John Calvin on How to Use Words
Note: this is the first chunk of my dissertation written at Yale. One copy sits on a library shelf somewhere. I know that because I received a $15 check. If you read past the jump, I owe YOU $15.
Introduction
We can’t possibly need another book on Calvin. So why add one to the pile? Shouldn’t I have thought twice when two of my own professors had written excellent books on Calvin? Serene Jones, a theologian, wrote a book on the artistry of Calvin’s rhetoric. Carlos Eire, an historian, wrote a book assessing Calvin’s views on worship and idolatry. But far from convincing me that poor Calvin had been needlessly hashed and rehashed, these two teachers incited in me an interest to find out more. Both in their books and in their teaching, the issue of Calvin’s politics was always in view. Their work repeatedly stressed that Calvin’s theological writing was political all the way through. I wanted to explore this claim further, and to explore as well what difference it makes – both for understanding Calvin and for the ongoing art of theological writing.
While visiting a Presbyterian seminary, a group of students asked me about my research. When I responded that I was writing about Calvin’s theology of worship, they let out a collective groan. This had not whetted their appetite. In the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that, for them, any attempt to analyze Calvin could only be an attempt to prove that Calvin was “right” about something or other, thereby proving that Presbyterianism was “right” about something or other. (It also became clear to me that they had read very little Calvin – “parts” of the Institutes had been assigned in one course, I was told). At this I had to laugh. Two years into my writing on Calvin, it had not once dawned on me that what I should do was try to show that Calvin was “right” about this or that. Of course, the difference between their approach to Calvin and my own was that I did not grow up Reformed or Calvinist. I came to Calvin not as the great Fount of my own tradition, but as a controversial and brilliant writer, pastor, politician, scholar and theologian who stood in that breathtakingly complex period when medieval Europe was becoming modern.
I was, and still am, fascinated with the question of how Calvin borrowed from the past, how he bent that past to his own purposes, and how he began to shape a variety of European audiences by his own writing. Because I grew up in a piety that focused on the Bible to the exclusion of confessions, creeds and doctrines, my theological education has certainly resulted in a steadily increasing appreciation for both Catholic and Reformed traditions of Christianity. In that broad sense, it is certainly true that I think Calvin’s theological writing can be commended to contemporary Christians and theologians (I’ll be more specific in a moment). But that is far different from a defensive treatment of a denominational hero. In that I have no interest.
My awkward title promises something on three topics: worship, politics and identity. In general, I believe that academics employing fancy words in order to speak in ways more complicated than is necessary should be strenuously avoided. It strikes me that I may have transgressed my own principles. All I can say in my defense is that, while “politics” and “identity” are certainly sexy academic buzzwords, I have de-sexyfied them by attaching them to a term that is, to many, outdated and uninteresting: “worship.” But I do want to defend the terms of my title by laying out clearly how I am using each of these terms and why such themes emerge from both Calvin’s social context and his theological writing.
I use the term “politics” to refer to realities that can be described both in terms of imagination (more specifically, in terms of symbols and metaphors that organize how people live) and in terms of social realities that can be publicly observed. By “politics” I have in mind a broader swath of realities than is sometimes thought of as matters of Church and State. I have in mind a cluster of issues that center on notions of authority, order (or social arrangements), and power. Any substantial political reflection has to deal with the significance of the polis. What is it for? How can it be a good and meaningful place to live? My goal in the dissertation is to affirm and deepen the claim that Calvin’s theological writing is political all the way through. But the execution of that argument is entirely dependent on understanding “politics” in this threefold way.
All three elements were constantly imagined by Calvin’s readers, and Calvin continually attempts to fashion these imaginative maps. Who has authority? What kind of authority is it? When is it obtained and lost? What is a well organized or beautiful community? How is a society to be organized and arranged? And how is power distributed? How does it circulate between members of the community and between the community and God? What is power, and what is it for? I will argue that most Europeans had a particularly Catholic imagination on these questions. Consequently, much of Calvin’s rhetorical efforts were devoted to attempting to provide an alternative set of imaginative symbols and metaphors. Yet “politics” has never been a matter that is merely in the mind. There are institutions who govern, courts and legal systems that regulate, and militaries that fight. These realities also permeate Calvin’s writing.
It seemed right to me that much of the scholarship on Calvin focused on his political significance. But much of the literature exhibited an unhelpful polarity. Theologians who wrote on Calvin’s politics tended to picture a Calvin whose political commitments and contributions were simply the deductive outworking of his doctrinal commitments. Historians and social scientists took the opposite approach, reading Calvin’s doctrine as just one more ruse behind which they found a pragmatist whose goal was the accumulation of power. Both groups tended to focus on Calvin’s explicit statements about political arrangements and the question of civil obedience. It seemed to me that what was most politically significant about Calvin was the overall rhetorical effect of his theological writing in the shaping of something like a Calvinist imagination. In large part, I describe this as the construction of the Calvinist self or, better yet, of Calvinist identity (I use these terms in loose ways, since Calvin never talked about “selves” or “identities,” but instead of human creatures and communities whose lives were lived before the glory of God).
