From Geneva to Wittenberg: Introduction and Overview

In my spiritual journey to date, I have lived, believed, and worshiped within three major traditions of the Christian faith. I was reared and formed initially as a Christian in the Baptist tradition, but, as I read, studied, and lived more in the faith I had been given, I came to conclusions about the sacraments and Church history that brought my viewpoint in line with the right wing of the Protestant Reformation, that which in its reform of medieval Roman Catholicism sought to maintain the greatest continuity in doctrine and worship with the Church as it had existed prior to the Reformation. This right wing of the Reformation in history has been represented principally by the Reformed churches and system of doctrine and the Lutheran churches and system of doctrine. By a blessed accident (what we would theologically call a Providence), I lived into the conservative Reformation first in the Reformed churches, and now, by a similar but also blessed accident, God has placed me in Christ's body as it finds its expression within the Lutheran churches. Though I am now living, worshiping, and believing as a Lutheran Christian, the blessings of my Reformed heritage (and also of my Baptist heritage prior to that) continue to live with me.

With that in mind, I will take opportunity briefly to sing the praises of what I view to be the chief blessings of the Reformed churches to global Christianity before moving on to the main project I have in view here of comparing the two traditions’ views on controverted matters between themselves and explaining my insights from navigating these issues and embracing the Lutheran take as the one more faithful and true to the Scriptures. I alluded to the word Providence above, and it is in the Calvinist emphasis on God's exhaustively sovereign and providential reign over his entire creation that I find the greatest comfort and benefit of this tradition. God is in control, and he is in control for us, lovingly governing his world and embracing it in the redemption he has accomplished for it through Jesus Christ. I believe this understanding helps us to better praise God and see his glory in all things. Where things are marred due to sin and death in this world, we can see in this understanding of Providence, that our fulfillment and hope in life and death, in good and bad, is the transcendent God who humbled himself, took on our flesh, suffered for us, died for us, rose for us, sits at the right hand of God as Lord of heaven and earth and Redeemer for us, and will come again for us to abolish sin and death from the good creation he loves and is so exhaustively engaged with. The Reformed teach this and find life in it better than most, and we can learn from them here.

I must also praise the way in light of the above, the Reformed tradition has historically preached the whole Scriptures and especially the Old Testament. I would not now trade the blessings of the sermons on a cyclical lectionary of Scripture passages in the Lutheran Divine Service, because these passages center us on Christ, who is taught all throughout Scripture as its central message, and they do this particularly well. It is not for nothing that these texts have been preached more extensively and exhaustively throughout the history of the church than any other passages in the Bible! Nevertheless, redemptive-historical preaching consecutively through whole books of the Bible and through the Old Testament helps to flesh the centrality of Christ out even in those passages that have not been preached as frequently in church history. I would heed the Lutheran caution of not conflating Law and Gospel or flattening the differences between the Testaments, but would that we all preached the whole Scriptures with the rigor and exhaustiveness the Reformed so often have!

I will conclude this brief litany of praises by connecting the exhaustive Providence of Calvinism with the exhaustive focus on Christ throughout all of Scripture that we see in Calvinism by praising the tradition for its commitment to seeing the Lordship of Christ exalted in every area of life. Lutherans, what with Luther's robust teaching on Creation, our Two Kingdoms theology of Christ's Lordship over heaven and earth, and our teaching on vocation as divine calling, do not have cause to hang our heads on these matters quite as much as is popularly thought, but I must give Calvinism props for showing me the way the Christian hope affects all of life and transforms people and societies for the glory of Christ.

Having now praised the aspects of my Reformed heritage that have most blessed me and that I believe to be genuine blessings to the entire Church catholic, I will now put forward some very general comparisons and contrasts and to state in as factual manner I can the controverted issues between the Lutheran and Reformed churches and confessions.

