CALVIN, JOHN
(1509–1564)

John Calvin, the Protestant reformer and theologian, was born at Noyon, France. The son of middle-class parents of considerable local importance, Calvin was early directed toward an ecclesiastical career. From 1523 to 1528 he studied theology in Paris, there becoming acquainted with both the scholastic and humanist trends of his day. When he had achieved the master of arts degree, Calvin, in response to his father's wishes, left Paris to study law at Orléans, finishing his doctorate there by early 1532.

By 1534 Calvin had decisively broken with his Catholic heritage and had joined the Protestant reform movement in France. From this time on, all his efforts were devoted to the cause of the Reformation, and most of the remainder of his life was spent preaching, teaching, and writing in Geneva. He carried on a voluminous correspondence with thinkers and reformers all over Europe, and he had a powerful voice in the political and educational, as well as the ecclesiastical, institutions of Geneva.

Calvin's major work was the Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536 and originally addressed to King Francis I of France in defense of the French Protestants. It was extensively revised several times, and the last edition, published in 1559, provides a systematic presentation of virtually all the lines of thought found in Calvin's other mature works.

Knowledge of God and Self

"Nearly all the wisdom we possess," wrote Calvin in the opening of the Institutes, "consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." The overarching question in the Institutes is how we acquire this twofold knowledge, and the answers to this question have proved to be the most influential part of Calvin's thought.

Thomas Aquinas had taught that the theologian should start with God and then consider creatures insofar as they relate to God as their beginning and end. Calvin broke decisively with this approach in claiming that knowledge of God is so interrelated with knowledge of ourselves that the one cannot be had without the other. He taught that when we accurately reflect on ourselves, we realize the excellence of our natural gifts; but we also realize that our exercise of these gifts yields "miserable ruin" and unhappiness, and that "our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God." Without this realization of our misery and dependence—especially of our misery—none of us comes, or even tries to come, to a knowledge of God. On the other hand, there is also no knowledge of self without a knowledge of God. Without a standard by which to measure ourselves, we invariably yield to pride, overestimating the worth of our natural gifts and overlooking the corruption that has resulted from the exercise of those gifts. Calvin readily allowed that "the philosophers," without knowing God, can give us much accurate and worthwhile information concerning man's faculties and constitution (I, XV). Philosophy, however, cannot yield a true estimate of our worth and condition.

In any discussion of Calvin's views on how we can come to know ourselves and God, it is very important to understand what he meant by knowing God, for his views on this point are both original and subtle. The Scholastics tended to equate knowing God with knowing truths about God. Calvin invariably regarded this as inadequate. He did not deny, indeed he insisted, that knowing God presupposes knowing about God. But in addition to this he always maintained that an essential aspect of our knowledge of God is our acknowledgment of his attitude toward us, especially his attitude of benevolence and love. Again, Calvin never equated acknowledging God's benevolence toward us with believing that God is benevolent toward us. Rather, acknowledging God's benevolence presupposes worshiping and obeying him. Thus, as Calvin uses the concept "knowing God," there is no knowledge of God apart from worship of, and obedience to, him. For this reason E. A. Dowey (1952) said that Calvin conceived of knowledge of God as existential. It may be added that Calvin held, as did many of the Scholastics, that what can be known about God is never his nature (quid est ), but only what he is like (qualis est ); and more specifically, what he is like toward us.

How is knowledge of God to be achieved? Calvin always held that knowledge of God can, in principle, be achieved by nourishing one's subjective awareness of deity and its will, with reflection on the structure of the objective world.

"There is," he said, "within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity [sensus divinitatis ]" (I, iii, 1). Although this concept of a sense of divinity played a significant role in Calvin's thought, he spent little time elucidating it. Apparently he thought of it as yielding a rudimentary conviction of dependence on some Maker, as well as a numinous awareness of the glory and majesty of the Creator. In support of his conviction that this sense is universal in humankind, Calvin frequently quoted Cicero. It is this universally innate sense of divinity in humankind that, according to Calvin, accounts for the universality of religion in human society. It is a seed of religion (semen religionis ). Religion is intrinsic to human life; it was not "invented by the subtlety and craft of a few to hold the simple folk in thrall" (I, iii, 2).

In Calvin's thought, conscience (conscientia ), as a subjective mode of revelation, was closely related to the sense of divinity. Conscience too, he said, is part of the native endowment of all men, written "upon the hearts of all." Typically he spoke of it as a sort of knowledge whose object is God's will; or, equivalently, the difference between good and evil, the law of God, or the law of nature. Thus it is by virtue of conscience that man is aware of his responsibility—aware of the moral demands to which he is subject with respect to God and man. Calvin did not state with any exactitude the actual principles that all men know by virtue of conscience. He did say, however, that "that inward law … written, even engraved, upon the hearts of all, in a sense asserts the very same things that are to be learned from the [Decalogue]" (II, viii, 1); and he said that what the Decalogue requires is perfect love of God and of our neighbor.

