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General Introduction

IV. INTERPRETER FOR THE SUFFERING CHURCH

In Calvin's mind there was a profound and prevailing continuity between Christ and the church: between the experience of Christ and the experience of God's people, whether in days of the " fathers," or in the early Christian church, or in his own day. There is hardly a Biblical account of the trials and tribulations of the godly that does not occasion a lively discussion from Calvin's pen. He never fails to see Christian lifesub specie crucis. The prophets were persecuted, and Christ was crucified. Christ's disciples were persecuted, and so were the Christians in the early church; so also were Christians in England, Scotland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Eastern Europe, and especially in Calvin's own country, France. News of the tortures, exiles, executions from these lands came to Calvin both by letter and by word of mouth from the many who sought refuge in Geneva. He spent much time and effort helping the refugees in the city, and writing letters of comfort and encouragement to Christian people in hopeless situations abroad.[46]Geneva itself was an object of ecclesiastical hatred and political machination, and in danger of invasion. Within the city there were rebellions, divisions, and all manner of restiveness. The fact is that all through his ministry Calvin's mind and soul were preoccupied with the sufferings that were the lot of the Protestants among whom he labored and for whom he was called upon to provide instruction, guidance, and encouragement; sufferings for which there often was no human help.

Calvin appropriated the sufferings of God's people depicted in the Bible for the evangelicals in Europe and for himself. It is hardly possible, as we read his comments on Noah, David, Job, Jeremiah, or on the disciples of Jesus, to escape the truth that they all are vivified by their profound appropriateness to his condition.[47]Calvin turns again and again to the inescapable and bewildering fact that in this world the disciples of Christ have suffered far more grievously than the wicked who have abused and oppressed them. So it had been in the past; so it was in his own day; so it was in his own person. He suffered physically as well as mentally all his days. He lived under cares and contentions which gradually killed him at the age of fifty-six. The image of Calvin as a stern and insensitive puritan overlord does not bear examination. He not only felt the afflictions of his fellow evangelicals, but also commented upon them constantly both as an interpreter of the Bible and also as a " theologian." It is quite possible and even necessary to see Calvin's work as a whole in the light of the wrongs that were perpetrated against the faithful throughout his ministry. It is no exaggeration to say that if one overlooks the mystery of the world's animosity to the gospel and to those who adhere to it, one is bound to misunderstand Calvin profoundly and to misconstrue his work both as a thinker and as a man of action. The following discussion of particular doctrines from this point of view is intended to give the reader a helpful clue to Calvin's mind. It is not meant to be a complete exposition, nor is it meant to obscure Calvin's primary concerns with the " honor of God," justification by faith alone, obedience to God in man's total life, and so on, which are essential for understanding his theology. We have not dwelt upon these latter emphases in Calvin because they are commonplaces of all adequate expositions of his work.

I.The Providence of God[48]

The suffering of the righteous confronts us directly with the providence of God; and the doctrine of providence was constantly on Calvin's mind and to it he made a peculiar contribution. It was traditional in medieval theology to write on " providence and free will." The providence of God, although welcome as providing for man's necessities, was a stumbling block in so far as it made man's own freedom doubtful. So the main interest of the philosophical theologians was to reconcile God's providence with man's freedom and responsibility. Now, all this is changed by Calvin. He finishes his comments on Acts 20:32 with the characteristic and blunt statement: " Since Scripture teaches that we have sufficient help in God's power, let us be mindful that only they are strong in the Lord who renounce their free will and lean upon him who alone, as Paul confesses rightly, is able to build up." When people suffered dungeon and exile, yea, were at the brink of death in the hands of irresistible foes, it was irrelevant and futile to reconcile providence with the free will of man. These victims of oppression were not free against the combined power of church and state. The only proper question under the circumstances was, " What did God intend by their suffering?" What these people needed to know was that God was " at the helm" and that neither torture nor death came upon them without the providence of God who was their Father. They were comforted, not by the knowledge of their freedom, which they did not have, but by faith in the sovereignty of God the Father which Calvin would not let them forget.