The inclusion of “identity” in my title stems from my understanding of “politics” as both the imaginative and socially concrete matters of authority, order and power. Calvin’s theology was political not just in the sense that he addressed political issues, but in the much stronger sense that he sought to fashion the polis by creating communities of agents who imagine and act in particular ways. That Calvin’s writing sought to fashion his readers into particular kinds of communities was the thesis of Serene Jones’ work, and she rightly argues that such fashioning was not restricted to ecclesial communities. I am using the term “identity” to refer primarily to the self-understanding of groups, a self-understanding that is not only imagined but also displayed before others in publicly recognizable ways. In that sense, I will be arguing that Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric was, on one level, an attempt to fashion the identities of his readers. As a good rhetorician, he was not making abstract theological pronouncements, but was trying to forge in his readers a new sense of belonging to a newly understood polis.
Yet the term “identity” is not without problems. It can loose whatever explanatory power it has when applied in too many directions. With that worry in mind, I want to try to specify the domain of “identity,” as I am using it, by connecting it to a particular understanding of “agency.” Kathryn Tanner’s The Politics of God (1992) has been in the back of my mind from the beginning of my research right through the final stages of writing. Tanner argues for the basic idea that there is no straightforward way to correlate theological claims and socio-political dispositions. Rather, persons’ political imaginations – to the extent that they are tied to beliefs about God at all – will depend on what kinds beliefs about God and the world inform their religious outlook. Oversimplifying a bit, the religious imagination of any agent will depend on whether they believe that their world is a fixed given, immune to human efforts at change, or whether they believe that their world is malleable, and can be altered by their own intervention. Tanner focuses on how agents understand themselves and their own agency within the world. And I want to add to this the issue of how those agents display their self-understanding in publicly recognizable ways. Nevertheless, my interest in the category of “identity” stems from a desire to ask of Calvin’s theological writing, “What kind of agents would it produce?”
Adding the notion of publicly recognizable behavior to notions of identity and agency is an attempt to analyze what I am calling Calvin’s liturgical anthropology. One way to get at this is to ask a broad question about the significance of human bodies and publicly recognizable identities in Calvin’s writing. Margaret Miles (1981) and Sarah Coakley (1997) make some suggestive remarks about Protestant conceptions of identity and human bodies, but I want to nuance their conclusions. I have heard it said, more than once, that the importance of the body was recovered only by Marx, and then by liberation, feminist, and black theologians, i.e. those who paid attention to the significance of human difference and particularity as registered in situated social spaces. By reading Calvin’s anti-nicodemite treatises alongside the Institutes, I argue that Calvin’s theological writing was deeply concerned about what people do with their bodies. He is certainly platonist and therefore dualist on body/soul questions. But that’s only one of the many conversations at play in his writings. In the nicodemite writings of the 1540’s, and carried into the various editions of the Institutes, was Calvin’s insistence that a private or internal alignment or general intellectual sympathy with the gospel – and therefore, with the reforming cause - was far from ideal. In fact, Calvin portrayed such a position as a continued entanglement in the powerful and distorting webs of idolatry. The goal was the public and bodily expression in recognizable practices of one’s identity as a Christian. Saved body and soul, Christians are to glorify and worship God body and soul.
From politics and identity we come now to the theological heart of the project, worship. Calvinist forms of religion are often characterized by an orientation to God that stresses God’s transcendence or otherness. Soli Deo Gloria – glory to God alone – is often used to capture this feature of Calvinist piety. Pushed to its extreme, this fixation on divine glory and sovereignty could lead to something like a religion based on fear before a terrible and terrifying God who relates to reality primarily as an absolute, sovereign power. But the question remains, what kind of piety does Calvin’s theological writing produce? Is the caricature of Calvinism as a form of cowering before power to be found in Calvin himself? I will argue that it is not. But the burden on me is to explore and explain what it was about Calvin’s theological vision that can block such a development. In explicating Calvin’s theology of worship, I will trace the rhetorical power of his writing by paying attention to how Calvin’s writing addressed the religious, social and political challenges faced by his readers. What does it mean, exactly, when Calvin fashions humanity as created for the end or goal of rendering God praise and thanksgiving? When human communities are persuaded that the worship of the God of glory is what dignifies life and leads to happiness, what kinds of agents will this produce? What kinds of attitudes and proclivities towards established authorities, orders and powers does this produce? This dissertation attempts to clarify what Calvin means by “worship” and the “glory of God” in order to fund answers to such questions.
