§13 Reformation Program! (part 2 of 2)
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tithesis of law and gospel. It cannot be denied that the Lutheran view of the relation is simpler and more vivid and dramatic. That Abraham saw the day of Christ and rejoiced [John 8:56] is something that is hard to explain even to adults and indeed theologians, let alone children. I do not know whether it was for this reason, to avoid upsetting the psychological simplicity of the familiar treatment, that he kept silence at this point. In fact we must not always say all that we know or might say. In the later versions of the Institutes he took up the matter all the more extensively, and the fact that in question 19 the Heidelberg Catechism followed Calvin and ventured to state the position so plainly>8 seems to me to be one of its most decisive theological services.
In another respect Calvin makes things easier for children than the Heidelberg, at least in this form of his catechism. I am referring to the doctri ion, which even here, in contrast to the first edition of the Institutes, he expounds for the first time under its own heading. The condition for acquiring that comforting trust.in God is faith,.says article 23.59 There is thus a distinction among people. Some receive the seed of the divine Word, others do.not.
~ According to article 24° this distinction goes back to God's
election, which applies to some, whereas others are rejected by the same divine. decree before the foundation of the world, so that the clearest and most. ~peérspicuous ‘Preaching of the truth. can be for them only a savor of death
é ie season for his choice to God alone. Avail our crude minds cannot comprehend the divine clarity. Those who seek to penetrate the divine majesty will be overpowered by the glory and struck down.°!
We should not say that it is an evasion when Calvin has recourse to mystery in this fashion. What he speaks of is not a mystery, but the mystery, the mystery of the freedom, the deity of God, of him who is and is not, of the ground of all grounds, of the light that is present for no eye, of him who goes and comes, who is eternal. This being so, faith is our only option, he is saying. Faith does not mean that everything is self-evident. It means being wrested out of the darkness of unbelief. God alone is the “why” of faith, God the Lord, God in his majesty. How can or may we ae of
58. Schaff, 313.
59. OS I, 390. Theme: “Predestination.”
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 390f. that “this being so” an explanation, a reason? If there were a reason for faith, it would not be faith. Faith is faith only when it has no basis other than the freedom, the decree, of God. Calvin is a thousand times right when he begins his description of faith with God and God alone. Whether he is equally right to assign faith and unbelief to two different human groups is another question. I for my part do not think so. It would be more consistent, I think, to speak loudly and forcefully about God’s electing and rejecting but to maintain a strong and significant silence about the elect and the rejected. But it would take us too far afield to go into that here. Two things Calvin believes we should cling to face-to-face with this mystery of the election of grace. First, God is always right, for even if he wished to destroy the whole human race, who could deny him the right to do so? If he saves some, it is of his sheer loving-kindness, to which no one can lay claim. Second, we need not plunge into the abyss of eternity to know how we ourselves stand; we have only to hold fast to the witness that is given us in Christ and that grants assurance of salvation to all who accept it.
True faith, says article 25,69 halts at the mercy of God that is promised us in the gospel. Promise and faith are correlative concepts for Calvin. Take away the promise, he says, and you take away the basis of faith.©4 A faith that is anything other than faith in the promise (in the things that we do not see but can only hope for according to Heb. 11:1) would again not be faith. Christ, however, is the confirmation of all promises, the quintessence of promise, we might say in line with Calvin. In him we see all the treasures of the divine mercy. In him they are offered to us. Hence he is the “perpetual object” of faith,® the lasting and definitive focus of all eyes that wait for the consummation.
This being so, article 26 continues,® it is obvious that faith transcends all the powers of our human nature. We are blind to the divine mysteries. We have no organ by which to perceive them. How can we be certain about the will of God for us? We who are human! Is it not a fact that the truth of God has no stability in us even when it is a matter of observing visible and perceptible things? How, then, can it be firm and
62. Ibid., 391.
63. Ibid., 391£. Theme: “Faith.”
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 392.
66. Ibid., 392f.
certain when God promises us things that no eye sees and no mind understands? No, when and where faith is present, it is so only as a distinctive and precious gift of God. It is a clarity of the Holy Spirit illumining our minds and confitming our hearts so that we are firmly convinced that the truth of God is so certain for us that it is totally impossible that what his holy Word promises should not be fulfilled.97 Article 27 deals with justification.°8 If Christ is really the sum of all the promises, the perpetual object of faith, we can know that what we receive though faith has to be in Christ alone. Stripped of our own righteousness, we are clothed with his.7? We do not receive anything of this righteousness within ourselves. It is imputed to us as promise, imputed just as if it were our own.7! Christ represents those who in him believe in the promise of God, and that means the forgiveness of sins, not an alteration in us, but the unheard-of and incomprehensible thing of an alteration in God’s attitude to us. This alteration is the point of the sending of Jesus Christ.