When Calvin took up the other matter of providence in relation to human wickedness, he insisted upon man's sin (as in the case of Judas), and upon the subtle tyranny of Satan over human beings (Matt. 26:14). But once again he insisted upon the proposition that no evil is perpetrated apart from God's providence and his use of it for his glory and the good of his people. Even as a sinner, a man could receive hope and courage from the faith that his own wickedness was under God's providence and would further, in spite of himself, God's glory.

We are not concerned here with justifying Calvin against his detractors. The point is that his doctrine of providence grew out of his preoccupation with the sufferings of " the elect," and can be stated and understood properly in that context. " Since Scripture teaches!" In a way, it is quite unwarranted to claim that Scripturein totodenies man's freedom in so far as he is a responsible being. Calvin himself does not deny, in fact he insists upon, the doctrine of man's responsibility (on Matt. 11:21). But he is far from wrong in the insight that Scripture is a celebration of God's peculiar sovereignty as God and Father, and was written above all by men who set themselves to instill courage and hope among God's troubled people, declaring God's control over the affairs of men and the hope of the fulfillment of his purpose through all the vicissitudes of human existence. In any case, Calvin's doctrine of providence, with all the thought he spent upon it, means that whether we are good or evil, whether we live or die, we are God's.

The subject of providence requires a discussion of miracles. To Calvin, the miracles of the Bible were in a class by themselves. They were the work of God the Father, in praise of Christ and for the sake of the church; and the knowledge of them was the work of the Spirit. They were to Calvin the means with which God revealed himself to his people. They were strictly " signs" in the sense of the Gospel of John. God worked them not to inflame man's taste for miracles in general, but as vehicles of his grace suitable for human apprehension. What made a miracle a sign was the Word of God. A miracle without the Word was to Calvin a prodigy which even the Pharaoh's magicians could perform (Ex. 7:12). It proved, not God's grace, but his judgment which blinded the people and made them deaf to God's word. Calvin recognized no sure way to discriminate between a sign and an imposture except by the Word of God as illumined by his Spirit (on 1 John 4:1 f.).

Calvin was aware that men are always gaping for miracles (on John 11:18). The more they feel their weakness before the powers of nature, the more they look for a supernatural power that will enable them to overcome the evils caused by nature and the climax of these evils in death. The miraclemongers care, not about the Kingdom of God, but about their convenience and their belly (on John 6:26). They have no taste for the cross, and therefore they debase the power of Christ with their " hope of gain." Calvin knew all this as a permanent temptation in the church. He insisted, therefore, repeatedly and strongly that miracle and doctrine go together (on Matt. 24:23, Mark 16:20), and refused to identify God's power with the working of miracles (on 1 Thess. 1:4), holding that the Word of God is superior to miracles (on John 4:48, 20:31). Christians languished and died in prisons without any miracle to enable them to escape. These people lived, not by miracles, but by the Word of God, by their faithfulness to Christ. What they had available was not the hope of physical escape, but the greater miracle of faithfulness and joy. Therefore, Calvin received the Biblical miracles as signs of God's power; but he knew the same power by the preaching of the gospel, by the miracle of weak men made strong, both as to those who preach and as to those who hear (on Mark 16:20).

2.Predestination

Calvin's doctrine of predestination is a complex matter, and is above all directed against the Roman Church, in support of " justification by faith."[49]But here it is necessary to keep in mind the persecution of the Protestants in his day. As in Scripture, so in Calvin's mind it was no small comfort that the sufferings of the church were predestined according to the will and the purpose of God.[50]Predestination meant to Calvin, as to Paul, that the sufferings of the Christians were no accident in the history of mankind. The unfolding of history was the realization of God's purpose which went back to the beginning. The doctrine of predestination for Calvin was bound up with the doctrine of history as the continued fulfillment of God's purpose. There had been, there was, and there was to be nothing fortuitous, nothing apart from God's intention, nothing that originates from man's will and caprice. Jesus Christ had been called and predestined by God for his mission, together with his suffering and cross. His gospel, scoffed at and rejected by the world, was no novelty. It had been in God's purpose and was promised in prophecy through the ages. So as age followed age, fulfillment followed fulfillment, all according to God's own eternal purpose.

