John Calvin on How to Use Words: The Christian Life (1)

Chapter 3: Sanctification and Religious Identity

Introduction: Worship, Sanctification and Communal Identity 

The next three chapters examine the political and liturgical dimensions of Calvin’s description of Christian faith in terms of how that faith fashions human lives into responsible agents who render God praise in all they are and do.  In what follows I am interested in exploring what Calvin has to say about specifically Christian lives.  Thus we will have moved, doctrinally speaking, from the sphere of Creation to the sphere of Redemption.  Since the one Triune God is both Creator and Redeemer, there will be considerable resemblance between what Calvin had to say about the liturgical orientation of all human life in Book I and what he had to say about Christian faith in the rest of the Institutes.  But there are important differences between the picture of human identity that emerges from their status as creatures and that which emerges from their status as God’s adopted children, united to Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.  The present chapter focuses on regeneration; chapter four focuses on justification; and chapter 5 will bring explicitly to the surface what will be a consistent sub-theme in chapters three and four, namely, the importance of practices, rituals, and ceremonies like the Lord’s Supper for the shape of human lives.

This division of the subject matter is certainly artificial in the sense that Calvin’s discussion of faith cannot be isolated from his attention to the institutions that govern human lives and the religious practices that sustain them.  For example, consider the often overlooked fact that Calvin’s discussion of regeneration and justification in Book III is framed by two sustained treatments of the institutional arrangements and sacramental practices that order the lives of Christians.  The frame on the far end is Book IV and its treatment of matters relating to church law and ceremonies.  The frame on the front end, often overlooked, is the prologue of approximately 150 pages that comprise the first five chapters of Book III.  This prologue to Book III – addressing how the Holy Spirit joins believers to Christ as well as the nature of true faith and repentance - functions to undercut the power of Roman Catholic religious identity by carving out an alternative vision of the Christian life.  The rhetorical power of this section derives not simply from the way the topics are discussed, but ultimately from the fierce and relentless assault on the prevailing sacramental/penitential framework familiar to most of Calvin’s readers.  It is the significance of these social and institutional dimensions of the Christian life – signaled by these two bookends – that provides the rationale for a fresh return to the frequently visited terrain of Calvin’s doctrine of the Christian life.  

     

In this chapter and the next I attempt to read the doctrines of sanctification and justification as the doctrinal fashioning of religious identity in terms of “faith” that is simultaneously a form of “political” theology.  I see this happening on three levels.  First, both doctrines carry an implicit rejection of presently existing ecclesial practices and propose alternative religious practices.  When and where such religious reforms were instituted, they required wide ranging upheaval in the channels where social, economic, and political power flowed.  Second, these doctrines function to fashion a particular conscience or ideology in Calvin’s readers: a new sense of agency born from the curious matrix of freedom and responsibility.  The third – and perhaps most significant – political feature of Calvinist theological identity concerns its relation to the theme of worship.  More needs to be said about that.

     

The argument of chapter two was that Calvin’s theological vision of human life developed in Book I of the Institutes hinged on the notion of human life worshipfully oriented to the majesty and love of God.  While the consequences of human sin are many, one that gets sustained treatment in Book I is the problem of idolatry.  Under the power of sin, humans no longer live in the rhythms of love of, trust in, and praise toward God – laid out in both tables of the law - that would have provided the only sustainable and satisfying form of human happiness.  Book II describes how Jesus Christ accomplishes and secures the benefits of divine goodness squandered by human sin.  And then only in Book III does Calvin turn to consider how those benefits are shared with humanity through the Holy Spirit’s activity of uniting believers to Christ in faith.

     

The significance of the theme of worship within Calvin’s doctrine of the Christian life should not be underestimated.  My argument is not that the connections between sanctification, justification, and worship are always explicitly on the surface of Book III.  Rather, the connections arise when two angles of analysis are presupposed.  First, I highlight the simple fact that the discussion of the Christian life is situated between a thoroughly liturgical anthropology unfolded in Book I and a relentless attention to the liturgical significance of religious practices that follows in Book IV.  Second, I rely on the historical portrait I sketched in the opening chapter.  The pressing social and political forces that characterized Calvin's life and the lives of his readers raised urgent questions about what counts as right worship and idolatry, as well as about what institutional arrangements best reflect God’s purposes for the world.  No publicly recognizable communities could have avoided seeing themselves in relation to these cultural debates about the right worship of God.

     

Yet the theme of worship is certainly present, even if not always explicit, in the early chapters of Book III.  Explaining why the “fear of God” is always part of the fabric of repentance, Calvin added in 1539:

For even though the life of man be replete with all the virtues, if it is not directed to the worship of God [ad Dei cultum referatur], it can indeed be praised by the world; but in heaven it will be sheer abomination, since the chief part of righteousness [iustitiae] is to render to God his right and honor [suum ius et honorem Deo reddere], of which he is impiously defrauded when we do not intend to subject ourselves to his control (3.3.7/CR II.439).

This statement is telling because it draws the connection between “righteousness” and worship characteristic of Calvin’s theological imagination.  The predominately Christological and soteriological themes addressed in Books II and III articulate how Christ restores the righteousness to humanity that had been lost in sin.  But here Calvin reminds us to keep Book I and the emphasis on worship in mind, since the “righteousness” to which Christ restores believers has as its “chief part” rendering honor to God. 

     

Again in 1539, Calvin added a statement clarifying the goal or end at which “repentance” aims.  Repentance consists of two parts, mortification and vivification, parts that correspond to a genuine sharing or participation in Christ’s death and resurrection.  Calvin then explains,

Therefore, in a word, I interpret repentance as regeneration, whose sole end [scopus] is to restore [reformetur] in us the image of God that had been disfigured and all but obliterated through Adam’s transgression (3.3.9/CR II.440).

For Calvin the regeneration or renewal of life in Christ aims at the restoration of the image of God ruined by sin.  So far forth, that is a standard way of interpreting Scripture.  But because Calvin’s discussion of the divine image and its sinful disfigurement highlights the contrast between the gift of the divinitatis sensum which rightly orients all human creatures to God in worship and its corruption into idolatry, his interpretation of the “restoration” emphasizes the turn, practically speaking, from idolatrous ways of living to practices of worship that genuinely honor God.

The Shaping Power of the Law

     

Before exploring Calvin’s attempt to rhetorically pattern the lives of his readers (Book III), I want to attend briefly to his description of the power of the Law to provide a form and orientation to human life (Book II).  In 1559 Calvin began his explanation of the Ten Commandments by noting that, even after humanity’s fall into sin, “the public worship [cultum] that God once prescribed is still in force” (2.8.1/CR II.266).  That is, Calvin wants to affirm that the theology of worship articulated in Book I continues to be the appropriate way for human creatures to relate to their Creator, and that the two tables of the moral law continue to provide guidance for such an endeavor.  The existence of sin marks the difference between the doctrinal discourses of creation and redemption.  First, because of sin, the natural law, or God’s will as manifest in conscience, is no longer clear and accessible to humanity.  Thus, God graciously provides a written law to clarify what had become obscure.  Second, apart from sin the moral law would have functioned to govern and guide obedience to God, whereas because of sin, the moral law takes on primarily the function of judging and condemning humanity insofar as it reveals humanity as absolutely powerless to render God appropriate obedience.  

     

In 1539, however, the treatment of the Ten Commandments began by reminding the reader of the inter-relatedness of knowledge of God and self-knowledge that framed the doctrine of creation in Book I.

Now in summarizing what is required for the true knowledge of God, we have taught that we cannot conceive him in his greatness [magnitudine] without being immediately confronted by his majesty [maiestas] , and so compelled to worship him [quae nos ad eius cultum adstringat].  In our discussion of the knowledge of ourselves we have set forth this chief point: that, empty of all opinion of our own virtue, and shorn of all assurance of our own righteousness – in fact, broken and crushed [fracti et contusi] by the awareness of our own utter poverty – we may learn genuine humility and self-abasement (2.8.1/CR II.266).

And having set before the reader once again the central theme of God’s majesty and the corresponding humble life of worship, Calvin simply adds, “Both of these the Lord accomplishes in his law.”  Here Calvin signals that the content of the moral law – once a “natural law” revealed in human conscience, now written down in Scripture – will be an elaboration of the glory/worship relation between Creator and creatures detailed in Book I.  “Now what is to be learned from the law can be readily understood: that God, as he is our Creator, has toward us by right the place of Father and Lord; for this reason we owe to him glory, reverence, love, and fear [illi a nobis deberi gloriam, reverentiam, amorem, timorem]” (2.8.2/CR II.267).  God is “Father” not only in the merciful redemption of sinners in Jesus Christ, but simply by virtue of being the Creator, the Fount of all good things.

     

The pedagogical value and rhetorical usefulness of the moral law as explained here in Book II is both similar to and different from Calvin’s appeal to the “law” in his depiction of the Christian life in Book III.  It is similar in that in both places the law represents God’s accommodation to finitude and weakness, God’s will being revealed in the form of promises and threats for humanity’s benefit.  Also, in both places the “law” embodies that “righteousness” that describes the reverent and obedient orientation God expects.  “The law has been divinely handed down to us to teach us perfect righteousness [perfectam iustitiam]” (2.8.5/CR II.270).  The dissimilarity is that in Book II the emphasis is on how the moral law unmasks human disobedience, whereas in Book III the emphasis is on how the moral law patterns the new obedience made possible by the Spirit’s activity of joining human lives to Christ.

     

Calvin’s theological use of the law in both cases is governed by his interpretive approach, which he lays out in three broad principles.  First, the obedience in view is not merely outward conformity to the law but also inward conformity of the heart, or an “inward and spiritual righteousness [intiriorem spirtualemque iustitiam]” (2.8.6/CR II.270).  Second, beyond the literal wording of the commands and prohibitions, our attention should focus upon the “the reason of the commandment; that is, in each commandment to ponder why it was given to us” – its “purpose” (2.8.8).  This means, for example, that the prohibition of killing actually contains the “requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can” (2.8.9).  

     

The third interpretive rule concerns the significance of the division of divine law into “two tables.”

God has so divided his law into two parts, which contain the whole of righteousness [tota iustitia], as to assign the first part to those duties of religion [religionis officiis] which particularly concern the worship of his majesty [ad numinis sui cultam]; the second, to the duties of love [officiis caritatis] that have to do with men . . . in the First Table, God instructs us in piety and the proper duties of religion, by which we are to worship his majesty [maiestas sua colenda est].  The Second Table prescribes how in accordance with the fear of his name we ought to conduct ourselves in human society (2.8.11/CR II.273-4).

The life of “righteousness” is life in conformity to God’s will for human creatures, the fulfillment of their basic orientation to God, the source of their true happiness.  What the moral law shows is that ingredient to this life are duties or obligations that run in two directions: duties toward God and toward others.  The duty of worshiping God comes first in order because worship is the “first foundation of righteousness [primum sane iustitiae fundamentum est Dei cultus],” even though neither Table of duties can be thought of in isolation from the other.  The worship of God and the love of neighbors are mutually informing dynamics in the Christian life, just as both together were ingredient to the vision of created human life explicated in Book I.

     

Zachmann has argued that whereas medieval soteriologies tended to prioritize the influence of divine grace upon the human will, Lutheran and Reformed soteriologies tended to prioritize the influence of divine grace upon the human conscience.  Regarding Calvin, this statement is true so long as the point is only about what gets emphasized.  Clearly Calvin has important theological claims to make about how the human will is affected by divine grace, namely, that the Spirit’s joining of believers to Christ in faith aims at obedience to the moral law.  In making these broad claims about graced human conduct, Calvin attempts to articulate the significance of the human will in the drama of grace and redemption.  The simple fact that his soteriological account of faith does not trade on thickly ontological accounts of grace as a quality infused in the soul – where the “will” is understood as one of the soul’s powers – is no reason to conclude that Calvin focuses on conscience to the exclusion of the will.  In fact, the rhetoric of sanctification works, in large part, to elicit a new sense of agency in Calvin’s readers, a restoration of their capacities to participate with God in the renewal of the world.

Sanctification (Institutes 3.6-10)

     

The proximate context for Calvin’s discussion of sanctification is the opening paragraph of Book III, where Calvin highlights the theme of the Holy Spirit’s power of uniting believers to Christ in faith.  The more remote but no less important context includes the liturgical anthropology of Book I, the theological significance and identity-forming power of the “law,” as well as the particular shape obedience takes in the social space of church and civic society.