The branch of the Reformation later designated by the term Reformed or Calvinist began under the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland. It began independently from the Reformation in Germany under Luther, but it held several things in common with it. Just as was the case with the Reformation in Germany, its principle for reforming the Roman Catholic Church in doctrine and worship was Scripture alone as the final authority in the Church. Similarly, just as was the case with the Reformation in Germany under Luther, the theological principle for reforming doctrine which Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation took from the Scriptures was justification by grace alone through faith alone. When it came to worship, however, the Reformation movements followed different principles. The Reformed followed what is termed the regulative principle, which states that only those practices explicitly commanded or prescribed in Scripture were to be permitted in the worship of God, while the Lutherans followed what can be called the normative principle, which states that the Church in its worship is forbidden from only those practices that are forbidden in or contrary to Scripture. As a result, the Reformed followed a more rigorous and radical plan for reforming worship, which included exclusive psalmody, the exclusion of musical instruments from worship, the removal of images and crucifixes from the churches, and a more simplified liturgy, while the Lutherans retained practices and traditions from the Church as it had existed prior to the Reformation, such as the singing of hymns, instrumental music, and much of the liturgical form and content of the medieval Mass. Some of the austerity of Reformed worship lessened under the leadership of John Calvin, but vast differences continued in the liturgical principles of the traditions, including down to the present.

The differences in approach to worship express some of the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in doctrinal and theological emphases of the two traditions. The heartbeat and very center of the Lutheran Reformation has always been justification by grace alone through faith alone. For Lutherans this doctrine has always been the rock on which the Church stands or falls, while in Calvinism the concern for the Gospel has often been expressed more in terms of God's immutable predestination than in terms of justification by faith, and obedience to the Law in Christian worship and liturgy have often been placed on equal footing with the preaching of the Gospel as the essence of the Church.

Their differing emphases in preaching the Gospel, the relative weight each puts on the doctrine of justification in their overall system, and their juncture with the differing emphases and principles of worship each tradition follows point us to the first issue between the Reformed churches and Lutheranism that truly is and has been church-dividing from the time of the Reformation. This is the issue of the sacraments in general, and of the Lord's Supper in particular. The Lutherans teach a straightforward doctrine of baptismal regeneration and the sacramental union of Jesus Christ's body and blood with the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper, while the Reformed have a more indirect understanding of the way in which the sacraments work for our salvation. This more indirect view of the sacraments stems from the greater emphasis the Reformed place on God's transcendence and secret predestination in our salvation. The sacraments testify indirectly to election and are means of salvation only to those who will ultimately persevere to the end and be finally saved. For the Lutherans, however, the Word of God, and its objective promises delivered to sinners directly in the sacraments are sure testimonies of God's saving intent. They tangibly present the realities they signify to all those who receive them. The Lord's Supper saves because it is Jesus Christ, his body and blood being immediately present in, with, and under the bread and wine. The Reformed, due to the normative status in their system of doctrine of Calvin's marked improvement over Zwingli on the sacraments, affirm a feeding on the body and blood of Jesus in the Supper indirectly through faith and the Holy Spirit, but for the Lutherans, it is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, through whom we receive the Holy Spirit, that guarantees our salvation and strengthens our faith. We know we are Christians because we have received these gifts to eat and drink to everlasting life.

This, of course, explains the juncture between worship and justification I obliquely mentioned above and failed to describe until now. The primary purpose of worship in the Lutheran view is to receive the forgiveness of sins. For the Reformed, the note of forgiveness in the worship service is still certainly there but the primary emphasis is on the duty to obey God and render him service. This is not to say, conversely, that Lutherans do not understand the Divine Service as moving us to gratefully serve God and our neighbor in response to his glorious gifts, but the primary form of worship God receives from us when we go to church is "the divine service of the Gospel" where "we receive from him gifts" (Defense of the Augsburg Confession, IV II.189).

As the controversy on the Lord's Supper indicates, the issues of grace and election are also controverted and church-dividing between the Lutherans and Reformed. Differences on predestination, the extent of the atonement, the question of the resistibility of grace, and perseverance in grace are the most salient points in the disagreement.

