John Calvin on How to Use Words in Worship

Chapter 2: Life in the Glorious Theater – Calvin’s Theology of Worship 
“Men are so stupid that they fasten [affigant] God wherever they fashion [affingunt] him” (Institutes I.11.9/CRII: 81).

Chapter 1 attempted to show that matters pertaining to worship and idolatry were at the center of the social and political conflicts in Calvin’s Europe. This chapter begins to show that the theme of worship was central in Calvin’s theological texts as well. Moreover, Calvin’s basic intuitions regarding worship, I will argue, provide the logic for his theological assessments of culture, society, politics and power.
Introduction: Liturgical Metaphysics In this chapter I explore some of the metaphysical assumptions implied in Calvin’s understanding of worship, assumptions suggested by the themes of soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone) and finitum non est capax infiniti (the finite is not capable of the infinite). The development of this metaphysic in Calvin’s doctrine of creation informs and influences his liturgical resistance to what he perceives as the Catholic localization of the holy - in statues and icons, in relics, in the Eucharistic elements, in Kings, in powerful social institutions, and in believers themselves. The next three chapters will examine how Calvin attempts to fashion the lives of his readers in a particular way, paying special attention to the kinds of rituals and practices that are affirmed and proscribed. But in the present chapter I attend to some of basic convictions informing the more practical judgments. These convictions consist largely in the way Calvin pictures the Creator/creature relation, especially the way he pictures the mode of God’s presence to, with, or among created things. So I am not presently interested in everything Calvin has to say about creation or anthropology. Rather, the guiding thread will be how the doctrinal themes of “glory” and “worship” color what Calvin says about human identity, both personal and communal. What I hope to show is that Calvin attempts to affirm God’s presence to nature and history, to the church, and to the faithful without falling prey to what he perceives as the idolatrous dangers of localization.

Calvin framed much of his theological critique of European culture in terms of an idolatrous “localization” of God’s presence and power and thought there were specific dangers attending such an idolatrous cultural and liturgical stance. For Calvin, practical religious problems were connected to problems in the clarity of doctrinal teaching. So for him, idolatrous practices that localize divine presence and power can only happen when proper Creator/creature distinctions are blurred, i.e. when heaven and earth are “mingled.” Whenever finite things are pictured as having the power to convey divine presence and power, then both the infinite God and finite realities have been misunderstood in ways that will distort the fundamental human orientation to God and the social spaces those human communities inhabit. As Calvin sees things, the dangers are manifold. At a general level, governments, social institutions, communities, and individuals will remain idolatrously distorted, bent away from their deepest orientation, which is to render God praise. More specifically, the danger is that reforming communities throughout Europe will continue to face the no-win alternative of either participating with or else being persecuted by the governmental and ecclesial powers confident about their capacity to mediate the divine.

For Calvin, right worship depends on getting the metaphysical distinctions between Creator and creature right. And getting worship right is a first order priority within a theological vision within which human identity is configured in terms of worship and idolatry. Calvin’s theological and doctrinal description of human creatures situates these creatures within a world characterized as a “glorious theater” of God’s works (1.6.2). This entails that human creatures – a special case of all created reality – have as their proper end or goal the worship of God in the form of praise and gratitude for the fatherly goodness of God. This chapter begins to explore the doctrinal correlation between divine glory and the worship appropriate to human lives, paying particular attention to the anthropological significance of this doctrinal matrix for Calvin. Thus I will be sketching some of the basic theological convictions behind Calvin’s doctrinal/political project of forming his audiences into communities who render God praise.

Calvin’s doctrine of creation involves an attempt to characterize the finite world and all finite things as “gifts” of the Creator/Giver and therefore “good,” while avoiding the danger of exaggerating them and thereby “mingling” heaven and earth. Correlatively, Calvin’s rhetorical goal was to dispose his readers to refer all created gifts back to the Father and Fountain of all good without idolatrously inflating the status of the created order. By putting matters this way, I view my argument not as competitive with but as complementary to Engel’s perspectivalism thesis. As Engel puts it, “In order to prevent people from concluding that this special dignity and worth is theirs as an innate or autonomous power, Calvin draws a more negative and sobering conclusion . . .” (1988: 7). Engel explains this dignity/humility tension by appealing to the dignifying effect of God-as-Father talk, and the humbling effect of God-as-Creator/Judge talk. My claim is that, in addition to these perspectival shifts, there is also a certain metaphysics of finitude at work in Calvin that can help illumine his insistence that human dignity is not an innate power. Calvin sought to elicit in his readers a religious imagination that recognized the basic goodness of the world without idolatrously localizing the holy in any particular finite things. Whether this is a good description of the religious imagination actually produced in Geneva is a different matter altogether.

In what follows I will focus largely on the Calvin’s 1559 Institutes, referring to commentaries, letters, and other treatises only when necessary. But first it will be helpful to mention Calvin’s anti-nicodemite writings and their importance for any attempt to understand Calvin’s claims about the centrality of worship.

For Calvin and his contemporaries, the term “nicodemism” referred, broadly speaking, to Protestants who continued to publicly participate in the Catholic sacramental system for one reason or another. There seems to be little scholarly agreement about the nature and scope of the “nicodemite” phenomenon in sixteenth century Europe. Yet if we consider Calvin’s letters and tracts devoted to the topic, the problem was characterized as compromise, idolatry, simulation, fear of persecution, and – interestingly – as a failure to take seriously enough the role of the human body and external rites in the practice of religious worship. Eire shows that the issue of “nicodemism” consistently occupied Calvin’s attention from 1536 to 1562. Thus, during a lifetime of working for reform within France, within Geneva, and throughout repeated revisions of the Institutes, Calvin could never avoid the pressing problem of whether it was appropriate for evangelicals to participate in Catholic rites. The previous chapter’s depiction of the ecclesial and political climate in France sheds some light on why outward participation in Catholic rites would appeal to many evangelicals in France and elsewhere: public support for the evangelical cause was illegal, and at times the persecution was fierce. In the present chapter I do not intend to say much more about this historical issue. Rather, I mention it simply to suggest that an attempt to interpret Calvin’s doctrine of creation from the angle of what it implies about “worship” and “idolatry” is, historically speaking, an attempt to stay close to the heart of Calvin’s practical, rhetorical, and political concerns. Thus the “nicodemite” problem is important to keep in view. Without it, Calvin’s discussion of theological topics like worship and the image of God might mistakenly be interpreted as signaling that Calvin’s theology proper is devoid of interesting questions about bodies, materiality, public space and political power. But Calvin’s doctrine of Creation is an important component of a religious imagination and a correlative praxis that raise exactly these kinds of questions.

Take, for example, a remark in the Genesis commentary (1554). The comment, “Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord,” (Genesis 4:26) signaled for Calvin the reemergence of right worship in a world polluted by Cain’s unacceptable sacrifice. Here Moses “commends the piety of one family which worshipped God in purity and holiness, when religion, among other people, was polluted or extinct.” Seth’s family represents a return to the true worship of God in the midst of an idolatrous world. With that family, “the face of the church began distinctly to appear, and that worship of God was set up which might continue to posterity.” Then Calvin remarks, “Such a restoration of religion has been effected also in our time; not that it had been altogether extinct; but there was no certainly defined people who called upon God; and, no sincere profession of faith, no uncorrupted religion could anywhere be discovered.” In 1554, Calvin looks back thirty years to the beginning of the reform and characterizes it as a return to right worship in idolatrous times. In what follows I explore the theological content of these claims about worship.
Glory and the Fountain of Good 
Within Calvin studies there is a tradition of arguing about the “guiding principle” or “thematic center” in Calvin’s theology. I will not here enter that debate. I merely want to argue that Calvin’s attention to the theme of divine glory within his articulation of the creator/creation relationship – a position nicely expressed in the themes of soli deo gloria and finitum non est capax infiniti – is one of the important centers of gravity in Calvin’s thought and thus cannot be ignored. Adopting this interpretive principle affords two advantages. First, it enables Calvin to be seen within a tradition of Reformed thought that distinguishes him in important ways from Catholics and Lutherans. Second, it enables a productive conversation with what historians of the period tell us, namely, that religious conflicts were in large part conflicts about religious practices of worship and what those practices imply about power, be it divine, ecclesial, or political.

But straight away I need to head off one possible misunderstanding. Because Calvin’s God is terrifyingly and inscrutably sovereign as well as generous and compassionate, Calvin interpreters tend to see Calvin’s God as either a terrifying despot or a gracious father. These interpretive possibilities are important for this project, since I want to explore what Calvin says about the form of human life that appropriately reflects the glory of God. Because Calvin thinks that knowledge of God and self-knowledge are interwoven, we always have to keep in mind how the theme of divine glory is refracted in the lives of human creatures. The human correlate to divine glory, for Calvin, is worship, understood richly as involving adoration, piety, and faith. And what evokes or elicits this adoration is not simply infinite power, but an infinitely good power that expresses itself primarily in terms of giving. And this holds, in spite of the fact that an appropriate fear of God is part of the fabric of Calvin’s understanding of “worship,” as Engel points out in her excellent treatment of Calvin’s “perspectivalism.”

God’s “glory,” along with other descriptors like majesty, splendor, brightness, and power, is a guiding theme in Calvin’s doctrinal articulation of the Creator/creature relation. Later chapters will take up Calvin’s use of divine glory and human worship as resources for thinking about issues of religious and cultural identity in a period of social and political turbulence. But for now I want to focus on Calvin’s use of divine glory in describing God, the created order, and the telos of properly functioning human natures. More specifically, I want to draw attention to links Calvin himself drew between “glory” and the problem of the (dis)continuity between Creator and creation. God’s glory belongs exclusively to God (marking a strict ontological divide), yet all of creation and especially human creatures resemble God somehow, or in Calvin’s words, reflect as in a mirror the divine glory (the continuity across the ontological divide). If metaphors of distance and transcendence suggest the former element, aesthetic metaphors of beauty, brightness, shining, and mirroring suggest the latter. Calvin’s characterization of the created world reveals his struggle to register both the likeness and the unlikeness that obtains between the infinite and the finite. So any attempt to come to grips with Calvin’s “theology of worship” will have to dwell on this doctrinal theme of God’s glory.

Calvin’s Romans commentary (1539) provides an interesting window into how Calvin conceives of God’s glory. Commenting on Romans 1:21, Calvin offers a relatively rare catalogue of divine attributes.

They glorified him not as God [Rom. 1:21]. No idea can be formed of God without including his eternity, power, wisdom, goodness, truth, righteousness, and mercy. His eternity appears evident, because he is the maker of all things – his power, because he holds all things in his hand and continues their existence – his wisdom, because he has arranged things in such an exquisite order – his goodness, for there is no other cause than himself, why he created all things, and no other reason, why he should be induced to preserve them – his justice, because in his government he punishes the guilty and defends the innocent – his mercy, because he bears with so much forbearance the perversity of men – and his truth, because he is unchangeable. He then who has a right notion of God ought to give him the praise due to his eternity, wisdom, goodness, and justice. Since men have not recognized these attributes in God, but have dreamt of him as though he were an empty phantom, they are justly said to have impiously robbed him of his own glory.

Notice that “glory” is not simply one of God’s attributes. “Glory” is that of which God is robbed when the richness and perfection of God’s existence (in terms of the attribute list) is not acknowledged by creatures. This suggests that “glory” characterizes the fullness or richness of the divine life, a counter image to conceiving God as an “empty phantom.”

Calvin uses the theme of divine glory both to pick out God as unique relative to the complex finite reality God created, and also to describe the finite world as mirroring the God who “gave” it into existence. In short, creation – while qualitatively different from its source - bears the marks or traces of its source. This brings us to the important thematic connection in Calvin’s imagination between “glory” and “gifts.”

When Calvin identifies the God of glory in Book I of the Institutes, the primary designations of God the Creator are Giver, Author, Father, and Fount of all good. For Calvin, “the mighty gifts with which we are endowed” point us back to the Creator who gives. Genuine knowledge of God is “that by which we not only conceive that there is a God but also grasp what befits us and is proper to his glory, in fine, what is to our advantage to know of him” (1.2.1). This is the first of many places where Calvin clearly correlates the human response to the glory of God with what is “to our advantage.” Furthermore, knowledge of God that is “proper to his glory” has to do with experiencing God as “Father or as Author of salvation” [patrem vel salutis autorem sentiet, ibid]. It is not enough “simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honor and adore [coli et adori], unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good [fontem omnium bonarum esse], and that we must seek nothing elsewhere than in him” (ibid). The universal impulse to “honor and adore” an infinite Creator-power is not enough, according to Calvin, because it fails to honor the Creator as infinitely good Giver. The fountain-of-good imagery then continues: “no drop will be found either of widsom and light, or of righteousness or power or rectitude, or of genuine truth, which does not flow from him, and of which he is not the cause” (1.2.1). Here standard neo-platonic imagery of cascading goodness provides the framework for Calvin’s discussion of divine glory and human worship. Calvin contends that the Genesis creation story should lead us to “contemplate God’s fatherly love [paternus Dei amor] toward mankind, in that he did not create Adam until he had lavished upon the universe all manner of good things [quam mundum omni bonorum copia locupletasset].” Furthermore, in “assuming the responsibility of a foreseeing and diligent father of the family [providi et seduli patris familias] he [God] shows his wonderful goodness toward us” (I.14.2/CR II: 118).

Divine glory is linked primarily to divine goodness, love, and incomprehensible majesty, at least in Calvin’s description of the Creator/creation relation. The emphasis upon the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will does indeed find a place in Calvin as well, and no doubt sits in tension with the goodness-love pole. But we need not address this complex issue now. Regarding God’s motive in creating, Calvin says, “if the cause is sought by which he was led once to create all these things, and is now moved to preserve them, we shall find that it is his goodness alone.” And this fact should “draw us to his love” (I.5.6). Book I can be read as Calvin’s instructions for reading the world as a theater of God’s glory. He does this by highlighting the themes of divine goodness and love in the book of nature, in the human soul, and in providential history.

In the Genesis commentary (1554), Calvin delineates the appropriate posture for God’s creatures by articulating the two extremes to be avoided.

Some, forgetful of God, apply the whole force of their mind to the consideration of nature; and others, overlooking the works of God, aspire with a foolish and insane curiosity to inquire into his essence (1948: 60).

Knowing God with the aid of the spectacles of Scripture entails rightly calibrating the significance of nature and created realities. But then Calvin can also put the same matter in terms of rendering God glory.

This herald [Moses] therefore approaches, who excites our attention, in order that we may perceive ourselves to be placed in this scene, for the purpose of beholding the glory of God; not indeed to observe them [the works] as mere witnesses, but to enjoy all the riches which are here exhibited . . .” (1948: 62).

Calvin pictures creation as the “scene” in which humanity has been placed for the purpose of “beholding God’s glory.” What is significant is that here divine glory refers not to the terrifying power of God. Rather, the contrast Calvin draws is between observing as “mere witnesses” and enjoying the riches of God’s beneficence and liberality.