     

But for now I will restrict attention to the material in 3.6-10.  This unit of material, composed in 1539, remained largely unchanged in the 1559 edition.  As written in 1539, Calvin began this treatment of the Christian life by defining his goal and distinguishing it from lengthy treatments of the virtues found in the “ancient doctors” and lists of human “duties” provided by the philosophers.  “To show the godly man how he may be directed to a rightly ordered life [qua vir pius ad rectum constituendae vitae scopum deducatur], and briefly to set down some universal rule with which to determine his duties [officia] – this will be quite enough for me.” Calvin attempts to show “how the life of a Christian man is to be ordered [formandam]”; this is, at bottom, “instruction in living [vitae institutionem].”  Calvin adds in 1559 that he aims to “assemble [colligere]” from Scripture a “pattern for the conduct of life [rationem vitae formandae]” (all from 3.6.1/CR II.501-2).  Two broad themes characterize Calvin’s theological aims: to offer instruction to his readers about the order and pattern of their lives, and to instruct them regarding the kinds of duties comprising that order and pattern.  

     

The major difference between his “instruction” and the training in virtues and duties characteristic of the moral philosophers and the church fathers, says Calvin, was his love for brevity as opposed to their prolixity.  Yet this comparison goes deeper, and as we will see, functions as a running theme throughout Calvin’s treatment of regeneration.  This is our first major clue as to how to read this material: Calvin sees himself as competing with – and surpassing – rival attempts at moral instruction.  

     

One example of this rivalry is Calvin’s denunciation of Stoic apatheia towards the end of his reflection on bearing the cross.  Having urged forebearance under suffering appointed for believers by God, Calvin then warns readers that he is not advocating a notion of apatheia.  Calvin suggests that a classical Stoic anthropology is blind to the rich importance of human affections.  Stoicism, unlike Christian faith, pictured humans as those “who like a stone was not affected at all [imo qui instar lapidis nulla re afficeretur]”; The Christian virtue of patience under adversity is not to be translated into Stoic conceptions of humanity as impervious to emotion, a mere “stock [or log, stipitem].”  The goal is not the avoidance of being deeply grieved but the persistence of trust in God in the midst of grief: “wounded by sorrow [tristitia] and grief [moerore], he rests in the spiritual consolation of God” (3.8.8-10/CR II.520-1).

Institutes 3.6 - Regeneration as the Renewal of the Divine Image

     

In 1559 Calvin composed two new paragraphs at the beginning of chapter six.  The function of the new introduction is to better locate the theme and subject matter of the next five chapters within the broader themes of the final form of the Institutes.  

     The object [scopum] of regeneration, as we have said, is to manifest in the life of believers a harmony and agreement [symmetria et consensus] between God’s righteousness [Dei iustitiam] and their obedience [obsequium], and thus to confirm [confirment] the adoption that they have received as sons.

     The law of God contains in itself that newness [novitatem] by which his image can be restored [instauratur] in us.  But because our slowness needs many goads [stimulis] and helps [adminiculis], it will be profitable to assemble [colligere] from various passages of Scripture a pattern for the conduct of life [rationem vitae formandae] in order that those who heartily repent may not err in their zeal (3.6.1/CR II.501).

Several features of this 1559 introduction to the ensuing material on regeneration warrant mention.  

     

First, Calvin makes sure the reader is aware that with the subject of regeneration we are simply outside the question of how persons come to be saved or come to have faith in the first place.  In Calvin’s words, regeneration “confirms” believers’ adoption as God’s children.  The collage of Scripture intended to pattern Christian living is not a journey to saving faith, but rather the offering of help or aid (adminiculis, the same term that heads all of Book IV) to God’s adopted children.  In theological parlance, regeneration presupposes justification and is to be kept conceptually distinct, even if the two are always experienced together as the conjoined benefits resulting from the union with Christ in faith.  This feature of Calvin’s thought will serve as a principle of resistance to any construals of the divine/human relationship which make space for human cooperation or participation in the granting of salvation to believers.  It signals Calvin’s peculiar theology of gifts.  In spite of the fact that Calvin chooses to treat regeneration before justification, this novel ordering presupposes the Christology of Book II and the treatment of justification by faith in the prologue of Book III.  In fact, it is most accurate to say that regeneration and justification mutually presuppose one another, since Calvin subordinates both to the broader theme of the believer’s “union with Christ” in faith, with regeneration and justification being the theological names for the benefits that result from this union.

     

Second, the object of regeneration is described in two ways: as the “harmony and agreement between God’s righteousness and their obedience,” and as the restoration of the divine image in believers through the newness contained in God’s law.  The richness of these claims cannot be unpacked in a few sentences.  Their inner logic will come into focus only by reflecting on how the material treated in 3.6-10 hangs together as a whole, and how this unit hangs together with the Insititutes as a whole.  Yet introductory questions are appropriate here.  These claims are significant because they alert the reader to the important threadlike connections between a number of different topics.  What exactly is “God’s righteousness” and what would it mean for human obedience to be in “harmony and agreement” with it?  What are the salient features of the divine image being “restored” in believers?  And why identify the principal source of this restoration and newness in the “law of God”?  Furthermore, are these two theological descriptions of regeneration to be read as rough parallels, enriching one another?  If so, then how do the themes of obedience, God’s law, and the renewal of the divine image in believers cohere within the rubric of the “union with Christ” by faith which is the broad theme of Book III?

     

In addition to matters concerning theological connections, the political significance of Calvin’s teaching on regeneration is also near the surface.  Readers of Calvin’s treatment of the Christian life may not expect to find in this material yet another strand in the subtle – perhaps even unintentional – construction of a theory of resistance to authorities.  But it is here nonetheless.  The beginning of Calvin’s treatment of regeneration contains a criticism of civil authorities who fail to maintain a godly social order, signaling to the reader that the theological language about obedience has broader scope than simply the individual’s relation to God.  First comes the statement that might appear void of any political content: “For to what purpose are we rescued from the wickedness [nequitia] and pollution [pollutione] of the world in which we were submerged if we allow ourselves throughout life to wallow in these?”  Written first in 1539, Calvin then continues by drawing attention to the social spaces in which his readers live:

Moreover, at the same time Scripture admonishes us that to be reckoned among the people of the Lord we must dwell in the holy city [sanctam civitatem] of Jerusalem.  As he has consecrated this city to himself, it is unlawful to profane it with the impurity of its inhabitants.  Whence these declarations: there will be a place in God’s Tabernacle for those who walk without blemish and strive after righteousness [Then he added in 1559:] For it is highly unfitting that the sanctuary in which he dwells should like a stable be crammed with filth (3.6.2).

As was pointed out in the previous chapter, one of the important political dimensions of Calvin’s theology of worship was the critique of idolatry and the civil and ecclesial powers that provided its institutional context.  But Calvin’s theology of worship also entails a picture of obedience that carries the political correlate that social institutions which inhibit rather than promote the obedience of societies to God are failing in their God-given duties.  The failure to promote and secure a social space in which obedience to God is given social form is a serious political failure.  While one might argue that Calvin’s references to “Jerusalem” should be read metaphorically so as to eliminate the political relevance, this is highly unlikely given the social context in which the text was written in 1539.  Like the social character of Calvin’s description of the divinitatis sensum (as was pointed out in chapter two), the political significance of the appeal to “Jerusalem” is easily overlooked if Calvin’s practical aims are not kept in mind.  At the very least, we have to recognize that Calvin’s treatment of the shape of the Christian life begins by urging the creation of a holy and obedient social space and by alluding to the disobedience of the social spaces in which his readers are currently living.  Those spaces, and the authorities responsible for them, are failing at a most serious point – the obligation to render God praise and worship in all of life’s activities.  While this is not an explicit call for his readers to actively resist their authorities, it contributed to the shaping of a new sense of agency over which Calvin’s explicit political advice had little control.

     

As Calvin suggested in the first paragraphs of the 1539 introduction to regeneration, his theological rendering of human life – what I am calling his doctrinal fashioning of liturgical identity – is seen as surpassing competing descriptions of human life.  Backing this claim is Calvin’s description of human lives taken into participation in Jesus Christ, who is the clearest manifestation of the divine image to which humanity is being restored in the economy of salvation.  Jesus Christ is both the agent of reconciliation with God and the likeness of God to which believers are being conformed.  It is this Scriptural picture of reconciliation and conformity that provides the pattern for Calvin’s instruction in living.  The rival discourses of “moral philosophy” aim at conformity with “nature.”  Far surpassing this is the Christian ethic: “For we have been adopted as sons by the Lord with this one condition: that our life express Christ, the bond of our adoption” (3.6.3).  By “condition” Calvin does not mean that God’s adoption of believers is contingent upon their success in expressing Christ, but that God’s adoption of them aims precisely at this expression and cannot be seen in isolation from it.  The term “express [repraesentet],” literally to make vividly present, reiterates the notions of pattern and order.  The lives of believers are to make present in the world the particular patterns and rhythms that characterized Jesus’ own life.  Thus, while the language of “imitating” Christ is important to Calvin, it cannot exhaust the logic of his instruction in Christian living because it leaves Christ external to the believer merely as exemplar of human moral effort.  Rather, Christ is the “bond of our adoption,” suggesting that Christ is the power that unites believers to God in a participatory way.  Over against the Catholic world of sacred relics, saints, and sacramentally infused grace, Calvin attempted to forge a different way to register the biblical idea of how believers participate in Christ.

     

In the rhetorically powerful paragraph that immediately follows, Calvin works out the texture of human obligations from their incorporation into Christ: cleansed in him, they do not befoul themselves; engrafted in his body, they do not disfigure it; tracking his ascension, they aspire heavenward.  “These, I say, are the most auspicious foundations upon which to establish one’s life.  One would look in vain for the like of these among the philosophers, who, in their commendation of virtue, never rise above the natural dignity of man” (3.6.3).

Institutes 3.7 – Self-Denial and the Patterning Power of the Law

     

Calvin began his treatment of the Christian life by emphasizing that it is a life that progresses by a continual return to repentance.  The dynamic of mortification and vivification – a patterned participation in Christ’s dying and rising – is not an initial moment to be gotten over, but a theological description of the whole of the Christian life.  That the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had made confession to priests a once-a-year obligation, Calvin saw as a departure from the Scriptural drama of continual repentance.  In 3.7, Calvin weds this theme of continual repentance to the organizing power of the law.  As such, the concept of “self-denial” featured in the chapter title does not adequately capture Calvin’s goals in what follows.  The actual pattern Calvin advocates is a continual movement from dying to rising, from self-denial to serving God and neighbor.  So the focus is placed upon “self-denial” only in the sense that, given human sinfulness, the movement towards serving God and neighbor in a way that expresses Christ’s life is possible only when it begins from a denial of the self.  

     

As the opening paragraphs of chapter seven make clear, self-denial actually marks a radical self-affirmation.  It refers to a dynamic of Christian living that is a continual movement out away from sinful self-preoccupation towards the worship of God and care for the neighbor that constitute the true end or goal of human life itself.  Both Christ and the Law image the newness that the Spirit is bringing about in the lives of believers.  Calvin’s focus here is to elicit the recognition of one’s truest identity in God’s restoration of the divine image in human lives, as well as of the patterns and rhythms that constitute that newness.  God’s “method of ordering a man’s life [constituendae vitae methodum]” entails the reordering of human life toward the worshipful life Calvin described as the only pathway to true happiness in Book I.  

The duty of believers is “to present their bodies to God as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to him,” and in this consists the lawful worship of him[legitimum eius cultum] [Rom. 12:1] . . . Now the great thing is this: we are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory. (3.7.1/CR II.505).

These words, written in 1539, make clear that Calvin’s fondness for the trope of “self-denial” is not an end in itself but an ingredient in the broader goal of fashioning human lives into a choir of praise.  It was the divinitatis sensum that provided the deepest glimpse into the meaning and significance of the goodness of human life in Book I, and here in Book III it is precisely that orientation to God in worship, praise, and gratitude that is being restored, only now by participation in Christ’s life of obedience.  

     

Only by a dynamic characterized by self-denial can believers express the movement of grace in their lives, a movement away from the old and into the new.  The language of “self-denial” is appropriate because Calvin images the human community as those in whom the brilliant luster of the divine image has become dull and unrecognizable.  They are those whose created orientation to God has been twisted into idolatrous superstition in myriad ways.  Drawing upon the “we are not our own” testimony in I Corinthians 6:19 and the “I no longer live but Christ lives in me” testimony of Galatians 2:20, Calvin writes with great rhetorical power about what it means to “do nothing except to [God’s] glory”:

We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds.  We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh.  We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours.  Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him.  We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal [legitimum finem] (3.7.1/CR II.506, italics mine).

It is at this point that Calvin comments on how the anthropology lying behind this vision of human life differs from what lay behind the prescriptions of the moral philosophers.  The classical anthropological ordering of governed will and governing reason is an inadequate picture of human life.  Because the sinful corruption of human life affects human reason no less than human willing, only the biblical distinction between “flesh” and “spirit” will do, where “flesh” captures the totality of the self’s powers in bondage to sin, and “spirit” captures the entire self’s renewal in faith.  Of this transformation, says Calvin, “all the philosophers were ignorant.”