Finally, while both Lutherans and Reformed fall safely within the bounds of Christological orthodoxy established in the Nicene Creed and the Formula of Chalcedon, each has steadily leveled at the other the charge of transgressing those boundaries. The Christological issue that has been in debate, i.e., the degree to which Christ's divine nature communicates its properties to the human nature, is significant for our understanding of the Incarnation itself. Of course, the occasion for the eruption of the controversy was differing teachings on the presence of the body and blood of Jesus in the Lord's Supper and the implications of Christ's Ascension to the right-hand of the Father to this question. The Christological issues, thus, are significant for their role in the sacramental teachings of each tradition.

I want to examine these controverted issues each a little more closely in their turn. I will start with the Christological controversy, advance to the Lord's Supper, and conclude my study with grace and election.

Fun with Predestination, Pelikan, and Post-millennialism

I've been working on and wrestling with some pretty rich and thought-provoking material since I last posted. Of course, Calvin's Institutes has been my constant companion throughout this year and has continued to provide depths of profundity for my soul to glory in and my mind to contemplate.

I have also been recently engaging patristics beyond the encounter with the Church Fathers I have found in Calvin (He's a bit too heavily reliant on Augustine but also liberally references Chrysostom, Cyprian, and Ambrose, among others). For those interested (as you should be:) in the development of Christian doctrine immediately following the biblical period and continuing on into the Imperial Church and beyond, Jaroslav Pelikan's first volume, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition: 100-600, of his landmark four-volume series, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, is essential reading. I think Pelikan was still a Lutheran when he wrote this, but he eventually became Eastern Orthodox, so reader beware! Exploring patristics as thoroughly as Pelikan did might just blow up some sacrosanct Protestant presuppositions, not to mention certain Roman Catholic ones as well. I just might return to blog about some of the gems from Mr. Pelikan's doctrinal history in the coming weeks.

The other thing that has really flipped my lid lately is Peter Leithart's The Kingdom and the Power: Recovering the Centrality of Church. In relation to Alexander Schmemann's enchanting classic, For the Life of the World, Leithart's book is a distinctively Reformed and biblical continuation of the former's theme of the realization of the Kingdom of God here and now in the Church and its centrality in God's broader, ongoing economy of cosmic consummation. Schmemann's prophetic focus in For the Life of the World is addressing the challenge of secularism in general to the authentically Christian worldview embodied in Orthodoxy. Leithart, on the other hand, writing in the early 90s, speaks a prophetic word to American evangelicals about their exclusively political response to the “culture war,” urging them to respond as the Church rather than as a political interest group, since our hopes for cosmic renewal are caught up neither with America—the "Redeemer Nation"—and its political and military operations nor in some impending dispensationalist scenario. No; our hope is in Christ and His Kingdom as it is already being realized in the teaching, worship, sacraments, discipline, and the spiritual and cultural dominion of the Church.

I think Leithart makes a very strong exegetical argument that I am compelled for the most part to agree with, but I am unfamiliar with and not entirely on-board with the amillennial/post-millennial preterist interpretation he puts forth of the Olivet Discourse in Matthew, Paul's discussion of physical Israel's rejection of Christ in Romans 9-11, and the events in the book of Revelation. Leithart is of the opinion that the events foretold and fulfilled in these famous passages are the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the Jews’ dispersal by the Romans that followed.

Leithart is not making a concession to Higher Criticism in this position, being in agreement with those who date Revelation prior to 70 A.D. I think it doubtful Revelation was composed before the fall of Jerusalem, but having Christ's prophecies refer to the fall of Jerusalem is satisfying for those otherwise left wondering why the events He told His disciples they would see fulfilled in their generation did not come to pass. At any rate, Leithart asserts that the destruction of the Temple was God's judgment on physical Israel for rejecting Christ and that this event heralded the arrival of the Kingdom of God—Christ's "millennial" reign over the world through the Church until He returns to bring in the full consummation. This is not the literal millennium in Revelation but a metaphorical one between Christ's first and second comings; hence Leithart is technically an "amillennialist" rather than a "post-millennialist," though his scheme is admittedly more of a hybrid of the two than purely one or the other.