For Calvin, however, there is not just a justification by faith but definitely (article 28) a sanctification by faith as well.”2 They are deceiving themselves who think they can boast of their faith in Christ without this second aspect.’3 There is for Calvin no contradiction between what he had just said and this further point, for in his view justification and sanctification lie from the outset on two different levels, yet they intersect —and this is the important thing — on the line which is Christ from an upward point of view and faith from a downward. Christ represents us before God; that is in faith the ground of justification. But Christ also gives us his Spirit; again in faith, that is the ground of our sanctification.’4 To put this in mechanical terms, a hinge has to open here. As the one thing is done for us in heaven, we on earth are put in a position to do the other. The second thing is still totally different from the first, but it has to take place in consequence of it. This other thing, the other that has to take place on earth, is the observing (“l’observation”), though
67. Ibid., 392.
68. Ibid., 393. Theme: “Justification.”
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 393. Theme: “Sanctification.”
73. Ibid., 394.
7A. Ibid., 393f.
First Genévan Stay
not, of course, the fulfilling of the law. The law, once the cause of self-condemnation, now becomes the light on our path [cf. Ps. 119:105]. It is not as though we are now doing works in our own strength. We do them in spiritual strength as works by which we are made ready for the righteousness of the kingdom of God.”
Hence — article 2976— there is no faith in -Christ without penitence, without regeneration. Participation in the righteousness with which Christ clothes us when representing us before God is a grace that we must not profane, for it means consecration of life.”” In this conversion regeneration takes place through mortification and vivification. As a result, penitence is a task that is always essential.78
We thus move on in article 307? to the meaning of good works. Especially clear in this article is the way in which Calvin constantly views our human situation dialectically, from a twofold standpoint. There is no doubt, he begins, that good works which proceed from a clear conscience, that is, a penitent conscience, are pleasing to God. But why and to what extent? Because God recognizes his own righteousness in them. The only righteousness of our works before God is that which consists of this correspondence to the divine righteousness.8° Only in faith in Christ is this correspondence really true and are we justified in what we do.
We might use the following comparison to make Calvin’s meaning clear.8! Imagine two mirrors parallel to one another. The one represents God's righteousness, the other our good works. A wall separates them, somewhat inadequately representing — every simile conceals! — the total impossibility of congruence between the perfect and the imperfect. We cannot possibly attain to the righteousness of God and our works cannot be pleasing to him. But imagine that at the end of the dividing wall a third mirror is pointed in the opposite direction, that is, turned to the first two divided mirrors. This third mirror is Christ. Then it is clear to us how far there can in fact be correspondence between God’s righteousness and our good works; how Christ can stand in our place before God and
75. Ibid., 394.
76. Ibid., 394f. Theme: “Penitence.”
77. Ibid., 394.
78. Ibid., 395.
79. Ibid., 395f. Theme: “Good Works.”
80. Ibid., 395.
81. The MS margin has an illustration. in God’s place before us; how in Christ we can participate in God and God can recognize himself in us; how we can find our righteousness in God and God can find his own righteousness again in us.
What Calvin calls correspondence here signifies a relation, one that is, of course, broken and indirect, that is real only in Christ, but that is in fact real in Christ. Apart from Christ God could not find a single meritorious work in his people. If there are to be justified works of ours, the justification must lie outside us.82 It is outside us in Christ, and now God finds in our intrinsically imperfect and polluted works nothing but a “total purity” (“une entiére pureté”), calling them righteous and rewarding them with eternal life.83 Take Christ away, the living relation, the correspondence between heaven and earth, and everything is as it was before, for only in Christ can this inconceivable thing, this paradox, be the truth.
I will pass over articles 31-40, which expound the Creed.®4 Article 41 on hope®> is important as a significant transition from belief in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting (in the last article on the Creed) to prayer. For Calvin the relation of hope to faith is that hope is the truly alive and active and motivated thing in faith, its pressing on from promise to fulfillment. It is true that if Calvin keeps Christ at a distance from us as the content of promise, along with the mercy of God and everlasting life, he does not do this as if there were a kind of static relation between here and there, a real this world and the next. Faith in itself, of course, is simply acceptance of the promise, but how can that take place without at once more than that taking place? Those who receive this assurance are now waiting for what God promises to take place. Faith takes it that God is truthful, hope waits for the manifestation of his truth. Faith accepts God as our Father, hope waits for him to show himself as such. Faith regards everlasting life as already given, hope waits for it to reveal itself to us.86 The total Calvin speaks in this “hope waits” (espérance attend).
