Hi Johnny -
I’ve said I’d write something about Calvinism here – so here goes. 
One of the very positive things about Calvinism is that it gives proper emphasis to the gratuitous and irresistible love of God – so it can undercut any works based schemes of salvation which is, in my view, right. If we think we can earn God’s love by good works we’ve completely missed the point, and if we do good to try and earn grace, once again, we are missing the same point. (This is not to say that we should not strive to do good, but rather that this has to be done as a response to an acknowledgement that we are already loved just as we are and therefore should try to act accordingly; and, of course, forgive ourselves and others when we often stumble. And the doctrine of the gratuitous and irresistible love of God has, for some notable figures in the Ecumenical Calvinist fold, lead in the direction of either hopeful or certain universalism.
Again, on a positive note, I’ve mentioned the balanced evaluation of Calvinism in ‘The Death of Adam’ by the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson. You don’t have to buy it. I’ll try and summarise her arguments here to you (from memory, for I no longer have the book – and I’ll put in some bits and bobs gleaned from elsewhere also)
Marilynne Robinson points out that Calvin has been demonised unfairly – especially over the burning of the Arian/Unitarian Christian Michel Servetus as a heretic at his instigation in Geneva. It is chiefly for this that his name has been blackened – especially by liberal American historians in the nineteenth century who thought him guilty of what amounts to un-American activities. In Calvin’s defence, Luther would have done the same thing, as would Elizabeth I of England – and she gets very good press from the same historians – who approved the burnings of two Anabaptists and four Arian/Unitarians in her time. For all of her tolerance the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed put non—Trinitarian Christians beyond the pale for her (and it’s not even clear that the Anabaptists she had burned were non-Trinitarians, although this is what they were condemned for). By way of contrast, Calvin went to great pains to persuade Servetus to repent and wanted Servetus’ sentence commuted to beheading when he remained unrepentant. However, Calvin’s hands were tied by the chief governing body of Presbyterian Elders who ruled Geneva. This is not to condone the awful and shameful crime of the burning of Servetus – or the many other crimes of religious terror in Geneva and elsewhere in Christian Europe at this time; but it does go some way to mitigate Calvin’s role.
Robinson also says much about the tradition of social justice found in Calvin and in his followers – it wasn’t all Protestant work ethic utilitarianism (but see later). She especially cites the American Calvinist Jonathan Edwards in this connection, who was concerned with the plight of the poor, and treated the Native Americans with consideration (he was also a slave owner, but his son became an anti slavery campaigner). She contrasts this attitude unfavourably with the harsh policies of Social Darwinism – hence her lament for the death of Adam. In addition she does a close textual analysis of Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ and shows that Darwin cannot be totally excused from the legacy of harsh social engineering and eugenics associated with the Social Darwinists.
Regarding the history of Calvinism in England – which I know quite well – Calvinism contributed much to the development of representative democracy (I’m sure this is the case elsewhere to). The Presbyterian organisational structure is based on a hierarchy of committees but a democratic process is inherent in the election of these committees – and this gave ordinary people the skills and confidence with which later to demand secular franchise. In Elizabethan England the Queen was most perturbed at the degree of independence from her appointed bishops that these committees were achieving (and reined them in from time to time). She was also appalled by the Calvinist tradition of holding ‘Prophesyings’ - a sort of question and answer/interactive type of sermon - because the freedom of speech expressed in these threatened her Royal authority at a time when religion was always political.