My use of the theme of worship as a primary interpretive lens is an attempt to read Calvin’s theological discourse as a discourse that participated fully in the vicissitudes of sixteenth century culture. To make the point historically, the status of the early reforming communities cannot just be described in terms of a political minority. It was a minority whose marginal position was encoded and reinforced by the politically and ecclesially institutionalized majority in religiously and sacramentally symbolic language. So it became a cultural contest about who has the right to define the contours of the most basic religious rituals and practices. Here authoring a theological text is political in the sense that it authorizes a set of politically potent and identity conferring symbols and practices.
Taking special note of the centrality of worship practices led me to a couple of insights about how the text of the Institutes both registers and contributes to this social drama. First, it seems to me that the theme of the ontological distinction between Infinite and finite, Creator and creature, occupies a privileged place in Calvin’s discourse. This theme is developed early on and is played out in various ways across a number of important topics. Furthermore, it lends to the whole of Calvin’s discourse a feature of polemic resistance to the dominant Catholic cultural ethos. Put simply, in the face of the dominant European Catholic imagination that relied on the stability and nearness of God’s power in the stability of political and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions, Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric attempts at almost every turn to fashion an alternative imagination, one that is dominated by something like an iconoclastic ideology. Reformed communities were asked to imagine and forge a world in which no finite things were capable of possessing divine power and presence, not Kings, not priests, not bread and wine, and not the human soul either. Yet this iconoclastic imagination still had room for a deep trust in God’s powerful and comforting presence to the persecuted faithful.
The second insight that flowed from paying attention to the dominance of the cultural debate about worship and the sacraments was the realization that Calvin’s theological discourse was keenly attuned to the power of religious practices in the shaping of human lives. One misses a lot if one reads Calvin as laying out a theological system in terms of things Christians ought to believe. I suppose there’s not a practical dimension of every single thing Calvin says, but almost. So I wanted to pay particular attention to the question of what practices are being supported or condemned in Calvin’s theological writing.
As will be evident by now, my interest in Calvin is not only historical. I think that Calvin’s theological writing evidences an approach or style that can be commended to all persons involved in any kind of theological reflection. I will say more on this but first let me address an obvious objection. Even as I revise this introduction, the leaders of the European Union countries are meeting in Brussels to finalize the wording of the EU constitution. It is expected that they will edit out any mention of God or Christianity as part of the common past binding the EU nations together. This is but one more reminder that the deeply Christianized sacred landscape of early modern Europe is no longer with us. So what could Calvin have to say to us across such an enormous divide? In late modern, socially differentiated societies, what would it even mean to suggest that liturgy and politics go together?
The objection is not without force. But I would not have written a book on Calvin if I thought his theological project an irretrievable historical relic. Let me mention several things that can be learned by paying attention to Calvin’s liturgical politics:
Calvin models a kind of theological writing that is rhetorically artful and pragmatically oriented toward shaping the lives of his readers. This humanist ideal of using doctrine to provide shape and wisdom to the lives of one’s readers is still an under-utilized way of writing theology.
Calvin’s liturgical focus provides an insightful resource for contemporary political thought. Calvin begins thinking politically by reflecting on God and God’s relation to finite things. Following his lead would, for many of us, require a greater immersion in the biblical drama and a greater appreciation of metaphysics as well.
Calvin’s theological writing prompts us to broaden and deepen our understanding of worship, reflecting more critically on the connections between human happiness and the proper orientation to God. For Calvin, the category of “worship” includes all the ways that human communities are to reflect the beauty of God. This means that questions about child care, legal systems, business ethics, labor practices, urban planning, and a whole lot else can and should be addressed theologically within a robust understanding of worship.
Introduction
We can’t possibly need another book on Calvin. So why add one to the pile? Shouldn’t I have thought twice when two of my own professors had written excellent books on Calvin? Serene Jones, a theologian, wrote a book on the artistry of Calvin’s rhetoric. Carlos Eire, an historian, wrote a book assessing Calvin’s views on worship and idolatry. But far from convincing me that poor Calvin had been needlessly hashed and rehashed, these two teachers incited in me an interest to find out more. Both in their books and in their teaching, the issue of Calvin’s politics was always in view. Their work repeatedly stressed that Calvin’s theological writing was political all the way through. I wanted to explore this claim further, and to explore as well what difference it makes – both for understanding Calvin and for the ongoing art of theological writing.
While visiting a Presbyterian seminary, a group of students asked me about my research. When I responded that I was writing about Calvin’s theology of worship, they let out a collective groan. This had not whetted their appetite. In the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that, for them, any attempt to analyze Calvin could only be an attempt to prove that Calvin was “right” about something or other, thereby proving that Presbyterianism was “right” about something or other. (It also became clear to me that they had read very little Calvin – “parts” of the Institutes had been assigned in one course, I was told). At this I had to laugh. Two years into my writing on Calvin, it had not once dawned on me that what I should do was try to show that Calvin was “right” about this or that. Of course, the difference between their approach to Calvin and my own was that I did not grow up Reformed or Calvinist. I came to Calvin not as the great Fount of my own tradition, but as a controversial and brilliant writer, pastor, politician, scholar and theologian who stood in that breathtakingly complex period when medieval Europe was becoming modern.