These are certainly new ideas for those of us reared on popular Dispensationalist evangelical eschatology. I will simply say that these ideas are new to me but already seem more plausible than the eschatological scenarios the snake oil salesmen have been peddling to us for years. Admittedly, though, I don't need much reason to reject eschatological scenarios that are overly pessimistic, escapist, and just generally Gnostic, especially since these are invariably the ready handmaidens of individualistic, radically anti-materialistic, and consequently world-denying, Church-minimizing, and sacrament-less theologies.

That being said, the view that Leithart puts forward has some problems for me, especially in the characteristically-Reformed assertion that God's covenant with Abraham has been transferred completely from his physical descendents—Israel according to the flesh, the Jews—to his spiritual descendents—the new Israel in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, the Church. I would argue, of course, that Christ, the Gospel, and His Church fulfill the Law and the conditions of God's covenant with Israel, indeed that for the most part the Church has superseded physical Israel in God's economy of earthly and cosmic consummation. However, I too cannot shake Paul's firm conviction that "all Israel will be saved" on the basis that "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:26, 29). God is not through with unbelieving Israel because He is the God who "has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all" (Romans 11:32).

The central passage for resolving what God has revealed to us concerning the physical descendants of Abraham is Romans chapters 9 through 11. It is also the central passage for discussing the biblical teachings on predestination, election, and reprobation. As a recent post of mine indicates, this too is an issue I have been thinking a good deal about lately as well, thanks to my engagement with Calvin’s treatment of predestination in his Institutes. The questions relating to election and reprobation are closely related to the question regarding God's ongoing plan for Israel, as it is specifically in the context of Paul's teaching regarding the unbelief of Israel that his lengthiest and, historically, most doctrinally-decisive treatment of predestination takes place. I will address both issues as I attempt to begin a brief exegesis of Romans 9-11 in my next post.

Fast and Feast, Flesh and Spirit

For someone who just joined a congregation in a mainline denomination three weeks ago, I was awfully hard on that segment of American Protestant Christianity in my last post. All criticisms aside, the orthodox majority of mainline Protestants have done some things better over the last century than most evangelicals have. They have done particularly well with two areas I am keenly interested in—the Sacraments and the social aspect of the Gospel, both emphases that have prevented them from falling into the Gnostic scheme of spiritualizing all the trappings of religion away, at least not to the extent that most evangelicals have.

When it comes to its official statements in its Book of Common Worship, the Presbyterian Church USA is one of the most solid of the mainline churches when it comes to its sacramental theology and its sacramental liturgies. Its baptismal liturgies incorporate the beauty of the best Reformed language about the Sacrament and handle with nuance and subtlety the dialectic theological concerns in play in Reformed thought on the Sacrament. Its Eucharistic liturgies incorporate elements of patristic liturgies, giving them an awesome sense of history and mystery and a catholicity that resonates with believers from the Christian traditions of Wittenberg, Geneva, Rome, and of Constantinople and points north and east. The PCUSA has also done a fantastic job in its work with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in bridging the centuries-old rift that developed between the Reformed and the Lutherans due to their differences on the Sacraments. Needless to say, I am thrilled to officially be a member of this denomination.

In her sermon last Lord's Day, our pastor, Reverend Nancy Carle, did not address the Sacraments but did deal nicely with the issue of fasting as a discipline we are called to practice especially during the season of Lent but also as an ordinary practice of our spirituality. She took the anti-Gnostic track of defending the practice by discussing the importance God places on the actions we perform in and with our bodies. We are not to think of ourselves as having competing and dichotomous fragments of ourselves labeled spirit and matter, with spirit being good and mighty and flesh being somehow lesser or weaker. She pointed to the fact that God called materiality and flesh good and very good when he created it in the beginning and that God assumed flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, who physically died and bodily rose from the grave. Likewise, she noted the Christian belief in the general resurrection of the dead as stated in the Apostles' Creed. It is in the context of such an embodied spirituality that fasting is an appropriate and necessary activity for Christians. In the season of Christ's suffering and death, we are to show our thanksgiving and joy by bringing our bodies into subjection and offering them as a sacrifice to he who was and is our all-sufficient sacrifice.