Articles 42f.87 describe prayer as the great movement beyond ourselves to God to find in him what we lack. Above all, then, it is a renouncing of our own dignity and glory. In it we do not exalt ourselves
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pyr, (Oks I SOS
83. Ibid., 396.
84. Ibid., 396fF.
85. Ibid., 403. Theme: “Hope.”
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., 403ff. Theme: “Prayer.” before God but bewail our plight before him.88 We thus do what is acceptable to him, and of itself prayer now becomes what it ought to be: petition and thanksgiving.
In expounding the Lord’s Prayer im articles 44-51,89 Calvin seeks to show how the honoring of God that is the theme of the first three petitions is for our own good, so that in praying for our own good.in the last three petitions we constantly redirect our thoughts from this to the honoring of God, since we can seek our own good only to God’s glory.?°
Article 52 bears the heading “Perseverance in Prayer”?! and is perhaps one of the most personal passages in Calvin. We must not try to tie God to specific circumstances nor to impose any law or conditions upon him. The first step in prayer is to subject our will to God’s so that, restrained, as it were, with a bridle, it seeks only to adjust and conform itself to that will.93 If we have composed our hearts to such obedience and are allowing the divine providence to rule over us completely, then we learn in prayer to trust, to wait upon the Lord, and to accept delay in the fulfillment of what we desire until the time his will decides, certain that he is always present with us even when this is not apparent, and that one day he will show that he is not deaf to our cry, no matter how often it seems not to be heard.?4 And even if after long waiting our senses do not see that our prayer has been of any use, our faith affirms what the senses cannot see, namely, that we have been granted all that is needful for us, that we have plenty in our poverty and comfort in our affliction. Hence, when all else leaves us in the lurch, God does not leave us, for he cannot let the expectation and patience of his people be in vain. God himself will be an adequate substitute for all else, so surely does he contain in himself all the good that he will fully reveal in the world to come.? This was the way in which Calvin prayed.
~ Articles 53-5676 deal with the sacraments. The sacrament is a witness to the grace of God, to his goodwill toward us, an outward sign of
88. Ibid., 403f.
89. Ibid., 405ff.
90. Ibid., 405f.
91. Ibid., 410f.
92. Ibid., 410.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., 410f.
96. Ibid., 411ff. Theme: “Sacraments.”
proclamation that the imbecility of our faith requires.97 Faith must be exercised before God and others,°8 both inwardly and outwardly, we might perhaps say, as an act of knowledge and as an act of confession, for, even though it is God’s work, it is still our faith, imperfect like all things human. God trains it by putting his high and heavenly mysteries in the form of carnal things as befits the ignorance of our flesh in all that is high and heavenly.?? It is not as though the things we are offered in the sacrament bore what is high and heavenly in themselves by nature. They do it only inasmuch as the Word of the Lord gives them this significance.!0° The promise that God’s Word gives us comes first. The sign follows. It confirms and seals the promise. It sheds light on it by putting it in the realm of what we can comprehend with the senses.!°! And as we ourselves do something at the same time, we exercise our faith outwardly before others as well, and it becomes confession and praise of God.!02
» For Calvin the high and heavenly mystery is the same in both baptism and the Lord’s Supper. There cannot possibly be different graces. The one always depends on the other or calls to it. Nevertheless, he possibly sees in baptism more of the sign of our fellowship with Christ, of our investing with the good things that God has hidden in Christ, of our sanctification, and in the supper more of the sign of justification, of Christ's representing us before God. All the same, baptism is also the promise of divine mercy and the supper the promise of Christ’s presence. Precisely in Calvin’s doctrine of the sacraments we can see how justification and sanctification, without merging or mingling (as in Osiander or in J. T. Beck in the 19th century),! do belong together and are alive and dynamic as the two divine standpoints from which we must see our life and whose relation can find no analogy in any natural or continuous process.