Calvin's doctrine of predestination was inspired by the need of the Protestant churches for a knowledge of the continuity between the gospel they believed and for which they suffered, and thepromises of Godmade from the beginning and through the ages. Like the early church, like evangelist and apostle, the Reformer took great pains to establish the antiquity of the gospel he preached. A church under persecution was plagued with profound doubts. Excommunicated ex-Romanists, subject to enemy power, deprived of home and goods, in exile and at death's door, these poor people who lived in anxiety and despair, subject to miseries from which even the dregs and criminals of society were exempt, had nothing to sustain them except the promises of God. They were invited by Calvin to turn their eyes to Abraham and Moses and Noah and David, to the great deliverance of God, to the mysterious workings of his " secret purpose," to the manifestations of his wisdom and power, rooted in his eternal purpose and his predestined end -- all established in Jesus Christ crucified, risen, ascended, and at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. If one abstracts the doctrine of predestinationbeforethe ages from thepromisesof God made by creation and fulfilled through the ages since, one does violence to Calvin's mind on this matter (see especially on 2 Tim. 1:9-10, Titus 1:2).

This introduction is not the place for a full exposition of such a complex and profound doctrine as predestination. We are interested only in indicating that Calvin's version of this doctrine cannot be understood properly except in relation to the suffering church. For instance, it is common to think of predestination as deterministic (on Rom. 9:17). Determinism means that one fact arises from one or more others by way of a natural necessity and that one can discover how one situation determines another. But one does not study the condition of the Christians in this world and arrive at an understanding of predestination. There is no open and comprehensible explanation of God's ways with his people one by one. God's purpose remains God's secret, and he alone can justify his deeds among men. So, God's predestination remained a mystery to Calvin, and was affirmed not as a doctrine of determinism arrived at by observing " the causes and connections of things," but by fixing the mind and heart upon the Word of God, upon Christ and the history of God's people. Determinism has nothing to do with the mystery of evil. On the contrary, it explains the mystery away. Predestination as Calvin understands it is inseparable from that same mystery and the very ground of courage for living with it.

3.Faith and Reason

Calvin refused to " explain" to himself or to others the workings of God's purpose in the fearful destiny of the believers in the world. On the other hand, the triumph of Christ, his ascension and sitting at God's right hand, were the immovable signs of God's sovereignty and thus the certainty of the fulfillment of God's predestined purpose. Predestination therefore meant to Calvin hope in a world where " determinism" could have produced only despair. This hope Calvin received from Scripture, and he was determined to let Scripture rule his mind and keep it within the bounds of sanity.

But the Word and promise of God made no sense to the carnal mind. The Word of God was both a stumbling block and a foolishness, and the flesh recoiled from it. There was no way of verifying it while believers were tortured and murdered all around him. There was no way of justifying the ways of God in His world except by faith.

Faith which is the proper work of the Spirit must rely upon and draw its strength from the promise of God in Christ and Scripture. It has no mandate to supersede the Word of God. And this is so because faith is to believe in God's love and care for his people in the midst of their humiliations and sufferings. But this love and care we know, not by our cogitations upon " the facts of life," but by adhering to God's word in the Bible. " Reason," which confronts us with the injustices and cruelties of this world, cannot attain to a certain knowledge of God's beneficence. The usual rational arguments for God's justice and mercy, based upon the observed workings of God's providence, even though Calvin himself used them, gave him no " certain knowledge." There was no use trying to make sense of the suffering of the elect by deep or high thinking. Therefore, the primacy of faith in our knowledge of God became established as a fixed point in Calvin's theology.

But faith did not solve the problem raised by reason to reason's satisfaction. The Spirit did not open to him the " secret counsel" of God, because in fact Scripture itself confronted him with this secret counsel, rather than removed its secrecy. Faith, therefore, could not, any more than reason, penetrate to a knowledge of God as he is in himself. Faith was a gift of God whose main function was to create in man a certain knowledge of God's goodness toward us. The miracle of faith was the miracle of joy in the midst of suffering. The knowledge of God given by the Word and the Spirit was a knowledge which occurred and became established with the joy of partaking in the cross of Christ. If the Christians not only bore their cross, but also rejoiced in bearing it, it was by the doing of God's own Spirit who regenerated them, made them new creatures. The doctrine of the Spirit comes to life in Calvin's theology, because he recognized that the comfort and joy of Christians at their cross is the work of the living God who " spoke by the prophets."

