I realised recently I harboured a
grudge. My grudge wasn’t against the living but against a long dead fellow Christian.
It’s one thing to harbour a grudge against a school bully who genuinely did you
harm and you are struggling to forgive. But to hold it against a person from
history, who ultimately is on your side is crazy. The subject of my dislike was
a man by the name of John Calvin and his only crime was to try and organise the
Christian belief system in a way that was functional, practical, logical,
faithful to the broader orthodoxy of the time and firmly based in the
scriptures. Why did this gripe me so much, because firmly laid at his door was
the idea that he came up with the doctrine of predestination. Broadly speaking,
predestination is the idea that the only pople that God will save for eternal
life are those he chose in the first place and all those who face damnation are
those he seemingly didn’t choose. This is the polar opposite of my faith
tradition which broadly says that Christ died for all people and it’s up to the
individual to accept this gift of salvation or not, a doctrinal position called
Arminianism, named after Arminius, a protégé of Calvin’s protégé, Theodore Beza.
John Calvin was born in Noyon, France
in 1509. A notable part of John Calvin’s spiritual journey began when he was
sent to Paris
to study at university to prepare for a career in the church. Beginning his
education initially at the University
of Paris, he later enrolled at the University of Orleans. At this time France was under going a period of
legal reform which sought a return the legal system to Roman law. Rather than
reading these laws in the light of tradition, commentaries and interpretative
glosses, which had been the custom, the French sought to read the texts,
unadorned, in the original languages and thus doing away with the perceived
obstacles to the original meaning of the text. This approach had a flow on
affect to the study of other areas, especially the study of scripture. It was
here in the universities of Orleans
that John Calvin came to study civil law. Through this study he learnt the
value of reading a text in it’s original language and methods of applying the
ancient meaning to a current situation. Of this Alistair McGrath says,
‘Although it is often suggested that
predestination stands at the centre of Calvin’s system, this is not the case;
the only principle which seems to govern Calvin’s organization is a concern to
be faithful to scripture one the one hand, and to achieve maximum clarity of
presentation on the other.’
It was at this time in his mid
twenties that he came into a new experience of Christ. After studying law,
Calvin returned to Paris to resume his theological studies and instead of
taking up a church post, left the church of Rome to become apart of the reform
movement. This eventually led to him writing his famous Institutes of the Christian
religion and his famous reforming work in the city of Geneva.
Rightly or wrongly, Calvin’s teachings on
predestination are often presented as a distinctive hallmark of his writing, but
it must be remembered that Calvin was not promoting a new perspective on
salvation but was endeavouring to present the common understanding in a new
way. To depart from this was close to heresy
and this was punishable by death. Richard A Muller says’
‘Unique or individualized doctrinal
formulation was not Calvin’s goal. If, for example, there is anything unique in
his doctrine of predestination, it arose from the way in which he gathered together
elements from past thinkers in the tradition and blended them into his own
formulations.’
Like many of those before him,
Calvin believed Salvation was something for the pre-ordained/church and not
specifically for all humanity. Salvation is
primarily the act of being rescued from damnation and going to heaven. In
his institutes he says,
This
prescience extends to the whole circuit of the world, and to all creatures. By
predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which
he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every
man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained
to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has
been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been
predestinated to life or to death.—Institutes of the Christian Religion [John Calvin, Institutes
of the Christian Faith, Chapter21 section 5 ]
Salvation was seen by Calvin to be
limited to the few that God had chosen by his free will to save. It is not
achieved in any way by their efforts but by God’s undeserved favour on them.
Salvation is an act initiated by God and achieved for the selected few by the
death of Christ. Strange and harsh as this may sound to my Armenianist ears, it
can be argued from scripture and was not a new thought. It’s an argument that
personally hasn’t won me over but one that speaks loudly when one is trying
define clearly who is in and who is out by divine declaration, something the
Protestant and Catholic Reformation were busy trying to do. For me, God did
predestined a group of people to be his people, but like Ruth the Moabite who
chose join God’s chosen people the Israelites, we choose to become part of
God’s chosen people.
Although for Calvin it seems that
the main thrust of salvation was to receive eternal life, it wasn’t the
entirety of his view. Gonzales says,
Calvin, as a theologian of the second
generation, did not allow the doctrine of justification to eclipse the rest of
Christian theology, and therefore was able to pay more attention to
several aspects of Christian faith which
Luther had virtually ignored-in particular the , the doctrine of sanctification
(Gonzalez, 77).
In his Institutes Calvin said,
We must now see in what way we become possessed of the blessings which
God has bestowed on his only-begotten Son, not for private use, but to enrich
the poor and needy. And the first thing to be attended to is, that so long as
we are without Christ and separated from him, nothing which he suffered and did
for the salvation of the human race is of the least benefit to us. (Institutes
3.1.)
For Calvin, Christian regeneration
or sanctification was inextricably linked with justification. He sees both of them
of God’s grace, one flowing into the other. Salvation is not just something
decided upon for the individual before the dawn of time and benefitted from
after death. It also brings about a regeneration in this life that allows a
person, in union with Christ through the Holy Spirit, to be a more a Christlike
person and to benefit the world around us. This bit warms the cockles of my
little Salvationist heart. For me, Christianity is a selfish pursuit if all it
entails is having insurance for the after life. For me it needs to make a
difference now, in the same way that Jesus’ ministry was just as much about the
present as it was about the future.
It seems my days of wrestling with
Calvin may be over, as he and I settle down to an easy truce. Rather than
seeing him as the mastermind of a doctrine that potentially renders Christians
into self righteous pew warmers, I now see him as one who tried to make the
outworking of the Christian faith active and relevant to his day and beyond. Calvin
was the one in the Reformation who didn’t drop the ball on holiness. He actively
promoted the concept that regeneration or sanctifacation was inextricably
linked to justification, or in other words, salvation was not just something
that affects the future but impacts positively on the life of the believer and
those around him now.
However one of the
roles that he is best remembered for was that of Tarzan in the 1959 movie, Tarzan the Apeman, which saw him putting
on the loin cloth in the first ever colour version of the original Tarzan story.
It was here, in a virtually non-verbal performance, that Denny’s strong screen
presence shone through and set the scene for a long career as a successful character
actor. Today he is the oldest living Tarzan, one of the patriarchs of the world
wide Tarzanic tribe and a nice guy to boot. He is also celebrating his 80th
Birthday today, so with out much ado……..