Marilynne Robinson also says something about censorship in Geneva during Calvin’s time. Although the writings of Christian ‘heretics’ were censored there, the printing presses were given free rein to churn out the Greek and Roman classics – even the slightly salacious ones – because Calvin was very much a classical humanist scholar and the best ethos of Calvinism has always emphasised learning. Calvin was also a great scholar of the Church Fathers – but rather too fixated on Augustine to my mind. Unlike Luther he was strongly opposed to allegorical interpretation of the Bible, but he plainly acknowledged that the biblical writers were not:
‘…strongly concerned with precise accuracy and their worldview often prevented them from making accurate statements. For example, he noted that Genesis describes the moon as being larger than Saturn and that Matthew’s account of the journey of the wise men probably misidentifies a comet as a star. He regarded such passages as evidence that the Holy Spirit accommodated the ancient worldview of biblical writers in inspiring scripture. Elsewhere, Calvin observed that the Gospel writers ‘were not scrupulous in their time sequences, nor even in keeping to details of words and actions.’ The Evangelists ‘had no intention of so putting their narrative together as always to keep an exact order of events’, he remarked. Calvin explained that the Gospel writers were moved by a deeper spiritual concern than factual accuracy. This concern was their commitment to ‘bring the whole pattern together to produce a kind of mirror or screen image of those features most useful for the understanding of Christ’. Calvin urged that it was pointless to quibble over the details of scriptural texts or to treat the Bible as a sourcebook for rational proofs or arguments. Just as the prophets and apostles did not fuss about with details or proceed by arguments, he argued, ‘we ought to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements, or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the spirit’. (Gary Dorrien, ‘The Remaking of Evangelical Theology’, pages 20-21).
It is well known by scholars that Calvin was no fundamentalist and actually had very little to say about predestination. However, in the two generations after Calvin (Dorrien again) the –
‘…Reformed emphasis on salvation as an unmerited gift of grace, bestowed by an absolutely sovereign God through faith in Christ, gave rise to highly forensic understandings of the gospel message. Post-Reformation orthodoxy assiduously protected this message from any creeping Catholic influence. Reformed confessional statements emphasized the theme sof double predestination, absolute divine sovereignty, and salvation by grace through faith. Right doctrine not only trumped all concerns with the spiritual life but sharply limited any possible claims about the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. The spiritual coldness and troubling moral implications of Protestant orthodoxy gave rise to the first glimmerings of a different type of evangelicalism in seventeenth century England and Germany…a movement away from creedal intellectualism of Reformed orthodoxy, arguing for a more spiritually integrative version of the Christian faith (namely the Pietist and the Holiness movements.’ (Gary Dorrien, ‘The Remaking of Evangelical Theology’, page 5).
And this leads us on to a consideration of the downside of Calvinism – particularly the sectarian Calvinism that is uninterested in the witness of the wider Church and tends to keep splitting into smaller and smaller sects driven by a lust for doctrinal correctness and a real hatred of that which it rejects.
In my last post I cited C.S. Lewis on the ‘practise of the absence of God’. Calvinism at its worst has no such tradition of ‘dry prayer’. Due to the belief in the assurance of the elect (standing over and against the non-assurance of the reprobate) and the aggressive propagation of this belief - extreme Calvinism has often been accompanied by epidemics of despair and suicide. This was the case in Calvinist Geneva – where apparently the homicide rate dropped fifty percent because of the strict regulation of behaviour, but the rise in the suicide rate more than compensated for this drop in homicides. It was the case in late Elizabethan England and in Jacobean England when Calvinism seemed to be winning. Thomas Cartwright, the Elizabethan extreme Calvinist Divine - who ultimately became a sectarian - argued that people suffering from ‘melanchonia’ were reprobates experiencing a foretaste of their own damnation (the Anglican Richard Hooker wrote against this idea with pastoral clarity and merciful passion). It was the case in eighteenth century America when Jonathan Edward’s ‘Great Awakening’ was accompanied by a number of suicides. And here is another paradox regarding Calvinism (in addition to my musings about Calvinism and Pantheism in an earlier post); Calvinism, that prides itself in its forensic intellectualism sets very strong store by emotionalism. Faith is full of paradox – but sectarian Calvinists are the last to admit this.
Regarding Marilynne Robinson point about Calvinism and social justice – there is much merit in her evidence. However, this needs to be balanced against the elements in Calvinism that gave us the Protestant work ethic. This is the idea that either a sign of assurance is a capacity for hard work and thrift, or that the only outlet for the anxiety over election is to throw yourself into your work and to keep working until you drop (both have been argued). Whole books have been written on this. I would modestly observe that just as ‘the Sabbath was made for man’ so work is meant primarily to serve the good of human society and human beings; it is not an end in itself. I also observe that the Calvinist Work Ethic has been responsible, at times, for harsh attitudes towards God’ poor that have come close to Social Darwinism.