I was, and still am, fascinated with the question of how Calvin borrowed from the past, how he bent that past to his own purposes, and how he began to shape a variety of European audiences by his own writing. Because I grew up in a piety that focused on the Bible to the exclusion of confessions, creeds and doctrines, my theological education has certainly resulted in a steadily increasing appreciation for both Catholic and Reformed traditions of Christianity. In that broad sense, it is certainly true that I think Calvin’s theological writing can be commended to contemporary Christians and theologians (I’ll be more specific in a moment). But that is far different from a defensive treatment of a denominational hero. In that I have no interest.
My awkward title promises something on three topics: worship, politics and identity. In general, I believe that academics employing fancy words in order to speak in ways more complicated than is necessary should be strenuously avoided. It strikes me that I may have transgressed my own principles. All I can say in my defense is that, while “politics” and “identity” are certainly sexy academic buzzwords, I have de-sexyfied them by attaching them to a term that is, to many, outdated and uninteresting: “worship.” But I do want to defend the terms of my title by laying out clearly how I am using each of these terms and why such themes emerge from both Calvin’s social context and his theological writing.
I use the term “politics” to refer to realities that can be described both in terms of imagination (more specifically, in terms of symbols and metaphors that organize how people live) and in terms of social realities that can be publicly observed. By “politics” I have in mind a broader swath of realities than is sometimes thought of as matters of Church and State. I have in mind a cluster of issues that center on notions of authority, order (or social arrangements), and power. Any substantial political reflection has to deal with the significance of the polis. What is it for? How can it be a good and meaningful place to live? My goal in the dissertation is to affirm and deepen the claim that Calvin’s theological writing is political all the way through. But the execution of that argument is entirely dependent on understanding “politics” in this threefold way.
All three elements were constantly imagined by Calvin’s readers, and Calvin continually attempts to fashion these imaginative maps. Who has authority? What kind of authority is it? When is it obtained and lost? What is a well organized or beautiful community? How is a society to be organized and arranged? And how is power distributed? How does it circulate between members of the community and between the community and God? What is power, and what is it for? I will argue that most Europeans had a particularly Catholic imagination on these questions. Consequently, much of Calvin’s rhetorical efforts were devoted to attempting to provide an alternative set of imaginative symbols and metaphors. Yet “politics” has never been a matter that is merely in the mind. There are institutions who govern, courts and legal systems that regulate, and militaries that fight. These realities also permeate Calvin’s writing.
It seemed right to me that much of the scholarship on Calvin focused on his political significance. But much of the literature exhibited an unhelpful polarity. Theologians who wrote on Calvin’s politics tended to picture a Calvin whose political commitments and contributions were simply the deductive outworking of his doctrinal commitments. Historians and social scientists took the opposite approach, reading Calvin’s doctrine as just one more ruse behind which they found a pragmatist whose goal was the accumulation of power. Both groups tended to focus on Calvin’s explicit statements about political arrangements and the question of civil obedience. It seemed to me that what was most politically significant about Calvin was the overall rhetorical effect of his theological writing in the shaping of something like a Calvinist imagination. In large part, I describe this as the construction of the Calvinist self or, better yet, of Calvinist identity (I use these terms in loose ways, since Calvin never talked about “selves” or “identities,” but instead of human creatures and communities whose lives were lived before the glory of God).
The inclusion of “identity” in my title stems from my understanding of “politics” as both the imaginative and socially concrete matters of authority, order and power. Calvin’s theology was political not just in the sense that he addressed political issues, but in the much stronger sense that he sought to fashion the polis by creating communities of agents who imagine and act in particular ways. That Calvin’s writing sought to fashion his readers into particular kinds of communities was the thesis of Serene Jones’ work, and she rightly argues that such fashioning was not restricted to ecclesial communities. I am using the term “identity” to refer primarily to the self-understanding of groups, a self-understanding that is not only imagined but also displayed before others in publicly recognizable ways. In that sense, I will be arguing that Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric was, on one level, an attempt to fashion the identities of his readers. As a good rhetorician, he was not making abstract theological pronouncements, but was trying to forge in his readers a new sense of belonging to a newly understood polis.
