The Perseverance of the Saint

Reformed theologians, developing the tradition of Augustine, have always asserted that the work of perseverance is a divine work. There are of course many, many texts in scripture that urge believers to vigilance and perseverance to the end, to remain in Christ, to continue in faith and so on. There are texts that certainly speak as if one could deny the faith: 1 Cor 10:12, 2 Peter 2:1 and so on. Most theological traditions have taught therefore that it is possible to lose grace once one has received it. The question is, however, whether God could allow a grace he begins to be ruined by the power of sin. Even Augustine divided into two the kinds of grace a believer receives, asserting that only the second, superadded grace produced perseverance.

The Reformed have explained by contrast that perseverance is a work of God through believers. In regeneration and faith he gives a grace that is unbreakable and inadmissible. The admonitions and warnings of scripture are ‘the way in which God himself confirms his promise and gift through believers’ (Bavinck). Apostates in scripture (1 Tim 4:1, Heb 6:4-8, 2 Pet 2:18-22) must, according to Bavinck, be either examples of incomplete apostasy (later restored?) or evidence of false conversion in the first place. Although I think his exegesis at these points is stretched beyond credulity, the theological point is a good one: God cannot/does not break his own covenant. Even Paul mourning over Israel does not conclude the God is faithless, even when Israel is. Rightly construed, the doctrine is of great assurance and comfort to Christian believers – God who begins a good work in us will bring it to completion (Phil 1:6). The Christian life is not fragile, even though it is tested.

The Reformed doctrine should not however be the cause of undue speculation as to one's inward state, nor should it give rise to passivity. The warnings to endure and to resist should be heeded as serious, live warnings. Hebrews seems able to blend at the one time both admonishment and comfort – which makes sense if perseverance, like the Christian life itself, is a divine work in and through human agents. It is the inward search for a certainty of one's own heart that makes the doctrine disturbing just when it is claimed it should be most comforting. Actually, the comfort lies in the character of God revealed in Christ: that even human weakness is not an obstacle to his purposes. But human fickleness is not thereby excused.

Perhaps the doctrine is better labelled 'the perseverance of the saint'. There was one who perservered, and so we can hold out confident hope of our own perseverance. Christ was tempted in every way as we are but did not sin.

My piece on Calvin in The Australian

Here!

Calvin and Hermeneutics

I have been invited to contribute an essay to a proposed collection on Calvin for his 500th birthday next year.

The suggestion was to write something on Calvin and Hermeneutics. But of course, there already exist some general overview articles on this subject, and even a book-length study by TF Torrance. So, an angle is needed.

Furthermore, I would rather not write a piece of merely antiquarian interest. It seems to me that if we have nothing to learn from Calvin's hermeneutical theory and practice, then the piece isn't really worth writing.

So: what do you think my angle should be?

I could:

• take a key text and see how Calvin handles it in his commentaries and his institutes, as an examplar of his method;
• write about his polemic against allegory, and against Origen in particular (preferring Chyrsostom);
• compare and contrast Calvin with a near contemporary - Bucer perhaps?
• or see how Calvin's hermeneutic was received by Anglicans (if it was);
• I would love to see how Calvin's interpretational method was embodied in the Geneva Bible, an English Bible translated by English exiles living and working alongside Calvin in Geneva while Mary was Queen;
• or, an essay entitled 'the Postmodern Calvin?' Calvin and Derrida, perhaps??! Calvin and Ricouer? (Someone has already tried this, admittedly)
• It would be cool to see how someone like, say, John Milton or some other more literary figure learnt from Calvin, if he did.

Any other ideas?

Postmillennialism - a temptation best avoided

Calvin taught a doctrine of the Church “continuously actualised within history”2 - the Body of Christ is not invisible, or concealed, but rather, although humbled in condition by suffering, actually glorious. Calvin’s eschatology has three socially-oriented consequences for the Church: to gather its members (i.e. mission), to discipline itself continuously, and to unite:3

What is the purpose of the coming of Christ but to gather us all together in one from this dispersion in which now we are wandering? Therefore the nearer His coming the more we must bend our efforts that the scattered may be brought together and united and that there may be one fold and one Shepherd.4

Calvin is not so hopeful about society outside the Church: the only remade society is the fellowship of believers. Yet the state (or prince) could play a positive role in the advancement of the Kingdom. In Book 4 of the Institutes he describes the work of governments which may indeed be called “Christian”.5 In the seventeeth and eigthteenth centuries it was Puritanism and Pietism that extended this optimism to the coming of the millennium within history. This was “post-millennialism”, as espoused by John Owen, Jonathan Edwards and later, James Orr,6 for example.7 Secular versions of post-millennialism have been foundational to the national identities of many modern states. Dutch theologian Hendrikus Berkhof goes so far as to propose that world has been sanctified by the rise of “Christian” culture.8

But Jurgen Moltmann is right to critique this “historical millennialism” on the grounds that it has been used to legitimate ecclesiastical or political power.9 Biblically speaking, post-millennialism rightly emphasises the binding of Satan (Luke 10:17, 18, John 12:20-32) and urges the Church to mission to the whole world (cf. Rev 7:9). There is a present reality to the reconstitution of society in the Church. We ought to believe in the present rule of the Ascended Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit in the world. However, post-millennialism can not withstand its own historical failure; nor does it properly account for the inevitability of suffering and persecution. It is also a doctrine which in the end emphasises the power of human works to achieve a social utopia in the here-and-now; it is little wonder that this theology is a parent to secular industrial modernism. God is too easy to removed from the post-millennial picture.