Regarding the Calvinist contribution to democracy in England (and elsewhere), I have to balance this by saying that the Calvinists came chiefly from the educated classes and their Biblical based Christianity presupposed a good level of literacy. They were terrible in their attitude towards God’s illiterate poor, who were recently deprived of the comforts of Catholic sacramentalism. The Calvinist committee members spied on them, interrogated them, and often persecuted them as heretics. In this connection I note that the record of Calvinists in the witch hunts is less than glorious; most of those burned after kangaroo court trials – with neighbours settling scores against neighbour - were actually Christians with woolly, illiterate doctrinal views.
On the penal substitution thread I’ve mentioned that whereas Luther’s opposition of Law and Gospel/Grace lead him into rabid and hate filled anti-Semitism, the forensic identification of Law and Gospel/Grace in Calvinism has produced relatively philo-Semitic attitudes. However, there is a downside to this. Thomas Cartwright, the Elizabethan Calvinist wanted the laws of Leviticus to become the Law of England. The quasi-fascist Dominionist movement founded by Gary North and Rousas Rushdooney in America of late has put forward the same arguments for Christian theocracy. I’ve suggested earlier that this is to misread the dynamic tradition of Jewish law – where in the time of Christ the horror at the thought of justice listening to false witness and the horror at the shedding of innocent blood meant that the greatest Rabbis agued for only the mildest of penalties. Surely it also flies in the face of the mercy code of Jesus – our Greatest Rabbi - shown in the story of the woman taken in adultery which strongly suggests that since we are all sinners, we have no right to impose ultimate penalties on our fellow sinners.
At this point I’d like to say something else good about Augustine. In his ‘City of God’ he elaborated Christ’s parable of the Wheat and the Tares. There are two cities in this world; the City of Man, governed by ‘cupiditas’ (self regarding desire); and the City of God governed by ‘caritas’ or (disinterested love). In this world the two interpenetrate each other, but must never be identified (as they are in the theocratic model). So a moderate Augustinian tradition, based on Augustine’s metaphor will argue that it is the proper function of law to prevent us from doing harm to each other; but it is not the law’s function force us to be good (not least because fallen and imperfect beings often find it hard to conceive of what the good is – even if they think they can read it out of the Bible). Likewise the proper function of law is to establish and maintain peace rather than truth (because our grasp on truth as fallen creatures will always be at best provisional). I have no problems with this.
This is a long post – but the subject is a complex one and I’d like to finally say a word about Frances Schaeffer; he’s the author that introduced me to Calvinism. There is a lot I can say about him; about his ‘Christian Manifesto’(which advocated that the law should establish and maintain Truth over Peace and inspired the actions of fanatics who Schaeffer himself would not have condoned); about the biography of him written by his son Frank (who is a bit sex obsessed for my liking, but people have not been able to give the lie to all of his revelations, which actually make Frances Schaeffer seem a rather a complex and lovable human being, and someone who did much good). I’d just like to say a couple of things about Frances Schaeffer’s reading of cultural history in his books, chiefly ‘The God Who is There’.
In his books Schaeffer argues that there was a distinctive Northern European Reformation Culture which showed proper respect for human dignity and in which God was sovereign – he’s talking chiefly about Calvinism but also shows approval of Luther. However, in his view, there was also a hubristic Southern European humanist tradition – emphasising the independence of human reason apart from God’s sovereign grace - rooted in the Catholic Humanism of Thomas Aquinas, developed by the Renaissance humanists, and eventually leading to the advent of secular humanism that has drifted into modern nihilism which we can see in the dreadful atrocities of the death camps at Auschwitz and in modern permissive society.
Well, it’s simply not true that all Renaissance humanists emphasised human independence apart from God’s grace. Certainly Petrarch, arguably the first Christina humanist, loved Augustine and had a thoroughly introspective consciousness. Some of the southern humanists such as the Italian Pico might have tended towards an over confidence in human reason, but the mainstream tradition that flourished predominantly in Northern Europe held to a sort of synergistic doctrine of redemption as a collaboration between the human and the divine. Calvin himself was a humanist in his insistence on sound and historical biblical scholarship.