Yet the term “identity” is not without problems. It can loose whatever explanatory power it has when applied in too many directions. With that worry in mind, I want to try to specify the domain of “identity,” as I am using it, by connecting it to a particular understanding of “agency.” Kathryn Tanner’s The Politics of God (1992) has been in the back of my mind from the beginning of my research right through the final stages of writing. Tanner argues for the basic idea that there is no straightforward way to correlate theological claims and socio-political dispositions. Rather, persons’ political imaginations – to the extent that they are tied to beliefs about God at all – will depend on what kinds beliefs about God and the world inform their religious outlook. Oversimplifying a bit, the religious imagination of any agent will depend on whether they believe that their world is a fixed given, immune to human efforts at change, or whether they believe that their world is malleable, and can be altered by their own intervention. Tanner focuses on how agents understand themselves and their own agency within the world. And I want to add to this the issue of how those agents display their self-understanding in publicly recognizable ways. Nevertheless, my interest in the category of “identity” stems from a desire to ask of Calvin’s theological writing, “What kind of agents would it produce?”
Adding the notion of publicly recognizable behavior to notions of identity and agency is an attempt to analyze what I am calling Calvin’s liturgical anthropology. One way to get at this is to ask a broad question about the significance of human bodies and publicly recognizable identities in Calvin’s writing. Margaret Miles (1981) and Sarah Coakley (1997) make some suggestive remarks about Protestant conceptions of identity and human bodies, but I want to nuance their conclusions. I have heard it said, more than once, that the importance of the body was recovered only by Marx, and then by liberation, feminist, and black theologians, i.e. those who paid attention to the significance of human difference and particularity as registered in situated social spaces. By reading Calvin’s anti-nicodemite treatises alongside the Institutes, I argue that Calvin’s theological writing was deeply concerned about what people do with their bodies. He is certainly platonist and therefore dualist on body/soul questions. But that’s only one of the many conversations at play in his writings. In the nicodemite writings of the 1540’s, and carried into the various editions of the Institutes, was Calvin’s insistence that a private or internal alignment or general intellectual sympathy with the gospel – and therefore, with the reforming cause - was far from ideal. In fact, Calvin portrayed such a position as a continued entanglement in the powerful and distorting webs of idolatry. The goal was the public and bodily expression in recognizable practices of one’s identity as a Christian. Saved body and soul, Christians are to glorify and worship God body and soul.
From politics and identity we come now to the theological heart of the project, worship. Calvinist forms of religion are often characterized by an orientation to God that stresses God’s transcendence or otherness. Soli Deo Gloria – glory to God alone – is often used to capture this feature of Calvinist piety. Pushed to its extreme, this fixation on divine glory and sovereignty could lead to something like a religion based on fear before a terrible and terrifying God who relates to reality primarily as an absolute, sovereign power. But the question remains, what kind of piety does Calvin’s theological writing produce? Is the caricature of Calvinism as a form of cowering before power to be found in Calvin himself? I will argue that it is not. But the burden on me is to explore and explain what it was about Calvin’s theological vision that can block such a development. In explicating Calvin’s theology of worship, I will trace the rhetorical power of his writing by paying attention to how Calvin’s writing addressed the religious, social and political challenges faced by his readers. What does it mean, exactly, when Calvin fashions humanity as created for the end or goal of rendering God praise and thanksgiving? When human communities are persuaded that the worship of the God of glory is what dignifies life and leads to happiness, what kinds of agents will this produce? What kinds of attitudes and proclivities towards established authorities, orders and powers does this produce? This dissertation attempts to clarify what Calvin means by “worship” and the “glory of God” in order to fund answers to such questions.
My use of the theme of worship as a primary interpretive lens is an attempt to read Calvin’s theological discourse as a discourse that participated fully in the vicissitudes of sixteenth century culture. To make the point historically, the status of the early reforming communities cannot just be described in terms of a political minority. It was a minority whose marginal position was encoded and reinforced by the politically and ecclesially institutionalized majority in religiously and sacramentally symbolic language. So it became a cultural contest about who has the right to define the contours of the most basic religious rituals and practices. Here authoring a theological text is political in the sense that it authorizes a set of politically potent and identity conferring symbols and practices.
Taking special note of the centrality of worship practices led me to a couple of insights about how the text of the Institutes both registers and contributes to this social drama. First, it seems to me that the theme of the ontological distinction between Infinite and finite, Creator and creature, occupies a privileged place in Calvin’s discourse. This theme is developed early on and is played out in various ways across a number of important topics. Furthermore, it lends to the whole of Calvin’s discourse a feature of polemic resistance to the dominant Catholic cultural ethos. Put simply, in the face of the dominant European Catholic imagination that relied on the stability and nearness of God’s power in the stability of political and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions, Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric attempts at almost every turn to fashion an alternative imagination, one that is dominated by something like an iconoclastic ideology. Reformed communities were asked to imagine and forge a world in which no finite things were capable of possessing divine power and presence, not Kings, not priests, not bread and wine, and not the human soul either. Yet this iconoclastic imagination still had room for a deep trust in God’s powerful and comforting presence to the persecuted faithful.