The anthropological significance of picturing the created world as a theatre of divine glory comes out in the following introductory remark in the Genesis commentary (1554):

For this is the argument of the book [Genesis]: After the world had been created, man was placed in it as in a theatre, that he, beholding above him and beneath the wonderful works of God, might reverently adore their Author. Secondly, that all things were ordained for the use of man, that he, being under deeper obligation, might devote and dedicate himself entirely to obedience towards God. Thirdly, that he was endued with understanding and reason, that being distinguished from brute animals he might meditate on a better life, and might even tend directly towards God, whose image he bore engraven on his own person (1948: 64-65).

As far as the worshipful orientation to God is concerned, Calvin here characterizes it as reverent adoration, a reverence marked by the ontological distance between human creatures who are part of the created fabric and the Creator who is “Author” of it all. But he adds two other characteristics to this orientation: that this adoration-relation to God carries along within it the deep moral obligation of obedience to God; and that the proper functioning of human reason – illumined by the divine image – involves the continual meditation on a “better life.” Genesis, for Calvin, pictures humanity as surrounded by signs of God’s goodness, obligated to serve the Maker responsible for its existence, and oriented in hope toward the God whose image humanity bears. Here we can see suggestive hints of a theology of worship that is only fully elaborated in the continual revisions of the Institutes, where worship appears as a rich and supple theological category that encompasses the patterning of collective moral life by the divine law (social ethics) and a hopeful orientation to a full sharing in divine glory.

Here I want to press on the problem of what Calvin’s emphasis upon creation-as-gift suggests about the problem of the mode of divine presence. That humans are everywhere surrounded by the “gifts” of God certainly implies a certain kind of relation between finite things and God, and between the human creatures aware of this and the God to whom they are grateful. But those are largely epistemic concerns. What are the metaphysical implications discernable in the epistemology of gratitude that emerges in Calvin’s doctrine of creation? Or again, what kind of metaphysical map orients Calvin’s picture of gifts and gift-giving? Calvin says that the pious derive their assurance from knowing “that the Lord is everywhere at work, and from trusting that his work will be for their welfare” (I.17.11). While Calvin does picture God as active and busy in the world, the language of God’s operations or activity is not easily translated into metaphysical questions about the character of divine presence.

The question here concerns the broad relationship between epistemology and metaphysics in Calvin’s thought. Questions about human knowledge of God are distinct from questions about the mode of God’s presence in the finite world. And Calvin eventually framed his major theological work in terms of knowledge. This makes sense in light of the fact that Calvin wanted to resist notions of sacramental presence that affirmed the efficacy of the presence of grace irrespective of one’s knowledge of it. Yet it would be wrong to interpret this knowledge emphasis as a simple indifference to the metaphysical question regarding the mode of God’s presence in the world. The resistance to certain Catholic notions of divine presence was not equivalent to a simple denial of God’s presence in the world, but a disagreement about how to faithfully characterize that presence. Calvin has plenty to say about the way God is present to creation; namely, God is present as the Giver/Author/Fount of all finite goods and as the providential organizer of history.
B. Worship and the Divinitatis Sensum 
The previous section focused on what Calvin’s claims about God’s glory might imply for how to understand the way in which God is present to finite reality. But now we turn more directly to the existential dimension. Calvin can use a number of terms to characterize the disposition most fitting for God’s human creatures – piety, reverence, awe, and obedience, to name a few. But all these terms share one feature: they are all expressions of knowing and relating to God in the mode of worship. Human creatures have as the end or goal of their natures – when properly functioning – to be worshippers of God. While the classical characterization of happiness as the end of human life is not absent in Calvin’s thought, it does appear that he intends to subordinate happiness to worship as the principal goal of human life. And what distinguishes the worshipful knowledge of the Creator from their knowledge of finite things is the fact that worship has as its appropriate object the infinite Creator and Author of every good. And while humanity may face various inconveniences by their ignorance regarding the existence and nature of other finite realities, ignorance with regard to the proper object of worship manifests the undoing of the human quest for happiness and fulfillment, and undercuts the very possibility of human lives that correspond to the reason for which they were created.

When Calvin describes the worshipful knowledge of God proper to human creatures he emphasizes the self-involving character of such knowledge. Here I will not attempt to offer an exhaustive treatment of Calvin’s theological anthropology. Instead, I will emphasize the role played by the theme of “worship” within his anthropology. What Calvin offers in Book I of the Institutes is a picture of human life properly disposed before the divine Giver of all good gifts in a posture of worship. Of course, Calvin’s anthropology in Book I concerns only humanity in its original, created integrity. Human nature as it now exists under sin, and human nature as it will be glorified in the resurrection, must also be included for a nuanced understanding of Calvin’s anthropology. Sin in the form of idolatry will be discussed later in the present chapter, and will serve as the backdrop to the redemption described in terms of “sanctification” and “justification,” which I treat in chapters three and four.

Calvin arranged the Institutes in terms of a dialectic between knowledge of God and knowledge of self. This means that anthropology depends on rightly configuring the relation between human creatures (or the human community) and God. More specifically, the proper orientation to God is knowledge in the mode of piety and worship, highly self-involving forms of knowing that influence how human communities see themselves. Any accurate picture of what it means to be a human creature requires seeing humans before the face of God. The derivative character of anthropology remedies, thinks Calvin, the human drive to over-estimate their powers and virtues (I.1.2). This drama of humanity before the face of the glorious God will be repeated, though in a new key, in Calvin’s treatment of justification.

Calvin resists characterizing knowledge of God as a presumptuous and speculative quest into the divine essence and instead insists on a more modest awareness of God’s willing and working on humanity’s behalf (I.5.9). The preferred term in this juxtaposition of faithful and unfaithful knowing is “piety,” that “reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces” (1.2.1). Even the rhetorical cast of Calvin’s theological writing evidences an attempt to dispose the reader to a posture of gratitude and adoration, inviting his readers into the very disposition of which he speaks.

For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him – they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him (I.2.1).

These remarks show the radically self-involving character of knowing God. The goal of this pious knowing is “yielding him willing service” and “giving” oneself to God. The language of giving reminds Calvin’s readers that the pious knowledge of God that is inextricably bound with sound anthropological wisdom is also lodged securely in an economy of gifts. Humanity stands before the face of the Author of all good gifts and in response “give” themselves back into God’s hands. Thus when Calvin says that “all right knowledge of God is born of obedience [omnis recta Dei cognitio ab obedientia nascitur]” (I.6.2/CRII: 54-5), the “obedience” in question is a giving of oneself over to the Creator whose (prior) giving accounts for the very existence and well being of human creatures.

In one often quoted passage Calvin puts the matter in terms of head versus heart knowledge:

And here again we ought to observe that we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in the heart. For the Lord manifests himself by his powers, the force of which we feel within ourselves and the benefits of which we enjoy. We must therefore be much more profoundly affected by this knowledge than if we were to imagine a God of whom no perception came through to us (I.5.9).

The human life pictured here is a life of feeling and enjoying the divine favor, a way of living thoroughly affected by the awareness of the benefits of creaturely life. Furthermore, the exercise of divine “powers” is not strictly correlated with human terror before the inscrutable divine will, but with the enjoyment of God’s care and favor. Any failure on the part of human creatures to relate to the Creator in this worshipful mode is pictured by Calvin as a culpable silence amidst a melodious choir comprising the rest of creation (I.5.15). In that sense, human life properly lived is a life of melodious praise, a singing elicited by the God of glory.

I have interpreted Calvin’s anthropology as found in the Institutes in terms of the correlation between the themes of divine glory and human worship. So far I have pointed out that human creatures are built for rendering God praise in a posture of piety and obedience, but I have not yet commented on the specific role Calvin affords to the activity of worshiping God. Calvin turns his attention explicitly to the themes of worship and its distortion in idolatry in a number of different places in the Institutes. And my argument will show that even where the worship/idolatry matrix is not explicit – as in the anthropology developed in Book III – it is nevertheless the assumed doctrinal background. But at present I want to focus on Calvin’s use of the divinitatis sensum, especially its anthropological significance and its contribution to Calvin’s theology of worship.

The paragraph immediately preceding Calvin’s treatment of the divinitatis sensum serves to map its explanatory power and reads as follows:

Here indeed is pure and real religion [pura germanaque religio]: faith so joined with an earnest fear of God [serio Dei timore] that this fear also embraces willing reverence [voluntariam reverentiam], and carries with it such legitimate worship [legitimum cultum] as is prescribed in the law. And we ought to note this fact even more diligently: all men have a vague general veneration for God [promiscue venerantur Deum], but very few really reverence him; and wherever there is great ostentation in ceremonies [caeremoniis ostentatio], sincerity of heart [cordis sinceritas] is rare indeed (1.2.2/CRII: 35-6).

The concept of the divinitatis sensum provides an explanation for the distinction between “real” and corrupt religion, between legitimate worship according to law and illegitimate worship. And Calvin draws these lines of distinction both between vague veneration and real reverence, and also between ostentatious ceremonies and sincerity of heart. For now I want to make two observations. First, the phenomenon of religion is explained by a theological appeal to a doxological description of what it means to be human. At bottom, human creatures are built for and oriented to the activity of worship here characterized as faith joined with fear [timore] of God. And second, the awareness of divinity is not enough by itself, since it can issue in inappropriate expressions of humanity’s basic orientation.

Not until the next subsection will we ask about the role of human bodies in this liturgical anthropology. But already a question arises: if “ostentatious ceremonies” are interpreted as a distorted manifestation of the human orientation to God, and “sincerity of heart” really is the heart of the matter, then does this liturgical anthropology entail a disinterest in human bodies, in external forms of worship, and in publicly recognizable religious observance? I will argue that such conclusions are not warranted.

Calvin’s remarks about the awareness of divinity or the seed of religion [religionis semen] may be familiar to many, but the import of these categories is crucial when seeking the connections between worship and anthropology. “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity [divinitatis sensum] . . . God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty [numinis intelligentiam]” (I.3.1/CRII: 36). Calvin emphasizes that this awareness of God is an essential characteristic of human persons that cannot be erased by sin. But he also claims that the presence of sin distorts this awareness to such a degree that it no longer yields any clear and reliable knowledge of God, and merely serves to render humanity inexcusable in their ignorance and idolatry. Debates surrounding these issues have dominated theology in the twentieth century, and scholars like Engel and Schreiner are suggesting that there are good reasons to move beyond them. At the very least, Calvin makes clear that the original, created condition of humanity is far from some sort of religious neutrality. Rather, created with an inalienable orientation to the infinite Source of their lives, humans are built to be able to see the majesty and wisdom of God in the external world around them. This is why the universe can be described as a “book,” “theater,” or “mirror” in which God’s attributes are displayed.

Yet there is one feature of Calvin’s discussion of the sensus that has received relatively scarce attention, namely, the corporate, social, or public dimension of Calvin’s anthropology. Referring to Cicero’s Nature of the Gods, Calvin remarks, “Yet there is, as the eminent pagan says, no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction [persuasio] that there is a God.” And then a bit further on,

Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all [inscriptum omnium cordibus divinitatis sensum] (I.3.1/CRII: 36).

In these programmatic remarks, Calvin focuses not on individuals, but on nations, peoples, regions, cities, and households. Calvin can also oscillate between individual and corporate descriptions of the corrupted sensum: “For each man’s mind is like a labyrinth, so that it is no wonder that individual nations were drawn aside into various falsehoods; and not only this – but individual men, almost, had their own gods” (I.5.12). Here the corruption of the seed of religion and right worship accounts for the corporate idolatry of nations. But the problem is not simply that social bodies might be uniformly in thrall to an idolatrous national ideology. After all, individualization of the religious impulse – having one’s own gods - here describes a deterioration of the implanted sensum.

So Calvin’s description of the sensum and its corruption in sin bears the marks of an appreciation of the public and social character of the phenomenon of religion. Calvin’s effort to help his readers read the book of nature correctly – by referring all its excellence and beauty to its source – is meant to draw boundaries between the community of the faithful who learn to recognize God in God’s works and those held in bondage to the errors of “the custom of the city” or the “agreement of tradition” (1.5.13). Social bodies of various kinds are squarely in the center of Calvin’s treatment of human identity. Whether human bodies matter significantly in Calvin’s theology of worship is a question that will have to wait. But we can at least say that Calvin’s prioritizing of “sincerity of heart” in matters of religion and worship is not to be read as a sign that Calvin operated with an individualist, interior or private view of religion.

Given Calvin’s experience of the powerful social dimension of religion as evidenced in France, in Geneva, and across Europe, such claims should not be surprising. In fact it would be surprising if Calvin had ignored or denigrated the outward, social, and public dimensions of religion. But Calvin is also aware that the blurry boundaries between religion and powerful social institutions open the door to an alternative account of religion; namely, the dark possibility that religion is nothing but a tool by which the powerful keep the weak in subjection. Machiavelli’s skeptical treatment of religion as a form of social control in The Prince serves as a vivid example of such a voice from Calvin’s world. Calvin does not deny that religion has in fact been used thus by the powerful. But he argues that this historical reality provides no explanation for the origin and persistence of the religious impulse (I.3.2). I point out this issue in order to press on Calvin’s social reading of religion. Precisely because religion is a social reality on Calvin’s interpretation, he has to guard against rival theories of religion that also emphasize the social character of religion. It is significant that Calvin does not respond to the religion-as-tool-of-the-powerful view by arguing that religion is a private and individual matter.

Although the sensum or seed of religion is characterized as obtaining in every individual human creature without exception, the characterization of what issues from a good or a distorted divinitatis sensum is largely social or corporate in nature. But let me close by noting the anthropological function of the concept. It allows Calvin to picture the created world as a “theater of God’s glory,” and it allows Calvin to paint a doctrinal picture of human life as essentially and irreducibly liturgical. What he gives us is a liturgical anthropology. In the following section I will attend to Calvin’s discussion of human faculties, that is, how humans are put together. But the doctrinal language of the sensum describes the orientation of all human life, regardless of just exactly how human bodies and souls are put together. Put simply, the knowledge of God characterized by adoration and worship of the divine majesty is the “end” of human life, the very “law” or “goal” of their creation. It is not immediately clear whether Calvin’s liturgical anthropology elaborated under the rubric of the divinitatis sensum can be integrated with or illumined by his more philosophically oriented development of a faculty-psychology. Wrestling with this question will have to wait until we say a bit more regarding Calvin on human faculties and human natures.
C. Human Nature Before the Glory of God: How Liturgical is the Anthropology? 
In the previous discussion regarding divine glory, worship, and the divinitatis sensum we have had Calvin’s anthropology in view. But the discussion focused on the Creator/creature (or infinite/finite) relation in a rather general way, assessing how Calvin pictures the “end” or “goal” of properly functioning human lives as a worshipful orientation to the Fount of all good. From that discussion we move now into Calvin’s treatment of the imago dei and the relations between body and soul.