1 H.R. Niebuhr, op.cit., p.218
2 T.F.Torrance, op.cit, p.60
3 ibid., p.62
4 Comm. on Heb 10:25, tr W.B. Johnston, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963)
5 J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, tr. Battles, F.L., (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), IV.20.3-4. See R. Doyle, op.cit., p. 45
6 J. Orr, The Progress of Dogma, London, (J.Clarke & Co, 1901)
7 D.Bloesch, op.cit., p.193
8 H. Berkhof, Christ The Meaning of History, tr. L. Buurman, (Grand Rapids: Baker. 1966); a position he modifed in Christian Faith - An Introduction to the Study of the Faith, tr. S.Woudstra, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1979), pp.511-21
9 J.Moltmann, The Coming of God - Christian Eschatology, tr. M. Kohl, (London: SCM Press, 1994), p.192

Calvin on the Extent of the Atonement

My study-room mate here at Wycliffe Hall Russ Dawn has written an interesting paper comparing and contrasting Calvin and his successor Theodore Beza on a number of issues including the extent of the atonement. On the one side, R.T. Kendall claims that Calvin did not teach limited atonement, whereas Beza did. Richard Muller replies that Calvin upheld the Lombardian distinction between the sufficiency of Christ's work for all sin, and the efficiency of that work only for the elect. Russ writes:

It is not patent, however, that Muller has resolved all the difficulties. Kendall, for instance, recognises that in Calvin's thought, although Christ died for all, he only intercedes for the elect, but he interprets this as meaning that for Calvin the decree of election 'is not rendered effectual in Christ's death but in His ascension and intercession at the Father's right hand'...In the final analysis, the best reading is that Beza and Calvin differed on the extent of the atonement. Beza clearly espoused limited atonement, whereas Calvin could clearly express universal atonement, or less clearly express limited atonement. It would be a selective, possibily tendentious reading of Calvin to place him squarely in the camp of the doctrine of limited atonement.

Kendall himself says:

Fundamental to the doctrine of faith in John Calvin is his belief that Christ died indiscriminately for all men. Equally crucial however is his conviction that, until faith is given, 'all that He has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.'

This might be somewhat overstating the case: Calvin doesn't clear up this issue because it wasn't a question he was particularly conscious of. However, what IS interesting in Calvin is that (as with the sacraments) faith, which is itself a gift of God by the Holy Spirit, is needed in order to effect salvation.

Gerrish on Calvin's Eucharistic Theology

Gerrish's great book Grace and Gratitude is one I have owned for many years and only now begun to read. Oh well...

He gives a terrific account of Calvin's pastoral concern in the Institutes - something he learnt from Erasmus; but that in addition, as his work progressed, he was concerned to show the thematic (if not 'systematic')coherence of his theology. The doctrines are not isolated entities, but mutually conditioning of one another.

Hence Gerrish's study of Calvin's Eucharistic theology is a useful introduction (well, so far!) into Calvin's work as a whole.

What becomes clearer in the final edition of Calvin's Institutes is that the father's liberality and his children's answering gratitude, or lack of it, is not only the theme of the Lord's Supper but a fundamental theme, perhaps the most fundamental theme, of an entire systeme of theology. It conveys, as nothing else can, the heart of Calvin's perception of God, humanity, and the harmony between them that was lost by Adam and restored by Christ...Piety and its renewal as faith in Christ - that is the subject of Calvin's pietatis summa. The holy banquet is simply the liturgical enactment of the them of grace and gratitude that lies at the heart of Calvin's entire theology... (p. 20).

Calvin and the Calvinists?

For me, an intriguing question still persisting in historical theology relates to the relation between John Calvin and those Reformed thinkers that followed in his wake. The classic Barthian-influenced account, repeated many times, is that Calvin - as the normative Reformed theologian - represented a genuine break in content AND method from the medieval scholastic theologians. Calvin for his part was committed both to biblicism and to not speculating.Later scholars returned to the things he had repudiated, distorting and unbalancing Calvin-ism from then on. Basil Hall's landmark article in this and other ways set 'Calvin against the Calvinists'.

Richard Muller supported by Carl Trueman in recent years have returned fire. As Trueman writes:

The account of the development of Reformed theology which this definition of scholasticism promotes is one whereby the pristine, non-metaphysical, exegetical theology of Calvin is slowly replaced by a speculative, metaphysical, overly-rational, and hair-splitting dogmatism, as represented by later theologians such as Voetius, Turretin, and John Owen.

I myself have believed and passed this on: and especially the more Barthian thinkers will assume this narrative. Trueman's argument in response is that 1) Calvin isn't the normative figure everyone assumes - rather the great Reformed confessions hold that place; 2) the name 'Calvinism' is actually unhelpful and polemical; 3) we need to look to the occassion and nature of each of the texts under question to fairly evaluate them. 4) Scholasticism as a method (the use of syllogisms and so on) has had a bad press and in fact was just the pedagogical method available for working in the university of the time; 5) Aristotelian metaphysics and rationality were used by everybody because this was the rationality of the day: it is not in itself proof of distortion...

I am not yet convinced. I heed the warning about the complexity of the historical picture and the breadth of Reformed dogmatic theology. However, when we read Calvin we are breathing a different air from that we later breathe. Calvin's humanist background gave him a pedagogical method and style altogether different from the Paris of his youth. It was not an accident that this style liberated him as a theologian. In the Institutes he is quite polemical about exactly the vices you find displayed in the later Protestant Orthodox, because that method and style had produced such skewed results in the past...