In baptism and the supper we are to avoid certain errors. Water is
97. Ibid., 411.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid.
103. Barth knew Andreas Osiander (1498-1552) esp. through the work of his Gottingen colleague E. Hirsch, Die .Theologie des Andreas Osiander (Gottingen, 1919), esp. 172ff. For Barth’s later evaluation of J. T. Beck (1804-1878), cf. his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1972), pp. 616ff., where he finds him closer to Osiander than to Calvin, if not indeed to Trent. not the cause or even the instrument of cleansing and regeneration, and_ there is no spatial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the supper. The aptismal water imparts to us knowledge of those gifts, and the eucharistic elements give us instruction on Christ’s presence with all his riches.14 For Calvin, however, this knowledge and instruction are the most vital and direct and supreme things that God can now do for us here and now. For the knowledge and instruction come about through the Spirit.! Is there anything stronger or more direct and divine than the Spirit for us who are human and not God? Would not anything more in fact be less? I would warn you here against viewing Calvin’s sacramental teaching as more limited than the Lutheran, as subtraction from the latter. For Calvin there was no belittling or conjuring away of the mystery. His concern was to put the mystery in the right place where it is unambiguously not just any mystery but the mystery of the relation between God and us, the mystery of the Spirit. Calvin excludes all spatial and material and natural ideas in order that that alone may remain which truly unites God and us, namely, the Spirit. If
Christ has gone up to heaven and left this dwelling on the earth in which we still find ourselves to be pilgrims, even so no distance can take away his ability to quicken his own people by what is his.!°° The reference is to the Spirit, to the Spirit, to the supreme Spirit, to the Spirit of God.
If we are assured of this fellowship between God and us by the miracle of the Spirit, then we can hazard the further thought that was so much a concern of Luther and that we found already in the Institutes. As the Spirit speaks in the sign to our spirits, Christ is present to us, and truly no less so than if we could see him with our eyes and touch him with our hands, indeed, with such power and efficacy that he not only gives the hope of eternal life to our spirits but makes us certain of the immortality of our flesh. 197
The very insight into the strictly and properly spiritual nature of God’s relation to us, the recollection of the distance between heaven and earth, makes possible for Calvin, then, the insight that corporeality is the end (the end) of the ways of God.!08 Without the first insight the second
104. OS I, 412, 413.
105. Ibid., 412.
106. Ibid., 412f.
107. Ibid., 413.
108. Barth picked up this phrase from E. C. Oetinger, Biblisches und Emblematisches Worterbuch... (1776), 407. would be naturalistic dreaming, just as the first without the second would be spiritualizing sophistry. Together the two insights form the genuine paradox of faith. The place from which we see the spatial and material and natural in its relation to Géd has to be transcendent, but from this place we do see it in that relation. Thus for Calvin everything is again said in his sacramental teaching, and here perhaps most strongly. “Hope waits,” he might perhaps say here too, and for that reason he stops inflexibly at the sign, but at the sign that signifies.
The final articles 57-60! present the doctrine of church and state in much the same words as used in the Institutes. Recall the militant description of the ministry of the Word of God.!!0 Calvin adopted it more or less word-for-word in the Catechism,!!! though with a stronger emphasis. God’s Word is what gives preachers their authority.!!2 If, then, they turn back to the dreams and inventions of their own heads, they are eo ipso no true pastors but are to be chased off as dangerous wolves. For Christ bids us listen only to those who tell us what they have taken from his Word.!!3 Of all human traditions we are to say that in no case do they bind the conscience, and in no case are they to be equated with service of God.114 If they do bind us, if they seek to be necessary to God’s glory, if they want to be spiritual laws, then they not only destroy Christian liberty but obscure true religion and violate the majesty of God, who alone wills to rule in our consciences by the Word.!!9
Calvin then moves on at once to an exposition of church discipline with the express caveat that we do not find in the memorandum but is there in the Institutes, namely, that it is a matter of regulating the church, not of a true restraint of evil, and also with the three reasons for it that we know already.!16 The teaching on government!!7 finally repeats the demand for unconditional obedience, the one condition being that, since the demand is made in the name of God, the will of God is itself a limit.
109. OS I, 413ff. Theme: “Church and State.”
110. Ibid., 237; BI 277ff
111. OS I, 414.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid., 414f
114. Ibid., 415.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 415f, On restraint of evil, 415; cf. 90f; for the 1536 Institutes, BI 83. See above, 185ff.
117. OS I, 416f.
23h
Here, too, Calvin’s last word is that we must obey God [Acts 5:29] rather than human authorities.
This, then, is how Calvin wanted the young people of Geneva to be taught. We are astonished. But let us ask carefully what it is that astonishes us. It certainly should not be the pedagogical inexperience and hardness of Calvin that he would offer children this kind of fare. To be sure, it is difficult dogmatic food. But do not assume too quickly that the children would not understand it. It was understood. The whole history of Geneva for the next centuries proves that. The Genevans quickly |
learned to listen to Calvin on predestination and Christ's
st’s eucharistic presence, and t
to
> speak
and Alexandria oul speak about homoousios and homoiousios.!