How should we view the inter-connections between Calvin’s analysis of body and soul, of the worshipful orientation of all creaturely life, and the importance Calvin attributes to the visible and historically situated bodies of human persons who are oriented to God in the mode of adoration? On the one hand, the question will be how to relate Calvin’s discussion of the divinitatis sensum with his discussion of the imago dei and the smooth functioning of a properly organized human nature. On the other hand, the question will concern how to understand Calvin’s emphasis on the “soul” as the principal seat of the divine image in relation to other kinds of commitments Calvin has to the importance of human bodies and to the public and social character of worship. Is Calvin’s discussion of human nature simply a borrowing from a platonic/neoplatonic strand in the philosophical and theological past? Or is Calvin developing a distinctively Christian anthropology, taking up the classical past in order to bend it theologically?

First, how does Calvin’s characterization of the divine image relate to his discussion of the sensus divinitatis? Engel rightly points out that debates about whether the image of God for Calvin refers to “reason” or to “worship,” that is, to natural or supernatural capacites, are misguided. It is both. Human nature is constituted by an ordered unity between a governing soul and a governed body, where reason and will are the two principal powers of the soul. Yet Calvin’s treatment of the soul/body relation under the rubric of the divine image shows that Calvin relies on a borrowed ontology and metaphysics in order to explain the self’s relations to the body, to the world, and to God. Bouwsma sees in Calvin’s picture of human nature as a “hierarchy of discrete faculties” a reflection of the ancient cosmology of a hierarchically structured universe. This would not be surprising given the claims of renaissance humanists that human beings are a “microcosmos.” But Bouwsma does draw attention to the tension between Calvin’s humanist inheritance and his attempts to utilize the very different biblical language of humans in terms of the “heart”. Right knowledge of God is adoring knowledge that is cognitive, but not in any narrowly rationalist sense: it does not merely “flit in the brain,” rather it extends to the heart and to the affections. Calvin’s discussion of human faculties is an attempt to show the metaphysics of human natures that is at least compatible with such an adoration-relation to the Creator. Put another way, proper ordering between human creatures and God is correlated with a proper ordering within the complex human natures themselves.

Now to the imago dei itself. I will focus on Calvin’s comments about humanity as created in God’s image, even though he also believed that all of creation bears God’s image in a general way. For Calvin, “man is called God’s image because he is like God [quia Deo similis est]” (1.15.3/CRII: 137). This likeness is an imaging or reflection of the divine glory, so that God’s glory “shines forth [refulgeat]” in the mirror of human lives. By making humanity in the divine image and likeness, God would “represent himself as in an image, by means of engraved marks of likeness [insculptas similitudinis notas]” (CRII: 137). Calvin is clear that “even in the several parts of the world some traces of God’s glory shine [partibus fulgere lineamenta quaedam gloriae Dei]” (CRII: 138). But this imago-likeness is peculiar to humankind:

Accordingly, the integrity with which Adam was endowed is expressed by this word [likeness], when he had full possession of right understanding, when he had his affections kept within the bounds of reason, all his senses tempered in right order, and he truly referred his excellence to exceptional gifts bestowed upon him by his Maker. And although the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and heart, or in the soul and its powers, yet there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow (I.15.3).

For Calvin, worshiping God (here, recognizing all goods as “exceptional gifts bestowed upon him by his Maker”) is the activity that defines the proper end of human lives. Lives oriented to this goal are a genuine possibility because of the gift of the divine image that shines in soul and body and orders them appropriately. Having a human nature that is “like” God in some significant sense would eventuate – given the absence of sin - in a life properly oriented to the adoration of the Creator. Of course this “likeness” of the divine image in no way qualifies the ontological divide between finite creatures and the infinite Source of all good, else the divine image would lead to a mutual respect between relative equals rather than a worshipful orientation of finite creatures to an infinite Creator. Calvin’s sensitivity to the danger of “mingling” God and creatures will be evident in his polemics with Osiander, as I will later show.

Calvin looks at what Scripture says about the renewal of the divine image in Christ, and then infers the character of the divine image in Adam prior to its corruption in the fall. From I Corinthians 15:45, Colossians 3:10, and Ephesians 4:24, Calvin concludes:

Now we are to see what Paul chiefly comprehends under this renewal. In the first place he posits knowledge, then pure righteousness and holiness. From this we infer that, to begin with, God’s image was visible in the light of the mind [in luce mentis], in the uprightness of the heart [in cordis rectitudine], and in the soundness of all the parts [partiumque omnium sanitate]. . . . Now we see how Christ is the most perfect image of God; if we are conformed to it, we are so restored that with true piety, righteousness, purity, and intelligence we bear God’s image (I.15.4/CR II: 138).

The primary images here are intellectual light, moral uprightness and purity, and orderliness within. Moreover, “whatever has to do with spiritual and eternal life is included under ‘image’.” Calvin rejects the theory that “image” refers to “dominion,” since the divine image is to be sought “within” and not “outside” humanity; it is “an inner good of the soul.” And it refers to those faculties whereby humanity “excels the remaining living creatures” (1.15.4). So in effect, the method of prioritizing the restoration in Christ delivers an emphasis on piety and righteousness, i.e. things having to do with “spiritual” and “eternal” life. Yet even “spiritual” categories like piety and righteousness, for Calvin, have to do with moral agents acting in public social space, as can be seen in Calvin’s characterization of the imago dei in terms of human lives that conform to divine law.

So the divine image is a sort of reflection of God’s own majesty in a finite medium, a “shining forth” relation between divine glory and human natures. But what is it about human natures that render them peculiarly apt to mirror the divine glory? Here we need to register Calvin’s statements regarding souls and bodies. The term “soul” refers to “an immortal yet created essence,” the “nobler” or “principal” part of human nature, and as such, soul is “something separate from the body” (I.15.2). That the soul is immortal had been Calvin’s view as early as 1532. But immortality is not a synonym for “divine,” and the adjective “created” signifies that the soul is neither an emanation nor a sharing of the divine being. But what does Calvin mean by calling the soul an “essence”? Metaphysically speaking, what is the significance of the claim that “the soul is endowed with essence”? The force of the claim appears to be simply that the soul is a substance that will endure even after its separation from the body. At the very least, then, essential souls are the kind of things that will survive death. Apparently human bodies are not “essences” in this sense. Bodies will not survive death. Yet in humanity’s original created integrity, there would not have been a separation of body and soul at death (because no death), but rather the transformation of both into heavenly glory. What is at stake in Calvin’s insistence on “souls endowed with essence” also relates to what I am calling his “metaphysics of finitude.” Simply put, to insist that souls are created essences is to rule out the possibility that souls are a metaphysical sharing in the divine essence, even if it does imply a certain kind of dualistic subordination of the body. Calvin’s anthropology, like the rest of his theology, is a policing of the frontier between finite creatures and the infinite Creator.

Calvin does not offer an exhaustive description of “souls” and “bodies” in the Institutes. Rather, he attempts to illumine the biblical language about the divine image in humanity by placing it within what was, for him, a plausible mapping of human faculties. The “soul” comprises the powers of understanding and will. The understanding is the “leader and governor of the soul” and distinguishes between approved or disapproved objects, while the “will” chooses and follows the good and rejects and flees what is disapproved (I.15.7). When emphasizing what distinguishes the soul from the body Calvin focuses on the “conscience” that discerns between good and evil and the “intelligence” that conceives of God and grasps what is just and right. On the other hand, when discussing the “body,” Calvin emphasizes the “sense perception” characteristic of “brute animals” that “does not go beyond the body.” The “body” cannot do the things that the soul’s powers can do. The “bodily senses” extend only to material things and not to invisible and spiritual things. The “body” signals what human creatures share with other non-human animals (I.15.2).

So Calvin’s treatment of the imago dei in relation to the constitution of human natures would appear to be a dead end if our goal is to find out how Calvin characterizes the theological significance of specifically human bodies. Here in Book I, he is using the soul/body distinction to map the difference between “intelligence” and “sense perception.” In attempting to delineate the liturgical and political dimensions of Calvin’s anthropology, I am contending that there are interesting theological questions about bodies, materiality, recognizable identities, public space, and political power in Calvin’s theology. This kind of claim, obviously, cannot find any firm footing in the imago dei material we have just discussed. It is rather in Calvin’s subtle and complex view of the danger of idolatry, seen for example in his worries about the “nicodemites,” that the interesting questions about human bodies, social space, and political power begin to crystallize.

In his anti-nicodemite writings, Calvin has a range of concerns about human bodies and their participation in practices of worship that go far beyond characterizing the body in terms of sensory forms of knowing shared with other animals. Still, there appears to me no necessary tension between Calvin’s (alleged) downplaying of the body in his most explicit anthropology and his emphasis upon the importance of the body when it comes to matters of worship and idolatry.

Second, what is the significance of Calvin’s decision to locate the divine image primarily in the soul for the status of human bodies? An initial reading of Calvin on the imago dei in the Institutes might lead one to conclude that for Calvin human bodies have less value than human souls. Calvin collects metaphors from Scripture that, to him, suggest a sharp boundary, a “separation,” between soul and body. The body is the “house of clay” in which we dwell, the corruptible “tabernacle of the flesh” that we put off in death, “prison houses” from which souls are freed in death (I.15.2).

Yet Calvin’s appraisal of the significance of the body cannot be approached flatfootedly, as if Calvin’s writing was simply the consistent working out of a rigorous and consistent principle on such matters. He said different things at different times because differing circumstances exerted pressure from one direction or another. On the one hand, there is the often overlooked dilemma regarding human worship in (what Calvin took to be) idolatrous cultural contexts. For example, the fact that French space was Catholic space made certain kinds of demands on the bodies that inhabited and worshiped within that space. And Calvin was attuned to how these cultural dynamics affected the role of communities oriented toward God in worship, and the need for an alternative social body in which human bodies can worship God without being idolatrously distorted. On the other hand, Calvin felt compelled to refute the claims about the imago dei and human bodies made by a Lutheran pastor and professor named Andreas Osiander, to which we will turn in just a moment.

But before we do, I want to note that some of the secondary literature tends to exacerbate the inattention to the human body that results from looking only at Calvin’s anthropology as it is articulated in Book I of the Institutes. For example, Oberman attempts to assess the uniqueness of Calvin’s interpretation of the imago dei by seeing it as a movement “from ontology to psychology.” Contrasting Calvin’s anthropology with medieval anthropology, Oberman says of Calvin, “In turn, grace does not provide ontological elevation, but psychological reorientation: from miserable alienation to the renewal of the pursuit of happiness” (1993: 271). Oberman’s comment is helpful insofar as he places Calvin’s anthropology in explicit conversation with ancient and humanist discourse about human happiness. But in doing so, Oberman’s analysis reflects how difficult it is to register the importance of Calvin’s treatment of the body and the public space within which recognizable rituals are publicly enacted. Had Oberman suggested how the theme of “happiness” is to be related to the theme of “worship,” perhaps these sorts of questions would have at least been raised. I agree with Oberman that there is a move “from ontology to psychology.” Yet I want to qualify that claim by arguing that the psyche or consciousness is not Calvin’s exclusive anthropological interest, and thus not the sole location of grace and transformation in Calvin’s writing. If reorientation from misery to happiness is related to a reorientation from idolatry to right worship, then this anthropological reorientation carries profound social and political implications within Calvin’s theological framework.
D. Divine Glory, Providence, and Human Agency 
Susan Schreiner – in her discussions of Calvin and the natural order - helpfully points out that Calvin distinguished between the reliability of what can be known of God through nature and through history. In short, history – where the faithful like Job are often oppressed by the ungodly – is a more ambiguous sign of divine glory and goodness than is the natural world (see I.5.10). According to Calvin, the gap between the injustice seen in history and the reliability of God as a just judge and protector of the godly ought to induce in humans a hope for a final judgement where all ambiguity will be erased. Yet Calvin’s awareness of apparent exceptions to God’s providential governance of creation and history gives rise to another problem. Calvin guards against attributing any historical evils to God’s account. This is no novel theological move, but given the rhetorical and doctrinal force of Calvin’s identification of the Creator as the caring Father and Fountain of all good, it is all the more important for Calvin to head off any suggestion that historical injustice is given by God in the same way as “gifts” are.

How might Calvin’s characterizations of divine providence and secondary causes inform his analysis of social and historical change? The temptation is to interpret Calvin flatfootedly. Yet there are numerous factors at play. He sometimes appears as a social conservative, favoring the preservation of the status quo under the guise of natural law and the orders of creation. But his political commitments and views about political change and historical agency cannot be reduced to this conservatism. There was a strand of social progressivism in Calvin that helps explain his own attempts to effect social and ecclesial reform and explains as well the political activism of subsequent Calvinists. Given his resistance to Catholic attempts to preserve a unified social order, and his desire to see a whole array of institutional and social changes, how could Calvin have been a conceptually consistent conservative? Both lines of interpretation can claim legitimacy. I am arguing that whatever is said here cannot ignore the connections between theological claims about the mode of God’s presence to the world and claims about how human agents might appropriately insert themselves within various networks of relations. Thus an inquiry into how Calvin thinks the Creator is present to the finite, created order - an order which includes the realm of social and historical change – is one important dimension of an interpretation of Calvin’s political theology.

For Calvin, human adoration, praise, and gratitude is the appropriate disposition before God not only as God relates to creation as the Fount of all good but also as God relates to the complex social and historical realities as providential governor of the finite world. We see the “presence of divine power shining as much in the continuing state of the universe as in its inception” [non minus in perpetuo mundi status quam prima eius origine praesentia divinae virtutis nobis illuceat]. So for Calvin, the concept “Creator” encompasses “governor” [moderatorem] and “preserver” [conservatorem]. God not only gives existence to all non-divine reality, God also “sustains, nourishes and cares for” [sustinendo, fovendo, curando] everything thus brought into existence. This providential relation is to be tasted as a “special care” and “fatherly favor” towards all that exists (I.16.1/CR II: 144-5).

My effort to approach Calvin’s teaching about providence in order to shed light on how he thinks God is present to the world is not unrelated to Calvin’s own concerns. Calvin himself attempts to craft a doctrinal picture of God’s relation to finite affairs that steers between the errors of a stoically distant god uninvolved in history and an exaggerated immanence of pantheism. Theological confusion on this matter, says Calvin, not only “defrauds [fraudant] God of his glory” but also forfeits what should have been “a most profitable doctrine [utilissima doctrina]” (I.16.3/CR II:146). Even so, for Calvin the affective or existential component of divine providence is of utmost concern. Divine glory is not correlated with human terror or anxiety before an inscrutable tyrant. Rather, humans can take comfort in the fact that they are never the victims of erratic violence but are always under the watchful care of a fatherly Creator. A right knowledge of God’s providential relation to the world frees from all care and anxiety, since knowing that God “so regulates all things that nothing takes place without his deliberation” (1.16.3) provides confidence in all situations.

