all-sufficient atonement Christ made with God.“ Its liturgy is an abjuration of Christ that cannot be compared to the Lord’s Supper.*° It makes God a finite object, and, as Calvin sees it, the priest’s facing the altar with his back to the people is part of this process.4° Does the fact that all is done in the name of God and Christ make it any different from paganism?47 Is not participation in it to be rejected since Romanists are looking for this and see in it a sign of assent?48 Is not the differentiating of outer and inner worship intolerable when the latter is a judgment on the former?4? Since God is now seeking to purge his church, can there be any more rational course than to correct radically and at a single stroke all the things that have simply come from the devil's school?>° Better be suspected of atheism than of idolatry, thinks Calvin in conclusion, and he is not afraid to call upon his friend to consider that what he is saying is not just human advice but an oracle from the sacred mouth of the eternal God that has for him the force of a command in this matter.?! So sure of his cause is Calvin!
For the rest, we cannot say that he was inattentive to the practical problems that scattered Protestants faced. Thus he says that it is not necessary and should not even be right for everyone to emerge as a proclaimer of evangelical truth. We must all follow our own vocations.°? Distinctions may also be made. Fasts and celibacy are matters of Christian freedom. We may break fasts and marry, but do not have to do this.»
42. Ibid., 295.
43, Ibid., 304.
44. Cf. ibid., 306f., 310.
45. Ibid., 307, 311.
46. Ibid., 308f.
47. Ibid., 312f.
48. Ibid., 315.
49. Cf. ibid., 309f.
50. Ibid., 303.
51. Ibid., 325.
52. Ibid., 294.
53. Ibid, 503)
Yielding is thus possible in such areas. This situation is different, however, with images, unction, indulgences, holy water, and especially the mass.>4 To give way on such matters is to betray God and to give real offense even if by only a semblance of participation. To give even the appearance of approving of the Roman Catholic cultus is reprehensible participation. This is what must not happen in any circumstances, and raising one’s hat to an image is included.>> Yet one may quietly and modestly attend a Roman Catholic church.° Paul very skeptically inspected the altars at Athens to see what was going on [Acts 17:23].°7
Calvin concludes with some positive hints and directions. Protestants must conduct themselves in such a way that they are not seen to be despisers of God. In the eyes of others their whole life must have a clearly religious cast.>8 Others must see so much good in them that they have to recognize them as servants of God! To avoid the difficulties created for them by servants who might betray them, they must insist that the whole household join with them in the knowledge of God so that it constitutes a little church. They will then not regret having been obedient.>? There is an urgent warning against mixed marriages, for these entangle people in a labyrinth, and there is no basis for the usual consolation that the person of different beliefs will be won over.
All in all, this is not a secondary matter but involves the very heart of religion.°! Calvin does not ask anything specific of his friend — simply that he not deny Christ. He should not cling so much to this life. He should see that it is worse to be cast off by Christ than to be regarded by others as an ungodly apostate and traitor. As regards the accusation that he himself was philosophizing about the conflict in the shade, Calvin believes that God will arm him with his Spirit when he finally leads him into the thick of the battle. He did not think out what he had written in the shade. It had been tested in the sufferings of the martyrs. These did not suffer in order that we might comfortably surrender the truth for which they died but in order to teach us how, trusting in God, we might
54. Cf. ibid., 303ff.
55. Ibid., 304, 325.
56. Ibid., 314f.
57. Ibid., 315.
58. Ibid., 325.
59. Ibid., 3256.
60. Ibid., 327.
61. Ibid.
become invincible face-to-face with the whole battle array of death, hell, the world, and Satan.©
The second open letter was to one of the best-known advocates of the Protestant party in France, Gésard Roussel, who under the protection of Margaret of Valois had become bishop of Oléron.© Calvin's letter to him on the sacerdotal ministry of the papacy is a sharp criticism of this step. ‘Amid the stream of congratulations I come to you morosely accusing, complaining of the very things on which others are congratulating you.”64 The glory is only in appearance.® Calvin then gives a graphic depiction of what the ministry really entails: not outward pomp but divine appointment, heavy responsibility, nervous tension, no slackness, watching.® In contrast, a Roman Catholic bishop’s chair means wealth, indifference, evil influence, the contradiction of its own claims.” A beleaguered city in which the plague breaks out!©® It might just as well be a robbers’ cave. His friend should either do something bold or resign. Otherwise he is neither a true man nor a Christian.”
In this way Calvin summons to decision. The hour when he himself had to go on to do something decisive had struck.7!
62. Ibid., 328.
63. Gérard Roussel (ca. 1500-1550), bishop of Oléron from 1536.
64. The reference is to the episcopal office; cf. OS I, 331f.
65. Ibid., 329.
66. Ibid., 331ff
67. Ibid., 335ff
68. Ibid., 340.
69. Ibid., 342.
70. Ibid., 362.
71. Obviously Barth had not been able fully to prepare his lecture here, so that he simply gives the contents of the second work under headings.