The second insight that flowed from paying attention to the dominance of the cultural debate about worship and the sacraments was the realization that Calvin’s theological discourse was keenly attuned to the power of religious practices in the shaping of human lives. One misses a lot if one reads Calvin as laying out a theological system in terms of things Christians ought to believe. I suppose there’s not a practical dimension of every single thing Calvin says, but almost. So I wanted to pay particular attention to the question of what practices are being supported or condemned in Calvin’s theological writing.
As will be evident by now, my interest in Calvin is not only historical. I think that Calvin’s theological writing evidences an approach or style that can be commended to all persons involved in any kind of theological reflection. I will say more on this but first let me address an obvious objection. Even as I revise this introduction, the leaders of the European Union countries are meeting in Brussels to finalize the wording of the EU constitution. It is expected that they will edit out any mention of God or Christianity as part of the common past binding the EU nations together. This is but one more reminder that the deeply Christianized sacred landscape of early modern Europe is no longer with us. So what could Calvin have to say to us across such an enormous divide? In late modern, socially differentiated societies, what would it even mean to suggest that liturgy and politics go together?
The objection is not without force. But I would not have written a book on Calvin if I thought his theological project an irretrievable historical relic. Let me mention several things that can be learned by paying attention to Calvin’s liturgical politics:
Calvin models a kind of theological writing that is rhetorically artful and pragmatically oriented toward shaping the lives of his readers. This humanist ideal of using doctrine to provide shape and wisdom to the lives of one’s readers is still an under-utilized way of writing theology.
Calvin’s liturgical focus provides an insightful resource for contemporary political thought. Calvin begins thinking politically by reflecting on God and God’s relation to finite things. Following his lead would, for many of us, require a greater immersion in the biblical drama and a greater appreciation of metaphysics as well.
Calvin’s theological writing prompts us to broaden and deepen our understanding of worship, reflecting more critically on the connections between human happiness and the proper orientation to God. For Calvin, the category of “worship” includes all the ways that human communities are to reflect the beauty of God. This means that questions about child care, legal systems, business ethics, labor practices, urban planning, and a whole lot else can and should be addressed theologically within a robust understanding of worship.
Calvin’s understanding of worship entailed a particularly keen reflection the centrality of the human body as it relates to social space, liturgical practices, and political power. Contemporary theorizing about the identity shaping significance of social practices would benefit from being in conversation with the wisdom of the Christian tradition on this topic.
Calvin’s political theology was both more biblical and more persuasive than many current proposals because of his attention to aesthetics. He sought to bring about a community that “reflects” the glory of God, a circulation of goods that participates in the beauty of God’s own life. We currently have too little reflection on the political significance of beautiful social arrangements.
Calvin’s liturgical politics relies on a deep connection between social identities and theological accounts of participation in the divine. For Calvin, the participation of human lives in the life of God is a participation of finite creatures in the life of the infinite itself. Keeping in mind Calvin’s rigorous theological policing of the boundaries between finite and infinite, it is crucial to be able to rightly describe this participation of unequals. It is precisely this radical inequality between humanity and God, this ontological divide between finite and infinite that makes the language of worship and praise necessary. “Worship” names the appropriate way for finite things to survive and flourish in our native context.
Calvin’s theology has its vibrance, in large part, because he realized that God’s world is a world shot through with power. Moreover, he was able to speak straightforwardly and positively about power. Contemporary theology has only begun to realize that the topic of power is not the preserve of social scientists. Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric was, among other things, Calvin’s description of the process by which divine power re-fashions persons and communities back to their created and worship-ful orientation to the glory of God. He advocates forms of agency that are driven by theological symbols and practices that perform and enact the power of God in the midst of alien powers that distort human living.
Here ends the list of suggestive contributions to contemporary theology. But a few more comments on power. Reading Calvin, oddly enough, reminded me of another French intellectual of a different sort, Michel Foucault. Both were sensitive to the dynamics of cultural power and the way power bears on subjectivity and agency. Both realized that State power is only one form of power, and by no means exhausts the kinds of power that circulate in any given culture. It was this appreciation for more capillary or micro-forms of power that enabled both to argue that attempts to topple political regimes is a questionable enterprise precisely because it leaves so many other forms of power in place. In spite of wildly divergent assumptions about divine power, state power, and ecclesial and cultural power, Calvin and Foucault both recognized that overthrowing State power would not automatically result in any genuine liberation. Both recognized that power bears on and shapes agents in a thousand ways, since all our social practices are symbolically laden realities that produce our subjectivities in a deep sense. But I think Calvin was more perceptive than Foucault on one important point: he described the map of cultural power in a way that left room for agency and negotiation on the part of human communities. I’m not confident Foucault can hold out any hope in the power of agents to resist and alter forms of power. It looks to me like nothing but endless deconstruction with little construction. Calvin envisions God providing humans with the gift of the law to give shape to human agents who really can help bring about a new politics, an altered public space, and more humanizing social relations that reflect in their own way the glory and love of God.