Calvin’s doctrine of providence, especially his attention to the psychological anxiety of his readers, reminds us that Calvin’s theology was written in large part to give communal shape and identity to reformed groups persecuted throughout Europe and to a reform taking institutional shape in Geneva. In the 1539 edition Calvin added that the faithful know that “when the world appears to be aimlessly tumbled about, the Lord is everywhere at work.” Or again, “however unstable the condition of men may be, whatever changes take place from time to time, they are governed by God” (I.17.11). Because God’s “fatherly favor” is not always evident in tumultuous times, “the thought creeps in that human affairs turn and whirl and the blind urge of fortune,” or that “God were making sport of men by throwing them about like balls” (I.17.1). Here Calvin links the question of the character of divine power and presence to the question of social and historical change. How ought Calvin’s audiences respond when chaos rules, when the whole world looks topsy turvy? Given the social situations of Calvin’s readers, these were gripping questions. In fact the political question was never far beneath the surface. Calvin’s high view of God’s involvement in turbulent upheaval is unflinching. The claim that God is “the true Arbiter of wars and peace, and this without any exception” (I.18.1) is Calvin’s attempt to assure readers that chaos and violence are not signs of God’s absence. The point of Calvin’s insistence that the divine will is the cause of all things, that there are no historical exceptions to God’s eternal decree, is that back behind the chaotic scene of history is God’s eternal and unchanging will. “[W]hat he had from eternity foreseen, approved, and decreed, he pursues in uninterrupted tenor, however sudden the variation may appear in men’s eyes” (I.17.13). Behind the chaotic flux of history there is the calm and steady outworking of the divine will.

But what is God’s providential relation to the sudden and violent social and historical change that constituted the landscape of Calvin and his readers? And what does God’s presence and activity in history imply about the role of finite agents in social and historical change? Schreiener concluded that Calvin’s comments on the relation between divine providence and finite, secondary causes in the unfolding of history are imprecise and unclear. There are other interpretive options, though. Engel argues that Calvin’s various and seemingly contradictory assertions regarding divine providence and human freedom can be reconciled into a complex whole when one takes into account the varying perspectives from which the assertions are made. Trinkaus argues that one should read Calvin’s statements about human freedom with an eye to Calvin’s use of the two-kingdoms distinction between spiritual and political affairs. In my view, Trinkaus’ interpretation is strengthened by the fact that it also makes sense of tensions in Calvin’s life between optimistic renaissance humanist sensibilities, and pessimistic Augustinian Protestant sensibilities. On this view, Calvin affirms human freedom with regard to temporal/political affairs, and denies it with regard to matters of the spiritual life before God. Engel argues that the distinction between will (voluntas) and freedom of choice between good and evil (liberum arbitrium) “enable [Calvin] to affirm freedom of the will as constitutive of human beings and deny freedom of choice as destructive of God’s free grace” (1988: 124). In spite of Engel’s claims, I do not see her position as a distinct alternative to that of Trinkaus, but an elaboration of it.

Does Calvin think “change” in general is good or bad? There are good reasons to think that such a question cannot be answered. To be blunt, Calvin’s theology affords no clear cut conclusions on how he thinks God relates to change, nor on whether Calvin himself is in principle against change (a social conservative) or in favor of it (a social radical). This kind of question fails to advance the discussion. Seeking the outlines of some abstract or generic principle is, I think, an exercise in barking up the wrong tree. Calvin’s basic position is that God’s will is the cause of everything that happens. God decrees everything, in the sense that God actively wills everything that comes to pass, in contrast to willing some things and permitting other things. Thus, everything that transpires in the finite world of nature and history is the outworking of the divine will. And this principle holds whether the state of affairs in question is the stable conservation of long-established social orders and institutional arrangements or whether the affair in question is revolutionary upheaval of social and political structures. On this note Calvin refuses to place God exclusively on the conservative side of protecting order or exclusively on the revolutionary side of actively dismantling sinful structures toward greater justice. In this sense, Bouwsma’s psychological portrait of Calvin as unequivocally resistant to change appears one sided.

Stevenson’s recent work on the relation between providence and politics in Calvin’s thought helpfully explores this political ambiguity. Like Bouwsma, Stevenson sees elements of progressive and conservative strains in Calvin’s writing. But Stevenson disagrees with Bouwsma’s psychological portrait of the “two Calvins.” Stevenson emphasizes that the ambiguity derives primarily from Calvin’s attempt to see the world in the light of Scripture, i.e. from his fidelity to the complex world of the Bible rather than to some theoretical principle.

Attempting to be faithful to Scripture, Calvin saw in God’s providence both liberation from cultural context and an obligation to recognize the presence of God’s will within that context. The conservative dimension to Calvin’s doctrine of providence is thus real and, although superficially paradoxical, not at all incongruous with his theology as a whole. Attempting faithfulness to Scripture, Calvin simply desires politically minded believers to carry in their minds an appreciation of their very human temptations to identify their purposes with God’s purposes rather than the reverse. God does rule and he often does so in surprisingly ordinary and ‘traditional’ ways. Calvin promotes a Christian posture not so much conflicted as attentive – attentive to God’s word in Scripture and to his constancy and activity within history.

Over against Bouwsma’s portrait of a psychologically conflicted Calvin – oscillating between fear of change and calls for radical reform – Stevenson pictures Calvin as trying to bring the complex world of Scripture to bear on the complex realities of Europe. I think Stevenson is right to emphasize Calvin’s worry about the tendency of human communities to identify their endeavors with God’s will, bringing the power of the sacred into the service of humanly devised political schemes.

There is another dimension to the progressive/conservative tension in Calvin’s thought, one having to do with Calvin’s view of power. One of the dominant factors in Calvin’s theological writing was his attention to the many ways that doctrine and practice interweave and inform one another. Calvin’s theological writing was not abstract but cycled back and forth between what he took to be important theological claims and the correlative practices appropriate to such claims. When addressing his readers, he continually directed their attention to the need to abandon any habits of life or patterns of observance that ran counter to the Christian faith and the need to commit oneself to a community where the habits, rhythms, patterns, and practices actually helped conform the community’s life to God’s plans and purposes in the world. This suggests that Calvin was particularly attuned to the way power affected peoples’ lives in a rather local fashion. This might shed some light on the nature of Calvin’s political conservatism.

It was Calvin’s deference for established political power that suggests his conservatism. But given what I have said above about his acute attention to the complex way power forms human lives at the more local level, Calvin’s reticence regarding political revolution might also reflect a kind of wisdom about the way power actually circulated in the lives of his readers. Calvin was not only interested in sovereign forms of power, important as that was. He was interested in the many ways that peoples’ lives were shaped that had little to do with issues of sovereignty. Basically, Calvin realized that overthrowing governments might not lead to the desired results, in the sense that substituting one regime for another may leave more local forms of power – like cultural habits and religious practices - untouched. No doubt Calvin’s politics were conservative. What I am suggesting is that such conservatism stemmed not from a naivete about how power works, but from an acknowledgment of the complexity of the way that power actually came to bear on his readers’ lives.

Asking about Calvin’s theology of cultural change does not get us far because Calvin refuses any distinction in God’s authorship of and responsibility for finite actions/events that are evil and good. God authors or decrees them both. They are both equally the outworking of the divine will. So historical change and finite actions are all always uniformly related to the divine will in the sense that God “decreed” them. Here the pastoral function of doctrine appears to guide the inquiry: Calvin sought above all else to guard against the horror of life lived in an unpredictable, godforsaken universe. Yet if this were all Calvin had to say on the matter, the result would be a divinizing of history itself, a blanket construal of all that happens, and of all presently existing social arrangements, as sacred in the sense that God willed it.

Three other features of Calvin’s doctrine of providence guard against such a divinization of culture and history. First, Calvin argues that God is not uniformly related to finite agents, secondary causes, and created intermediaries. Calvin’s picture of the creator/creation relation evidences no commitment to the claim that finite causes are always respected and preserved by divine causality. Nor is Calvin committed to a picture of God relating uniformly to all of finite reality. Calvin says of inanimate objects like the sun, that while having been “by nature endowed with its own property, yet it does not exercise its own power except in so far as it is directed by God’s ever-present hand” (1.16.2). (Calvin’s position is that God governs not only the “system” of nature but each and every particular in the system, see I.16.4). Calvin argues from the first chapter of Genesis that the existence of light prior to God’s creation of the sun shows that the sun is “merely the instrument that God uses because he so wills; for with no more difficulty he might abandon it, and act through himself” (I.16.2). Thus, Calvin claims that God can, and sometimes does, work without any created causes or finite agents. Calvin’s programmatic statement of the relation between divine providential agency and created intermediaries is that God’s providence “is the determinative principle of all things in such a way that sometimes it works through an intermediary [mediis interpositis operetur], sometimes without an intermediary [sine mediis], sometimes contrary to every intermediary [contra omnia media]” (I.17.1/CR II: 153). So in addition to Calvin’s claim that the divine will is the “cause” of all things, we can add the claim that this divine will is not uniformly mediated by natural laws or secondary causes. This means that it is impossible to interpret the purposes of the divine will simply by analyzing social and political patterns and changes.

For the Christian, the divine plan behind the chaotic flux of history may be inscrutable, but it is certainly there. Thus, the Christian knows God “as the principal cause of things [praecipuam rerum causam], yet will give attention to the secondary causes [causas inferiores] in their proper place” (I.17.6/CR II: 159). So Calvin acknowledges that the faithful cannot simply look past the visible world of finite causes, but he does caution against viewing them outside the scope of the all-encompassing divine decree. With regard to human affairs and social interaction, “a godly man will not overlook the secondary causes.” “In short, for benefits received he will reverence and praise the Lord as their principal author [reverebitur et praedicabit, ut praecipuum autorem], but will honor men as his ministers [sed homines ut eius ministros honorabit].” Moreover, humans are not to overlook “inferior causes” when taking precaution for the future, as if God were best honored by refusing any creaturely helps (I.17.9/CR II: 161). What Calvin offers is a picture of life in the flux of time and space where finite events and things are seen against the background of the providential plan of the infinite Creator. The natural world, culture, and history are affirmed as the God-given arena of human existence, but creation is to be seen and used for what it is and not exaggerated as a self-explanatory reality (the right use of created things will be a theme picked up in Book III).

Second, God can decree evil in such a way that God bears no responsibility or “stain” as a result. It is one thing to say that the divine governance of the world is seen in the stability and rhythms of natural and social life, in the stable institutions that organize social and political life, and even in the movements and changes that are aimed at increasing justice. But it is another thing to affirm the causal presence of providential divine agency to unjust or corrupt orders, institutions, and wars. Nevertheless, this is Calvin’s position. And Calvin is forced to hold such a position because he rejects the doing/permitting distinction that attempts to differentiate between what God actively wills and what God passively permits. The divine will is the cause of everything, and that includes actions and states of affairs that can be described as evil. Book I chapter 18 (new in 1559) is titled, “God so uses the works of the ungodly, and so bends their minds to carry out his judgments, that he remains pure from every stain.” To preserve the purity of the divine will by recourse to divine “permission” will not work, thinks Calvin, because it pictures God sitting in a “watch-tower awaiting chance events” (1.18.1) and denies the comprehensive scope of the all determining and always active divine will. This part of the argument is less than persuasive.

Third, Calvin combines the claim that God’s will is the cause of all things with a paradoxical insistence on the agency, responsibility, and culpability of finite agents. Calvin does not offer a philosophically satisfying account of how these claims are logically compatible. Yet he insists on telling two distinct stories about what transpires on the historical stage. One story concerns the divine control of all historical events. The other story concerns an attempt to register the reality and responsibility of human agents within history. Kathryn Tanner has pointed out that one way to affirm both the sovereignty of God’s providential will and the responsibility of finite moral agents is to picture divine and human action in non-competitive ways. One can easily imagine that God’s will for any particular situation might include human agency. God might just will that some state of affairs come to pass as a result of human deliberation and action. This seems to me the general direction of Calvin’s remarks, even if it cannot synthesize everything he says on the matter. When Calvin says that “we are not at all hindered by God’s eternal decrees either from looking ahead for ourselves or from putting all our affairs in order,” he is addressing practical ethical and pastoral issues raised by his emphasis on God’s all-determining will. No diminution of human agency is implied, since God’s will incorporates and does not compete with human willing. Trinkaus sees Calvin’s insistence on the responsibility of human moral agents as reflecting a humanist tendency in Calvin’s anthropology. Humans are to be busy precisely because their activity is to be seen as part of God’s providential plan, and not as a futile railing against fate. Despite the popular claim that Calvin’s theology of God’s exalted glory is related inversely to human debasement, this competitive framing of divine and human agency seems unable to account for Calvin’s robust sense of human agency and responsibility.

To summarize so far, Calvin describes God the Creator as a gloriously powerful Being worthy of fear and reverence as well as a generous Father, wellspring of all good found in the world, worthy of gratitude and praise. Far from being idle and removed, this glorious God remains actively present in the ongoing affairs of nature and history, sustaining creation in existence and guiding it in accordance with the divine will. Yet it appears that any attempt to ascertain a general principle for how this Creator is present to creation founders. More particularly, the precise nature of God’s providential relation to social and political change is beyond human wisdom and subject to no clear and consistent principles. Viewed against the background of Calvin’s criticism of idolatrous localizations of divine power in Catholic Europe, this view of God’s presence to nature and history is meant to function as a block to any further localizations of divine power. Part of my broad thesis is that the political dimensions of Calvin’s anthropology cannot be ascertained by appeal to his discussion of human agency in Book I of the Institutes. The political fabric of his writing comes into view only when we look at his broad concerns about worship and idolatry, his description of human lives as restored to their created liturgical orientation in sanctification and justification, and his sensitive depiction of how public rituals and practices affect those human lives.
E. Mingling Heaven and Earth: The Debate with Osiander and Servetus 
Calvin developed his theology of soli Deo gloria and finitum non capax infiniti early on, but in the 1550’s Calvin’s arguments with two fellow Protestants reveal that the theological vision was not simply anti-Catholic. Calvin inherited from his patristic and medieval predecessors an appreciation for the importance of drawing the ontological line between Creator and creatures in the right place. In trinitarian terms, making the right kinds of distinctions between the three trinitarian “persons” required that both Son and Spirit be placed squarely on the “creator” side of the divide. Likewise, anthropological discussions required a description of human creatures as situated on the creature, or what-is-not-God, side of the ontological divide. Part of Calvin’s concern in articulating a doctrine of creation – and thus a theological anthropology - was to guard against blurring the boundaries between finite and infinite, creation and Creator.