For they set up reason alone as the ruling principle in man, and think that it alone should be listened to; to it alone, in short, they entrust the conduct of life.  But the Christian philosophy bids reason give way to, submit and subject itself to, the Holy Spirit so that the man himself may no longer live but hear Christ living and reigning within him (3.7.1).

Notice that Calvin’s picture of the whole person – reason and will - subject to the Holy Spirit is at the same time a picture of Christ living within.  Calvin sees the differences between Christian instruction and moral philosophy to reside primarily in the ways that the lives of Christians are marked and patterned by their participation in Christ. 

     

Here in 3.7, the ordering of human life that flows from participation in Christ is given content by means of Calvin’s reflection on the two tables of the law, i.e. duties to love and honor God and to serve our neighbors.  “Thus, with reference to both Tables of the Law, [God] commands us to put off our own nature and to deny whatever our reason and will dictate” (3.7.3).  As Calvin articulated in his treatment of the law in Book II, the sinful corruption of reason and will results in bondage that eliminates the possibility of living in the rhythms of the worship of God and dedication to one’s fellow humans.  Human life in the power of sin is human life in love with itself and hateful towards others.  The renewal of the divine image however, turns narcissism back towards the outside, drawing believers to love and serve their fellow humans precisely because they are being trained to see the divine image in all others, however faint it might appear.  

     

Calvin’s powerful attention to the shaping power of the law in Book II here provides the organizing framework for human lives being sanctified in Christ.  More specifically, the Ten Commandments provide the fabric of the doctrine of regeneration.  Calvin first turns his attention to the Second Table of the law, working out the implications of repentance and regeneration with regard to social relations.  Because all goods humans have are gifts of God and because their faults have been overlooked in God’s mercy, believers have the duty to honor others by attending to the gifts of God within those others and by mercifully overlooking their faults (3.7.4).  Believers have the duty to benefit their fellows in every way possible, always looking after the good of others (3.7.5).  Awoken to the image of God in all others, believers have the duty to ignore the question of whether their neighbors “merit” their love and service (3.7.6).  Finally, beyond the mere exercise of duties and obligations, believers are called to perform the duties of love from a “sincere feeling of love [ex sincero amoris affectu]” which compels them to put themselves in the place of helpless others, the only limit being the end of their resources (3.7.7/CR II.511).  

     

Two things are worthy of note here.  First, Calvin’s readers once again find themselves immersed into a form of life that is a way of participating in God’s own life, especially and proximately the life of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.  Calvin sees the Ten Commandments not simply as an external ethical guide, but as the very pattern in which Christ himself lived and died on humanity’s behalf.  Far from relating Law and Gospel as two competing frames of reference as did Luther, Calvin can view the moral law given to Moses as identical with Christian faith as far as content is concerned, even if Jesus Christ was manifested to Israel less clearly than to the Church.  Thus the legal framing of human life in terms of the Ten Commandments and the Christological patterning of life that emerges from faith’s participation in Christ are differing descriptions of the same dynamic in the identity of the faithful, and do not compete with one another as they do in Luther.  And the other-oriented social ethic developed here expresses Christ’s life, even though it does not overstep itself in heroically trying to match it.  Second, Calvin’s concern to develop a truly social ethic oriented to the public good again distinguishes the goal of the Christian life from some versions of moral philosophy.  Beyond the concern for the cultivation of virtues, Calvin’s doctrine of regeneration enacts a continual movement toward the common good in patterned lives of love and service made possible only by grace, the power of the Spirit uniting believers to Christ.  The economic implications of his picture of neighbor love are particularly striking, even though Calvin carefully delimits the sacrificial (Christomorphic) social ethic characteristic of the Church from expectations of what will obtain in the wider civic realm.  

     

Calvin turns to the relation between regeneration and the First Table of the Law (the right worship of God) in 3.7.8-10.  In these sections Calvin considers how self-denial is required for anyone committed to following the divine will.  “Scripture calls us to resign ourselves and all our possessions to the Lord’s will, and to yield to him the desires of our hearts to be tamed and subjugated.”  This taming of desire is not a stoic denial of desire but a re-training of its focus onto God and the neighbor.  Like the treatment of social relations, this material is primarily economic in tone, emphasizing the new orientation to worldly goods that accompanies regeneration.  Forsaking all desires to prosper, the believer forsakes any way of prospering other than by God’s blessing.  Furthermore, the concrete application of trusting God’s blessing is that believers will forsake any strategies for wealth that would entail doing injury to their neighbor.  And finally, times of adversity and poverty will be borne with a peaceful and grateful disposition because believers are confident in the goodness of the God into whose hands they have committed themselves.  Here we have a soteriological fashioning of identity that hinges, theologically speaking, on participation in Christ.  As will become clear in the following chapter on justification, Calvin characterizes God’s creative and redemptive relations to humanity in terms of gift-giving.  Thus, it comes as no surprise that Calvin advocates a social ethic that has gift-giving at its heart.  This theological concept of participation means that the economy of grace and the economy in which (created) goods circulate have everything to do with one another.  

     

Calvin’s discussion of self-denial brings into focus a particular kind of social agent.  Responsibility to love and care for the needs of others in the community is written into the weave of economic, political, and social life.  The principal duties that obtain for believers are those of neighbor love.  This shows that the theme of worship in Calvin’s thought is not an obsession with the vertical dimension of piety to the exclusion of social ethics.  Rather, the Christian life is a life that honors and worships God by being shaped and ordered by the pattern of the Ten Commandments, a life of active obedience wherein regard for the welfare of needy others is as central as the right worship of God.  Institutionally, this social ethic was visible in Geneva in the hospital’s care of poor and needy Genevans (a hospital run by the laity) and in the parallel institution for needy French exiles, the Bources Francaise (with heavy involvement from Calvin himself).  Far from being just another way of pursuing happiness by diligence and arduous discipline, such a life is itself a gift made possible only by a union with Christ in faith.

Institutes 3.8-10 Human Life as a Participation in Christ’s life

     

Calvin’s instruction on Christian living involves a rather complex and dynamic appeal to order, pattern, and structure.  To the questions – What is it that gives shape and form to Christian living? What keeps enthusiasm within its bounds and makes it fruitful? – Calvin provides not one answer but several: Scripture, Law, Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and the Consistory.  The material on regeneration is, in fact, a brief primer on Scripture’s plan for living.  But it is only with the Holy Spirit that Scripture can be truly heard and believers united to Christ.  And regeneration is the restoration of the divine image in human lives, a Spirit powered conformation to that particular likeness of God whose incarnate life is narrated in the gospel accounts.  While Jesus’ sacrificial regard for the good of others is written into Calvin’s treatment of self-denial and the Two Tables of the Law, the specific patterning power of Jesus own particular life story comes into explicit focus in 3.8-10.  These three chapters really represent two major movements, the cross bearing of chapter eight and the meditation on future life of chapter nine.  The instruction on the appropriate use of earthly goods in chapter 10 is more an extension or qualification of the hope described in chapter nine than it is a shift to a genuinely new theme.  So here we have again Christ’s dying and rising writ large as mapping the contours and the movement of Christian living.  This is Calvin’s interpretation of what it means for Christians to have their lives “in Christ.”  Christian living is nothing else than a real participation in Christ.  And the drama of salvation is nothing less than humanity’s incorporation into the Trinitarian life of God.  

     

Just how to capture the difference, theologically and aesthetically, between Calvin’s notion of participation in Christ and that of his Catholic contemporaries is a complex matter.  Calvin’s notion of participation did not picture divine grace as an infused quality of the soul.  Yet a Catholic like Ignatius of Loyola proves that rhetorical and practical attempts to fashion the lives of readers into conformity with Christ could assume a variety of forms in the sixteenth century.  Granted, the “readers” being shaped in case of Ignatius’ Exercises were primarily priests, monks and nuns.  Nevertheless, the participatory conformity to Christ is at the heart of Ignatian piety.  Interestingly, Ignatius published the official version of the Spiritual Excercises in 1539, as Calvin published the second Latin edition of the Institutes, newly exiled from Geneva.

     

It is helpful to remember at this point that the themes of regeneration and justification are not primary but are subordinate themes in Calvin’s theological picture of human life.  The dominant theme is the union or communion of believers with Christ in faith, with regeneration being simply a helpful, biblical way to describe some of the effects of that union.  But this “union” with Christ is not to be located exclusively on a mystical, otherworldly or transcendental plane; it also issues forth into “conformity” with Christ in an outward and public manner.  

     

Calvin’s reflections on “cross-bearing” emphasize that the Christ with whom believers are united and to whom they are being conformed was and is the suffering Jesus.  Unity with Christ entails a unity at precisely this point: a likeness or participation in the suffering of Christ that is characterized by obedience to the Father and aimed at the well-being of those in need.  Yet while Christ’s cross-bearing gives a certain shape to Christian living, the relation is not simply one of identity.  The relevant features of Christ’s suffering in which believers participate are not its once for all saving significance as God’s unrepeatable (Trinitarian) self-offering.  The relevant similarity, for Calvin, is that believers – like Christ – are God’s beloved children whom God will test with adversity their entire lives.  Calvin’s exhortation to bear the cross reiterates his high view of God’s providential involvement in all that transpires; the suffering and adversity encountered by believers are not random happenings of fate or chance; they are divinely inflicted wounds which aim at deepening faith, hope, and love.

     

Calvin offers a number of overlapping lists of what he has in mind.  That Christians can expect to bear the cross means they can count on a “hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil” (3.8.1).  They can count on God afflicting them with “disgrace, or poverty, or bereavement, or disease, or other calamities” (3.8.2).  The list of crosses to bear can shift slightly, elsewhere appearing as poverty, exile, contempt, prison, disgrace, and death (3.8.7), expanding to include injustice [iniuriae] (3.8.10) and insult [contumelia] (3.8.11).  Yet the tone of these sections is far from despairing or grim.  The emphasis is not upon the certainty of suffering so much as it is on the certainty of God’s favor and care in the midst of the various crosses to be borne.  In typical fashion, one of the calamity lists concludes with the promise: “But when the favor of our God breathes upon us, every one of these things turns into happiness [felicitatem] for us.”  Why can Calvin say something so counter-intuitive?  Because “if we are vexed and despised, we but take all the firmer root in Christ.  If we are branded with disgrace and ignominy, we but have a fuller place in the Kingdom of God” (3.8.7).  

     

It is this note of identification with Christ in suffering that provides the rhetorical power of Calvin’s reflections on the cruciform shape of Christian living.  Calvin’s use of Scripture in this material contributes to this goal.  The characters in Scripture become, in Calvin’s narrative, a cast of persons - God’s own beloved family - who found God’s blessing precisely in their obedient endurance of suffering for the sake of God’s honor.  If we keep in mind the precarious plight of Calvin’s French audience, it is possible to see this exhortation to cross-bearing not as a sadistic affirmation of suffering itself, but rather as the offering of a lens for viewing one’s life – a lens in which one’s suffering for God’s sake becomes a sign of special dignity.  In a world in which his readers were familiar with the threat of exile, imprisonment, disgrace, death, and injustice at the hands of the powerful, Calvin attempts to paint the lives of the minority group into the vast canvas of Scriptural characters, empowering them to live against the grain of their identification as heretics by culturally powerful institutions.  Despite what powerful Catholic authorities say about your community and convictions, says Calvin, you can take heart that your trials mark you as participants in the ancient lineage of God’s faithful, headed by none other than Jesus Christ himself.  

     

But there is another dimension to Calvin’s attempt to fashion the lives of his readers in the face of intimidating institutional opposition.  Calvin’s prologue to Book III laid out the centrality of repentance to the Christian life by detailing his resistance to the forming power and theological backing of Catholic practices of obligatory confession to priests, indulgences, and satisfaction.  At the heart of the Catholic appeal to the need for Christians to confess and make satisfaction was the theological premise that in confession guilt was forgiven but punishments remained.  Calvin counters by arguing that the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice brings the forgiveness of both guilt and punishment.  Nevertheless, his reflections on cross-bearing reveal an interesting, if subtle, agreement with his Catholic opponents.  Not unlike his Catholic opponents, Calvin believed that God afflicts believers with suffering, that the life of faith requires the endurance of pain and adversity authored by God.  Calvin can even agree with the Catholic penitential system in saying that, at least sometimes, adversity is a form of divine punishment.  But the similarities end there.  Calvin emphasizes how heaven-sent adversity functions as a test and trial for the faithful, proving their identity as God’s beloved, along with Israel and Jesus Christ.  Yet even Calvin’s doctrine of divine punishment differs from Catholic satisfaction.  For Calvin, such punishment plays no role in effecting or occasioning the believer’s reconciliation with God.  It simply confirms or signals the believer’s identity as God’s child whom God disciplines.  For Calvin’s beleaguered readers, suffering - even in the form of divine punishment - is not a signal that one was (or is) outside the bounds of divine grace; rather it is a sign of the very presence of grace and one’s status as a recipient of that grace.  This theological revision of suffering and divine punishment cannot be reduced to the question of how it functioned in the lives of Calvin’s readers.  But that function is part of doctrine’s truth.  In one sense, Calvin’s treatment of cross-bearing is the offering of pastoral comfort to religious minorities pressed down and afflicted.  Take heart, says Calvin, your troubles join you to the company of the faithful.