118 Such things were for them not just pettifogging issues or matters for doctors of theology, but living questions. If they no longer are that for us, so much the worse for us! In itself Christian dogmatics, when it really speaks, is just as alive and intelligible as anything else in the world. It really speaks when necessity, spirit, and life stand behind it, when it is a hard-won answer to serious questions. Then it is an urgent matter of the day. Then it is as relevant as anything else in virtue of its special connection with the most burning of all questions. Then children, too, can understand it. But if it is no longer that, then it becomes obscure, difficult, and absurd. Then all our efforts to explain it or to give it emotional force are no help. Then sincere young people laugh at our psychological wiles, no matter how well meaning they may be. If we are in this latter position, then we need to ask ourselves how it has come about that something that did speak once will no longer speak to us. We certainly should not suppress the historical truth that it did speak once.
Confession
You will recall that in our account of the memorandum presented to the Genevan council a confession of faith was put forward as a requirement for the Lord’s Supper, a confession to which the council and all citizens were solemnly to subscribe. In the preface to the Latin version of the catechism in 1538 (5, 319),!19 Calvin himself tells us what considerations
118. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa, MPG 46, 557.
119. OS I, 426-34. moved the pastors to ask for this prerequisite. Whatever others might think of it, he said, the pastors could not limit their work so narrowly as to be content with preaching as a completed task. They had to attend more closely to those whose blood might be required of them should they perish because of the pastors’ sloth. As this concern became sharper, it became a particularly burning and painful one when they had to administer the Lord's Supper. For although they viewed the faith of many as more than doubtful, all the people without exception streamed to the supper. They thus took to themselves the wrath of God rather than sharing in the sacrament of life. Should it not be concluded that even the pastors were profaning the sacrament if they could administer it with so little joy? The pastors, then, could have a good conscience only if they demanded that those who wished to be counted as Christ’s people and to be admitted to the holy and spiritual meal would pledge themselves to the name of Christ by a solemn confession.!2° It was obviously the text of this confession that was presented to the council on November 10, 1536, along with articles on church government that have not survived.!?! We may also assume that reference was somehow made to the confession in the articles. As we shall see, the confession was then printed separately in April 1537 and distributed to all the houses. In 1538 Calvin then translated it into Latin along with the catechism and thus made it known to a wider public. The longer title tells us that all citizens, residents, and subjects were to swear to uphold and keep it (9, 693; 22, 85; Müller, Bekenntisschriften, 111; Ratinjoy 355)822
The question of authorship is not at all simple. The 1538 Latin translation undoubtedly came from Calvin’s pen, and in whole and in detail the confession is based on Calvin’s Catechism. But between the beginning and the end with Calvin another was probably the true author. For the sake of brevity this author left out an exposition of the Ten Commandments, Apostles’ Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer, as we did last time. He put a section on the authority of holy scripture at the beginning. He greatly shortened the expositions of the catechism. In many places he simplified them theologically by eliminating the dialectical element. He omitted the section on predestination and the second half of that on government, where God, we are told, must be obeyed first. In compensa-
120. Ibid., 428f.
120, COMI 206:
122. OS I, 418ff; cf. CO 9, 693ff.; 22, 85ff (French); and 5, 355f. (Latin). tion he enriched the earlier work by enlarging the section on discipline with a sonorous list of vices and many sections with powerful attacks on the papacy, as in the section on the Lord’s Supper, where the mass is called, almost in the words later used by the Heidelberg Catechism, an abomination and damnable idolatry, churches dependent on the papacy are called synagogues of Satan, and so on.!23 So far as possible, everything is made practical and illuminating and easy to handle. As we would see it, this confession is unquestionably more usable than the catechism itself as a means of instruction. What it offers as the first Calvinistic confessional statement is throughout Calvin's theology. There is hardly a non- Calvinistic word in it. But a thin veil of Reformed churchiness is thrown over Calvin’s concepts, as would be attempted so often later with success or failure, most classically in the Heidelberg Catechism. On linguistic grounds (prolegomena to 22)!?4 it may be cogently argued that the author was Farel, not Calvin.