Faith is the knowledge of God's goodness toward his suffering people, and not a vague and general sense of the divine. Calvin did not deny that the carnal mind has a confused and idolatrous awareness of God. But he knew that a natural knowledge of God, without his self-revelation in Christ crucified and risen, by the inward working of his Spirit, is no match whatsoever against the machinations of the devil and the cruelty of men. He knew that human cogitation, without God's illumination and power, is helpless before the monstrous evils which proclaim the power of Satan and his reign of darkness and death. Calvin knew this, and felt it adequately. He knew the misery of this body of death, and he knew also that a mind conjoined with this body must inevitably be overwhelmed by a life that is in fact a shadow of death (on 2 Cor. 4:11-12). Sufferings of this life act as portents of death, and before death, says Calvin, " all the powers of men succumb with terror" (on 2 Cor. 1:8). Calvin was deeply impressed, doubtless in himself as in others, with the elemental desire to live and the shrinking of the flesh from its destruction (on 2 Cor. 5:1, Gal. 2:20, 2 Tim. 4:7). He knew how brave men are away from danger, and how they turn into trembling leaves when they meet it (on John 18:17). This was no academic matter with him. He knew it as a common human reality. And he knew that in the jaws of hell, it is only the Lord who gives true courage. " Let us, therefore," he says, " learn to be strong nowhere but in the Lord" (ibid.).

4.Jesus Christ

The Commentaries contain numerous and weighty statements that we know God in Christ. Commenting on 1 Peter 3:21, Calvin says, " Hence all cogitation on God apart from Christ is an immense abyss which immediately swallows up our whole mind." In another place, speaking of the knowledge of God among the Athenians, he says that " the Lord allowed the men of Athens to fall into extreme madness" (on Acts 17:16). Abyss, labyrinth, madness: such were words which came to Calvin's mind when he considered man's knowledge of God apart from Christ. For those who have taken up their cross for the gospel's sake, there is no knowledge of God's goodness except in the knowledge of the crucified and risen Christ.

In the context of the Christian life, Christ's mediatorship was to Calvin a continuing experience as well as a historical event. That God had revealed himself as Father in a man who was tempted and suffered, who exercised his Sonship by the death of the cross, was at the center of the gospel to multitudes of Christians who suffered and were tempted under their cross. Calvin's Christ was nothing if he was not the Comforter of the church, the source of the Christian's courage and hope, and his power of endurance.

This explains two of the characteristic emphases of Calvin: the humanity and the Kingship of Christ, perhaps his Kingship and humanity, as two focuses of his mediatorship. No one after Paul in the history of the church, so far as we know, made so much of the ascension of Christ and his sitting at the right hand of the Father, as did Calvin. There is nothing more joyful for a Christian than to know that Christ crucified is at God's right hand as the King and comfort of his people, reigning over the church, interceding with the Father for his people, protecting and watching over them in their tribulations. Hence in Calvin's thought the death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, issue in his sitting at God's right hand as the climax of his own mission; from it they derive their whole glory as elements of the gospel. The sitting at the right hand is also the source of all the benefits that Christians receive from God the Father. It is not too much to say that if one takes away Christ at God's right hand, the whole gospel as addressed to the suffering church falls to pieces, because the Christians are left without their Christ, and therefore without their God. Hence, there is no image so alive in Calvin's mind as that of the Son seated next to the Father. Calvin insisted upon the ascension of the same Christ who lived and died for us. The Christ who sits at God's right hand is not a spirit who is ignorant of our flesh. He has gone from us to lift our minds up to our God and his heaven. So it is that he gives us his spiritual gifts, by the Spirit, of courage and hope in the midst of our trials. Thus it is that he is at once " the vicar of God" (on Mark 16:19) and our brother.

Calvin was as little concerned with the divine " essence" of Christ as he was with the essence of God in general. It is the divine power and grace of Christ that he finds of decisive importance for the church. He of course never denied, he emphatically affirmed, the union of divine and human natures in Christ. By the standard of the Church fathers, he was orthodox enough. But the words " essence" or " nature" belonged to contexts of thought that were not his own. He had no stomach for the kind of metaphysical reflection that is required by the mind's desire to penetrate to God's or Christ's essence. The main point of Calvin's insistence on the deity of Christ was that he was the agent of our salvation. Commenting on Col. 1:15, he insists that Christ is " the image of the invisible God," not only by virtue of his essence, but also as one in whom God makes himself known to us. We know nothing about Christ's divine nature apart from what he has done and continues to do for us. And he has done and continues to do his work as a human being and our brother. Our brother is our King, and our King is our brother. This situation is stated properly in terms, not of essence, but of God's saving work; provided we bear in mind with Calvin that the one and the same saving work was at once the Father's and the Son's by the Spirit.