     

What has cross-bearing to do with worship?  For Calvin, the central question is how to persevere in offering God praise and thanksgiving in the midst of extreme adversity.  Since the cross-bearing Jesus is the agent and goal of believer’s restoration into the divine image, the orientation to God in worship must take form in the midst of suffering.  This, in fact, is the topic of Calvin’s concluding remarks on cross-bearing.

[H]owever much in bearing the cross our minds are constrained by the natural feeling of bitterness, they are as much diffused with spiritual joy.  From this, thanksgiving also follows, which cannot exist without joy; but if the praise of the Lord and thanksgiving can come forth only from a cheerful and happy heart – and there is nothing that ought to interrupt this in us – it thus is clear how necessary it is that the bitterness of the cross be tempered with spiritual joy (3.8.11).

Uninterrupted praise and thanksgiving to God from a happy heart – that was Calvin’s basic picture of human life, both as created (Book I) and redeemed (Book III).  Calvin’s rhetorical strategy was to cultivate and elicit such a life in his readers by providing a persuasive Scriptural account of the shape of the Christian life.  Lives of ceaseless praise – made possible not because of the absence of suffering, but right in the midst of it – is the practical and existential heart of Calvin’s theological anthropology.     

     

Stepping back from the details of Calvin’s texts, we are reminded yet again that his goal in 3.6-10 is to help his readers imaginatively live into the divine image.  This is to happen by a Spirit authored conformation to the divine law and to the crucified and risen Christ.  Just as there is movement and direction to the pattern of Christ’s life, who went through suffering and into resurrection glory, so too the shape of believers’ lives will conform to this same movement.  Just as in the gospel narration of Christ’s life suffering is not valued simply for the sake of suffering, so too in the lives of believers, participation in Christ’s suffering only has its value in its lying on a trajectory towards resurrection glory.  Calvin seeks to capture this Christological patterning of Christian living by following his treatment of cross bearing with his meditation on the future life of resurrection glory.  

     

This patterned movement from suffering into heavenly glory is given its particular contours by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.  But it is not radically new.  It is a pattern that maintains a basic continuity with the picture of human life in its created integrity sketched in Book I.  Not quite a creation ex nihilo, it is a restoration of the original divine image.

Whatever kind of tribulation presses upon us, we must ever look to this end: to accustom ourselves to contempt for the present life [ad praesentis vitae contemptum] and to be aroused thereby to meditate upon the future life . . . For it is a shame for us to be no better than brute beasts, whose condition would be no whit inferior to our own if there were not left to us hope of eternity after death [spes aeternitatis post mortem] (3.9.1).

For Calvin, the loss of hope, of an orientation towards a future that far surpasses the present, would be a loss of humanity’s basic humanity.  Without hope towards a future, humans are reduced to “brute beasts.”  This is a clear allusion to Calvin’s discussion in Book I of the divine image that distinguishes humans from other animals.  To be united to Christ in faith, to be made a participant in the patterned movement from suffering to resurrection glory, is to be conformed to the life God had always intended for human creatures.  

     

The problem, as Calvin sees it, is that virtually all of humanity exhibits their bondage to the power of sin in an inordinate love of their present lives which results in a forgetfulness of their God-given orientation toward the future in hope.  What is striking to first time readers of this material is the juxtaposition of the appropriate desire for heavenly immortality with a “contempt” for present, earthly life.  Immediately there looms the question of a world-forsaking other-worldliness.  Calvin’s use of language actually shows that the surprising power and negativity of the rhetoric of “contempt” for the present life is called for primarily because the corrupting power of sin goes so deeply into human life.  Sin’s power results in distorted human lives that are almost completely absorbed in concerns for earthly goods.  When that is the theological description of how things stand, a harsh form of rhetoric becomes the most appropriate form of theological writing.  First, the problem with the present life is not that it is “earthly” but that it is sinfully distorted.  Earthly life is “never to be hated except in so far as it holds us subject to sin.”  “But in comparison with the immortality to come, let us despise this life and long to renounce it, on account of bondage to sin . . .” (3.9.4, italics mine).  Second, the problem with the present life is not some inherently negative feature of it, but simply that it does not fully encompass that for which humans are destined by God.  Human life is ordered to something higher and better.  The “otherworldiness” charge stems from mistakenly reading this material as a denigration of earthly life rather than as an affirmation of the divinely ordained pilgrimage through “this” life and into the next.  Only in that sense is the present life an “exile” (3.9.5).  Calvin has to ratchet down his readers’ esteem for the present life only as a means to ratcheting up their expectation for the next.  

     

As we might expect, Calvin’s reflections on the hopeful orientation of human life affords him an opportunity to reiterate his vision of human life as having its truest identity in its rightful orientation to divine glory.

[W]e are in preparation, so to speak, for the glory of the Heavenly Kingdom.  For the Lord has ordained that those who are one day to be crowned in heaven should first undergo struggles on earth in order that they may not triumph until they have overcome the difficulties of war, and attained victory.  Then there is another reason: we begin in the present life, through various benefits, to taste the sweetness of the divine generosity [quod variis beneficiis divinae benignitatis suavitatem delibare in ea incipimus] in order to whet our hope and desire to seek after the full revelation of this (3.9.3/CR II: 525).

The first image is that of soldiers engaged in battle and looking forward to victory.  The second image is that of a deep desire for God kept strong by small tastes of the full banquet of God’s glorious presence to come.  Here divine glory is refracted in images of God crowning the battle weary and satiating the hungry with God’s own glorious presence.

     

The border between chapters nine and ten signal only a slight shift of emphasis, not a transition to a new theme.  Having described the proper ordering between earthly and heavenly life (3.9), Calvin proceeds to elaborate on the attitudinal implications of this ordering (3.10).  Having drawn the distinction between the present and the future and identified the future as the true human destiny, Calvin then turns to the other side of the distinction – the present, earthly life - to value it in its own, proper way.  

     

The practical question for Calvin’s readers concerns the “right use of earthly benefits,” the ignorance of which would amount to deficiencies in the broader goal of eliciting wisdom in Christian living.  Calvin begins by describing a “conscience” neither too severe (counseling abstinence from all but what is “necessary”) nor too indulgent (advocating for unrestrained freedom).  

Let this be our principle: that the use of God’s gifts is not wrongly directed when it is referred to that end [finem] to which the Author himself created and destined them for us, since he created them for our good, not for our ruin (3.10.2).

This principle is simply a specification of that laid out repeatedly in Book I: that human life finds its true dignity and happiness in gratefully acknowledging all good things as gifts from the Creator.  Lives of gratitude and praise make consistent practice of referring all gifts back to their Author and Source.  What Calvin adds here is the admonition to try to discern the divine intent back behind the giving of all particular gifts.  The three main features which fall out of this theological principle are an affirmation of beauty, calling, and frugality. 

     

Calvin’s treatment of beauty and delight emerges in tandem with a correlative anthropological argument.  The argument that humanity’s godly duty is to temper their use of earthly things in strict accordance with the canon of necessity and utility rely on a deficient anthropology.  

Away, then, with that inhuman philosophy which, while conceding only a necessary use of creatures, not only malignantly deprives us of the lawful fruit of God’s beneficence but cannot be practiced unless it robs a man of all his senses and degrades him to a block.

The order of creation is, for Calvin, an order of life that includes an abundance of beauty.  The beauty, order, and harmony of the created world are frequent themes of Book I.  Created beauty is a reflection of the infinitely more rich beauty of the Creator.  The anthropological correlate of the beauty of the divine life is an appropriate - that is, sensual - delight in the encounter with beauty.  In Calvin’s treatment of the imago dei in Book I, the role of the senses were downplayed not because Calvin devalued the senses in themselves, but because he believed they played little role in the process of human reasoning.  In Book I, Calvin was focused on the knowledge of God the Creator that characterizes the divine image and distinguishes humanity from the brutes.  Yet here, Calvin offers a theological argument for a proper valuing of the human senses (even though his affirmation of beauty and delight turns quickly to a consideration of the dangers of inordinately indulging in fleshly lusts).  A rightly ordered life, restored to conformity with the crucified and risen Christ, will engage the sensual beauty of God’s world with delight.  That is part of what it means to reflect the divine glory – believers not only trust, fear, and love God, they delight in God when they see divine beauty reflected in the finite world.  

     

Similarly, Calvin’s treatment of “calling” should be seen as part of Calvin’s instruction to readers about how to use the present life that reflects our participation in the patterning movement from suffering to glory.  One’s “calling,” as Calvin sees it, is one of those “earthly helps” of which believers are to make wise use.  It is only by paying attention to one’s calling that one begins to perceive the particular ways in which one is to live out the duties of honoring God and serving neighbors.  Calvin follows Luther in widening the traditional notion of “calling” from religious professionals to include all believers.  This means that there will be a variety of ways for believers to live their lives “in Christ.”  That Calvin’s readers were instructed to remain in the specific form of life to which God had called them might well appear to constrict social movement and occupational freedom.  The flip side was that it provided an internal complexity and a kind of flexibility within the broad theological theme of participation in and conformity to Christ.  While Calvin’s notion of “calling” has often been singled out as a peculiarly powerful influence of Calvinism in the West, it is helpful to remember that the language Calvin uses in the two 1539 paragraphs devoted to it simply rephrase what he had said earlier about regeneration in general.  God bids all to remember their specific “calling” because many wander “hither and thither,” turning things “topsy-turvy,” and are tempted to “heedlessly wander about throughout life.”  

[T]he Lord’s calling is in everything the beginning and foundation of well-doing.  And if there is anyone who will not direct himself to it, he will never hold to the straight path in his duties (3.10.6).

These themes of wandering aimlessness, well-doing, and duty replay the broad concerns of Calvin’s rhetorical goals in this section on the Christian life.  The reason for setting forth the Scriptural pattern was so that “those who heartily repent may not err in their zeal” (3.6.1).  

     

The real heart of Calvin’s instructions on how earthly goods are to be used consists in a cluster of reflections on the economic life of Christians.  The goal for Christians is to know “how to bear poverty peaceably and patiently, as well as to bear abundance moderately” (3.10.4).  The three rules or constraints upon the general principle of Christian freedom are as follows.  First, believers are to shun indulgence and ostentation in any form.  Second, believers are to bear poverty patiently so as not to cultivate an immoderate desire for what they lack.  And third, believers are to use earthly goods as stewards who will render account of that usage to God.  

     

The explicit effect of these admonitions would be the shaping of the economic attitudes and practices of Calvin’s readers.  Geneva itself displayed the institutions that accompanied this theological vision of a regulated social economy.  Certainly the text of the Institutes does not offer detailed economic guidance for believers.  But what is clear is that the conformity of believers to Christ’s life of suffering obedience in behalf of needy others has to be worked out in the economic details of daily life.  An ascetic and frugal lifestyle is now to characterize all believers of whatever station in life.  The political edge of these admonitions to frugality are also clear.  Calvin indicts any ecclesiastical or political regimes that resort to showy displays of economic power.

The Social, Ecclesial and Political Dimensions of Obedience

     

I only briefly touched on the structure and role of the Consistory in Geneva in chapter one.  The present task is to press deeper into the social and theological functioning of the Consistory when it is considered in relation to Calvin’s effort in the Institutes to fashion his readers into communities who worship God rightly.

     

Calvin and his fellow reformers were driven to the reforming cause because of a principled resistance to what they saw as the idolatrous labyrinth of Roman Catholicism and the imprisoning tangle of religious law imposed upon Europe by both Pope and King.  In chapter one, I sketched in broad strokes Calvin’s experience of Catholic authority and social control in Paris.  Calvin’s exile from France and eventual arrival in Geneva is the story of a reformer who sought to bring into existence an alternative to what he saw as the idolatrous social order prevalent in most of Europe.  Yet the installation of the Consistory in Geneva upon Calvin’s return in 1541 raises the question whether there was any considerable difference between the authoritarian social control in Catholic Paris and what was experienced in Protestant Geneva.  Calvinist sympathizers tend to stress the differences between an authoritarian Paris and a liberated Geneva.  Critical theorists tend to stress the homogeneity of all forms of social “discipline,” therefore seeing little use in distinguishing among different kinds of religious traditions.  

     

This chapter contributes indirectly to such discussions by explicating how Calvin’s rhetorical use of “regeneration,” law, and order functioned to fashion communal identity.  By highlighting the social and theological rationale for the Consistory – connecting its function to various themes like repentance, divine glory, worship, obedience and law – I tried to emphasize that despite some formal social similarities, the theological imaginations of Catholic Paris and Calvinist Geneva diverged sharply.  The question I tried to keep in mind was the following: How did Calvin’s rendering of God and God’s relation to human communities inform his criticism of European culture in a way that commended an institution like the Consistory? 