The subjective awareness of divinity and of its will can be supplemented, Calvin taught, by reflecting on the structure of the external world and the pattern of history. "[God has] not only sowed in men's minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him" (I, v, l). At various times Calvin called the universe at large a book, a mirror, and a theater for the display of God's attributes—preeminently for the display of his goodness to us but also of his glory, wisdom, power, and justice. In the course of expounding his view that God can be known through his works, Calvin explicitly opposed the view that God can be known by speculation concerning his essence. It is by nourishing his sense of divinity and his conscience, with the contemplation of God's works, that man can in principle arrive at a knowledge of God.

sin

It was Calvin's persistent teaching, however, that in fact no one does come to know God in the manner described above. The positive demands placed on all men by God's internal and external revelation are rejected, and this rejection results in an endless series of spurious religions. This resistance to God's demands is what Calvin identified as sin. Thus sin is not primarily ignorance about God; although such ignorance, or blindness, as Calvin often called it, will always be a consequence. Rather, Calvin viewed sin as an active willful opposition to God, as a positive refusal to acknowledge his demands of worship and obedience and as a deliberate alienation from him. Its prime characteristic is perversity, and its root is ordinarily pride and self-love.

Thus, being in sin is just the opposite of knowing God. Calvin, however, was quite willing to allow that a person who does not know God because he refuses to worship and obey him can still know or believe a variety of propositions about God that happen to be true. This explains what has, to so many readers, proved to be such an infuriating feature of Calvin's thought—his insistence, sometimes in adjacent sentences, that the pagans do not at all know God but are not wholly ignorant of him. For example, Calvin, speaking of man's natural ability to know God, said, "the greatest geniuses are blinder than moles." In the very next sentence he said, "Certainly I do not deny that one can read competent and apt statements about God here and there in the philosophers" (II, ii, 18).

Not only was Calvin insistent that knowing or believing "competent and apt" propositions about God was not sufficient for knowing God; he was also profoundly convinced that man's proud refusal to worship and obey God leads him to resist acknowledging the truth about God. Sin, although primarily a matter of the will, infects man's reason as well. Perversity leads to blindness and distortion. Immediately after saying that the philosophers make competent and apt statements about God, Calvin added, "but these always show a certain giddy imagination…. They [the philosophers] saw things in such a way that their seeing did not direct them to the truth, much less enable them to attain it." Thus the consequence of man's willful alienation from God is not merely that he does not know God but also that his views about God are now so incomplete and distorted that nothing at all can be built on them. This is Calvin's judgment on natural theology.

It must be added that Calvin regarded the effects of sin as far more pervasive than have yet been indicated. Not only does sin disrupt man's relation to God; it thereby spreads corruption throughout the whole of human life. Of course, it does not impair our natural faculties as such. Calvin typically spoke of reason and will as man's chief faculties, and he held that the man in sin may be as intelligent and as capable of making decisions as the man who knows God. The corruption is to be found, rather, in the use we make of our native capacities.

Calvin maintained that if we are to state accurately what sin does to man's use of his native talents, we must distinguish between man's supernatural gifts, his abilities concerning heavenly things, and his natural gifts, his abilities concerning earthly things (II, ii, 12–13). The supernatural gifts comprise man's ability to know God, to worship him properly, and to obey him inwardly as well as outwardly. We have, however, been stripped of these gifts. The natural gifts pertain to matters of the present life, such as government, household management, all mechanical skills, and the liberal arts. Concerning these, said Calvin, our abilities have certainly not been destroyed. Not only are ancient law, medicine, and natural philosophy worthy of the highest admiration (II, ii, 15); but man, even in his estrangement from God, retains some sense of the laws that must be obeyed if human society is to be preserved. Man "tends through natural instinct to foster and preserve society. Consequently, we observe that there exist in all men's minds universal impressions of a certain civic fair dealing and order…. And this is ample proof that in the arrangement of this life no man is without the light of reason" (II, ii, 13). Calvin immediately added, however, that although man's abilities concerning earthly things have not been destroyed, they have been profoundly corrupted. In opposition to what he understood as the teaching of the Greek philosophers, he held that both reason and will have been gravely wounded; the mind "is both weak and plunged into deep darkness. And depravity of the will is all too well known" (II, ii, 12).