Calvin’s treatment of God’s triune nature, while not elaborate, functions to achieve two very definite purposes in the flow of the Institutes. First, Calvin repeatedly alerts the reader to his goal of treating the issue with brevity and clarity so that a proper understanding of God’s three-foldness will aid in the reading of Scripture rather than leading astray. Here one of the broader aims of the Institutes as a whole is inscribed into Calvin’s doctrine of God: a presentation of doctrine that will prove useful in the proper interpretation of Scripture. Calvin does not speculate on the character of God’s inner-trinitarian relations because such reflection obscures rather than facilitates a hearing of the word of Scripture. Second, by the 1559 edition Calvin’s treatment of the Trinity is placed within a broader argument about idolatrously distorted pictures of God. This tends to give to the trinitarian discussion a rather epistemological tone. One can know something of God from nature and history, but only with the aid of Scripture is God’s three-foldness made known. And only the true God, the triune God, is worthy of worship and praise. Calvin is content to argue that Scripture’s God lives as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is enough just to assert that these “persons” are distinct yet do not detract from the unity of the divine essence. While Calvin recognizes a certain dynamic or relational movement within the divine life – there is “a kind of distribution or economy in God” (1.8.6) – he is not interested in offering richly textured descriptions of those relations. Calvin anticipates much of recent theology’s attempt to use gift-relations to describe God’s relation to the world and the forms of human life that crystallize thereby. Like many current trends, Calvin pictures human participation in God’s life as a participation in an economy of gift-relations. But unlike some recent theorizing, Calvin does not explicitly develop an account of God's inner-trinitarian life as perfect self giving.

These trinitarian concerns are inseparable from anthropological concerns. Calvin claimed that Servetus “indiscriminately mingles [promiscue permiscet] both the Son of God and the Spirit with created beings generally.” And then he explains further that Servetus “particularly states that the spirits of believers are coeternal and consubstantial with God . . .” (1.13.22/CR II: 109). Servetus comes under fire yet again in a discussion of the soul and the imago dei, as Calvin accuses him of thinking “the soul to be a derivative of God’s substance [traducem esse substantiae Dei], as if some portion of immeasurable divinity had flowed into man [quasi aliqua immensae divinitatis portio in hominem fluxisset]” (1.15.5/CR II: 139). Calvin opposes viewing the soul as a “secret inflowing of divinity [arcanum divinitatis influxum]” (ibid/CR II: 140). Creation “is not inpouring [transfusio], but the beginning of essence out of nothing [essentiae ex nihilo exordium]” (ibid). Osiander too is charged with a similar blurring of boundaries because of his talk of “essential righteousness” and his characterization our conformity to Christ in terms of a sharing of Christ’s “substance” (ibid).

Calvin’s programmatic statement about the divine image is as follows: “For although God’s glory shines forth in the outer man, yet there is no doubt that the proper seat [propriam sedem] of his image is in the soul” (I.15.3/CR II: 136). Calvin affirms that the body participates in the imaging that properly belongs to the soul, “provided it be regarded as a settled principle that the image of God, which is seen or glows in these outward marks, is spiritual” (1.15.3). This claim that the divine image is “spiritual” brings us to Calvin’s arguments against Osiander.

Calvin criticizes Osiander on a number of issues – including the divine image, the necessity of the incarnation, and the nature of justifying grace – but for now we are concerned with the debate about the divine image and human bodies. Osiander is charged with “indiscriminately extending God’s image both to the body and to the soul.” In so doing, he “mingles heaven and earth” (I.15.3). But Calvin himself is willing to extend God’s image to the body, so what is “indiscriminate” about Osiander’s view? Osiander had argued that Christ would have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned. This claim might at first seem irrelevant to claims about the divine image, but Calvin interprets Osiander as arguing that “the body that was destined for Christ was the exemplar and type [examplar ac typus] of that corporeal figure which was then formed.” This would mean, says Calvin, that “man was formed only after the type and exemplar of Christ as man; and thus the pattern [idea] from which Adam was taken was Christ in so far as he was to be clothed with flesh” (I.15.3/CR II: 137). Here form, type, exemplar, and pattern are all terms used to refer to the imaging-relation between God and human creatures. Osiander is interpreted as claiming that it is the body of the incarnate Christ that serves as the pattern for the divine image in humanity.

My interest in Calvin’s argument with Osiander centers on the role played by human bodies in the human orientation to God in worship. Osiander’s theological worry, as Calvin realized, was to affirm that the whole human being is called the image of God, not merely the “soul” part. This worry involved the desire to affirm both the integration of the soul/body composite and the goodness of human bodies. Calvin shares these concerns, but argues that Osiander’s way of marking the significance of the human body indiscriminately “mingles heaven and earth.” So, “although the soul is not man” – a gesture toward Osiander’s worry about the integrity of human natures – “yet it is not absurd for man, in respect to his soul, to be called God’s image” (I.15.3, italics mine). Calvin’s emphasis on the human soul is an attempt to signal what is unique to humans relative to other creatures. Otherwise, readers would lose sight of the antithesis “which raises man above all other creatures and, as it were, separates him from the common mass.”

If Calvin’s interlocutor were claiming that the divine image is restricted exclusively to the human soul, perhaps Calvin’s view that even the body participates in the imaging-relation could be read as an affirmation of the status and significance of the human body. But that is precisely not the case. Calvin is in dialogue with someone who wants to extend the divine image to the human body, and in response Calvin affirms that the principle seat of the divine image is the human “soul.”

In the previous sections of this chapter I have been tracking how Calvin pictures the mode of divine presence in the created world. The present discussion of the divine image is not reducible to but does contribute to this inquiry. How does Calvin picture the mode of God’s presence to human creatures? Are human creatures, unique among all creatures because of the degree to which their souls reflect the divine glory, sites of divine power? Calvin’s debate with Osiander can be read as a debate about the mode of God’s presence to or in created things, human creatures in particular. For Calvin, Osiander operates with a picture of divine presence that is too sacramental, a way of seeing divine power present in humans that materially localizes divine power in an idolatrous way. Put another way, Osiander exaggerates the immanence of God to creation – of divine power to human persons – and thus distorts the boundaries between Creator and creatures. Thus, he “mingles heaven and earth.” Calvin even points ahead to his criticism in Book III of Osiander’s conception of the mystical union with Christ, where the issue is largely the same (see I.15.5). It seems to me that Calvin’s theological anthropology can be read, on one level, as the working out of the finitum non est capax infiniti tendency that characterizes Calvin’s doctrine of creation.

Furthermore, Calvin’s criticism of Osiander’s view of essential righteousness leads to an accusation of both Osiander and Servetus as sharing in the “delusion of the Manichees” (1.15.5). The inclusion of Osiander is, on the surface of things, rather odd. At least with respect to the status of human bodies, Osiander and the Manichaeans were saying exactly the opposite. Osiander was affirming an integrated unity of body and soul in order to emphasize the created goodness of human bodies; Manichaeans emphasized the divinity of the soul in a way that placed the goodness of the body in question. In spite of these contrasting views of bodiliness, Calvin diagnoses what he considers to be a problem common to both camps: wrongly picturing the status of the soul by attributing to it a sharing or participation in the divine essence. Osiander’s affirmation of the body’s goodness does not concern Calvin here. Osiander, like Servetus and the Manichaeans, pictures the soul as a “derivation of God’s substance,” thereby mingling heaven and earth.

The positive thesis that serves as the criterion for criticism is Calvin’s understanding of the “restoration of the image”:

And when Paul discusses the restoration of the image, it is clear that we should infer from his words that man is made to conform to God, not by an inflowing of substance [non substantiae influxus], but by the grace and power of the Spirit [sed spiritus gratia et virtute]. For he says that by “beholding Christ’s glory, we are being transformed into his very image . . . as through the Spirit of the Lord” [II Cor. 3:18], who surely works in us without rendering us consubstantial with God [ut Deo consubstantiales nos reddat] (I.15.5/CRII: 140).

Whether Servetus and Osiander were actually arguing for an “inflowing of substance” or the “consubstantial” nature of the Creator/creature relation is a matter for historical inquiry and is important for any responsible treatment of the complex dynamics of sixteenth century thought. For now, I simply want to point to Calvin’s sensitivity to the principle of finitum non capax infiniti in the development of his anthropology. No doubt the grace and power of the Spirit conform human lives to God, but the presence of this divine power is in no way possessed by human creatures. Creatures are not finite sites of the divine essence. While it is true that even Calvin’s Catholic opponents would agree with this point, there is something distinctively Reformed about Calvin’s position. In sum, Calvin’s theological anthropology registers an acute worry about the boundaries that obtain between finite things and the infinite divine. This anthropological worry echoes a broad and pervasive pattern in Calvin’s theological project: an attempt to describe human lives as participating in the life of God in such a way that there is always a clear ontological boundary drawn between Creator and creature. There is no sharing or mixing, as if the life, power, or being of God could be transferred and mingled with created things. Human participation in the divine life certainly implies a kind of divine presence, but for Calvin it is the infinity or glory of God that demands the further claim that such a divine presence to creatures could never be a localized presence.
The Problem of Idolatry and the Localization of the Holy 
While the issue of idolatry was a profoundly theological one, it was also cultural and political. The daily affairs of many Europeans were suffused with signs and tokens of the divine. Criticizing this cultural and political tendency to locate the divine in a variety of finite things involved an unavoidable disruption to established orders (as I tried to demonstrate in chapter 1). I do not wish to analyze everything Calvin has to say about idolatry. Instead I will focus on how the theme of idolatry intersects with Calvin’s liturgical anthropology and on what it contributes to the question of Calvin’s finitum non est capax infiniti picture of the creator/creation relation. Battles suggests that while Augustine was converted by reading Romans 13:13f, and while Luther’s was captivated by Romans 1:17, Calvin’s change of heart was caused in large part by Romans 1:18-25, especially verses 18 and 25. But even if this particular passage does not bear the psychological weight suggested by Battles, Paul’s description of a world that fails to give God glory, that worships the creature rather than the Creator, was certainly at the heart of Calvin’s theological project.

Chapters 11 and 12 of Book I on idolatry and worship are new material to Book I in the 1559 edition. The content itself is not new, but is borrowed from Calvin’s remarks on the second commandment in earlier editions. Calvin begins by offering arguments based on the second commandment, Isaiah, and Acts 17. The problem can be variously named: “idolatry,” “fashioning” divinity according to opinion [divinitatis propria opinione sibi fabricant homines], desiring “visible figures of God” [visibiles Dei figuras apperterent], attaching a “form” to God [ei forma ulla affingitur], representing God by a “visible image” [visibili effigie representare], seeking “visible forms of God” [visibiles eius formas appetunt] (1.11.1-2/CRII:74-75). Calvin summarizes, “But without exception [God] repudiates all likenesses, pictures, and other signs by which the superstitious have thought he will be near them” (1.11.1). Later I will return to the problem of divine “nearness.” In these statements the problem seems to be visibility, form, and a fictitious nearness. But interpreting Isaiah, Calvin maps the idolatrous confusion in a number of ways. It occurs “when the incorporeal is made to resemble corporeal matter, the invisible a visible likeness, the spirit an inanimate object, the immeasurable a puny bit of wood, stone, or gold.” Here the problem is not only visibility, but materiality, objectivization, and measuring or circumscribing. In all these ways God is “represented falsely and with an insult to his majesty” (I.11.4). So a number of different arguments are running through the critique of idolatry. But the commitment behind it all is the conviction that the infinite Creator is immeasurable “spirit” and as such cannot be confused with physical or visible representations.

Who did Calvin have in mind when speaking this way? He mentions the erecting of statues and the painting of images as representations of the divine as specific examples of idolatry. The Persians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks are mentioned, even though Calvin had his own contemporaries in his sights. He refers to “Greek Christians” when he argues that no distinctions are to be made between statues and icons, “graven images [sculptile]” and “likenesses [similitudinam]” (1.11.4/CRII: 78). His comments on idolatry in the Romans commentary move easily between the idolatry of the heathen poets and that of the Catholic sacramental system. Calvin’s interpretation of the role of images in the Old Testament leads him from worries about Jewish idolatry to “the papists, who prate that there was some visible likeness of God” (I.11.3). Then Calvin links the idolatrous “papists” with his broader anthropology by classifying it as a perennial human danger.

Calvin is forced to deal with the possibility that God was manifestly present in some visible, material forms in the Old Testament. This raised the question of whether Calvin was interpreting the second commandment too strictly, and whether his opponents’ use of images might have good scriptural sanction. Citing the theophanies of the burning bush, the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant, and the dove at Jesus’ baptism, Calvin admits that God “from time to time showed the presence of his divine majesty by definite signs . . .”. But all these signs “aptly conformed to his plan of teaching [namely, the second commandment] and at the same time clearly told men of his incomprehensible essence.” Far from confirming the possibility of “outward representations [externam figuram]” of God, Calvin argues that all these signs undo themselves: Moses cannot see God’s face, the dove disappears, and the cherubim symbolize the concealing of God’s presence (1.11.3). David Steinmetz shows that Calvin’s deconstruction of these apparently straightforward theophanies constituted a response to Luther and Eck who used the Cherubim as an example of the fitness of visible things to disclose the invisible God.

As one might guess, these considerations influenced arguments about the status of the eucharistic elements (to this we will return in chapter five). Calvin himself connects the Old Testament theophanies to the sacramental teachings and practices of the Church. Speaking of the cloud that went before Israel, Calvin says that God

chose to add also his visible presence to remove all room for doubt. But although the words of Moses seem in some measure to include the Lord in the cloud, we must observe the sacramental mode of speaking (sacramentalis loquendi ratio) wherein God transfers his name to visible figures, not to affix to them his essence or to circumscribe his infinity, but only to show that he does not deceitfully expose the signs of his presence to men’s eyes, but that the exhibition of the thing signified is at the same time truly conjoined with them. Therefore, although Moses states that God was in the cloud and in the pillar of fire, yet he does not wish to draw him down from heaven or to subject his infinite glory to visible signs, with which the truth may consist without his local presence.

Here again, Calvin’s understanding of the infinity of divine glory correlates to an acute worry about linking God’s providential presence to nature and history with an idolatrous identification of any “local presence” of God, be that in the cloud or in the sacraments.

These exegetical remarks by Calvin tend to focus on the problem of visibility, and suggest that Calvin opposes true faith to an idolatrous religion of the eyes and the senses: “For they [the cherubim] had been formed to this end, that veiling the mercy seat with their wings they might bar not only human eyes but all the senses from beholding God, and thus correct men’s rashness” (I.11.3). Calvin argues that his resistance to representing God in images is “nothing else but repeating word for word what the prophets have taught” (I.11.5). But it was not so clear to Calvin’s “papist” contemporaries that, for example, their “pictures or statues that they dedicate to the saints” were idols set “in place of God” (I.11.7). When Calvin argues against the Catholic argument for images on the basis of their pedagogical role for illiterate Christians, he does appear to think in terms of ears versus eyes:

In the preaching of his Word and sacred mysteries he has bidden that a common doctrine be there set forth for all. But those whose eyes rove about in contemplating idols betray that their minds are not diligently intent upon this doctrine. . . . For perhaps the covetous fix their minds and eyes more tenaciously upon gold and silver than upon any word of God (I.11.7, underline mine).

Calvin has no qualms with sculpture and painting per se, with the proviso that “only those things are to be sculptured or painted which the eyes are capable of seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perception of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations” (I.11.12, emphasis mine). Nevertheless, when Calvin describes the pre-fall integrity of human creatures, the visible world is capable of being accurately interpreted as God’s handiwork.