The confession shows plainly what a strong impact Calvin's theology had made only a few months after his arrival, even on those who were so much older than its author. It is also astonishing, however, how quickly Farel learned — and how easily and swiftly this may be done with the theology of Calvin or anyone else — to remain more or less faithful to the wording and yet to make of this theology something different, something, we might say, that is more customary and that may be put more easily to use. Supposing that Calvin had died of the illness that afflicted him in the fall of 1536. The work of reformation that had been begun with the Institutes would have been in the hands of Farel and the other pastors once again, and they would have continued it along the lines of the confession. Farel was an open and honest man, not wanting at all in zeal. But things would have been much different than under Calvin, as they were thirty or forty years later when Calvin was no longer there: Calvin with his very theological and, for all its turning to the world, very unpractical abstractness; Calvin with his puzzling zeal for an extreme doctrine of predestination; Calvin with his incomparably paradoxical concept of Christ and the Lord’s Supper; Calvin with his insistence that obedience must first be paid to God [Acts 5:29]. Much that was ambivalent and demonic would then
123. For the vices see CO 9, 698; 22, 93; OS I, 424f. On the mass see CO 9, 697; 22, 92; OS I, 423; cf. Heidelberg Catechism, qu. 80; Schaff, 335f. On the synagogues of Satan see GO’ 9; 698; 22) 93:'OS I, 424.
124. CO 22, 9/10. certainly not have happened: the disaster of 1538;!25 the rough power struggle of the 1540s; the fall of Bolsec; the burning of Servetus; the momentous development of the second, Reformed form of the Reformation in such a way that it made a place for itself and could no longer be set aside as simply a sect, a special instance of spiritualizing Enthusiasm — in short, much of that which has made Calvin such an unsympathetic figure in the eyes of the educated world.
The making of a compromise in which Reformed Protestantism would have a good and strict but not so unbearable or aggressive a form, a mild type of Reformed Protestantism linked to a necessary devotion to the shades of Zwingli, but accepting, with some discontent, of course, its destiny as a singular form of Lutheranism, which alone deserved serious consideration — all this would have been just as possible in Geneva as in Zurich, Basel, or Bern. For all their excellent qualities, and for all their respect for the Genevan reformation, how carefully and self-consciously did Bullinger, Myconius, and Haller hold aloof from it as long as they lived, with the open or secret question always on their lips: Why are you really like that? Could you not be rather simpler, rather more palatable, rather more like ourselves? How much more Farel for all his rough edges and corners, how much more the worthy Beza, would have been their man, even the man for Geneva, which would not have had to suffer all those things under them. How then a Calvin jubilee might have been celebrated in 1559 similar to the celebrations of 1909,1!2° at a safe distance from the guns, with infinite joy under the shadow of the great name, but joy at what? At being so very different from Calvin himself!
As we have said, had Calvin been dead, things would very easily have returned to normal, to what was possible and supportable. Some of the difficult nails of Calvin would, of course, have been too forcefully hammered in by now for people to escape them that easily. They could not forget all that quickly the great threat under which they had lived for the last decades or the great promise which they sensed behind it. For honor’s sake belief in predestination and verbal inspiration and church discipline would have had to be maintained for a time, and would in fact have been maintained with honest conviction. Yet soon enough it would have had to be admitted that these things were not meant in the same way as in Calvin, and honesty would have demanded the abandoning of all the
125. The expulsion of Farel, Calvin, and Courault from Geneva.
126. See n. 104 above. extreme positions. The great disruption!27 would have been over. Unfortunately, perhaps the Spirit would have been lost as well. Church history could go on as usual. The thinly veiled Calvinistic confession of Farel shows that all this might easily have come to pass already in 1536.
Calvin did not repudiate Farel’s work. He accepted it as though it were his own. He could do this easily. The veil was thin, so thin that it did not take much to stand by what was written. Calvin had always reckoned with the fact that there would
be others alongside him who would say and do things differently. In this matter he would naturally let his old friend take the lead, at least outwardly. There was no danger in so doing, for this was a confession that was tobe subscribed to only once. The Reformed church had never had confessional documents in the solemn sense familiar to Lutherans. Farel’s confession was good enough for the purpose. This, in my view, is how we must understand Calvin's relation to this part of the Reformation program in Geneva. The voice was Jacob’s voice, but in this instance he could be content that the hands were the hands of Esau [cf. Gen. 27:22].
But let us pause for a moment to consider what it really meant that Farel and Calvin dared to come before the council and people of Geneva with this demand for a Protestant confession. This point in their Reformation program was just as strange and repulsive as the other two, the church order and the catechism. We learn of the objections that were made to the demand from Calvin himself in his preface to the Latin edition of the catechism in 1538.!28 The objections were by no means flimsy. For example, it was asked, not merely in Geneva but by Protestants abroad, whether such a confession had any legitimate place alongside the confession that everyone made by the fact of being baptized.!2? This was an objection that Calvin himself could well understand. It is basically the same objection that many rightly make today against what is called confirmation. On Calvin’s own view no human work is to be interposed as necessary for salvation between the heavenly grace that is known and confessed in baptism and a life in time that is obedient to that grace. On his view, too, baptism stood in need of no confirmation. A second objection went to the very heart of the demand. All citizens were to pledge
127. Cf. the heading of Barth’s exposition of Rom. 12-15 in his 2nd ed. of Rémerbrief (Munich, 1922), ET Romans, 424ff.
128. See n. 119 above.
129. OS 1,429. themselves by an oath to keep the divine law that no one can keep, and they were thus inevitably being led into perjury.!30 In this regard appeal could be made to Calvin himself as a witness, for he had spoken plainly enough about our human inability to keep God’s law.