     

Geneva’s 1541 Ecclesiastical Ordinances set up a council of pastors and elders called the Consistory.  Public resistance to this institution sparked a backlash against Calvin and Farel that forced them out of Geneva in 1538.  When Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541 in order to help implement evangelical reforms, the establishment of the Consistory, along with the drawing up of the Confession of Faith and the Catechism, was among the first reforms established.  The creation and activity of this group in Geneva (and throughout Europe) accounts, probably more than anything else, for the popular assumption that historical Calvinism was characterized by austere obedience and the suffocating enforcement of a puritan morality code.  The Ordinances make clear Calvin’s conviction that a council devoted to discipline and oversight within the Church was needed, and that such a body was distinct in purpose and authority from the various civil councils.  But theologically speaking, the political significance of the Consistory comes into focus only when we see how Calvin’s rhetoric of orderliness, obedience, and law provides the symbolic framework that organizes what he has to say about the goals of Christian living, about the role of the Consistory in regulating the life of the Church, and about the role of civil authorities in securing and maintaining a social space that glorifies God.  

     

Just now the records of the Genevan Consistory in Calvin’s day are beginning to be published in English.  Greater acquaintance with the way the Consistory actually worked has led scholars to conclude that the body dealt as much with matters of domestic squabbles as it did with the enforcement of what we might think of as religious orthodoxy.  This coincides with a noticeable shift in scholarly opinions about its historical significance.  Where once the Consistory was viewed as a “moral reign of terror,” it is now generally seen as an intrusive social body whose goal was to “maintain orderly family life.”  Nevertheless, the popular association of Calvinism and Calvinist theology with moral tyranny and religiously sanctioned repression continues.  I enter this debate by pressing on connections in Calvin’s own writing between doctrines and practices, between religion and politics.  What calls out for discussion is the nature of the relationship between Calvin’s rhetorical attempt to fashion a particular picture of Christian faith and Christian living in the lives of his readers, on the one hand, and the institutional role of the Consistory, on the other.

     

The political scope of Calvin’s theological rendering of human life and community must be registered because the question about discipline was a question about European culture and the powers that govern and shape it.  Implicit in Calvin’s discussion of sanctification, obedience and discipline is his characterization of European cultural life as disorderly and disobedient.  Scholarly interest in Geneva now tends to focus on its oppressive features, but Calvin’s worries about social life focused on chaos and disorder.  Moreover, Calvin and his colleagues were accused by their Catholic opponents with fostering social and moral disorder.  This accusation was a politically charged one given conflicts between European political power and the “seditious” Anabaptists, like those defeated at Munster in 1534.  Calvin agrees that European social life was a moral mess, but retorted that this can be laid, if anywhere, at the feet of Catholic authorities.  In the Necessity of Reforming the Church, written in 1554 to Emperor Charles V and the German princes in order to plead the cause of Reform, Calvin turns the onus of social disorder back onto his opponents:

With regard to the discipline exercised over the people, the matter stands thus: Provided the domination of the clergy remains intact, provided no deduction is made from their tribute or plunder, almost any thing else is done with impunity, or carelessly overlooked. We see the general prevalence of all kinds of wickedness in the manners of society . . . I admit that the fact is attributable to many causes, but among the many, the primary cause is, that the priests, either from indulgence or carelessness, have allowed the wicked to give loose reins to their lusts . . . But, though so many disgraceful proceedings take place openly before the eyes of all, as to them excommunication is asleep. And yet the very persons among whom all these disorders prevail have the hardihood to upbraid us with want of order! (Tracts, vol. 2, 263-4).

Calvin assumed he had only to appeal to the direct experience of the Emperor and the Princes.  All were aware, thought Calvin, that the moral looseness of European social life ran counter to the kind of disciplined social life that honors God.  More to the point, though, is Calvin’s claim that there is no institutional mechanism within the Catholic framework for addressing this social problem.  “To them,” says Calvin, “excommunication is asleep.”  In and through his theological writing, Calvin sought to craft Geneva into a community marked by the holiness appropriate for God’s adopted family.  For this endeavor, excommunication would need to be reawakened.

     

Calvin’s attempt to fashion a new communal imagination with his description of the believer’s union with Christ is too often read individualistically, with little attention given to the social, political, and institutional dimensions of this religious vision.  What results is an interpretation of the drama of grace and salvation as taking part primarily between God and the believer, leaving the communal dimension of the Church as an important but derivative feature of that drama.  Such individualistic readings of Calvin overlook the significance of the external form, order, and pattern of the Christian life worked out in Book III and extended in Book IV.  The remedy to this misreading is the recognition that Calvin’s ecclesiology in Book IV is no less central to his treatment of the Christian life than is his treatment of sanctification and justification in Book III.

     

The inseparability of Books III and IV, of individual and ecclesial bodies, should come as no surprise.  Calvin’s anti-nicodemite writings revealed his resistance to denigrating the religious significance of external matters and publicly enacted rituals.  His 1539 defense of the reforming cause to Cardinal Sadoleto makes a similar point. Responding to Sadoleto, Calvin explains that the Church’s identity is marked as much by discipline and ceremonies as it is by doctrines and sacraments.  

Since there are three things on which the safety of the Church is founded, viz., doctrine, discipline, and the sacraments, and to these a fourth is added, viz., ceremonies, by which to exercise the people in offices of piety . . . Of ceremonies, indeed, you have more than enough, but for the most part so childish in their import, and vitiated by innumerable forms of superstition, as to be utterly unavailing for the preservation of the Church . . . Ceremonies we have in a great measure abolished, but we were compelled to do so; partly because by their multitude they had degenerated into a kind of judaism, partly because they had filled the minds of the people with superstition, and could not possibly remain without doing the greatest injury to the piety which it was their office to promote.  Still we have retained those which seemed sufficient for the circumstances of the times (Olin 2000: 57-8).

This kind of comment shows how important getting the “externals” right, the public and institutional dimension of religion, was for Calvin.  He himself conceived of the break from Roman Catholicism not simply as a departure from religious lives lived out under the authority of institutions, but instead as a re-conception of the institutional dimension of the religious life.

     

Calvin’s discussion of the church – its ministry, order, and authority – is located in the final book, titled, “The External Means or Aids by Which God Invites Us Into the Society of Christ and Holds Us Therein.”  God graciously provides these external helps in order to “beget and increase faith within us, and advance it to its goal,” thus providing for humanity’s weakness, ignorance, and sloth.  In providing the church, its ministry, order, and sacraments, God provides the external helps without which pilgrim-believers could not stay the course.  “Shut up as we are in the prison house of the flesh, we have not yet attained angelic rank.  God, therefore, in his wonderful providence accommodating himself to our capacity, has prescribed a way for us, though still far off, to draw near to him” (4.1.1).  

     

It is Calvin’s notion of the visible church as the “mother” of all the faithful that most powerfully attests to the essentially communal character of the Christian life and communion with Christ:

For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels.  Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives . . . God’s fatherly favor and the especial witness of spiritual life are limited to his flock, so that it is always disastrous to leave the church (4.1.4).

These words show that it is not at all accurate to depict the difference between Catholic and Reformed picture of faith as ecclesial versus individual religion.  While Calvin’s departure from Roman Catholicism resulted in a differently construed communal dimension of the Christian faith, the ecclesial character of faith is no less necessary or important.  Moreover, Calvin is particularly insistent on the necessity of the external patterns of church life because the themes of law, order, pattern and form are so central to his understanding of faith, and because unlike some perfectionist Anabaptists (see 4.1.13-23) he emphasizes the persistent power of sin and need for forgiveness during the pilgrimage in the “flesh.”  The reason it is “disastrous to leave the church” is that it is the gathered and public worship of the Christian community that provides the external shape of Christian living: the church’s disciplined enforcement of morality keeps the ever-sinful pilgrims on their journey and helps fashion a communal life that glorifies God.

     

Some argue that Calvin’s true genius was his ability to imagine and organize an institutional base for the growing Reform movement.  This is true insofar as Calvin succeeded in creating an alternative ecclesiastical organization.  Here I will forego any comprehensive treatment of Calvin’s ecclesiology in order to focus upon his treatment of the Church’s “spiritual power,” the great part of which was added in 1559.  This material affords the best picture of the social and institutional dimension of Calvin’s doctrine of sanctification.  Calvin mentions three distinct powers belonging to the Church – doctrine, law-making, and discipline.  I will not treat the issue of doctrine.  Suffice it to say that Calvin develops an account of the Church's authority to draft and explain articles of faith.  The emphasis throughout is upon the relative or derivative character of the Church’s doctrinal authority: the Church is charged with clearly explaining the Word of God for the purpose of building up the Church.  Calvin works out this conception of the Church’s true doctrinal power in distinction to Roman Catholic claims of doctrinal infallibility for Pope and councils (see 4.8-9).

     

Calvin’s teaching regarding the Church’s spiritual power of making laws is the institutional correlate to the significance of the “law” laid out in Books II and III.  Calvin is no less interested in the communal dimension of sanctification, law, and order than he is in its relevance for the shaping of the lives of individual believers.  Simply to point out such a thing shows how far from Calvin’s own imagination we ourselves stand.  To anticipate a bit, Calvin agrees with Roman Catholicism that the Church rightly exercises its power in the making of laws, but forges a different conception of the function of that law in relation to the Church’s worship and to the consciences of believers.  The broad argument I am here developing is that Calvin’s use of the theological rhetoric of regeneration and justification was intended to craft his readers into a liturgical community whose lives are marked by obedience, gratitude, and praise.  We look now at Calvin’s treatment of the theological significance of the Church’s power of law-making in order to glimpse the institutional framework meant to sustain the anthropological picture that emerges in the soteriological doctrine of Book III.

     

Calvin begins by accusing the Romanists of ensnaring miserable human souls in their many nets of human tradition, by referring to the “cruel butchery” of auricular confession and suggesting that all Roman Catholic laws “tyrannously oppress consciences.”  Then comes the programmatic statement regarding the Church’s genuine authority to make laws.

This is the power now to be discussed, whether the church may lawfully bind consciences by its laws.  In this discussion we are not dealing with the political order, but are only concerned with how God is to be duly worshiped according to the rule laid down by him, and how the spiritual freedom which looks to God may remain unimpaired for us (4.10.1).

Calvin’s chief concern, then, is to develop an account of ecclesiastical law that accomplishes two things at once.  On the one hand, and in line with Calvin’s instruction on the right ordering of Christian living, Calvin wants to affirm the Church’s appropriate power of ordering and shaping the corporate worship of God.  On the other hand, in line with his notion of justification, Calvin wants to make sure that the church’s exercise of its power to make laws protects and does not subvert the “spiritual freedom” that is the effect of God’s justification of sinners.  How do you create an institutional basis for regulating and shaping Church life in hostile political territory without inappropriately exaggerating the Church’s power by interposing it between God and the consciences of believers?  Furthermore, how do you create an institutional basis for the Reformed faith without confusing the boundaries between ecclesial and civil jurisdictions?  These are the anthropological, social, and political challenges Calvin’s theological rhetoric attempts to address.

     

Let us begin by registering the broad theological motifs that are at play in Calvin’s effort to articulate the Church’s power of law-making.

I assert the one point that necessity ought not to be imposed upon consciences in those matters from which they have been freed by Christ; and unless freed, as we have previously taught, they cannot rest with God.  They should acknowledge one King [regem], their deliverer [liberatorem] Christ, and should be governed [regantur] by one law of freedom [libertatis lege], the holy Word of the gospel, if they would retain the grace which they once obtained in Christ.  They must be held in no bondage, and bound by no bounds . . . My purpose here is, therefore, to attack constitutions made to bind souls inwardly before God and to lay scruples on them, as if enjoining things necessary to salvation (4.10.1-2/CR II: 867-8).

Calvin’s soteriology results in a picture of Christ ruling over the conscience in a liberating way.  And for Calvin, this means that any human “constitutions” that purport to rule the consciences of believers would result in bondage rather than freedom.  The polemical edge is hard to miss.  Calvin charges the Romanists with misconstruing the relation between inwardness and externals.  Any suggestion that ecclesial laws are “necessary” in the outworking of salvation amounts to an intrusion into Christ’s exclusive sphere of saving power.  Calvin’s mapping of power suggests that the “inward” realm marks the exclusive domain of God’s jurisdiction over human life.  Referring to that inwardness under the terms “soul” and “conscience,” Calvin describes it as simultaneously freed by and bound to God.  Yet Calvin combines this theological anthropology with a theological reading of medieval culture in which Catholic ecclesiastical power has undermined this freedom/bondage matrix.  Catholic law undermines Christian freedom by making its laws “necessary.”  It undermines Christian obedience to God by inappropriately interposing itself between the believer and God, confusing the absolute allegiance owed to God with the merely relative loyalty appropriate to finite powers.  Because God alone rules over human souls, church law usurps God’s right and honor whenever it is presented as having to do with the “true worship of God, and that consciences are bound to keep, as if their observance were compulsory” (4.10.8).