Calvin's eloquent comments on the events of Christ's life and death as recorded in the Gospels are clearly intended to show the Christians that they are suffering after their King and participating in his life. Here the deity of Christ in no wise vitiates his authentically human experience of temptation and " Passion." Calvin pays his tribute to orthodoxy by reminding himself that the Son of God put on humanity and shared our life freely and voluntarily. He even shows a predilection for the notion that he was " God clothed in human flesh" (on Luke 19:41), or " manifested in the flesh" (on John 1:1, 1 Tim. 3:16). " And yet, in Christ we see the infinite glory of God united with our polluted flesh so that they become one" (on 1 Tim. 3:16). Calvin's concern for the encouragement of the church led him not only to emphasize Christ's common humanity but also to present it as a state of creaturely weakness. The human nature of Christ was not that of Adam before the Fall! He was no ideal and splendid specimen of humanity such as man is supposed to have been before he sinned (Augustine[51]). He had " our polluted flesh" ; our flesh with all its susceptibilities and pains. When he was slapped, or whipped, or finally nailed to the wood, he did not look down upon the proceedings as a bemused god or hero; he suffered as suffer the believers who are tormented by their persecutors.

It is quite evident that the orthodox understanding of the two natures of Christ, as involving a divine and a human essence and even a divine and a human consciousness, was, to say the least, awkward in relation to Calvin's concern with Christ's role as mediator -- especially with Christ as the head of a church engaged in mortal combat with evil. It is hardly too much to say that Christ's divinity meant to Calvin above all that he, with the Father, was the source of the Christian life and its blessings (on 2 Thess. 2:16). He insisted that the Biblical statements concerning Christ's relation to God are, as it were, not metaphysical but soteriological or " operational." They refer to his work, to what he is to us and for us. God himself we know by his saving work; and as this saving work is done by Christ, we knowhimas God.[52]

5.The Christian Life and the Last Things

About the Christian life we need not say much in this place. We have cited Calvin extensively on this subject in our selections. Here we shall consider his so-called otherworldliness.

Calvin's emphasis on self-denial can be understood and interpreted rightly only if we keep in mind that there is in fact no victory over the power of death without a denial of the self which works by sin and despair. A man has to know the death of Christ by his own death, and know the resurrection of Christ by the miracle of the victory over death within him; and such knowledge is inseparable from the warfare in which he is subject to temptation and harassment under the assaults of Satan. Calvin speaks of an inner and an outer mortification. The first has to do with the struggle against sin or unfaithfulness; the latter with the struggle against the powers of this world (on 2 Cor. 4:10). It is quite evident that these two go together, since the temptation to deny our Lord rises in the midst of fear of the evils to which men expose themselves in the hands of men when they set out to obey God and cleave to Christ.

Calvin knew no antidote to defeat and ruin except to raise our minds to heaven. To him, a Christian walked on earth, but his life was hid in heaven. He spoke with obvious passion against attachment to this world, and exhorted Christians to renounce it in favor of heaven. In a sense, nothing is so essential to his theology as the opposition between heaven and earth, and the insistence that Christians, with their minds and hearts, leave the earth and go up to heaven.

But Calvin wanted Christians to lift their minds to heaven because Christ is there, and it is from there that he reigns over the church in the world. He says explicitly that heaven, where God is, and Christ is, is " above all the heavens." It is not the heaven we see and in which the stars shine (on Heb. 9:24). Calvin is not concerned with it except as the abode of God and Christ, and the origin of our salvation; so that, to turn the mind to heaven means to turn it to Christ at God's right hand: to turn to him for strength against tribulation and for victory over evil. We must turn to " heaven" for victory on earth.