Calvin’s critique of eye-oriented religion presupposes both his de-emphasis of sensory knowing in his discussion of the imago dei in body and soul, and his liturgical anthropology of the divinitatis sensum and its idolatrous distortion in sin. Old Testament stories regarding the problem of idols teach that “man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols [perpetuam idolarum fabricam].” The idolatrous distortion of the created human orientation to God “conceives an unreality [vanitatem] and an empty appearance [inane spectrum] as God” (I.11.8/CRII: 80). Obviously, the iconoclastic controversies themselves are a debate about whether this flat-footed way of describing matters is an accurate depiction of what is going on in the liturgical use of icons and statues. But where the question is primarily of Calvin’s perception of what counts as idolatry, and of the rationale that fuels that perception, it is not hard to imagine how Calvin’s theological rhetoric could inspire popular revolts aimed at destroying images.

Until now, we have focused on Calvin’s sense of why idolatrous representations of God are inappropriate to the infinite and immeasurable essence of God. But Calvin also provides more anthropologically-oriented statements about the dynamics of idolatry. The golden calf incident “shows the origin of idolatry to be that men do not believe God is with them unless he shows himself physically present [nisi carnaliter exhibeat se praesentum].” Or again, “Daily experience teaches that flesh is always uneasy until it has obtained some figment like itself in which it may fondly find solace as in an image of God.” This “blind desire” for a visible likeness leads humankind to “set up symbols in which they believed God appeared before their bodily eyes” (I.11.8/CRII: 80). So the problem is not only that God’s majesty is misrepresented but also that human beings and communities become idolatrous parodies of what they were created to be by giving in to the sinful desire to have a god physically and visibly near.

Calvin’s arguments about idolatry were driven by a vision of the impotence of finite things – images, statues, or whatever – to convey the divine presence. And Calvin is well aware that defenders of visible representations of God make a distinction between worshiping a finite thing and worshiping God in and through a finite thing. Yet Calvin’s theological rendering of the idolatrously distorted divinitatis sensum leads him to reject such a distinction. Given the debasement of the human orientation to the divine, there is – subsequent to the Fall - no such thing as an innocent use of representational imagery. This is one issue where Calvin and the Reformed tradition part ways with Luther. Luther, for example, could classify the sacrament of the Mass as a thing indifferent to the life of faith, whereas Calvin classified it as idolatrous and hence saw no room for compromise. This unyielding position regarding rites and ceremonies deemed idolatrous is what informs Calvin’s long-standing debate with those he termed “Nicodemites” (as was discussed in chapter 1). Visible forms of the divine are, for Calvin, neither pedagogical aids for church catechesis nor accommodated liturgical helps for pilgrims on earth. Rather, they are yet one more sign that the adoration-relation between humanity and God has gone awry.

Calvin’s theological attempts to police the boundaries between Creator and creature, infinite and finite, lay very near the surface in his discussion of idolatry. The use of images presupposes that divinity “inheres [inesset]” the finite, that “some power of divinity dwells [inhabitare] there.” “For just as soon as a visible form has been fashioned for God, his power is also bound [alligatur] to it. Men are so stupid that they fasten [affigant] God wherever they fashion [affingunt] him” (I.11.9/CRII: 81). So the metaphors pile up: an idolatrous metaphysics pictures the divine as inhering or dwelling in, bound or fastened to, finite realities. Calvin’s counter-metaphysics, though by no means a well developed system, evidences a desire to render all glory only to the infinite God and to accurately register the incapacity of all finite media to house the divine presence.

This idolatrous localization of the holy, the desire for the physical nearness of divine presence and power, misses the appropriate way to worshipfully relate to God. The “best way to contemplate the divine is where minds are lifted above themselves with admiration [animi supra se admiratione efferuntur]” (I.11.3/CRII: 76). Although the created world reflects the divine glory, Calvin replaces a vision of the religious life that is deeply sacramental with a skepticism about the capacity of finite things to convey divine presence and power. This reference to “minds lifted above themselves” signals a theological theme that Calvin will develop in his understanding of Christian identity and the nature of liturgical practices. Calvin’s doctrine of Creation is, at least in part, the outworking of a theological metaphysics that provides a framework for Calvin’s rejection of Catholic social space and for his construction of a different kind of space. Only by paying attention to this liturgical metaphysic can we begin to understand his uncompromising attitude to a whole cluster of specific practices like the veneration of Kings, saints, relics, and the eucharistic elements.

Calvin’s notion of divine glory – and the appropriate ways in which God is glorified by human communities – is meant to be an extrapolation of God’s creative relation to the world. Up to this point, Calvin’s claims have had virtually nothing to do with specific claims about the way that sinful humans are redeemed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But in the following two chapters I will focus on precisely that shift from the topic of creation to the topic of redemption. The majesty of the triune God and the human orientation to this God in worship, praise, and adoration continues as the consistent melody of Calvin’s writing. But now we turn to consider how that theme is refracted through the lens of human sin and Christ’s overcoming of that sin in his dying and rising.

This chapter restricts itself to issues of God’s creative presence to nature, human nature and history. Chapters three and four turn to Calvin’s description of God’s saving or redemptive presence in the lives of the faithful.

Humans are “in hoc splendidissimo theatro locatus” (1.6.2/CR II:54). In the Institutes, the “theater” imagery appears also at 1.14.20; 2.6.1; 3.9.2.

The only place I need to part ways with Engel – as far as I can tell - concerns her claim that the divine image is both a “dynamic relation” to God and a “substantial endowment” of the human creature (50). At stake here is Torrance’s thesis that the divine image is only a gift and never a possession. Engel is probably right that Torrance’s Calvin is a rather “Barthian” Calvin. But on the debate about whether the divine image can be considered a “possession” for Calvin, I side with Torrance. Engel’s argument in favor of viewing the image as also a “substantial possession” of human creatures depends wholly on what one infers from the metaphorical logic of “engraving” (p. 53), and as such is rather thin. If the issue, at bottom, is whether post-fall humans retain the divine image, one need not affirm that the image is a “substantial possession” to answer in the affirmative. Fallen humanity, for Calvin, retains the image in the sense that they retain a relation or orientation to God, albeit distorted.

Battles recognizes this tension between affirming creation’s goodness without detracting from divine glory when he summarizes the logic of Calvin’s theology (the “calculus fidei”) by pointing to the always only approximating character of theological language that must modestly guard against dangers in the quest for knowing and loving God. “This [scriptural] history, whose midpoint is the incarnation, is best seen as a pathway toward truth which, throughout its length, is fraught with turnings to either side, which to take is disaster. Faithful listening to Scripture prevents us from turning to either side. Truth, then, is an approaching, by human creatures, under divine guidance, to the goal of God their Creator, Redeemer, and Judge” (1996: 173). Battles’ grounds this analysis in a careful consideration of how Calvin often steers between varying theological opponents.

For an overview, see Eire (1986), ch. 7. Other secondary treatments include Francis Higman, “The Question of Nicodemism,” in Calvinus ecclesiae genevensis custos, ed. Wilhelm H. Neuser (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984), 165-70; and two articles by Robert White – “Calvin and the Nicodemite Controversy: An Overlooked Text of 1541,” in Calvin Theological Journal 35 (2000): 282-296; and “Calvin, the Nicodemites and the Cost of Discipleship,” Reformed Theological Review, 56 (1997): 14-27. Relevant writings by Calvin include private letters published in 1537: De fugiendis (CR 5.239) and the first letter of the Duae epistolae (CR 5.239-312); a letter to the duchess of Ferrara written in 1540 (CR 11.326); a letter to friends (Herminjard 7.307-19) written in 1540 and published in 1543 paired with the next relevant work, the Petit Traicte. Finally, the most significant treatise was the 1544 Excuse a Messieurs les Nicodemites, sur la Complaincte qu’Ilz Font de Sa Trop Rigeur (CR 6.601).

Eire (1986): ch. 7 on Nicodemitism.

Calvin’s commentary on Genesis 4:26 (English transl. Eerdmans, 1948).

See Engel’s (1988) “Introduction” for a nice summary of these debates.

For example, Tillich’s A History of Christian Thought, 1968: 263 places the majesty of God at the center of Calvin’s thought.

For example, see Eire, War Against the Idols (1986); N.Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (2000); Oberman (1993) shows that the earliest Catholic responses to Calvin focused not so much on doctrinal positions laid out in the early editions of the Institutes, but rather on his criticisms of religious practices like the veneration of relics. This suggests that Catholics, at least, took the heart of Calvin’s theology to concern practices of worship, especially those like venerating relics which suggested, to Calvin, the localization of divine power in particular finite things (in O’Malley, 1993: 259-262).

There is also something of the overwhelming sublime in Calvin’s doctrine of God, sublime in the sense of awe-inspiring and terrifying. With regard to worship, it is at least clear that the fear of God is a central component of Xan faith. (On this see Oberman, Initia Calvini, 1991: 26-28). Yet in I.15.4 Calvin rejects understanding religion in terms of fear or dread.

Mary Potter Engel, John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology (1988). Engel argues that the variety of seemingly contradictory claims Calvin makes about humankind is due to a frequent shifting of perspective. Her point is that sometimes he discusses humanity from the human perspective, other times from the perspective of God as “Creator” or God as “Father.” While I am emphasizing that worship and piety are crucial features of Calvin’s anthropology, Engel is right to point out that the elements of fear and awe come to the fore when Calvin has God the infinite and glorious Creator in mind, and that the elements of gratitude and love come to the fore when Calvin has God the merciful and gracious Father in mind. Her thesis is as follows: “Calvin’s anthropology is an intricate complex of a wide variety of assertions and judgments about humankind, each one reflecting a different theological perspective. Many of these assertions and judgments support the thesis of pessimism; many the counter-thesis of optimism. Some are undeniably contradictory to one another, supporting the thesis of contradiction. All of these assertions and judgments, however, are held together by a determinable set of distinct theological perspectives which I refer to as the ‘dynamic perspectival structure of Calvin’s anthropology’.” (p. xi).

See Zachman (1993: ch. 5) for a concise summary of Calvin’s doctrine of God, especially for the significance for the Creator/Redeemer framework and for the Trinitarian character of the account.

There is clearly an aesthetic dimension to Calvin’s theology – God’s beauty reflected in the beauty of creation. On this see Calvin’s comments on Romans 1:18, “ . . . though the structure of the world, and the most beautiful arrangement of the elements, ought to have induced man to glorify God, yet no one discharged his proper duty” (1947: 67). Or on the following verse (Rom. 1:19): “By saying that God has made it [i.e. the truth about God] manifest, he means, that man was created to be a spectator of this formed world, and that eyes were given him, that he might, by looking on so beautiful a picture, be led up to the Author himself” (1947: 70).

Romans Commentary (1947: 71-72)

Comm. Zeph. 1:12 – “Since, then the glory of God consists in his justice, wisdom, judgment, power, and other attributes, all who deny God to be the governor of the world entirely extinguish, as much as they can, his glory.” Calvin’s treatment of God’s attributes in Institutes I.10.2 follows a similar line of thought. The context is what can be known of God through creation with the aid of Scripture. This section precedes Calvin’s treatment of what can be known of God only from Scripture (Trinity, Creation, Providence). “God’s attributes are for the most part . . . ‘in solution’ in Calvin’s theology, rather than ‘in precipitate’.” (Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism, p. 143, quoted in Dowey, 1952: 205).

When Calvin uses the term “glory” to refer to the richness of the divine life, he emphasizes a quality of God’s life that is in no way dependent on the response of creatures. But as will become clearer in later chapters on sacramental practices, Calvin can also speak of human creatures dishonoring God or robbing God of glory by violating the transaction of honor implicit in all acts of worship (on this “transaction” aspect, see Eire).

Sometimes Calvin’s resistance to worshiping God in images is tied directly to this conviction about the richness and perfection of the divine life. God’s glory, which is “subject to no defects,” is not to be likened to “the most wretched condition of man” (Calvin on Romans 1:23, 1947:74). It appears that Calvin is arguing not only that images cannot capture the fullness of divine glory, but also that this is a failing at what is most at the heart of who God is in relation to the world. Thus idols fail to capture what is most important for humans to understand about God.

. . . qua non modo concipimus aliquem esse Deum, sed etiam tenemus quod de eo scira nostra refert, quod utile est in eius gloriam, quod denique expedit (CR II: 34).

Interpretations of Calvin’s doctrine of God that emphasize the sovereignty, inscrutability, and terrifying distance of the predestining God must at least deal with this data. Calvin argues that the proper alignment of human lives to divine glory is not oppressive and terrifying, but “befits us” and is “advantageous.”

Oberman, in “The Pursuit of Happiness: Calvin Between Humanism and Reform,” (O’Mally, Izblick, and Chrstianson: 1993, p. 251-283) notes the difference between Calvin’s personal and actively present God, on the one hand, and the distant and impersonally removed God of the Deists a few generations later. In spite of this difference, is it possible that Calvin’s theology – insofar as it tends to de-sacralize the natural, social, and political worlds – contributes to this absenting of God from the world? Calvin rejects picturing the world as a self-run machine in I.16.1. So it is not a matter of trying to see in Calvin a proto-deist, but of asking whether, against his own intentions, his theology lent support to a certain deist development of the doctrine of the God/world relation.

Dowey (1952: 8) notes that all editions of the Institutes begin by framing the discussion in terms of knowledge. Then Dowey remarks, “Calvin is here a kind of Kant, an epistemologist not a metaphysician, with reference both to God and to the world.” Whether and in what way Calvin is a “kind of Kant” is an interesting question. That Calvin is not a “metaphysician” is true but misleading if it is taken to mean that there is no discernable metaphysical commitments in Calvin’s theology.

Calvin can refer to creation as a “manifestation” of God. But the emphasis does fall on the benefits accruing to our knowledge of God’s presence. Commenting on Romans 1:20 (1540), Calvin says, “Yet let this difference be remembered, that the manifestation of God, by which he makes his glory known in his creation, is, with regard to the light itself, sufficiently clear; but that on account of our blindness, it is not found to be sufficient” (1947: 71). Notice that what is here “manifested” is the knowledge of God’s glory.

Oberman lays out Calvin’s reworking of the classical theme of human happiness in his article, “The Pursuit of Happiness: . . .” (in O’Malley, 1993:251-283). The theme can also be seen in the Genesis commentary, where Calvin interprets God’s refusal to admit Adam near the tree of life in terms of the frustration of the pursuit of happiness. “[F]or by these words Adam is admonished that the punishment to which he is consigned shall not be that of a moment, or of a few days, but that he shall always be an exile from a happy life” (1948: 183-184).