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Furst Genevan Stay
As regards the circumstances in which Calvin came to settle in Geneva on his way back from Paris to Basel, he himself tells us in the preface to his Psalms commentary (31, 26) that he had resolved to live a retired life, but finally Master Guillaume Farel kept him in Geneva, not so much by counsel or admonition as by a terrible curse, as if God from on high had laid his hand on him to hold him fast. For the direct route to Strassburg where he wanted to go was blocked by war, so he decided to go by way of Geneva, but not to spend more than a single night there. Just before, the papacy had been chased out of the city by that excellent man whom he had mentioned and by Pierre Viret, but things had not yet been put right and there were bad and dangerous splits and parties in the city. Now it happened that a man who later shamefully apostatized and went back to the papists recognized Calvin and made him known to the others. [This was none other than Calvin's friend and travel companion du Tillet, who had left him on returning from Italy and settled in Geneva; Kampschulte, I, 280. His relapse took place at the end of 1537 or early in 1538.]! The result was that Farel in his burning zeal for the cause of the gospel made every effort to keep Calvin in Geneva. When the latter told him that he planned some private studies for which he wanted to remain free, and when Farel saw that he could gain nothing by entreaty, he called upon God to curse the leisure and tranquility for study that Calvin sought if he turned his back on such great need and denied his help. This saying
1. Barth’s brackets. terrified and shook Calvin to such an extent that he abandoned his intended journey. Yet with a sense of his shyness and timidity he did not want to pledge himself to take up any specific office.* According to Beza’a Life of Calvin, Farel, a man of heroic spirit, told Calvin that if he hid behind his studies he predicted in the name of almighty God that God would curse him for not joining with them in this work and seeking self rather than Christ (21, 125).3
In this way Calvin was torn away from the contemplative life of the theological Humanist, of the Protestant sage, of the radical but not practically engaged observer, speaker, and writer, and plunged into the fulfillment of his own deepest urge, into the active life of the Genevan reformer. I must ask you, as you survey what we have said about Calvin thus far, to keep in mind that that was the beginning. A portrait of Calvin without the great restraint that expressed itself plainly enough in the decisive scene we have just described; a portrait of Calvin as simply the theocrat who is zealous and races and runs and speaks and writes and organizes and deposes and burns and burns up for the glory of God without considering whether this can ever be a human affair; a portrait in which it is forgotten that this man of organization and system was not really concerned about organization or system, that this captain was not really concerned about the battle or the positions under attack, that this new and energetic worker on the medieval problem was not really concerned about the city of God on earth, that behind all his actions there lie at root such nonactivist thoughts as meditation on the future life, alien righteousness, predestination, and Christian liberty, that is, the reality on behalf of which we can strictly do nothing; a portrait of this kind, whether favorable or hostile in intention, can only be not just distorted but false.
If we want to understand Calvin aright under the sign of action —and he does indeed come under this sign, and under it, from the standpoint of church history and world history, and under it he became what he was — then we have to realize that for him this action was, to a very different degree than for Luther, basically demanded and necessitated by his understanding of Christianity, even though it was for him also a descent to the
2. The key words are as follows: “et avoye deliberé de continuer de mesme iusqu’a ce que finalement maistre Guillaume Farel me reteint 4 Geneve, non pas tant par conseil et exhortation, que par une adjuration espouvantable, comme si Dieu eust d’enhaut estendu sa main sur moy pour m/varrester.”
3. Beza, loannis Calvini Vita, CO 21, 125.
Life of Calvin
basement. We have to realize that all the great and also the little things that he did along this line, all the important and often the questionable things, were done in this basement, and that they cannot be understood properly without the great provis6 of etérnity, grace, and freedom that Calvin himself always kept more or less clearly in view. Calvin could work alongside Farel, but Calvin was no Farel, who had been born in that basement as a vassal of the good Lord. Nor was it just the aristocratic element in Calvin’s character that constantly prevented him from saying and doing the far too obvious things that his friend Farel confidently thought he could venture to say and do. Farelism, that is, pastoral daring and rashness to the glory of God and the improvement of conditions, is not really Calvinism, and it can hardly have escaped Farel himself that in pressing this man at any price to join him in his work he was summoning someone who was something very different from a better edition of himself.
It is the more typical of Calvin that in the ultimate weapon that Farel, like many zealous pastors, used so freely, he still thought he could see the hand of God that he could not escape. What he really heard was the voice of his own innermost genius. But no, we do best to take him at his word and see here the hand of God that terrified and shook him afresh in the security that he had achieved with his knowledge of Luther’s gospel; that diverted him afresh, as he thought, from the path that he had marked out for himself; that tore him away from the sober, clear, satisfying, superior position of one who sees the true relation of God to the things of this world and who for this very reason takes care to become involved in these things only so far as is absolutely necessary; that plunged him into the ambivalent, dangerous, compromising position of one who on the basis of the knowledge of God cannot take leave of that knowledge and discipline, but at the risk of being defiled becomes involved in the problems of the world of things. By this movement he placed himself under judgment but also under promise. The situations in which he became entangled would often not be without their tragic aspect, but also — and this is perhaps harder to bear — not without their comic aspect.