     

The anthropological significance of Calvin’s ecclesiology is manifested in the extensive attention given to inwardness, soul, and conscience (material written largely in 1550).  The crucial distinction, as Calvin sees it, is that between the “outward forum” and the “forum of conscience.”  From various passages of Scripture, Calvin defines the conscience as “an awareness of divine judgment [sensum divini iudicii]” and “good conscience” as “an inward uprightness of heart” or “a lively longing to worship God and a sincere intent to live a godly and holy life” (4.10.3-4/CR II: 869).  It refers, properly speaking, to moral obligations to God and does not include moral obligations to others.  Calvin’s picture of created human life is one in which humanity is aware of its obligation to praise and obey God, an awareness mediated by the presence to the conscience of what is termed the “eternal,” or “divine” law, or sometimes “natural” or “moral” law.  Calvin’s point is that God’s will for human life, manifest in the “moral” law and written indelibly upon the conscience, is alone what “binds” human conscience.  The negative implication is that human laws, be they ecclesiastical or civil laws, do not.  “[H]uman laws, whether made by magistrate or by church, even though they have to be observed (I speak of good and just laws), still do not of themselves bind [ligare] the conscience” (4.10.5/CR II: 871).

     

These distinctions regarding divine and human rule within the sphere of human conscience have important political implications.  In one sense, Calvin is unfolding a distinction between “spiritual” and “temporal” freedom developed in 3.19.  On that register, Calvin is careful to limit the “freedom” that results from being united to Christ in faith to a “spiritual” freedom that is not to be confused with one’s obligations to obey civil authorities.  In quite another sense, though, Calvin’s description of conscience goes beyond the scope of that distinction.  Whereas the spiritual/temporal distinction maps onto a distinction between church authority and civil authority, Calvin’s discussion of conscience maps a distinction between God on the one hand, and all human authorities – ecclesial or civil – on the other.  This second mapping accords with the broad metaphysical picture informing Calvin’s theological imagination.  Because both church and civil authorities are finite powers, Calvin is extremely wary of exaggerating those finite powers by picturing them as local sites that mediate divine power in some straightforward way.  Calvin avoids picturing any tight mediation of divine power by such finite institutions.  Instead, God relates to human lives on a different level.  In that sense, there is a gap of sorts between the immediacy of believers’ relations to God and their relations to finite authorities.  Here we see one more example of Calvin’s (finitum non capax infiniti) metaphysics informing his theological vision of politics and power.

     

Yet all that has been said so far concerns the negative side of Calvin’s discussion of the Church’s spiritual power of making laws: “They are not to be considered necessary for salvation and thus bind consciences by scruples; nor are they to be associated with the worship of God, and piety thus be lodged in them” (4.10.27, written 1536).  The move to a positive consideration of “legitimate church observances” involves a reflection upon the “end” toward which all such legitimate church laws aim.  

[T]he end [propositum] in view must always be one of two things, or both together – that in the sacred assembly of believers all things be done decently and with becoming dignity; and that the human community itself be kept in order with certain bonds of humanity and moderation.  For when it is once understood that a law has been made for the sake of public decency, there is taken away the superstition into which those fall who measure the worship of God by human inventions.  Again, when it is recognized that the law has to do with common usage, then that false opinion of obligation and necessity, which struck consciences with great terror when traditions were thought necessary to salvation, is overthrown.  For here nothing is required except that love be fostered among us by common effort (4.10.28).

Calvin had already worked out this conception of church law in 1536.  For the many who were sympathetic to the evangelical cause, or the many who had already fled Catholic territory to find sanctuary in Reformed territories, such rhetoric served a crucial role insofar as it opened up a space of freedom whereby persons could see themselves as not bound by Catholic church law.  Furthermore, Calvin accomplishes a second task simultaneously.  He re-locates the significance of Church law, placing it squarely in the spheres of public decency and fitting moderation.  Thus the Christian life is a life on pilgrimage, always lived within the patterning wisdom of the church as “Mother.”  The “laws” which are the very sinews of the church provide the shape of Christian living.  

    

One prominent feature of church laws was their conventionality and alterability.  Calvin specifies that the content of church laws concerns either “rites and ceremonies” or “discipline and peace” (4.10.29).  That such laws must be “founded upon God’s authority” and “drawn from Scripture” (4.10.30) might lead one to imagine that Calvin saw such laws, once discerned, as stable and unalterable manifestations of God’s will in the church.  Yet his argument runs in the opposite direction.  In Scripture, Calvin says, God has clearly expressed “the whole sum of true righteousness, and all aspects of the worship of his majesty, and whatever was necessary to salvation.”  

But because [God] did not will in outward discipline and ceremonies to prescribe in detail what we ought to do (because he foresaw that this depended upon the state of the times, and he did not deem one form suitable for all ages), here we must take refuge in those general rules which he has given, that whatever the necessity of the church will require for order and decorum should be tested against these.  Lastly, because he has taught nothing specifically, and because these things are not necessary to salvation, and for the upbuilding of the church ought to be variously accommodated to the customs of each nation and age, it will be fitting (as the advantage of the church will require) to change and abrogate traditional practices and to establish new ones (4.10.30, written 1543).

When we think of Calvin’s lifelong effort to persuade the French public to transfer their allegiance from the Roman Church to the Reforming cause, his affirmation of the need for changing “traditional practices” is not surprising.  It would have been a component of the broad Reformed campaign to pry the consciences of Catholics free from the claims of tradition, authority, and continuity.  Over against mere custom, only Scripture as read with the aid of the Holy Spirit can guide the church’s liturgical practices.  “Therefore, since either the custom of the city or the agreement of tradition is too weak and frail a bond of piety to follow in worshiping God, it remains for God himself to give witness of himself from heaven” (1.5.13).  On the other hand, Calvin’s keen sense of historical flux will surprise many.  It will especially surprise those who view Calvinism as an austere, unbending, and authoritarian religion of moral tyranny.  I have no interest in arguing that church law and its enforcement by the Consistory – in Geneva and elsewhere - was not experienced as suffocating and authoritarian.  I only here want to point out that the theological vision informing the practical shape of Reformed social life emphasized the malleability of governing structures and religious practices, even though it relied on a high view of law, order, and discipline.

     

In her book, The Politics of God (1992), Kathryn Tanner distinguishes between theological claims that emphasize the alterability of social structures and those that emphasize the permanence of existing structures.  Though she was not addressing the specific issue of the shape of Church life – regulations for worship, prayer, morality, and discipline – her general point can illumine Calvin’s theology of church law.  Insofar as Tanner’s map of positions is useful, Calvin should be seen as articulating a vision of the malleability of social orders and traditional practices.  As Tanner points out, such a position presupposes that social orders are finite realities that are not to be described as participating ontologically in the divine life and thus sharing in the immutability appropriate only to the Creator.  Once again, the theological significance of the distinction between Creator and creature exerts pressure on Calvin’s practical proposals.  His high view of the patterned and law-regulated shape of the Christian life is combined with an equally strong emphasis on the finitude and alterability of all created orders.  To de-sacralize or disenchant church law is not to argue for its insignificance, but to argue for the importance of its malleability in the service of the good of the church in changing historical contexts.

     

It remains for us to explore the third dimension of the church’s “spiritual power” as Calvin saw it.  In addition to explaining doctrine and making laws, the church has the power of discipline, of enforcing morality.  Here we come to Calvin’s theological justification for the infamous institution of the Consistory.  My goal here will be to draw out the theological significance of church discipline within the broad Calvinist theological vision, and thereby to suggest something of the political significance of the Consistory.

     

Kingdon’s chapter, “The Control of Morals in Calvin’s Geneva,” discusses the role of the Consistory in enforcing obedience, discipline, and morality.  Picking up the popular association of Calvinism with notions of austerity, asceticism, repression, and the absence of joy, Kingdon asks, “Where did this moral austerity come from?  Why have Calvinists been more concerned with morals than other men?” (3).  One can certainly wonder whether that is the right way to put the matter.  To say that Calvinists were “more concerned with morals” makes it sound as if the notion of “morality” were a stable entity that is granted more or less importance by differing religious groups.  It would be more plausible to suggest that the very notion of “morality” is always shifting and changing, with different moralities being allocated different kinds of significance in different kinds of religious settings.  Kingdon appears to agree when he denies that “Calvinist theology values the moral life more than other types of Christian theology.”  But Kingdon’s real point here is to minimize the significance of any “theology” supposedly characteristic of Reformed communities.  There is not anything peculiar to Reformed theology, argues Kingdon, that would account for the institutional control of morality by the Consistory in Geneva.  

     

Then Kingdon suggests what he takes to be an anti- or at least non-theological explanation: “The real explanation of the moral austerity that characterized Calvinism from the beginning lies, it seems to me, in the fact that early Calvinist communities enforced morality.”  Kingdon’s thesis does not seem implausible to me.  What does seem implausible is the suggestion that notions of morality and its social enforcement were not, properly speaking, “theological” matters.  Such a view works only if one operates with a naively narrow conception of what counted as “theology” for Calvin and his colleagues and readers.  To put matters succinctly, social conformity to God’s Law as well as the social obligation of authorities to oversee such conformity were at the very heart of what Calvin meant by the right worship of God.  And the theology and practice of this worship of God was itself at the heart of the theological task.  Calvinist worship was not reducible to matters of morality, but it certainly cannot be divorced from morality.  Far from being matters peripheral to the theological scope of things, the institutional control of social life in Geneva by the Consistory resonates with the entire tone of Calvin’s theology of worship.  I am not arguing that the Consistory was a good thing, only that attempts to ignore its theological significance are not persuasive. 

     

In the conclusion to his study of adultery and divorce in Calvin’s Geneva, Kingdon responds to the question, “What are we to make of the Consistory?” in the following way.

 . . . the Consistory was a remarkably intrusive institution.  It felt itself privileged to explore the behavior of the people of Geneva, even their most intimate behavior, in considerable detail.  And . . . it felt itself licensed to require that this behavior be changed.  In this it resembles institutions dedicated to social control in modern totalitarian governments.

Kingdon’s study bears out what the Register of the Genevan Consistory makes clear: that the Consistory was far more involved in regulating domestic and social life in Geneva than it was a mechanism for enforcing religious orthodoxy and for policing heresy.  In Kingdon’s words, it was an “institution dedicated to social control.”  On that there is little doubt.  Furthermore, it would be true to say that, in some respects, its social function “resembled” the function of modern totalitarian governments.  Yet putting the matter this way also flattens some important and interesting differences.  Any kind of institutional intervention into the sexual lives of its citizenry for the purpose of changing behaviors is an interesting topic.  Any such institutions would require the backing or support of a powerful ideology.  But all ideologies are not reducible to the bare facts of their social functions.  There are questions to be asked about the fabric or texture of the ideologies themselves.  This chapter has explored the Calvinist ideology of sanctification, obedience, and worship – especially as those themes are registered in the institutional framework of the Reformed Church and its Consistory.  No formal “resemblances” should obscure the reality that the Genevan Consistory was not a “totalitarian government.”  It did not function as a political institution under the civil authorities, but rather as an ecclesial institution that worked in relation with civil councils.  That the Consistory wielded the power to require changes in Genevan behavior is a claim that, while true, requires specification to be of much help at all.

     

Unlike the ecclesiastical powers relating to doctrine and law making, the power of discipline concerns the need to address the persistence of sin in the church’s pilgrimage.  Hence, we should see Calvin’s proposals for church discipline as forming an imaginative, institutional, and theological alternative both to the Catholic penitential system and to Anabaptist claims of post-baptismal perfection.  Moreover, the Consistory manifests Calvin’s desire for a disciplined Europe rather than the disorderly and disobedient one that currently prevailed.  Part of the political fallout is that Calvin advocates a different mapping of “spiritual” and “political” power than the mapping suggested by traditional Catholic practices.  Calvin’s account of discipline is, on one level, a rhetorical battle over the interpretation of a small family of Scriptural passages concerning authority, power, ruling, and discipline (viz. Mt 16:19, 18:15f; Jn 20:23; Rom. 12:8; I Cor. 12:28; I Tim. 5:17).  It is, as well, a rhetorical battle regarding the appropriate way to forge continuity with the “courts” of the ancient church.  “For this purpose courts of judgment were established in the church from the beginning to deal with the censure of morals, to investigate vices, and to be charged with the exercise of the office of the keys” (4.11.1).  On these historical and scriptural bases, Calvin says, his opponents establish confession, excommunication, law making, indulgences and the primacy of the Roman see. 