Zachman describes this human failure well. The sensus divinitatis refers to “the awareness that there is some god who created us, whose majesty we must worship and adore . . . but this is not the same thing as knowing who the true God is (quis sit Deus) or what God is like (qualis sit).” In light of Calvin’s commentary on Acts 17:24 – “For the true rule of godliness is precisely this, to have a true grasp of who the God is, whom we worship” – Zachman concludes, “The awareness that there is a God . . . is not the same as true religion” (1993: 103).

On this use of “self-involving,” see David Kelsey’s Eccentric Existence. He relies on Donald Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement. Dowey calls this feature of Calvin’s account the “existential” character of our knowledge of God: “The knowledge of God in Calvin’s theology is never separated from religious and moral concern. More exactly, it is never separated from the answer that man gives through worship and obedience when God reveals himself” (1952: 24).

See Margaret Miles, “Theology, Anthropology, and the Human Body in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion,” (1981) for a helpful summary of these three distinct angles of analysis in Calvin’s theology; see also Gerrish, ed., Reformers in Profile (1967: 155).

Dowey (1952: 20) captures the force of this principle nicely. The interrelation of our self-knowledge and our knowledge of God is not “a systematic postulate, but an a posteriori principle true to the biblical picture of God and man. For Calvin, God is never an abstraction to be related to an abstractly conceived humanity, but the God of man, whose face is turned ‘toward us’ and whose name and person and will are known. And correspondingly, man is always described in terms of his relation to this known God: as created by God, separated from God, or redeemed by him. Thus, every theological statement has an anthropological correlate, and every anthropological statement, a theological correlate.”

A different, but interesting, rendering of the anthropological significance of God’s “face” is registered in Calvin’s sermon on the opening verses of John’s Gospel. There, Calvin claims that the image of God in humanity means that in humanity we look God in the face. “It is true that we can contemplate God in all his creatures, but when he manifests himself in man, then it is as though we were looking him in the face, whereas in viewing him in other creatures we see him obscurely and as if from the back. . . . in [creatures] we see, so to speak, his feet, his hands, and his back; but in man we see, so to speak, his face” (quoted in Bouwsma, 1988: 142-43). Or a comment on Romans 1:17, “When we taste the gospel, we indeed see God’s smiling countenance turned towards us, but at a distance; the more the knowledge of true religion grows in us, by becoming as it were nearer, we behold God’s favour more clearly and more familiarly” (1947: 65).

Coniunctam cum amore Dei reverentiam quam beneficiorum eius notitia conciliat (CR II: 34).

Donec enim sentiant homines, Deo se omnia debere, paterna se eius cura foveri, eum sibi omnium bonorum esse autorem, ut nihil extra epsum quaerendum sit, nunquam ei se voluntario ovservantia subiicient; imo nisi solidam in eo felicitatem sibi constituant, nunquam se illi vere ex animo totos addicent (CR II: 34).

Atque hic rursus observandum est, invitari nos ad Dei notitiam, non quae inani speculatione contenta in cerebro tantum volitet, sed quae solida futura sit et fructosa, si rite percipiatur a nobis radicemque agat in corde. A suis enim virtutibus manifestatur Dominus; quarum vim quia sentimus intra nos, et beneficiis fruimur, vividius multo hac cognitione nos affici necesse est, quamsi Deum imaginaremus cuius nullus ad nos sensus perveniret (CR II: 47).

See especially I.12; II.8; and IV.10

Dowey’s concise discussion of worship is helpful (1952: 29-31). “The difference between worship that is acceptable to God and that which is not, is not a matter simply of the intentions of the worshiper, but of the revealed character of the forms used. God prescribes the cult and man must neither add to it nor take away from it.” Dowey also captures the complex human relation to a God who is both overwhelming and generous: “Worship belongs primarily to man’s apprehension of and reaction to God’s numen. The reaction is twofold: man stands awe-stricken in fear, and yet is drawn in love. These two responses are not antithetical, but belong side by side in the pious heart.” Dowey even sees in Calvin resonance with Otto’s phenomenology of religion. “This all comports well with Otto’s celebrated analysis of God as mysterium tremendum and fascinosum.”

Engel (1988:50ff) puts the issue in terms of whether the image of God is a “substantial endowment” or a “dynamic relation.” She argues for the presence of both, due to Calvin’s varying perspectives. Schreiener (1991:55) suggests that the debate about whether the image was lost in the fall depends on whether one defines it in terms of proper relationship to God (which is lost) or in terms of reason and will , a capacity for language, knowledge and culture (of this a remnant remains present in fallen human nature).

Here I am trying to illumine the complementarity of the awareness of God grounded in the sensus divinitatis and the rational capacity of humanity to “know” God as revealed in nature and history. Thus I think Engel is right when she says that the divine image is both the worshiping orientation to God and human reason. Dowey, on the other hand, tends to draw overly sharp distinctions beween the “immediacy” of the sensus divinitatis and the “observation” and “ratiocination” involved in the knowledge of God derived from the external world (see Dowey, 1952: 74-77).

Calvin’s comments in The Necessity of Reforming the Church suggest that it was the connection between worship and publicly embodied rituals that directed him to emphasize the social character of religion. “The very Majesty of God extorts this much from us, that we are unable to withdraw entirely from his service. Therefore, as we cannot evade the necessity of worshipping him, our only remaining course is to seek out indirect substitutes that we may not be obliged to come directly into his presence; or rather, by means of external ceremonies, like specious masks, we hide the inward malice of the heart, and, in order that we may not be forced to give it to him, interpose bodily observances, like a wall of partition” (NRC [1554], from the Comprehensive John Calvin Collection, p. 219).

cf. I.5.4, where Calvin criticizes another explanation of religion, one that accounts for it by characterizing it as the production of human fear and dread. (The literary reference continues to be Cicero’s Nature of the Gods). Calvin charges some of his contemporaries with atheism in De Scandalis).

The term homo adorans – while never used by Calvin as far as I know – seems appropriate. I came across the term in Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, where Wolterstorff cites Alexander Schmemann as the original author of the term.

“Besides, if all men are born and live to the end that they may know God . . . it is clear that all those who do not direct every thought and action in their lives to this goal degenerate from the law of their creation” (I.4.3). Or again, “The final goal of the blessed life, moreover, rests in the knowledge of God” (I.5.1). “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 greateness of his works – as the only goal of all the activities of this life” (II.8.16).

Eire suggested (in a 9/17/01 conversation) that Calvin’s debts to a platonic/neoplatonic worldview can be situated within a post-Erasmian revolution in both epistemology and metaphysics amounting to a denial that the senses provide reliable knowledge and a correlative denial that finite/tangible/sensible things are capable of conveying the infinite. See Eire (1986: 28-36) for a discussion of Erasmus’ platonist/spiritualist anthropology. Zachman (1993: 102) sees platonism in Calvin’s understanding of the conscience. From the fact that Calvin associates conscience with consciousness (conscius) or awareness (sensus), and that Luther associates it with the syllogism of practical reason, Zachman suggests that this may indicate “the Platonic versus Aristotelian influences in their anthropologies.”

Instead of arguing for an exclusive link between the divine image to “reason” (like Battenhouse) or to “worship” (like Niesel), Engel argues for a complex complementarity: “Though from the perspective of God the image of God is most appropriately referred to as true piety, reason is not excluded from the definition of the image. It is included as one of the parts rightly ordered in the full integrity of the self. From the perspective of humankind the image is seen as both reason and piety (worship). Even though there are differences in the definitions of piety in both cases, the pairing of piety and reason in both perspectives is important to note. This close connection between reason and piety in Calvin’ understanding of the image of God, no matter from which perspective, indicates the futility of trying to define the image of God as either reason alone or piety alone” (1988: 50). Ftnt 50 refers to s. 41 on Job 10, s. 12 on Job 3, s. 11 on Job 3, s. 61 on Job 18, s. 12 on Job 3, s. 103 on Job 28, Acts 17:27, Rom. 1:19, Inst. 1.15.6; 2.1.1.

Bouwsma (1988: 78-9) assumes there is something like the bibilical view of human natures. The interpretive question is not whether in Calvin there are these two strands: biblical and classical/philosophical. All agree they are there. The disagreement is whether they sit together like oil and water, unintegrated, as Bouwsma suggests, or whether the classical tradition is subjected to critique and revision by Calvin’s commitment to a biblical anthropology, as Oberman suggests: “it has not been sufficiently noted that Calvin intended to develop a new biblical anthropology by redefining its key terms.” Oberman contends that the borrowing from the classical tradition was critically tested by Scripture. (in O'Malley, Izbick, and Christianson, 1993: 252-3). Oberman confirms Muller’s thesis about the priority of biblical interpretation over philosophical/theological exposition in the development of the Institutes. Concerning body/soul relations, Oberman says, “Calvin wants first to listen so closely to Scripture that both the reality of the world and God’s will are understood. Then, only a posteriori, he assesses how far the classical tradition has succeeded in its effort to solve the basic mysteries of the world” (1993: 257-8).

See Engel (1988) ch. 2 for a clear exposition of the image of God discussion in Calvin scholarship. Engel resists Torrance’s claim that “the wider image in creation reflect God only when it is acknowledged by the narrower image in humankind.” She does so by employing the perspectivalism thesis: from the perspective of the Creator, all creation – nature and humankind alike – image God; from the human perspective, there is a hierarchy of clarity, dull in the body and bright in the soul; from the perspective of the Father, humankind is singled out as the “elect and privileged creature of God” (42) in distinction from nature. In my opinion, Engel’s general interpretive thesis is at its greatest usefulness when she applies it to the problems of the image of God. Other chapters, while helpful, are less compelling.

Proinde hac voce notatur integritas qua praeditus fuit Adam quum recta intelligentia polleret, affectus haberet compositors ad rationem, sensus omnes recto ordine temperatos, vereque eximiis dotibus opificis sui excellentiam referret. Ac quamvis primaria sedes divinae imaginis fueris in mente et corde, vel in anima eiusque potentiis, nulla tamen pars fuit etiam usque ad corpus, in qua non scintillae aliquae micarent (CR II: 138).

Engel is helpful here. Against the weight of opinion that the image “is to be interpreted exclusively through the restored image in Jesus Christ” – including Niesel and Torrance – Engel points out that while the “fullness” of the image is known only in Jesus Christ, there is also a knowledge of the image “through the remnants” in fallen humanity (62).

“Now it will not be difficult to decide the purpose of the whole law: the fulfillment of righteousness to form human life to the archetype of divine purity. For God has so depicted his character in the law that if any man carries out in deeds whatever is enjoined there, he will express the image of God, as it were, in his own life” (II.8.51). See Dowey for helpful discussions of law and obedience in the spheres of creation and redemption (1952: 56ff and 222ff).

In the Psychopannychia – written 1532 and published 1536 – Calvin distinguishes himself from some Anabaptists who teach that the soul is mortal and dies along with the body, “sleeping” until both soul and body are resurrected together. Calvin’s rejection of purgatory and prayers for the dead had opened him to the charge of the holding an Anabaptist position on this matter. But Calvin argues that the soul is immortal, and thus does not die but separates from the body and goes immediately into God’s presence.

“Now, unless the soul were something essential, separate from the body, Scripture would not teach that we dwell in houses of clay and at death leave the tabernacle of the flesh . . .”; “Besides, unless souls survive when freed from the prison houses of their bodies . . .” (I.15.2).

Put this way, it could be argued that Calvin simply reproduces a metaphysics found in the classical philosophers. Yet in commenting on Genesis 2:7, Calvin clarifies that immortality is “annexed” to the imago dei, and thus not a natural property of souls themselves. (OC 23:36; see Oberman in O’Malley, 1993: 268). This way of putting the matter de-emphasizes the notion of possessing a quality and emphasizes the features of human nature that accrue from being rightly related to God the Creator.

Genesis commentary: “Truly the first man would have passed to a better life, had he remained upright; but there would have been no separation of the soul from the body, no curruption, no kind of destruction, and, in short, no violent change” (1948: 180). The created ideal, then, was the glorification of human natures in such a way that the soul was kept in harmony with its body.

Historically speaking, there is no obvious set of pressing questions about human natures or human identities or souls and bodies. Different social and theological contexts will mean that different problems appear more pressing. My interest in Calvin’s use of the sensus divinitatis is driven by an awareness that the questions and issues that were pressing for Calvin will be different from those that appear pressing for modern folks. The opening paragraph of Miles’ essay on Calvin’s view of the human body outlines the importance of this kind of historical sensitivity. But her insightful essay might have been even better had she attempted to take account of the socio-political and theological problems surrounding issues of worship and idolatry. She infers a relative lack of interest in the human body in Calvin’s texts because she focuses on the social conservatism in Calvin’s understanding of “calling” and because she interprets Calvin’s picture of the life of faith as having to do exclusively with a renewed “consciousness.” If Calvin’s understanding of “calling” were seen as an anti-clerical affirmation of the secular occupations of the laity, or if Calvin’s understanding of the life of faith were seen as a criticism of idolatrous religious practices that were public, visible, and bodily, then a different assessment of Calvin on the “human body” might emerge.

Likewise, Bouwsma’s treatment of Calvin’s anthropology tries to situate Calvin’s theological concerns within the tension between the biblical and philosophical influences on Calvin’s thought. This leads Bouwsma to sense an lack of fit between Calvin’s borrowing of body/soul distinctions from the Greek philosophical past and his borrowing of the more holistic, biblical focus upon the “heart” as the center of human beings. This attention to different strands of Calvin’s intellectual debts – and to tensions between these strands – is helpful. But as an interpretive framework is does not go very far in illumining the importance of worship for Calvin’s theological project.

The post-Kantian assumption that reason and understanding are not distinct from “sense perception” but actually require it was not part of Calvin’s thinking about human faculties. (cf Calvin’s assertion that reason and intelligence do not “belong to the body” – I.15.3).

For example, Calvin claims in the Psychopannychia (written 1532) that the divine image simply does not shine in the human body, and he grounds the claim in a worry about idolatrous representation of God: “God himself, who is a Spirit, cannot be represented by any bodily shape” (Tracts and Treatises, 2: 422f). Commenting on this statement (p. 43), Engel argues that Calvin had polemical reasons for saying contradictory things, and that exaggerated claims, like the above concerning the inability of the body to image God, should be taken in a qualified way. I want to press beyond Engel here to ask about how Calvin’s theology of worship, idolatry, and his vision of the boundary between finite and infinite might inform these claims about human bodies. Engel smoothes the edges too easily on this body/soul problem when she claims that “one can conclude that there is no controversy here, for Calvin maintains both sides of the debate” (47). Maintaining both sides of a contradiction is, at the very least, a controversy. Nevertheless, Engel offers an excellent overview of Calvin’s various statements on body/soul relations, and argues persuasively that here perspectival approach can help sort out the confusion (see pp. 161-176). From the perspectives of God as Creator and Redeemer/Judge, both body and soul are similarly cared for, judged, and redeemed. From the human perspective, soul is related to body as greater and lesser, but not as good to evil. With this last distinction, Engel argues that Calvin is not a “dualist.” For Engel, one is a dualist only if one holds the position that the body is evil. She doesn’t consider whether Calvin might be a “dualist” when one has other forms of “dualism” in mind.