With the embodied nature of our spirituality under discussion last Lord's Day, it was appropriate that the contrasting theme of feast also appeared in the service. The idea of fasting as a means of feasting on Jesus Christ came up during the sermon, and, during the children's feature, Nancy discussed with the youngsters the ample material for feasting our worship together provides. She pulled out a hymnal and intimated to the children that a great feast for our ears was set in the music of the church. She pulled out a Bible and pointed to the great feast for our hearts that God's Word is. She also pointed to the congregation and the choir assembled behind her and noted what a feast of wisdom is set before inquiring minds in all the lessons God's people can teach us.

Most naturally, then, my mind made the progression to something else that is as central to our life and worship together as the spoken and written Word of God. Also, with the matters of the mental, emotional, and spiritual feasts set before God's people in worship being dealt with, it was only natural that I should think of the physical feast of the Church. My eyes went from the pastor and the children gathered on the other side of the sanctuary back to the centrally-located altar, hoping against hope that I was mistaken that no feast of Christ's body and blood lay there ready and waiting for us to consume, but, alas, I was not mistaken. No bread. No wine. No literal feast was to be had this day. In good Presbyterian fashion, our fare today was destined only to be words.

Well, my time for complaining is over. Presbyterians have not historically celebrated the Lord's Supper often. Many are now doing so weekly, but many more still are not. The fact is that Presbyterianism is centered on the Word. Well, the entire Church is centered on the Word of God—both the testimony about him and his Father we call Scripture and the God-Man himself, Jesus Christ. The Word of God is speech by and about God as well as the flesh and blood human being that was and is God. Just as Jesus did not come in words alone but also in the flesh when he walked the earth, so too does he not, or, at least should not have to, come by words alone today. In this sense, it is perfectly Presbyterian to make the Sacraments as central to our worship as the Bible is. Since Christ has gone to be present in heaven at the right hand of the Father, through the power the Holy Spirit the Sacraments are the means, in addition to the speech of Holy Writ, by which we continue to commune with him in a fleshly way.

Do I overstate the need for God to engage us at every level of our being, or, conversely that we need to engage God at every level of our being? Doesn't Scripture say, "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all" (John 6:63). This is the verse that the Swiss Reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, used to support his position on the Lord's Supper at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529.

At this fateful meeting, the Protestant princes and theologians of Germany and their counterparts from Switzerland were assembled to bolster the Protestant movement and unify it in the face of the threat from the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Zwingli and the Swiss Reformed camp agreed on virtually all major points of doctrine with Luther and his followers. However, Luther and Zwingli quarreled bitterly on the question of the Lord's Supper.

Luther took quite literally Christ's words at the Last Supper, "This is my body. This is my blood." He was quite unwilling to budge on this point. He felt that the statement was just too strongly put in Scripture to spiritualize it away. He did not quite accept the Roman Catholic view either, but this was primarily because it was expressed in terms more associated with Aristotelian philosophy than the Bible.

Zwingli found Luther's view to be outright idolatry. He found repugnant the idea that God is present "in, with, and under" the physical elements of bread and wine. On this point, John Calvin would later agree with Zwingli, but his reason for rejecting the physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist was thoroughly biblical. As for Zwingli, the basis of his reasoning was philosophical.

Calvin could not reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ the human being sitting at the right hand of the Father in heaven while simultaneously being present on a thousand altars. He was worried about inadvertently endorsing the "Monophysite" heresy (which is the elimination of the distinction between Christ's humanity and divinity, namely that "the humanity of Christ is absorbed into his divinity just as a drop of rain is into the sea"), but he nevertheless still affirmed that Christ is spiritually present in the Sacrament and that it contains a divine blessing for believers and a curse for unbelievers.

Zwingli, on the other hand, could not reconcile Christ's physical presence in Communion with his Platonic understanding of the relationship between spirit and matter. For Zwingli, matter was inherently inferior to spirit and could not carry the weight of spiritual reality. As a result, Zwingli's interpretation of that great Eucharistic chapter, John 6, hinged upon verse 63: "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all." (I find it remarkable that a theologian who was as otherwise skilled as Zwingli was could fail to recognize that following his exegetical reasoning on the Lord's Supper to its most obvious conclusion would be to empty the Incarnation of any significance as well!)