     

A church without discipline is a body without “sinews” holding it together, a community in which “each is allowed to do what he pleases.”  Discipline is a bridle, a spur, a father’s rod (4.12.1).  A church can do without it no more than can a society or a family.  On that level, the church is an organization like any other.  This ministry of discipline includes all levels of criticism and correction, but the most controversial application is the exercise of excommunication.  It is undertaken by a group (the Consistory) in the light of the whole community, and only as a last resort.  But the salient point for our purposes is that the Consistory’s disciplinary decisions do not arrogate to themselves the right of mediating salvation and damnation.  Ecclesial discipline has its rationale, strictly speaking, apart from the economy of salvation.  It is “not our task,” Calvin says, “to erase from the number of the elect those who have been expelled from the church, or to despair as if they were already lost” (4.12.9).  What the church mediates is rather the corrective warning that if the sinner persists obstinately against God’s will then the threat of damnation looms as a likely outcome.  Yet the pastoral aim is the restoration of the repentant sinner to the community of those who participate in the benefits of Christ. 

     

Calvin advocates an alternative institutional embodiment of the Scriptural testimony concerning the keys, binding and loosing, and ruling:

We conclude that in those passages the power of the keys is simply the preaching of the gospel, and that with regard to men it is not so much power as ministry.  For Christ has not given this power actually to men, but to his Word, of which he has made men ministers (4.11.1, written 1543).

One of the sub-themes of this dissertation’s focus on Calvin’s theology of worship is the accompanying indictment of idolatrous localizations of divine power.  Calvin’s picture of finite, creaturely realities is that they ought not ever be pictured as capable of possessing and mediating divine power in such a way that picks them out as ontologically superior to other creaturely realities.  In the above passage we see Calvin’s reticence regarding the theme of ecclesiastical “power.”  His comments show that his political departure from the social vision of Catholicism turns in large part on a different picture of how divine power is mediated in finite realities.  First he mentions that the church’s disciplinary authority is a form of “ministry.”  Second he points out that the authority exercised by the church is not a power possessed by church authorities.  Divine power is the exclusive possession of the “Word,” and is never to be transferred to creaturely realities, be they individuals or institutions.

     

When Calvin wrote these sections on ecclesiastical power in 1543, the theme was developed in conjunction with a treatment of civil power and a reflection on their boundary lines and shared goals.  Calvin’s turn to the third feature of the church’s power emphasizes its political significance: the church’s enforcement of obedience is, of the three, “the most important in a well-ordered state.”  Yet the importance is not a competition over the same jurisdictional turf, for “spiritual polity” is “quite distinct from the civil polity, yet does not hinder or threaten it but rather greatly helps and furthers it” (4.11.1).  The theological rationale Calvin offers here for the spiritual/civil distinction is that the church’s disciplinary power is best seen as the institutional form taken by the persistent need for repentance.  The civil power can coerce, compel, and punish quite apart from the question of whether the sinner’s will complies.  The church exercises its power always in appeal to the will of the wrongdoer by a call to repentance and an invitation to return to the church community.  In a “well-ordered city,” a drunk or a fornicator will be put in jail and hence the civil laws and “outward justice” are satisfied, but the church is not to admit such a one to the Lord’s Supper until he is repentant.  

     

No doubt the union of believers with Christ effects the regeneration of those believers. Thus, they are called to inch forward in whatever tiny increments may be possible, even though their lives – and the life of the Church itself - will continue to be marked by sin.  Calvin finds it necessary to distinguish his notion of progress from Anabaptist perfectionism.  As evident in the original letter to Francis I in 1536, Calvin’s success in distinguishing the Reformed cause from the Anabaptist cause was of considerable political importance.  That maintenance of group boundaries emerges again in Calvin’s talk of sanctification and progress.  It is no surprise that in giving instruction on the shape and form of Christian living Calvin should attempt to demarcate the boundaries between Reformed communities and other, “seditious” minorities.  

     

Calvin specifically singles out Anabaptists in explaining his view that repentance is a life-long task because sin never ceases to harass believers.  

Certain Anabaptists of our day conjure up some sort of frenzied excess instead of spiritual regeneration.  The children of God, they assert, restored to the state of innocence, now need not take care to bridle the lust of the flesh, but should rather follow the Spirit as their guide, under whose impulsion they can never go astray (3.3.14).

To this perfectionist description Calvin responds that “far removed from perfection, we must move steadily forward, and though entangled in vices, daily fight against them.”  Calvin’s depiction of sanctification as a Spirit-authored continual struggle against the power of sin not only affects his rendering of the Christian life, but provides the theological background for why Christian communities need the discipline and monitoring provided by the institution of the Consistory.  Given that even the regenerate are plagued continually by sin, the chances of partaking of the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner are, in fact, quite high, and must be taken seriously.

Conclusion

     

The often subtle and implicit connections between the rhetoric of sanctification and the theme of worship become explicit and practical in Calvin’s sacramental theology.  The “aim” of a rightly functioning church jurisdiction is to guard the sacramental life of the Church in a manner that is distinct from civil power and that is not subject to despotic control by any one individual (see 4.11.4).  The basic rationale for the creation of the social institution of the Consistory is the attempt to codify the call to repentance and obedience in the practice of sharing in the Lord’s Supper. 

     

Calvin’s high view of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the ongoing life of Geneva required some sort of mechanism for guarding the sanctity of the sacrament and the health of the Church in Geneva.  Matters of sacramental symbolism and institutional authority were as intertwined in Geneva as they were in Paris.  The Reformed ideology that characterized the Catholic Mass as an idolatrous eating in the 1534 Placards Affair in Paris also fueled the rationale for the Consistory’s oversight of Reformed sacramental practices in Geneva.  Chapter five will turn explicitly to the symbolic and political role played by the sacrament of Lord’s Supper in the life of Calvinist communities. 

     

The present chapter has attempted to highlight some of the ways that the doctrinal rhetoric of sanctification and its institutional framing contributed to the emergence and fashioning of a new sense of identity and agency in Calvin’s readers.  The doctrinal fashioning of identity and agency characteristic of Calvin’s theological writing calls into question the air-tight division between “religion” and “politics.”  Worship bridges doctrine and practice in Calvin’s writing and in sixteenth century Europe; and the rhetoric of sanctification should not be artificially divorced from its thematic and practical relation to matters of worship.  Calvin’s effort to persuade Europeans to alter their religious lives carried within it an implicit call for a different political landscape.  Rather than arguing for causal connections, I have simply tried to point out the cultural and ideological significance of the rhetorical effects of Calvin’s writing.  At the very least, it is highly problematic to limit the political significance of early Calvinism to what is thought of as Calvin’s explicit political theory.  Calvin’s theological rendering of sanctification as life patterned in accordance with the Law and into the image of Christ must also be seen as part of Calvin’s “political theology.”

Calvin’s explanation of the first four commandments provides texture to the worship that is the chief part of righteousness.  Regarding the first command to have no strange gods before Jehovah, Calvin remarks that what we owe to God should not be transferred to another, namely: 1) adoration [adorationem] and the spiritual obedience of conscience [spirituale conscientiae obsequium]; 2) trust [fiduciam]; 3) invocation [invocationem], and; 4) thanksgiving [gratiarum actionem].  “Thus, steeped in the knowledge of him, they may aspire to contemplate, fear and worship, his majesty; to participate in his blessings; to seek his help at all times; to recognize, and by praises to celebrate, the greatness of his works – as the only goal [unicum scopum] of all the activities of this life” (2.8.16/CR II.278).  It is this life of worship of and obedience to God – the proper “goal” of all human life – that is not to be misdirected elsewhere.  “For it is unlawful to take away even a particle from his glory.”  The danger of transferring God’s glory elsewhere is the focus of the next command.  The second commandment prohibiting graven images is explained by reference to Calvin’s treatment of idolatry in Book I.  The God who is “incomprehensible” by sense perception is not to be represented by visible forms; thus “lawful” worship is “spiritual” worship (2.8.17).  Regarding the Second Table of duties toward neighbor, Calvin concludes, “our life shall best conform to God’s will and the prescription of the law when it is in every respect most fruitful for our brethren” (2.8.54).

 Zachman (1993: 2): “The new definition of grace given by Luther and Calvin [namely, a shift from “renewal” to “assurance”] brought about a corresponding shift in the particular anthropological locus toward which the grace of God is directed.  The locus is no longer primarily the will, as it was for Augustine, but the conscience.”

 Stevenson highlights the notions of agency and activism in Calvin’s theology.  He argues, for example, that predestination concerns a religious posture of freedom from anxiety about one’s worthiness that clears a motivational space for social ethics aimed solely at the good of another in pleasing God.  I agree that this is the space cleared for sanctification and social ethics in Calvin’s thought.  He also sees, in part, the connections between agency, worship, and sanctification: “Christians are not merely to worship God, they are to put themselves in his hands for the massive, indeed global, reclamation project which Christ and his Spirit are working to accomplish” (1999: 64).  Yes, glorifying God entails that human lives are taken up into a participation in God’s historical purposes in the world.  And this broad theological picture entails the restoration of human agency, not its erasure.  This activism, though, need not be pictured as something other than worship.  It is itself part of the honor humanity owes God.  It is not hard to find plentiful testimony to the “activist spirit” of Calvinism in the secondary literature.  (1999: ch. 3, especially p. 63).

 This treatment of the Christian life even circulated as an independent unit as early as 1549 or 1550.  See Battles’ translation: p. 684, n. 1; p. xlii, n. 19; p. lx, n. 65.

 Noteworthy here is Bossy’s claim that in the fifteenth century, Christianity’s main vehicle for moral instruction shifted away from a framework of the seven deadly sins to the Ten Commandments.  (See Bossy: 1985, p. 38).

 Randall Zachmann, in The Assurance of Faith (1993), develops an argument that opposing Luther to Calvin in terms of justification and regeneration has become a common, but misguided, interpretive principle.  See especially pages 1-5 in the introduction for a helpful summary of how pervasively Calvin has been misread as replacing the Lutheran focus on justification with a focus on sanctification, renewal, and obedience.

 See 3.17.5 - “ . . . God’s children are pleasing and lovable to him, since he sees in them the marks and features of his own countenance.  For we have elsewhere taught that regeneration is a renewal of the divine image in us.  Since, therefore, wherever God contemplates his own face, he both rightly loves it and holds it in honor, it is said with good reason that the lives of believers, framed to holiness and righteousness, are pleasing to him” (3.17.5).  Here salvation is clearly described as a way of participating in the divine life.  Here it is formal, and without specific content, but nonetheless reformation into the divine image is what the drama of salvation is about, God seeing God’s own face/countenance marked in the lives of believers.

 See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol 2 (1978), for a helpful discussion of how Calvin’s theological rhetoric funded a form of political resistance that emerged despite Calvin’s own political conservatism on such matters.  

 Hac enim conditione si adoptamur in filios a Domino, ut Christum, nostrae adoptionis vinculum, vita nostra repraesentet (CR II.503).

 Calvin did not respond to Catholic models of participation by dropping the participation metaphors and settling for metaphors of imitation, as did many Anabaptists.  We will have a chance to return to Calvin’s notion of participation in Christ in the treatment of his eucharistic theology in the fifth chapter.

 The social significance of such a claim can only be registered by considering how deeply the Lenten season of repentance had marked the European calendar and rhythm of life.  Bossy details the festive “carnival” that opened the Lenten season, and helpfully explores the social significance of this special season in a religious world where the confession of sins to priests was expected only anually (Bossy: 1985, p. 42f).  

 Three instances of “nostri non sumus” are then mirrored by three instances of “Dei sumus” (CR II.506).

 See Zachman (1993: 141-145).  Put another way: “The order of right teaching and preaching by 1559 is not ‘first law, then gospel,’ as seen in Luther and detected earlier in Calvin, but first the distinguishing of the Father and Lord as Creator from all idols, and then the revelation of God as Father to fallen siners in Jesus Christ, which is the basis, along with the testimony of the law and the work of the Spirit, of our acknowledgment of our sin and poverty so that we take refuge in Christ” (157).

 Describing the Church as the “communion of saints,” Calvin explains, “It is as if one said that the saints are gathered into the society of Christ on the principle that whatever benefits God confers upon them, they should in turn share with one another.  This does not, however, rule out diversity of graces, inasmuch as we know the gifts of the Spirit are variously distributed.  Nor is the civil order disturbed, which allows each individual to own his private possessions, since it is necessary to keep peace among men that the ownership of property should be distinct and personal among them” (4.1.3, added 1559).

 Calvin’s notion of gift-giving shares broad similarities with the theological project being worked out by Kathryn Tanner.  Tanner’s work focuses on the way that the circulation of human goods mirrors the circulation of gifts from God to the world.  Both Tanner and Calvin draw such conclusions because there is a robust notion of God’s created/material gifts in play.  Were redemptive/spiritual gifts the sole concern, circulations of material goods (hence social ethics) would appear alien to theological reflection.  Tanner emphasizes that in a graced economy, gifts circulate non-competitively.  Calvin’s emphasis on the absence of “merit” from the circulation of material goods is probably a close parallel.  See Tanner (2001), ch. 3.

