Calvin at 500

Calvin at 500 by Dean J. Seal

John Calvin is famous for many things, like predestination, the Total depravity of humans, and putting a guy in jail for smiling at a baptism. Modern Calvinists don’t actually follow (or do) any of those three things, but we are still stuck explaining them. Allow me to explain.
First, you should know I grew up a Norwegian Lutheran (not Swedish or German, for God’s sake). That’s a pretty dour line of theology right there. After several years of abstinence, an agnostic atheism, my wife and I decided we wanted some sort of spirituality to counter the overwhelming materialism and selfishness of Manhattan. We ended up at a Presbyterian church because of the great preaching and the emphasis on education.
Here’s the kind of funny spiritual cultural joke: Homer Simpson’s church is Prebsylutheran.
So anyway, you might say, what’s the dif? We’re all on the same team, aren’t we? Don’t we read the same Bible and quote the same guy and have Christmas on the same day?
Well, yes and no. And here we start looking at the hair-splitting we call theology, or the search for meaning in the interpretation of these texts.
I’ll try to be brief, but here’s a rundown to make it complicated before it gets easy. Luther was a Catholic, an Augustinian monk who wanted to reform the church, not start a new branch. Calvin was a Lutheran, and also a lawyer, and in setting out to define the methodology of the church he disagreed with a little of what Luther said, which the Lutherans saw as too far gone. Consequently, Calvin’s theology is called Reformed, even though Luther started the Reformation, because he was reforming the reformation thoughts of Luther.
Let’s go deeper before we come back up. The Roman Catholic Church likes to frown on the Lutherans for breaking up the church, but in fact the first schism in the church was between the Roman Church and the Orthodox Church. Originally, the Orthodox churches had one patriarch for each major city, and they met on occasion t come to some consensus about how things should run. As Constantine was the Roman Emperor who made the empire Christian, and he moved the capitol to Constantinople (where else?), Roman bishops were a little ticked off. They decided that Rome had been the center of the world for several centuries, that Paul and Peter died there, and that they should be first among equals- in fact the Bishop of Rome should be calling the shots. That was the first break, when the rest of the patriarchs told them no dice.
Remember this; the Pope is still called the Bishop of Rome. He is also called the Pontiff, which comes from pontifex, which was the high priest of the Roman pagan gods who were responsible for the power of the Empire. So the Catholic power structure was born, in rebellion to the other churches, and it set itself up on a model based n the Roman army. That accounts for the structure and the authoritarian modus operendi.
Why do i bring this up? Because it is key to the Roman Catholic understanding of Faith. On the Catholic Church, faith is defined as assenting to the church’s teaching. This is very much specific to the existence of a structure, in understanding the church as the Body of Christ on Earth, and thier teaching, big surprise here, supports this idea.
The Lutheran (and Presbyterian) definition of faith is trust that God is merciful to sinners. This is a much more direct relationship to God for us humans. We don’t have the church as a mediator.
How do these differences work themselves out? Let’s start with Luther’s other revolution; he translated the New Testament into German, so that anyone could read it. The Catholics were against that, and stayed against it up until very recent times. Thier idea was that the Bible is easily misinterpreted, that the individual would get it wrong, and as a friend of mine put it, the priest was saying, “Put that down! Shut that book! I’ll tell you what you need to know!” It was the church’s job to teach, and it was the human’s job to have faith that God would be teaching through the church.
Luther thought this was wrong, because the church made so many mistakes. The selling of indulgences, where you can get remission from sin by paying the church money as a penance, was what galled Luther to the breaking point (the Romans are bringing that back, by the way). The Roman Catholic Church was using that money to build St. Peter’s Cathedral, the one where the Pope says mass and makes his speeches, where the Sistine Chapel is. The next time you see that building and that art, as beautiful as it is, remember they paid the price with the fracturing of Western Christianity.
Luther came back with the idea that it was faith alone, not the church, which gives us redemption and salvation. It’s the Good News, the Good Spell, the Gospel, that tells us of the love and mercy of the Creator God.
I’ll get farther into the differences between Lutheran theology and Catholic theology in the next blog. We need to touch on Calvin before his birthday week is up. Forgive me for dramatically oversimplifying; remember Luther told us to “sin bravely” knowing that God is merciful. Wikipedia’s summation suffices here:
We may summarize the three uses [according to Luther] as follows:
1 To restrain external evil...
2 To show us our sin (pedagogical, theological, ...or convicting use [or as a] mirror).
3 To show us God's character and will as a rule and guide to holy living, empowered by the Gospel alone (didactic use) or (rule).

Reformed view
In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Reformer John Calvin likewise distinguished three uses in the Law. Calvin wrote: "That the whole matter may be made clearer, let us take a succinct view of the office and use of the Moral Law. Now this office and use seems to me to consist of three parts."
1 By "exhibiting the righteousness of God, — in other words, the righteousness which alone is acceptable to God, — it admonishes every one of his own unrighteousness,... convicts, and finally condemns him."
2 It acts "by means of its fearful denunciations and the consequent dread of punishment, to curb those who, unless forced, have no regard for rectitude and justice."
3 "The third use of the Law. . .has respect to believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already flourishes and reigns. . . . For it is the best instrument for enabling them daily to learn with greater truth and certainty what that will of the Lord is which they aspire to follow, and to confirm them in this knowledge. . ."

Lutherans freaked about point number 3, that one could use the Bible to guide one’s actions. To Lutherans, this was unknowable, and also a centering of behavior on Works’ Righteousness, that you could earn your way to salvation through your own power. To Calvin, it was self evident that those who felt they were in the power of a loving God would look for ways to live out the scripture’s guidance.
In my mind they both make sense and aren’t mutually exclusive; but in the days of yore, things were very much either/or. Either Luther was right about works Righteousness and we shouldn’t seek special knowledge and grace though our own efforts; or Calvin was right that grace is a gift from God and we should be motivated by it to do good in this world.
Let me close with a bit of a surprise: Both Calvin and Luther believed in predestination, that one’s salvation was known by God, determined by God, and out of our hands. It’s the Calvinists and the Reformed movement that got attached to it because that became a problem when some more reformed Dutchmen began to break off from he Reformed movement (note: at this point the Catholics say, why did you all break off from he Roman Church? Just to make smaller and smaller churches? And the Protestants say, why did you break off from he Greeks? So you could speak Latin?).
These differences, while occasionally infuriating and seemingly quibblesome, as also the rules that guide our churchs, thier preaching and their actions. The core issue here is that we are all theologians, we are all philosophers, and some of us have had the chance to study them and some of us agree to take the word to the experts. But we still have to decide which expert we listen to. Is it the Pope? Or is it your local parish preacher?
Or is it God? Or is it you?