In striking fashion Calvin’s answer to these objections is simply one long reference to the OT. What were Moses, the kings Josiah and Asa, and later Ezra and Nehemiah doing when they had the people of Israel swear to try to keep God’s law?!3! Did they forget the sacrament of circumcision in which the covenant of God was sealed without confession? Did they really lead Israel into perjury? Is it really a matter here of demanding that we seek after the righteousness of the law and not of confessing the righteousness of Christ with which we are to be clothed as we renounce all human righteousness? Is not the impossibility of keeping God’s law an essential part of this confession?!32 A recklessly bold riposte, one has to say. There is thus a renewing of the covenant with God (Calvin uses this expression), but with the admission that we do not have to renew anything, but will be renewed in Christ! A confession, then, that everything we confess amounts to nothing! Yes, that is Calvin’s paradoxical meaning.
For a just evaluation of this development and of the whole historical process, we have to keep in mind that Calvin was operating on two levels, an upper and a lower. The decisive process was on the upper level, and there he was in full agreement with his critics. There we are indeed poor and wretched and blind and naked face-to-face with the gracious God. There the glory of God shines over all that takes place in the transitory world. But then — and this again is distinctive of Calvin — something is also taking place on the lower level, and it ought to do so, certainly in full awareness of the relativity of what may happen there, and therefore something that is from the very first imperfect and halting and irresolute, yet precisely in awareness of the relativity, something that still takes place with the energy and solemnity of the history of God’s kingdom in the OT. In this action, realizing that we are only human, we must still show, too, that we are God’s.!33 In it God, impossible though this might sound, has to be glorified by us.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid., 429f.
132. Ibid., 430.
133. Perhaps echoing the motto of Christoph Blumhardt in his third period (1896- 1900); cf. C. Blumhardt, Eine Auswahl.. ., ed. R. Lejeune, vol. III: hr Menschen seid Gottes! Predigten und Andachten aus den Jahren 1896-1900 (Zurich and Leipzig, 1928).
Just because Calvin constantly had meditation on the future life in view — and we must stress this again
— he had a strongly developed feeling for significant action on earth, for what could be at times unavoidably dramatic Christian testimonies of the fellowship of Christians with Christ. This is why the Lord’s Supper was so important for him, or church discipline with its solemn act of excommunicating the unworthy. This is why later in situations of conflict he would press matters not unwillingly to an almost incomparably impressive intensity, for example, in his last sermon in St. Pierre’s in 1538 in defiance of the prohibition of the council, or on occasion by openly refusing to give communion to someone who was acting shamelessly, or by solemnly entering the council chamber at the head of all the pastors.!34 He also made his dying into a solemn act in several scenes.!3> We may compare him in this regard with Luther and his death. This will show us how Calvin’s death had about it something of a very impressive and by no means unplanned event.!3° We find the same thing on many occasions, and above all we have to note in such matters the urge to make things vivid and dramatic, and to see the profound link between this urge and all that Calvin was and willed. When we become solemn, there is usually something very suspect about it because we do not really know why we are solemn. Solemnity in itself, solemnity on the lower level without the overarching light of eternal occurrence that is reflected in our action, is naturally all wrong. But it might well be that with the need to think of eternal things we can again have the freedom here below to be solemn.
First, however, we can hardly be warned too much against merely imitating Calvin in this regard. It is in this connection that we are to understand the demand he made upon Geneva for confession. He perceived the objections that might be brought against the demand, but he also saw the need for something striking and momentous at this stage in the Genevan reformation, something in which all should have a part so that expression might be given to, and everybody impressed with, the element of seriousness, decision, and irrevocability in the situation produced by the Reformation, a great sign or symbol in which everybody
134. On the sermon see below, 359f. On refusing to give communion see Kampschulte, II, 203ff., esp. 209-11; also I, 460f On entering the council chamber, see ibid., NG OAS}.