 See Don Compier’s book, John Calvin’s Rhetorical Doctrine of Sin (2001), for a persuasive argument that Calvin’s doctrine of sin was developed with a view to particular sins in the realm of social ethics and institutional issues of power.

 See Kingdon’s essays, “Social Welfare in Calvin’s Geneva,” and “The Deacons of the Reformed Church in Calvin’s Geneva,” both in Church and Society in Reformation Europe (1985).

 For a summary of Calvin’s notion of Jesus Christ as the image of the Father to whom believers are being conformed, see Zachmann (1993: 159-162, 194-198).  Jesus as “image” of God is primarily a theological claim about the person of Christ.  This is the form toward which all believers are being patterned.  But the pattern itself – of dying and rising – involves a claim about the work of Christ.  That Christological pattern is captured nicely by Zachman: “The obedience of Jesus Christ even unto death on the cross represents the fulfillment of that part of the wonderful exchange whereby all the evils that separate us from God are transferred from us to the incarnate Son of God.  However, since Jesus Christ is true God as well as true human, it follows that he did not take all of our evils upon himself to be overcome by them, but rather in order to overcome them for us.  Thus, even though our reconciliation with God is complete on the cross, the victory of the Son of God over all the evils that he took upon himself is accomplished in his resurrection.”

 “By setting forth one God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Scripture distinguishes the true God from all other idols by depicting God the Father as the fountain of all good things not only in relation to the world, but also in relation to the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that it is proper to call the Father the fountain of all divinity.  The term ‘Father’ therefore names God in relation to the Son and Holy Spirit before it describes God in relation to the world or humanity.  The fountain of every good is only known by participation in the triune life of God itself: for the Son and the Holy Spirit bring about our participation in the powers of God that can only come from the Father.  No creature will be able to know or call on God as Father without being engrafted into the Son by the Holy Spirit” (Zachman, 1993: 133).  Contrary to what I first thought, there is considerable similarity between Calvin’s notion of salvation as a participation in the Trinitarian life of God and Kathryn Tanner’s vision of a (Trinitarian) gift-giving framework that reverberates across a number of theological spectrums (See Tanner’s argument in Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 2001).

 “duram, laboriosam, inquietam, plurimque ac variis malorum generibus refertam vitam” (CR II: 515).

 “Ergo vel ignominia, vel paupertate, vel orbitate, vel morbo, vel aliis calamatibus nos affligit” (CR II: 516).

 Paupertas, exsilium, contemptus, carcer, ignominia, mors (CR II: 519).

 “Si vexamur et contemnimur, eo firmiores agimus in Christo radices; si probris ac ignominia notamur, eo ampliore loco sumus in regno Dei” (CR II: 519-520).

 There is a darker side to this pastoral counsel, though.  See 3.6.4-5 for hints about the “others” on the excluded margins of Calvin’s discourse.  Painting Reformed communities into the biblical picture as Jesus’ friends has as its corollary the creation of an “other” who plays the role of Jesus’ enemies and torturers.  See Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) for examples of identity-construction in the face of a powerful “other” in sixteenth century Europe.

 Istae, inquam, cogitationes faciunt, ut quantum animi nostri contrahuntur in cruce, naturali acerbitatis sensu, tantum spirituali laetitia diffundantur.  Unde et gratiarum actio sequitur, quae nulla sine gaudio esse potest.  Quod se laus Domini, et gratiarum actio non nisi ab hilari laetoque pectore emanare potest, nihil autem est quod eam interpellare in nobis debeat, hine apparet quam necessarium sit, crucis amaritudinem spirituali gaudio temperari (CR II: 522-3).

 There may not be an answer to a question I was asked by Graham Ward: What model of the self is at play in Calvin?  I tried, futilely, to answer the question.  Upon reflection, the question is too abstract and speculative for Calvin.  There is no dominant theory of the self, identity, or human nature, but rather an ad hoc borrowing of various anthropologies in the service of a practically oriented anthropology that shifts in perspective from one theological loci to another.

 The same problem attends a comment in the Genesis commentary: “[S]ince the eternal inheritance of man is in heaven, it is truly right that we should tend thither; yet must we fix our foot on earth long enough to enable us to consider the abode which God requires man to use for a time” (1948: 114-115).  Here the significance of the earthly/temporal realm is figured as only part of a pilgrimage which ultimately not at earth but at “heaven.”  Yet the earth/heaven contrast is simply the idiom of Scripture, and carries with it varying kinds of dualisms in differing historical periods.  For Calvin, the main emphases are, first, God’s provision of an earthly pilgrimage that has its value precisely in its position within the wisdom of God’s plans, and second, the orientation of human life toward fulfillment in the uninterrupted enjoyment of God.  The flat-footed charge of otherworldliness risks missing the difference between a denigration of earthly life and an attempt to see it’s value as derivative upon hope for a future of fellowship with God.

 See also Calvin’s treatment of the resurrection in terms of a union with God in 3.25, especially 3.25.2, 10: “The ancient philosophers anxiously discussed the sovereign good, and even contended among themselves over it.  Yet none but Plato recognized man’s highest good as union with God, and he could not even dimly sense its nature.  And no wonder, for he had learned nothing of the sacred bond of that union.”  “[L]et us always have in mind the eternal hapiness, the goal of resurrection . . . If God contains the fullness of all good things in himself like an inexhaustible fountain, nothing beyond him is to e sought by those who strive after the highest good and all the elements of happiness.”

 rectus sit bonorum terrestrium usus (3.10.1/CR II: 528).

 Facessat ergo inhumana illa philosophia, quae dum nullum nisi necessarium usum concedit ex creaturis, non tantum maligne nos privat licito beneficentiae divinae fructu, sed obrinere non potest, nisi hominem cunctis sensibus spoliatum in stipitem redegerit (3.10.3/CR II: 530).

 See Kathy Tanner (2001: ch. 3, especially p. 74) for a helpful discussion of the Christian life as encompassing and fostering differences among believers, a life of creative improvisation on a consistent melody.

 Again, see Kingdon’s essays, “Social Welfare in Calvin’s Geneva,” and “The Deacons of the Reformed Church in Calvin’s Geneva,” both in Church and Society in Reformation Europe (1985).

 See, for example, McGrath (1990: 111-114).  McGrath subtly calls into question the assumption that the Consistory was a tool of moral oppression by suggesting that such an institution was required for the survival of a persecuted minority:  “Lutheranism generally advanced through the sympathy of monarchs and princes . . . Calvinism generally had to survive and advance in distinctly hostile situations (such as France in the 1550’s), in which both monarch and the existing church establishment were opposed to its development.  Under such conditions, the very srvival of Calvinist groups was dependent upon a strong and well-disciplined church, capable of surviving the hostility of its milieu” (111).  Despite McGrath’s claim that Calvin himself “conceived of the Consistory primarily as an instrument for the ‘policing’ of religious orthodoxy” (113), the consensus now is that, in actual function, it dealt more with domestic matters than with matters of orthodoxy and heresy.  McGrath rightly points out that Calvin and the Consistory had little to do with the infamous indictment and burning of Servetus in 1553 (see pp. 114ff).    

 See, for example, the work of Talil Asad, Genealogies and Religion (esp. chs. 3 and 4), and Michael Foucault (Self/Knowledge).  On Foucault, see also John Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity.

 Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, Vol. 1, 1542-1544.  Robert M. Kingdon, ed.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (2000).

 This claim is made by W. Fred Graham in response to Kingdon in Renaissance, Reformation, and Resurgence, ed. de Klerk (1976: 109-110).

 Had Calvin never revised the 1536 edition of the Institutes, one might have had reason to read Calvinist theology as a largely individual affair.  Hopfl (1982) points out that in 1536 the Christian life was described in an “institutional vacuum.”  He meant that the introduction of the external church and secular authorities in the final chapter was not connected to the picture of the Christian life laid out in the main body of the work.  According to Hopfl, the conception of Christians as subject to a “two-fold regiment” was not “thematically integrated into the work” until the final edition of 1559 (pp. 34-5).

 De Externis Mediis vel Adminiculis Quibus Deus in Christi Societatem Nos Invitat et in ea Retinet (CR II: 744).

 Quando non alius est in vitam ingressus nisi nos ipsa concipiat in utero, nisi pariat, nisi nos alat suis uberibus, denique sub custodia et gubernatione sua nos tueatur, donec exuti carne mortali similes erimus angelis.  Neque enim patitur nostra infirmitas a schola nos dimitti, donec toto vitae cursu discipuli fuerimus . . . Quibus verbis paternus Dei favor et peculiare spiritualis vitae testimonium ad gregem eius restringitur, ut semper exitialis sit ab ecclesia discessio  (CR II: 749).

 See, for example, McGrath (1990), p. 127: “[Calvin’s] perception of the possibilities afforded to his particular understanding of the Reformation by the establishment of appropriate institutions (such as the Genevan Academy) and structures (such as the Venerable Company of Pastors), and the exploitation of technology (such as printing) placed him at the forefront of a movement which was from the outset international in its orientation.”

 Much of the teaching on “conscience” followed “christian freedom” – 3.19 – in 1543 and 1553, tying it thematically to justification as well.

 Haec potestas tractanda nunc est, an ecclesiae leceat conscientias obstringere suis legibus.  In qua disputatione non attingitur ordo politicus, sed tantum hoc agitur ut rite colatur Deus secundum praescriptam a se regulam, et spiritualis libertas, quae Deum respicit, salva nobis maneat (CR II: 867-8).

 Forum externum et forum conscientiae (CR II: 868).

 Kingdon, in de Klerk, Church and Society in Reformation Europe (1985: ch. 8).

 Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (1995: 180-181).

 Zachmann (1993: 189-190) helpfully points out that one rationale for the significance of repentance and renewal and institutionalized discipline was Calvin’s sensitivity to antinomianism.  Calvin often attacked those he labed “antinomian” for leading messy and disobedient lives, largely unchanged by the gospel.  Behind Calvin’s vision for the Consistory is a criticism of Catholic authorities – ecclesial as well as political – for failing to foster and maintain a godly civic order.  For Calvin, Catholic Europe was idolatrous not just because its forms of worship violated the First Table of the Law, but also because its social life was in stark contradiction to the life of love and justice embodied by the Second Table.

 Habemus, potestatem clavium esse simpliciter in illis locis evangelii praedicationem; nec tam potestatem esse quam ministerium, si ad homines respicimus.  Non enim hominibus hanc potestatem proprie Christus dedit, sed verbo suo, cuius homines ministros fecit (CR II: 893).

 Given that the Consistory was a form of social discipline that created a culture of surveillance, it is hard not to see similarities to Foucault’s reflections on the panopticon.  The Consistory was not a representation or participation in the eternal and unchanging divine law.  Rather, it was a finite institution intended to serve only as an analagous representation of the divine will in its reliance on Scripture.  But it is not to be seen as authoritative in the sense of mediating divine power, as if divine power were located therein in a special way.  Instead, its nature and function have to do with aiding and helping communities of Christians who are sinful and on pilgrimage, living in the call to conformity to Christ in worship and obedience.  The Register of the Consistory shows that self-surveillance in Geneva took the form of neighbors willing to spy on and report the infractions of one another. But did the invasive gaze of the moral community function simply as a manifestation of the gaze of the divine?  That depends on how one figures the symbolism of God’s gaze.  Calvin himself argued that God’s merciful way of looking at human lives established a liberation from anxiety and oppression.  “Scripture shows what all our works deserve when it states that they cannot bear God’s gaze because they are full of uncleanness” (3.15.3).  Calvin suggests here that God does not in fact gaze at our works, but that if God were to so gaze, it would be to our ruin.  Likewise, the Consistory’s watching is a kind of gaze that aims at human rehabilitation, a gaze that – because it comes from creaturely equals – can be borne and will not destroy.  So the Consistory functioned quite differently than as a simple medium of the terrifying and wrathful gaze of divine judgment.  Insofar as it was a medium of God’s governance at all, it was intended to mediate the merciful provision of an order and pattern that orients human life towards the source of its true happiness.  It therefore should not be seen as simply a refiguring of the omniscient and terrifyingly powerful God into the social sphere.

 “But no one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength to press on with due eagerness, and weakness so weighs down the greater number that, with wavering and limping and even creeping along the ground, they move at a feeble rate.  Let each one of us, then, proceed according to the measure of his puny capacity and set out upon the journey we have begun.  No one shall set out so inauspiciously as not daily to make some headway, though it be slight.  Therefore, let us not cease so to act that we may make some unceasing progress in the way of the Lord.  And let us not despair at the slightness of our success; for even though attainment may not correspond to desire, when today outstrips yesterday the effort is not lost” (3.6.5).  

 Wallace (1988: 33-36) is particularly helpful on the sacramental rationale for the Consistory.

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