Yet behind all these situations there would be a more than usual and more than historical necessity. His actions would be ambivalent on this lower ground, as everything human that is done there is ambivalent. God’s wrath and God’s judgment would blaze forth almost indistinguishably from these deeds, arousing both love and hate, both admiration and horror, a savor of life to life and of death to death [2 Cor. 2:16]. But in the last analysis who may presume to judge, seeing these acts rest on knowledge and are acts of obedience? A consideration has its place here that we learned to know in discussing Calvin's ethics (at the beginning of ch. 6 of the Institutes) and that Calvin urged against the Lutherans at the Worms Colloquy of 1540, namely, that there is a fatherly indulgence in the law, too, in virtue of which God accepts even our defiled works,.not on account of their worthiness, but on account of his kindness, if only, as God’s children in the NT sense, we have regard to the promise that is ours, not as those who act but as those who trust in his fatherly benevolence (21, 269).4
The urge to dare to go to work in faith was the hand of God which in that hour Calvin saw embodied in the pious impertinence of the good Farel. Here once again Calvin was humbled and broken and converted, and this time more penetratingly and with more momentous results, perhaps, than in his earlier conversion from the papacy to Lutheranism. In truth, this was not just a step out of the study into practical life as Farel was demanding. Hidden behind this in itself insignificant switch was the step from the humility (Demut) of faith to the courage (Muz) of faith. And what can be more humbling than to have to prove humility, which is thought to be already present and practiced, by courage? The very essence of the Reformed or Calvinist branch of the Reformation lies in that demand. It is no wonder that this second change lived on in Calvin's memory much more vitally and vividly than the first, as we see from the preface to the Psalms commentary. For it was by this second change that he became what he was. Naturally he did not do so for the first time in that hour with Farel, for we see the controlling influence of the change already in the first /Institutes and even in the Psychopannychia. But the hour with Farel became for him as it were the symbol of the change, for it was then that it moved out of the realm of thought and became event.
It then became unequivocally clear that God demands of us a double brokenness, the first by way of the insight that God alone is great and that we can do nothing for him and for our own justification, the second by way of the insight that we must obey this great God in faith either by what we do not do or by what we do, but at all events that we must obey him if we really believe. Disobedience is equivalent to unbelief. This means that even everything we might do in contrast to the dangerous and am-
4. Cf. the Acta conventus Wormaciensis of W. Musculus (11.10.1540), reprinted in CO 21, 269. See also above, p. 197 n. 136.
Life of Calvin
bivalent active life, for example, studying, is also human and not justified in itself. The contemplative life of study offers no salvation. It is a possibility, an opportunity, and indeed, after this hour Calvin would truly study for the first time, but it is no moré than that, and if the humility that will not be courageous seeks to hide behind it, it is even less than that, an impossibility, an occasion of perishing for all our humility. “You are seeking self and not Christ, and the Lord will curse you.”> How true that is! So, then, this path is at least under threat, and the other path, that of an active life, is at least open even though it lies under the shadow of the same threat.
We thus have a concrete and definite relation to the world by which the relation to God must in some way demonstrate itself. As we saw, we miss this in the ethics of the Institutes, which pointed out the possibility but not the actuality and necessity of this or that definite action, the first and last word of that ethics being Christian liberty. It had to be so. A theological ethics that would take any different attitude would be Roman Catholic and not Reformed. Only the reality of God, which is concealed in the reality of life, can fill this vacuum. On the one hand was this reality in all its full and succulent uniqueness and pregnancy, on the other was the earthly, banal, and limited Geneva on Lake Geneva, where things had not yet been put in order,° where very much that was conceivable but also very difficult had yet to be done. Here, then, was the place to obey, here something had to be done, ere fatherly indulgence had to be invoked over all the human work.” Where else but in this earthly, banal, and limited here and now? Farel was needed to point to this here and now, to issue a call that would ring in such a way that it was like a blow, that Calvin, for whom it was nothing new, received it as though it were something very new, the very thing that was new for him. Why could not Calvin resist it? Why had he to see in Farel’s demand the symbol of his second conversion? Why could he not refuse to see in this here and now his own here and now? There was many another Geneva and many another Farel.
At this point, of course, no further survey or discussion of what happened can help us. We confront the problem of the unique, the contingent, the divinely willed as such, and can only say that this is how it was. It is enough to see that it took place because this problem, the
5. See n. 3 above.
6. See 204ff. above.
7. See n. 4 above.
problem of ethics, was like a rock on Calvin’s path that he could not remove, and nothing would be more distinctive of Calvin's life and work than that there was this rock on his path. Nevertheless — and I go back now to the beginning of what I was saying — we have to keep in mind that what we have here was an event, a change, showing that the man of Geneva whose puzzling portrait we are trying to unroll was. a broken man, a doubly broken man, not a Farel, not a vassal of God, if we may use that phrase again, though it was through Farel that he was converted, and his life would now be linked to this Farel. If we fail to see the break, we cannot understand the portrait. Our evaluation of it will be wrong. We cannot hear the promise and the warning that lie in it.