135. Cf. OS II, 398-404.
136. Cf. Stahelin, II, 460ff. could see clearly what the situation was and be united with others in relation to it. As clearly as a stroke of lightning, the history of the kingdom of God had to be seen as something that had not happened but was in process of happening, and the excitable people of Geneva, always disposed to high spirits and revolt, had to become again the people of the OT covenant, while he himself, Calvin, would be their Moses, Josiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah. All this had to come about like a lightning flash, an impossible event, not meant ever to be a church institution, not meant —not at all—for imitation, at root a wholly eschatological event. Nevertheless, as such, conceivable as a once and for all, a special, a most special, event, it was somehow necessary.
In the preface to the catechism, directly after his explanation of the demand, Calvin added an almost supplicatory request to other Protestants abroad who had blamed him to some extent on the matter — and this passage is one of the most gripping that I have learned to know thus far in Calvin — to bear in mind that we are all soldiers engaged in one war against the one foe, under the one leader, and in the one camp. Unity is thus demanded above all that is individual or that divides.!37 If we want to show obedience to Christ our captain, it is imperative that we bind ourselves together as one pious society and keep peace among ourselves. What? Should not the enemy, the devil, constrain us to act in concert?!38 He alone can rejoice in our conflicts. If only we were to consider that there is a danger of fighting against Christ himself should we oppose actions in which even one scintilla of piety may be seen. Ought we not to note and honor the insignia and ornaments of our God no matter in whom they encounter us?!39 Ought we to have such distrust of one another as to be always so ready to take in a bad sense all that our brethren and fellows undertake? With charity and goodwill should we not instead think the best of one another and act on one another's behalf?!4° Especially when it is a matter of ceremonies, in which we have freedom and do not have to agree? What will be asked of us at the last judgment but whether we have made good use of this freedom? Those will stand in that day who have done most for edification. May, then, our whole care and attention and diligence and concern be directed to edification, in‘which we can be
137. OS I, 430.
138. Ibid., 431.
139. Ibid.
140. Ibid., 431f.
successful only insofar as we go forward in earnest fear of God, sincere piety, and undissembled holiness of life.!41
It was finally in this light and context that Calvin himself saw the Genevan confession. He can defend himself, but he can also lay down his weapons. He strongly supported the need for the act, but if the objection to it was sound, he simply replied that it was no more than a ceremony, a possible means of edification. Think of it as you will, but no conflict about it in any circumstances. As I understand it, Calvin thought the act necessary in the sphere of freedom. Freedom stands above the need, and Christ the captain above freedom. I believe that this renunciation of any justification does in fact justify the extraordinary act. Those who know what Calvin knew here of the peace of God that passes all understanding [Phil. 4:7] may permit themselves extraordinary acts of this kind. I at least would not be bold enough to stop them with criticisms.
That is how it is in some sense with the whole of the Genevan program of reformation as we have come to know it. What are we to say concerning it? We can put ourselves back in the situation of the time and thus say correctly that in the way they were undertaken the measures initiated by Farel and Calvin, the church order, catechism, and confession, met the historical needs of the hour. When the position of the gospel in this remarkable corner of Europe was under attack on every hand, what would have become of Geneva if these extraordinary men had not purposed and ventured to do these things? And perhaps we may also ask what would have become of the Reformation in general if these very wellequipped men had not come along and founded this school? The very things that scare us off from the Genevan program in fact fit only too well into the general situation of the day on the lower, secular level, just as a purely sociological study of the things that were then attempted will find real pleasure in them. It was a classical, an only too classical construct that then began to emerge in Calvin’s work of reform. From the opposite angle we may also with some truth remark that Calvinism did in fact fit into this world much too well, that the construct was too classically human. Then we can point to all the things in the acts, as acts on the lower level, that were imperfect and suspect and even openly perverted: the dangerous proximity and relationship of these acts to what the enemy, Roman Catholicism, was doing in this situation; the serious temptation to revive the Middle Ages in a new and even more ambiguous and dangerous form; the
141. Ibid., 432.
292,
acute infiltration of a political, legal, or at any rate OT element into the Reformation gospel.
We can say all these things. Nevertheless, we cannot fail to see that when we have justified and criticized, beyond all that may be said both for and against, there is finally something else to be said on Calvin's behalf, even if it be only indirectly. I refer simply to the fact that here was a man who in the Spirit dared to take a step, a dangerous step, an earthly step, yet a step that he had to take. It may be that nothing more can finally be said in his defense. But as a sign he had a promise that many more easily justified human steps do not have because they are not ventured as this step was. It is the secret of life in general to know what Calvin knew, to look beyond to what is incorruptible, and then to live and act in the world of the corruptible precisely with this higher reference.