If man's natural gifts are to be healed and his supernatural gifts restored, his sin must be overcome; he must come to know God. We have already seen that for this purpose man's conscience, his sense of divinity, and his awareness of God's revelation in the objective world are all inadequate. Thus, if human life was to be renewed, it was necessary that God should choose some special means. This he did by revealing himself with special clarity in the history of the Jewish people, culminating in the life and words of Christ. When God leads man to respond to this revelation with faith, then man again knows God. Indeed, faith, consisting as it does in a clear knowledge about God coupled with proper worship and true obedience, is a certain sort of knowledge of God—that sort which focuses on Christ as interpreted in the Scriptures. Thus, in Calvin's thought there is never a contrast between faith in God and knowledge of God; rather, given man's prior perversity, faith is the only kind of knowledge of God available to men. Also, faith, in Calvin's teaching, is never understood in scholastic fashion as an assent to divinely revealed propositions. Rather, the object of faith is God as revealed in Christ.

Social and Political Teachings

Calvin's social and political theory has also proved most influential. Man, according to Calvin, is a creature of fellowship, created with tendencies that find their fulfillment in a variety of natural groupings, each concerned with a certain facet of man's life in society. One of these groupings is the church, another the state. Church and state are differentiated primarily by reference to their different tasks. The concern of the church is the spiritual realm, the life of the inner man; the concern of the state is the temporal realm, the regulation of external conduct. In regulating external conduct, the general aim of the state, in Calvin's view, is to insure justice or equity in society at large. This equity has two facets. Obviously the state must enforce restrictive justice, but Calvin also believed that the state should secure distributive justice, doing its best to eliminate gross inequalities in the material status of its members.

It is the duty of the church to seek the welfare of the state, but equally it is the duty of the state to seek the welfare of the church. Thus, part of the state's duty is to promote piety; and Calvin, along with most of his contemporaries, regarded blasphemy as a civil crime. It was Calvin's view, however, that church and state ought to be structurally independent of each other. Church officials are not, by virtue of their office, to have any official voice in the state; and state officials are not, by virtue of their office, to have any official voice in the church.

Although he thought that the best form of government would vary with circumstances, Calvin quite firmly believed that the ideal government would be a republic in which those of the aristocracy who are competent to rule are elected by the citizenry, and in which power is balanced and diffused among a number of different magistrates. The magistrate has his authority from God. In a sense his authority is God's authority; for magistrates, Calvin said, are ministers of Divine justice, vicegerents of God. Thus the duty of the magistrate is to apply the law of God, implanted on the hearts of all and clarified in the Scriptures, to the affairs of civil society. To what extent and under what circumstances Calvin regarded civil disobedience as justified is a matter of debate. What is clear is that Calvin regarded the law of nature as in some sense a standard by which the decisions of the magistrate are to be judged, and at the same time he regarded revolutions which rip apart the entire fabric of human society as not to be condoned.

Influence

Both the theological and social views of Calvin have had an enormous influence throughout history. The Reformed, churches of the Continent and the Presbyterian churches of England adhered fundamentally to his thought, and the dominant theological thought of the American colonies was Calvinistic. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the impact of Calvinism on society and theological thought suffered a decline, but the twentieth century saw a resurgence in Calvin's influence. In the early part of the century in the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper led a revival of Calvinism in politics and education as well as in theology. And the so-called neoorthodox theology, represented by such figures as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, not only was accompanied by a renewed interest in the writings of Calvin but also in large measure marked a return to the main patterns of Calvin's theological thought.

See also Barth, Karl; Brunner, Emil; Thomas Aquinas, St.

Bibliography

The standard edition of Calvin's works is that by J. W. Baum, E. Cunitz, E. Reuss, et al., in the Corpus Reformatorum, 59 vols. (Brunswick, Germany, 1863–1900). Most of these were translated by the Calvin Translation Society as Works, 48 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843–1855). An especially fine annotated translation is J. T. McNeill, ed., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by F. L. Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia; Fortress Press, 1959). The classic study of Calvin's life is Émile Doumergue, Jean Calvin; les hommes et les choses de son temps, 7 vols. (Lausanne: G. Bridel, 1899–1927).

For discussions of the sources of Calvin's thought, see François Wendel, Calvin: Sources et évolution de sa pensée religieuse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), translated by Philip Mairet as Calvin (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); and Josef Bohatec, Budé und Calvin (Graz, Austria, 1940). A good discussion of Calvin's theology as a whole is Wilhelm Niesel, Die Theologie Calvins (Munich: C. Kaiser, 1938), translated by Harold Knight as The Theology of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956). The most adequate discussion of Calvin's views on the knowledge of God is E. A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin's Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). Calvin's doctrine of man is treated in Thomas Forsyth Torrance, Calvin's Doctrine of Man (London: Lutterworth, 1949). Calvin's social and political thought is well discussed in André Biéler, La pensée économique et sociale de Calvin (Geneva: Librairie de l'universityé, 1959); and Josef Bohatec, Calvins Lehre von Staat und Kirche (Breslau: M. and H. Marcus, 1937). The finest survey of the history of Calvinism is J. T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

Nicholas Wolterstorff (1967)