At any rate, Luther thought Zwingli had performed a rational emptying of the Lord's Supper and thus uttered, "We are not of the same spirit." (Yay Luther! Even though these words were disastrous for Protestant prospects for church unity and I have some points of departure from Lutheran views of the Lord's Supper, I still have to admire Luther's stand for historic Christianity here.) It was at this point in history that we can mark the definitive split between the Reformed and the Lutherans. Though Calvin took a view of the Sacrament somewhat closer to Luther's view, he helped deepen the split between his followers and Luther's by signing a statement of agreement with Zwingli's followers in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. The Reformed have been trying to figure out whether they follow Calvin or Zwingli on the Lord's Supper ever since. (Can you guess which I follow on this doctrine?)

But what do we make of the essential biblical distinction between Spirit and flesh? Paul, for example, uses the dichotomy between Spirit and flesh repeatedly in his letters to mark a sharp distinction between the life of regenerate and unregenerate humanity. Those of the Spirit are rescued from sin and death, given everlasting life, and set on a trajectory toward glory, but those of the flesh are altogether ruined, wrecked, and doomed.

The Gnostics read their anti-materialist prejudices onto Paul's letters, inferring that spirit is inherently good and that matter is inherently evil. I do not mean to question Paul or the Holy Spirit for their mutual decision to use these terms, but it seems as if the distinction inherently smacks of Gnosticism or some species of Platonism.

Well, I think we can defend Paul's and also John's use of this dichotomy while affirming that there is nothing intrinsic to mere spirit or to mere flesh that makes one superior to the other. I want to note a couple of things.

1. "Spirit" in the Pauline Epistles and in John 6:63 is, of course, the Holy Spirit.
2. "Flesh," as used in the New Testament, often means sinful human nature. That is what is in play in most Pauline usage of the word. Neither does it refer exclusively to our bodies and their sinful nature but it includes our sinful minds, sinful hearts, and sinful spirits as well. This is all "flesh" for Paul.
3. "Flesh" in John 6:63 is not synonymous with "sinful human nature" or bare materiality but with pure natural reason. The flesh here that is of no help is that of the human mind unenlightened by faith, not the flesh and blood that Christ bids us to eat and drink as our regular "spiritual" food earlier in the chapter. Christ's literal flesh and blood offered up for us at Calvary, and consequently signified for and delivered tangibly to us in the Eucharist (not by transformation but by the presence of the Holy Spirit in and with the bread and wine, according to my Reformed perspective), is everything in John 6. The flesh and blood Christ offered up for us at Calvary is the root of our Life as regenerated persons.
   
   (The best Protestant commentary I could find on John 6:63 is solid but contains a heresy. The Geneva Study Bible notes of this verse: "The flesh of Christ therefore quickens us, because he that is man is God: and this mystery is only comprehended by faith, which is the gift of God, found only in the elect."
   
   Good so far and still good on its lexical note on Spirit, except for the heresy it contains: "Spirit, that is, that power which flows from the Godhead causes the flesh of Christ (which is otherwise nothing but flesh) both to live in itself and to give life to us."
   
   That which is in parentheses is technically heretical because there is no humanity of Christ without the divine nature joined to it in hypostatic union. The ancient ecumenical Council of Chalcedon describes Christ as being "in two natures, inconfusedly,unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.")
   
   I digress; the point is that Christ's discourse on his flesh and blood in John 6 must be apprehended by faith, not according to human reason. Human reason finds it preposterous that Jesus can be both fully God and fully human and consequently a human sacrifice for us, but faith recognizes that these are the central realities of the Christian faith.
4. The Spirit is eternal, but the flesh is temporary. This doesn't necessarily imply hierarchy of mere spirit over mere matter. The Spirit/flesh dichotomy is most appropriate for its inference about duration and influence. Flesh (matter) as we currently know it is perishable. Sinful flesh in particular is dying a slow death in the Church and in the individual Christian, but it will inevitably and completely die, though bare matter will not disappear because we will have perfect and incorruptible physical bodies in the Kingdom.
   