On the other hand, to turn away from the earth is to Calvin to mortify the sinful flesh which shrinks before warfare with evil and the suffering it entails. To renounce the world is to renounce Satan and all his evil works. It is hard to be faithful to the gospel while the flesh rebels against the privations and oppressions which it would avoid at the expense of treachery to Christ and his gospel. In short, Calvin's insistence upon self-denial and world renunciation must be understood in the context of the Christian warfare and in the light of the sheer necessity of dying to sin if one is to live to Christ. It has nothing to do with ascetic contempt for the created world, or with an otherworldliness which seeks a heaven because it despairs of this world in general. Calvin had only love and respect for the world as God's creation for the use and enjoyment of man.[53]

Calvin turns the attention of the Christian not only upward but also toward the future. Hope, for Calvin, is at the heart of the Christian life. He sets before his readers " the blessed and immortal rest of heaven" as the hope that will enable them to suffer death with patience, and even to desire eagerly what they fear (on Luke 12:50). With Paul, he argues that if there be no resurrection of the dead, Christians, who are sheep meant for slaughter, are the most miserable of men (on 1 Cor. 15:19). He regards the present life of the Christians, with all its travail and groanings, as unfulfilled unless our redemption culminates in the resurrection and " eternal felicity."

But the new life in Christ is itself by a resurrection from the dead (on John 5:21). When Paul says that the Spirit of God " shall also quicken your mortal bodies," according to Calvin he means " everything left in us that is subject to death. . . . From this we gather that here he speaks not of the last resurrection which shall be in a moment, but of the continuous working of the Spirit, by which he gradually destroys the remnants of the flesh and restores a heavenly life in us" (on Rom. 8:11). In his comments on Acts 2:19, he identifiesthe great day of the Lordnot with the last things, but with " the whole Kingdom of Christ" and the trials of the church. He does not postpone the destruction of death prophesied by Paul to the end, but speaks of it as having already occurred, as already realized in the deliverance of the Christians from the power of death (on 1 Cor. 15:26). The Day of Judgment is even now anticipated in the present dread and terror deep in the lives of the ungodly, and in the present joy and exultation of the believers (on Rom. 2:5). The coming of Christ itself is anticipated when Christians obey God and " vie one with another in imitating him" (on Heb. 10:7); when Christians, in the extremity of their sufferings, call upon him, and he comes to them with power and help (on Matt. 19:23); when he consummates his present reign with a complete revelation of his authority in all the earth (on Matt. 25:31). Calvin speaks of the last things as a full manifestation of what is now hidden or obscure.

He even, as we say, demythologizes the prophecy " Heaven and earth shall pass away," by calling upon Christians to raise their faith " above heaven and earth," to Christ in God's heaven (on Matt. 24:35). He calls upon them so to meditate upon the last things as to receive patience and perseverance in their trials (on 1 John 3:2). Their life is to be a waiting, without any clairvoyance as to time and seasons. They are to live every day as though it were their last (as it might well have been under the cross), in the hope of Christ's coming, by which they are to be comforted by Christ (on Heb. 10:25). Calvin was well aware of the absurdity of the Christians' situation, and knew very well how foolish the Christians' hope looked from the outside. But he also knew that the hope which grows within the Christian life, from it and into it, has its own peculiar rationale, and flourishes in spite of external circumstances, because it is the work of Christ and his Spirit. In this way, the eschatological statements of the Bible, with their several " metaphors" (on 1 Cor. 15:52, Heb. 10:26-27), illuminate the life of the Christians, as well as point to their ultimate destiny with God. But here one must remember Calvin's concern with the present responsibilities of Christians and his whole ethical concern to which we have devoted a long chapter.

[46]SeeLetters of John Calvin, ed. by Jules Bonnet, 4 vols. It has an excellent index.

[47]See especially the Autobiographical Sketch, pp. 51, 55-57.

[48]For the following sections, the reader is referred to the chapter corresponding to the following topics.

[49]See pp. 197f., theInstitutes, Bk. III, chs. 21-24. The position of these chapters in theInstitutesis itself revealing.

[50]See especially on Rom. 8:28-30, pp. 306 f.

[51]City of God, Bk. XII, pars. 9 f., Bk. XXII, pars. 12 f.

[52]Niesel, Wilhelm,The Theology of Calvin, The Westminster Press, 1956, tr. by Harold Knight.

[53]See pp. 124, 347, 349 f., 355, 356.

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