Like many others, I have learned a great deal from cultural theorists and their conversation about the nature and function of power. Diagnostically and critically speaking, cultural theory is quite profound. But I want to suggest that theology has been a form of diagnosing power relations for quite some time. In theology we have a form of discourse that has wanted to pay attention to the way finite powers are arranged and related, to how those powers shape and constrain human agency, to what can and cannot be done in the face of wrongly arranged power, and to how to secure healthy circulations of power in social arrangements. Calvin’s contribution to such questions warrants consideration. It is primarily his attention to cultural and religious practices that shape human identity where we see him attuned to questions of power. Moreover, his theology itself is practical in orientation, it seeks to make the reader better, seeks to construct an agent capable of rendering God praise in difficult circumstances. So Calvin can diagnose, I think, in ways analogous to recent cultural theory. But, as I will argue, his theological construction is where he contributes most to our questions about power. He develops a notion of God powering other centers of power to lives of giving and sharing as a way of participating in the divine life. All this is part of Calvin’s theology of “worship.”
Finally, with regard to method my attention is focused on Calvin’s theological texts, but I read these texts as registering a lively theological debate that is embedded within specific social dynamics and institutional powers. Moreover, I am most interested in Calvin’s magnum opus, the Institutes, even though I often found it necessary to consult his commentaries and treatises as well. I focus primarily on the 1559 Institutes because 1) I am trying to pay attention to the rhetorical goals of his writing, to the ways he attempted to shape the dispositions of his readers; and 2) Focusing on the Institutes allows me to focus on how Christian beliefs and practices are arranged and configured, and how those clusters of configured beliefs and practices are “used” in particular ways. For example, I will point out how important themes like “worship”, “ascension” or “union with Christ” require Calvin to pry standard Christian teachings apart from their popular uses in order to put them to new use. Both goals are better served by paying sustained attention to the development of an interplay of metaphors and a series of arguments across Calvin’s major work.
This dissertation is really a series of attempts to discern the complex interplay between theology and politics in several prominent places in the Institutes, after first devoting an introductory chapter to framing the historical and social context (chapter 1). First, I analyze the theological drama of human lives before the glory and love of the Creator as narrated in Book I of the Institutes (chapter 2). This constitutes Calvin’s picture of human life before the fall, and provides the content of what he thinks is restored to human life through faith in Christ. Next, I turn to Calvin’s rhetoric of regeneration (chapter 3) and justification (chapter 4), arguing for the importance of the category of worship for Calvin’s attempts to shape the lives of his readers by means of these traditional doctrines. Finally, I turn to what was a socially contentious and politically important religious practice – the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (chapter 5). In each of these places, I pay attention to how the theme of worship informs the conversation, to the life-shaping practices being affirmed or condemned, and to Calvin’s efforts to shape the lives of his readers in the face of hostile institutionalized powers arrayed against them.
A concluding note on the scope of this project. It is not intended to be a full scale treatment of Calvin’s politics nor a summary of his political conclusions. Rather, it is an attempt to read Calvin’s doctrinal theology through the lens of the social and political context of Calvin and his readers. I can only sample a few important themes, showing how various features of his theological discourse were politically significant. If there is any conclusion, it is that conclusions are hard to come by. I will argue that Calvin had a variety of theological commitments and imaginative resources that he deployed in a number of ways, often with ambiguous results. Certainly, this style created tension, as with any great art, and as with any great theology. That is to say, I do not think Calvin is predictable in the sense of rigorously pursuing a conceptual system. Yet for readers who allow themselves to be transported into a world Calvin described as a “theatre of God’s glory,” politics may never look the same.
Calvin’s political theology was both more biblical and more persuasive than many current proposals because of his attention to aesthetics. He sought to bring about a community that “reflects” the glory of God, a circulation of goods that participates in the beauty of God’s own life. We currently have too little reflection on the political significance of beautiful social arrangements.
Calvin’s liturgical politics relies on a deep connection between social identities and theological accounts of participation in the divine. For Calvin, the participation of human lives in the life of God is a participation of finite creatures in the life of the infinite itself. Keeping in mind Calvin’s rigorous theological policing of the boundaries between finite and infinite, it is crucial to be able to rightly describe this participation of unequals. It is precisely this radical inequality between humanity and God, this ontological divide between finite and infinite that makes the language of worship and praise necessary. “Worship” names the appropriate way for finite things to survive and flourish in our native context.
Calvin’s theology has its vibrance, in large part, because he realized that God’s world is a world shot through with power. Moreover, he was able to speak straightforwardly and positively about power. Contemporary theology has only begun to realize that the topic of power is not the preserve of social scientists. Calvin’s doctrinal rhetoric was, among other things, Calvin’s description of the process by which divine power re-fashions persons and communities back to their created and worship-ful orientation to the glory of God. He advocates forms of agency that are driven by theological symbols and practices that perform and enact the power of God in the midst of alien powers that distort human living.