In speaking of the Reformed tradition of human dignity Schaeffer completely ignores the contribution of the Anabaptist tradition to the establishment of human rights in Europe. He praises the writings of the seventeenth century Englishman John Locke as the high point of ‘Christian law’. However, Locke, although an Anglican, was a secret Arian/Biblicist Unitarian; he was also aware through correspondence with Dutch Armenian humanist scholars of the cover up that Protestant martyrologies had achieved in blaming all intolerance and persecution on Popery and Romish attitudes alone; it was the sins of Reformed religion and magisterial Protestantism in general that inspired Locke’s writings on religious toleration.
And I note that the downside of secular humanist rationalism of the enlightenment may have been present in the methodical mechanization of death in Nazi Germany – but Luther also has a lot to answer for.
With Schaeffer we have a Calvinist, intellectual fundamentalist who, because of his elect status, could serve up a version of history which had to be true – hence his guru status amongst the faithful and his lack of any humility or attention to inconvenient counter evidence in his arguments and analysis. With him we have history of ideas framed as a ‘clobber text’ – and his books are still used like biblical proof texts by intelligent fundamentalists.
Schaeffer was a man of compassion. He did chide the Reformers for their attitudes on slavery and anti-Semitism, seeing this as their wilful disobedience to the clear teaching of the Bible. But the way I see it Schaeffer would not have read the Bible as forbidding either if he had not first had to come to terms with the holocaust, and if he had not been subjected to an awareness of the Civil Rights Movement (because it was this movement more than the abolition of slavery that drove home the full truth of the dignity of Black people to White Christians).
Sectarian Calvinism has a stern tradition of discerning God’s favour and wrath in human history. This sometimes can be a little irritating to the outsider. For instance, the Welsh Calvinist preacher Martyn Lloyd Jones ranted about the German bombing of Britain being a just judgement of God against a sinful Britain during World War II (go figure?). Likewise, Calvinist inspired fundamentalists ranted about 9/11 being a judgement of God against the toleration of gay people in America. As for me I don’t think we should identify the engine of history with the will of God – this is what Hegel and Marx did in turn. History has its catalogue of innocent victims. It is to the revelation of history’s innocent victims that we should look for the meaning of history as revealed in Christ the innocent victim.
All the best
Dick
Agreed - interestingly Darwin lost his faith initially because he could no longer believe in the wrathful God of his upbringing (it happened a lot to second generation Victorian Evangelicals). His agnosticism because of the pointless suffering in nature came later
Och well, we can’t agree on everything. I like to see people in the context of their times. For his time Dante was a revolutionary. He walked with pity amongst the damned when the mainstream Western tradition looked forward to scoffing at their torments. His love for Beatrice may just be plain weird by modern standards - but he did something very revolutionary with his weird love. He redeemed human love between a man and a woman, because his love of Beatrice is the path that takes him to Paradise (this is real departure from the then dominant misogynistic western view of the Fall that put the blame on Eve). Also I’ve seen Jungian’s interpret the whole of the Divine Comedy in terms of a journey in ‘individuation’. Dante didn’t literally travel through hell to Paradise. He’d been to his own hell, purified himself in his own purgatory, and become integrate din his own inner paradise. The Divine Rose of Paradise at the close of the Comedy is often spoken of in terms of being a mandala - a Jungian symbol of integration.
get like this seomtimes (rather oftenactually) especially when we’ve been posting too much and are tired!!! 
. It’s a great thread you’ve started (and if you’re reading this) will post mine and James thoughts as an essay so I don’t have to get heavily involved in the thread argument. Once I’ve posted, anyone who reads it (if anyone reads it!!!) can quote it, misquote it, agree with it (in part or in full) or disagree with it (in part or in full) - but I think my discussion with James has explored slightly different angles on the issue of Satan than some that have developed on the new thread to date (I don’t want to interrupt the thread by putting a great wodge of stuff inthe middle of it that closes down conversation; and if I post it in bits I will get drawn into a conversation again that James and I have already had and completed, and be acting as the Fat Controller on another thread - if you see what I mean?).
). ‘The Allegory of Love’ is more of academic interest, and Lewis’ conclusions about the medieval cult of Courtly Love are now much disputed – but the book is a forerunner in its field and I’m glad I read it (once