See also Calvin’s remarks on Genesis 2:7: “Three gradations, indeed, are to be noted in the creation of man; that his dead body was formed out of the dust of the earth; that it was endued with a soul, whence it should receive vital motion; and that on this soul God engraved his own image, to which immortality is annexed” (1948: 112).

Osiander (1498-1552), pastor at Nuremberg and in 1549 professor at Konigsberg.

Oberman sees this “move” as a paradigm shift away from conversations about substances and accidents, natural and supernatural gifts, towards biblical/relational categories of communion and alienation. “Calvin does not see man as born to ‘exist’ on the highest level of ‘being,’ but to be in pursuit of happiness (felicitas) . . . When the imago dei is lost, then this is not a loss in ‘substance’ or ‘essence,’ but in orientation” (in O’Malley, 1993: 264-6). “Since the fall man is bewildered . . . we are here far removed from the ontological language of tradition” (1993: 265-6).

Schreiener (1991: 33, 113).

Schreiener (1991: 16ff).

Ubi temere mundus volutari in speciem videtur, Dominum ubique operari sciunt . . . quatumvis instabilis sit hominum conditio, quaecunque subinde accidunt vices divinitus gubernari (CR II: 164).

Caeco fortunae impetu volvi et rotari res humanas . . . ac si Deus homines quasi pilas iacando (CR II:154).

Deus bellorum et pacis certus est arbiter (CR II: 167).

Referring to Calvin’s frequent references in Book I to an orderly universe which betrays the grandeur and power of the divine Architect, Trinkaus says, “And all these passages were intended to show that behind the disorderly appearance of natural and human events there lies a reality of order on a scale that is incomprehensible from the puny perspective of man.” Hence Calvin refutes the possible interpretation of chaotic nature and history that concludes that humans have to do primarily with an arbitrary and capricious “fortune” (1983: 321).

Schreiener (1991: 30).

Engel characterizes Trinkaus’ view as an attempt to explain the double-sidedness of divine providence and human freedom in Calvin by appealing to a distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”: “They argue that Calvin affirms human freedom in natural activity, but denies it in supernatural activity” (1988: 142-144). Engel’s attempt to distinguish her interpretation from this one is not successful, and may indicate that perhaps “perspectivalism” has less explanatory power here than on the divine image and body/soul problems.

“Calvin emphasizes that God is the cause of all events, both the ordinary political order and the dramatic reversals of political fortune sometimes experienced by princes” (Engel, 1988: 128). Engel refers especially to s. 48 on Job 12 (CO 33:593, 599).

Interestingly, Dowey’s analysis of conscience emphasizes the same dynamic from another angle. Conscience “is the ground for both conservative and revolutionary principles in society . . . Thus, God binds man by conscience to endure an unjust government and to remain affiliated with an impure church so long as the actual marks of church and state are on them. At the same time, neither bishop nor magistrate can demand divine authority, binding consciences, for arbitrary and heteronomous legislation. A follower of Calvin’s principle here can be, for conscience sake, depending upon the circumstances, either revolutionary or conservative, but never anarchistic or authoritarian with regard to human institutions which God has prescribed for the preservation of order” (1952: 63).

Bouwsma (1988: 81-2). Bouwsma collects a number of quotations that do in fact suggest Calvin’s fear of change. Bouwsma attributes this fear to Calvin’s adherence to an ancient “cosmological model of order.” According to Bouwsma, Calvin “dreaded change,” exhibited an “abhorrence of change,” a “hatred of change.” This analysis accounts neither for the complexity of Calvin’s position regarding social change nor for the basic historical fact that Calvin was a reformer whose efforts aimed at significant ecclesial, social, and cultural change.

Stevenson, William. Sovereign Grace: The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin’s Political Thought (1999).

Stevenson (1999: 143).

As Schreiner put it, “While it may seem harsh to allow for no contingency in the world or to say that the tree that falls on one’s head is divinely willed, that was the price Calvin was willing to pay in order to remove humanity from an unpredictable universe . . . he thought it better for God to decree the ‘evils’ that beset us than to make human beings the victims of a blind fortune or chance under the control of no divine power” (1991: 35).

See also here Calvin’s remarks on the order of the days of creation: “It did not happen from inconsideration or by accident, that the light preceded the sun and the moon. To nothing are we more prone than to tie down the power of God to those instruments, the agency of which he employs . . . Therefore, the Lord, by the very order of creation, bears witness that he holds in his hand the light, which he is able to impart to us without the sun and moon” (1948: 76). Or again, “We acknowledge, it is true, in words, that the First Cause is self-sufficient, and that intermediate and secondary causes have only what they borrow from this First Cause; but, in reality, we picture God to ourselves as poor or imperfect, unless he is assisted by second causes” (1948: 82).

Quamvis naturaliter singulis indita sit sua proprietas, vim tamen suam non exserere, nisi quatenus praesenti Dei manu diriguntur (CR II: 145).

Instrumentum duntaxat quo ititur Deus, quia ita vult; quum posit, eo praeterito, per se ipsum nihilo dificilius agere (CR II: 146).

Oberman contends that Calvin’s conception of how humans engage temporal affairs is an “earth affirming transcending” of Augustine’s (dualistic) frui/uti distinction. Whereas Augustine argued that the faithful are to enjoy God and use earthly goods, Calvin opts for the possibility of rightly enjoying the created world (in O’Malley, 1993: 273-4).

Deum ita impiriorum opera uti, et animos flectere ad exsequenda sua iudicia, ut purus ipse ab omni labe maneat (CR II: 167).

Ac si in specula sedens exspectaret fortuitos eventus (CR II: 168).

Calvin argues as follows: “God does not inquire into what men have been able to do, or what they have done, but what they have willed to do, so that purpose and will may be taken into account” (I.18.4). For Calvin’s argument to work, it would need to be the case that the divine will causes all objective events but not any subjective ones. Yet this is not Calvin’s position, since he agrees that God “not only uses the work of the ungodly, but also governs their plans and intentions.” So the argument doesn’t work. But what is interesting is that Calvin takes pains to preserve the compatibility of the claim that the divine will is the cause of all things with the claim that God the Creator is the Fount of all good.

See God and Creation in Christian Theology (1988), and The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (1992).

A competitive relation between divine and human agency would mean that God’s acting and human acting are figured as a zero-sum game: the more God acts, the less humans act – a calculus of inverse proportions. But if, as Tanner suggests, the divine agent and human agents occupy different ontological categories, then any such zero-sum calculus is misleading.

See especially I.17.3-5

Trinkaus sees in Calvin a picture of a “busy God” in distinction from traditional pictures of God as “passively contemplative, enjoying his leisure.” Bouwsma shows that Calvin did not give up the theological commitment to divine immutability and impassibility, so the contrast is not simply between an idle and a busy God, but with how God’s activity in the world is characterized. Nevertheless, Trinkaus gets Calvin right regarding the affirmation of human agency: For Calvin, “a busy God worked through busy men, who by their activity improved their position in the world as far as this corresponded to the divine project, and by this means furthered and cast glory upon that project” (p. 327 in The Scope of Rennaissance Humanism, 1983).

See, for example: Margaret Miles (1981: 304); Bouwsma (1988: 107).

Calvin’s remarks on Genesis 1:6 reveal that his fear of mixing/mingling heaven and earth is deeply tied to a fear of reversing or undoing the created order itself: “The work of the second day is to provide an empty space around the circumference of the earth, that heaven and earth may not be mixed together. For since the proverb, ‘to mingle heaven and earth,’ denotes the extreme of disorder, this distinction ought to be regarded as of great importance . . . for the first time, a separation was ordained, whereas a confused admixture had previously existed” (1948: 78).

See, for example, Kathryn Tanner’s book Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity (2001), which turns on an fully fleshed out reflection on the gift-giving character of God’s own immanent life. My point is simply that Calvin did not, in fact, develop such an account in the Institutes. On the other hand, all the evidence points to the fact that he certainly could have done so. Looking back to Calvin’s doctrine of God from his treatment of our Christomorphic participation in the divine life in terms of a joyful and loving self-giving to our neighbors without regard for return, one can easily imagine Calvin drawing out these themes more explicitly in Trinitarian terms. My sense is that Calvin thought such reflection as being too distant from the surface of the biblical text’s mere references to “begetting” and “proceeding.” Also, one has to take into account that gift-relations are at the heart of how Calvin describes the Creator/creature relation, so that it would not be right to say that reflections on gift-giving is absent from his doctrine of God; it’s just absent from his treatment of the relations between the three divine “persons.”

In the Psychopannychia (published 1542), Calvin says, “Whatever philosophers or these dreamers [the Anabaptists] may pretend, we hold that nothing can bear the image of God but spirit, since God is a spirit.” Quoted in Battles, 1996: 146.

Imaginem Dei promiscue tam ad corpus quam ad animam extendens, coelum terrae miscet (CRII: 136-7).

I think Engel’s perspectivalism thesis misses the point here.

Whether this hypothesis can illumine Osiander’s theology of culture is another question worth pursuing. Does an exaggerated divine immanence sacralize the social and political realms for Osiander in a way that parallels Calvin’s criticism of French Catholicism? I will leave this to those who know Osiander better than I do.

On the materiality of lay devotion in the late medieval and early modern period, see Eire (War Against the Idols, ch. 1) and Elwood (The Body Broken, ch. 1).

Battles, 1996: 142

simulacra, picturas, aliaque signa quibus eum sibi propinquum fore putarunt superstitiosi (CRII: 75).

“For surely there is nothing less fitting than to wish to reduce God, who is immeasurable and incomprehensible, to a five-foot measure!” (I.11.4).

See Calvin’s commentary on Exodus 3:4: “For since the nature of God is spiritual, it is not allowable to imagine respecting him anything earthly or gross; nor does his immensity permit of his being confined to place” (quoted in Dowey, 1952: 5).

“For they consider that they have acquitted themselves beautifully if they do not make sculptures of God, while they wantonly indulge in pictures more than any other nation” (I.11.4).

After referring to examples of sacrilege and idolatry found in Ovid, Calvin says, “So at this day, where superstition reigns, and not the word of God, they acknowledge no other kind of sacrilege than the stealing of what belongs to churches, as there is no God but in idols, no religion but in pomp and magnificence” (1947: 106).

“This people [the papists] with fervid swiftness repeatedly rushed forth to seek out idols for themselves as waters form a great wellspring gush out with violent force. From this fact let us learn how greatly our nature inlcines toward idolatry . . .” (I.11.3).

Steinmetz (1995: 60-61).

Commentary on Exodus 13:21 (CO XXIV.145b), quoted in Dowey, 1952: 13 (ftnt. 46).

Margaret Miles (1981) points out Calvin’s preference for a religion of the ears as opposed to a religion of the eyes.

Dei maiestas, quae oculorum sensu longe superior est, ne indecoris spectris corrumpatur (CRII: 83).

Genesis Commentary: “The intention of Moses, in beginning his Book with the creation of the world, is, to render God, as it were, visible to us in his works” (58). “We know God, who is himself invisible, only through his works . . . This is the reason why the Lord, that he might invite us to the knowledge of himself, places the fabric of heaven and earth before our eyes, rendering himself, in a certain manner, manifest in them” (59). (1948:58-59).

On Calvinist iconoclasm, see Eire (1986), especially chs. 4 and 8.

Cf. Calvin’s comments on Romans 1:25, on the sin of idolatry: “For religious honor cannot be given to a creature, without taking it away, in a disgraceful and sacrilegious manner, from God: and vain is the excuse that images are worshipped on god’s account, since God acknowledges no such worship, nor regards it as acceptable; and the true God is not then worshipped at all, but a fictitious God, whom the flesh has devised for itself” (1947: 78). Calvin speaks to the danger of any alleged representations of the divine in his treatise on The Necessity of Reforming the Church: “As to the charge which they bring against us for discarding images, as well as the bones and relics of saints, it is easily answered. For none of these things ought to be valued at more than the brazen serpent, and the reasons for removing them were not less valid than those of Hezekiah for breaking it. It is certain that the idolomania, with which the minds of men are now fascinated, cannot be cured otherwise than by removing bodily the source of the infatuation” (NRC [1554], from The Comprehensive John Calvin Collection, p. 216).

That the Reformed tradition represented a distinct theoretical and practical approach to worship in distinction from both Lutheran and Anabaptist Protestants is one of the central theses of Eire’s (1986) chronicle of the development of this tradition. See especially his chapter 7 for the Nicodemite issue. Also important here is Zachman: “Unlike Luther, who roots all idolatry in the conscience’s portrayal of God to itself (that is, that God is gracious to those who do good works and are aware of no sin in themselves), Calvin roots all idolatry in the carnal conceptions that we form of God on the basis of the taste of divinity we acquire from God’s powers depicted in the works of creation. Idolatry for Calvin not only involves a false confidence in our own works – seen both in superstition and in hypocrisy – as it does for Luther, but also involves the carnality of our worship in images and ceremonies, thereby confusing the Creator with creation. Calvin therefore counters idolatry not only by properly depicting the grace of God in Jesus Christ, but also first by properly depicting God as Creator, thereby overcoming the confusion between Creator and creature. Calvin is also much more concerned with externals such as images and ceremonies than was Luther, categorically rejecting them, even apart form false trust of conscience in them, because they directly contradict God’s nature as Spirit” (1993: 110). This analysis resonates with that offered by Eire. Elsewhere (pp. 232-243), Zachman shifts the emphasis by arguing that Calvin’s resistance to idolatrous rites and ceremonies derives from the importance Calvin places on correspondence and conformity between the life of faith and God’s righteousness. See also p. 74ff, 122-3.

In spite of Calvin’s biting remarks about Catholics craving to have a god physically “near,” Calvin’s continual use of the metaphor of “accommodation” to illumine the way God makes Godself accessible to humanity could be seen as an alternative construal of “nearness.” Battles notes that Calvin figures the Incarnation not so much as the site of maximal presence in a finite medium but as the paradigmatic case of divine accommodation: “At the center of God’s accommodating himself to human capacity, however, is his supreme act of condescension, the giving of his only Son to reconcile a fallen world to himself. If accommodation is the speech-bridge between the known and the unknown, between the infinitesimal and the infinite, between the apparent and the real, between the human and the divine, the Logos who tented among us is the point from which we must view creation, fall, and all history, before and since the incarnation” (1996: 119).

Zachman spells out this shift from creation to redemption nicely: “God the Creator cannot be known as Father by creatures who have by their sin destroyed themselves as children of God, unless God sets himself forth as the Father of sinners in the person of the only-begotten Son. Those who profess to worship the Creator, even on the basis of scriptural witness, without embracing Jesus Christ, do not worship the true God, because they cannot know God as Father apart from Jesus Christ . . . In Adam, we lost every good thing that God the Father had bestowed on us for the life of our souls; in Christ, God manifests himself as Father to us by freely bestowing upon empty sinners every good thing” (1993: 140).