Here ends the list of suggestive contributions to contemporary theology. But a few more comments on power. Reading Calvin, oddly enough, reminded me of another French intellectual of a different sort, Michel Foucault. Both were sensitive to the dynamics of cultural power and the way power bears on subjectivity and agency. Both realized that State power is only one form of power, and by no means exhausts the kinds of power that circulate in any given culture. It was this appreciation for more capillary or micro-forms of power that enabled both to argue that attempts to topple political regimes is a questionable enterprise precisely because it leaves so many other forms of power in place. In spite of wildly divergent assumptions about divine power, state power, and ecclesial and cultural power, Calvin and Foucault both recognized that overthrowing State power would not automatically result in any genuine liberation. Both recognized that power bears on and shapes agents in a thousand ways, since all our social practices are symbolically laden realities that produce our subjectivities in a deep sense. But I think Calvin was more perceptive than Foucault on one important point: he described the map of cultural power in a way that left room for agency and negotiation on the part of human communities. I’m not confident Foucault can hold out any hope in the power of agents to resist and alter forms of power. It looks to me like nothing but endless deconstruction with little construction. Calvin envisions God providing humans with the gift of the law to give shape to human agents who really can help bring about a new politics, an altered public space, and more humanizing social relations that reflect in their own way the glory and love of God.
Like many others, I have learned a great deal from cultural theorists and their conversation about the nature and function of power. Diagnostically and critically speaking, cultural theory is quite profound. But I want to suggest that theology has been a form of diagnosing power relations for quite some time. In theology we have a form of discourse that has wanted to pay attention to the way finite powers are arranged and related, to how those powers shape and constrain human agency, to what can and cannot be done in the face of wrongly arranged power, and to how to secure healthy circulations of power in social arrangements. Calvin’s contribution to such questions warrants consideration. It is primarily his attention to cultural and religious practices that shape human identity where we see him attuned to questions of power. Moreover, his theology itself is practical in orientation, it seeks to make the reader better, seeks to construct an agent capable of rendering God praise in difficult circumstances. So Calvin can diagnose, I think, in ways analogous to recent cultural theory. But, as I will argue, his theological construction is where he contributes most to our questions about power. He develops a notion of God powering other centers of power to lives of giving and sharing as a way of participating in the divine life. All this is part of Calvin’s theology of “worship.”
Finally, with regard to method my attention is focused on Calvin’s theological texts, but I read these texts as registering a lively theological debate that is embedded within specific social dynamics and institutional powers. Moreover, I am most interested in Calvin’s magnum opus, the Institutes, even though I often found it necessary to consult his commentaries and treatises as well. I focus primarily on the 1559 Institutes because 1) I am trying to pay attention to the rhetorical goals of his writing, to the ways he attempted to shape the dispositions of his readers; and 2) Focusing on the Institutes allows me to focus on how Christian beliefs and practices are arranged and configured, and how those clusters of configured beliefs and practices are “used” in particular ways. For example, I will point out how important themes like “worship”, “ascension” or “union with Christ” require Calvin to pry standard Christian teachings apart from their popular uses in order to put them to new use. Both goals are better served by paying sustained attention to the development of an interplay of metaphors and a series of arguments across Calvin’s major work.
This dissertation is really a series of attempts to discern the complex interplay between theology and politics in several prominent places in the Institutes, after first devoting an introductory chapter to framing the historical and social context (chapter 1). First, I analyze the theological drama of human lives before the glory and love of the Creator as narrated in Book I of the Institutes (chapter 2). This constitutes Calvin’s picture of human life before the fall, and provides the content of what he thinks is restored to human life through faith in Christ. Next, I turn to Calvin’s rhetoric of regeneration (chapter 3) and justification (chapter 4), arguing for the importance of the category of worship for Calvin’s attempts to shape the lives of his readers by means of these traditional doctrines. Finally, I turn to what was a socially contentious and politically important religious practice – the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (chapter 5). In each of these places, I pay attention to how the theme of worship informs the conversation, to the life-shaping practices being affirmed or condemned, and to Calvin’s efforts to shape the lives of his readers in the face of hostile institutionalized powers arrayed against them.
A concluding note on the scope of this project. It is not intended to be a full scale treatment of Calvin’s politics nor a summary of his political conclusions. Rather, it is an attempt to read Calvin’s doctrinal theology through the lens of the social and political context of Calvin and his readers. I can only sample a few important themes, showing how various features of his theological discourse were politically significant. If there is any conclusion, it is that conclusions are hard to come by. I will argue that Calvin had a variety of theological commitments and imaginative resources that he deployed in a number of ways, often with ambiguous results. Certainly, this style created tension, as with any great art, and as with any great theology. That is to say, I do not think Calvin is predictable in the sense of rigorously pursuing a conceptual system. Yet for readers who allow themselves to be transported into a world Calvin described as a “theatre of God’s glory,” politics may never look the same.
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