   The Spirit, on the other hand, which is God's agent (not to mention very God of very God) of cosmic and individual regeneration, is already powerful in the Church, the world, and in individual believers. The Spirit's influence is eternal and is only getting stronger in the Church, the world, and in individual believers. It will triumph over all when the Kingdom arrives in all its fullness.

Okay, here's how I'm going to bring this sprawling train wreck to an end. We fast during Lent, not because matter is bad, but because matter is good, inasmuch as it is a means of communion with God. We fast so we can bring our bodies and souls into subjection to the will of God and thus offer our whole selves as sacrifices to the one who sacrificed his whole self for us.

When we feast as the Church on the Lord's Supper, we are anticipating that time when matter is returned to the purpose for which it was created—to be a means of union between God and his creatures. The purpose of the Eucharist is thus, according to my friend Dustin Lyon, "the fundamental proclamation of the gospel where all creation is redeemed and the world becomes what it was meant to be: a means of communion with God and transparent to Him." That's why the Word of God, as embodied in Jesus himself, Scripture, and Sacrament, are central to Christian worship. Let us not feast on words alone but on the Word, flesh and Spirit, in all of his fullness.

Thoughts on Calvin

Here is my weekly post for my Reformation and Modern Church History class. I am discussing my impressions regarding John Calvin's personality and theology.

John Calvin looms perhaps as large in my theological imagination as St. Paul. In moments when I forget that the seat of authority rests exclusively in the Scriptures, in those moments when I am over-awed by the power of the human mind to comprehend the mysteries of God and by the eloquence of speech and the written word to express them, I get carried away and ascribe too much significance to extra-biblical witnesses to God's grace and glory. I have often done this with Calvin, and, worse, I have aspired to emulate him and attain to his level of glory. When I recognize this for the sin that it is, I turn to the God who is above and beyond anything we can comprehend and put into words, realizing my own inadequacy of expression in the face of such majesty and wonder, and I worship. Calvin was a great teacher, but, if any honors belong to human teachers, they belong to those through whom God chose to give us the authoritative witness to His revelation in history that is the Scriptures. Paul is to be honored above Calvin and God infinitely above them both.

Nevertheless, we can glory in and praise God for his gifts to others and for the gifts he gives us through them. I thank God for Calvin. I also thank God that through this week's readings and lectures I have had some incorrect impressions corrected.

Much to my surprise, and initially to my chagrin, Calvin describes himself as being of "a timid, soft, and pusillanimous nature." This is much to the contrary of what I had been informed about him. Without ever reading much of his writing, excluding quotations from his writings on the sacraments I have seen in a couple of books, I have long been aware of his importance and influence in the Protestant faith tradition and have been captivated by the grand sound of the term "Calvinism" and by the larger-than-life character of his teachings on grace, God's sovereignty in bringing us to faith and in preserving us to the end, and, of course, his thoroughly orthodox and well-balanced view of the sacraments. In contrast to what I have long thought about much of his teaching, however, I have also long thought of Calvin the man as a somewhat nasty fellow—a combative, dogmatic man who was spiritually prideful and arrogant about his knowledge, had an explosive temper, was generally ill tempered, and was the theocratic dictator who condemned Servetus to death. I also thought that the man who is the champion of the idea that God created the vast majority of humankind for the express purpose of damning them, must himself be as indifferent and un-empathetic toward people as he believed God to be.

What has been revealed to me, however, since I started reading the Institutes this year in commemoration of his 500th birthday (which coincidently falls the same day as my birthday, July 10) and since I have gotten to know him a little more personally this week is that he utterly confounds me. I love him, but he drives me nuts. On the one hand, I do see a man who is a surprisingly (to me anyway) earnest, caring, humble shepherd of his flock. He is also, or at least strives to be, intellectually humble. He does not rise to the heights of speculation that it would be easy for such an intelligent man to rise to. He has a proper and sober regard for the utter mystery of God; he's almost apophatic at some points. Also, I see that he was not a politician but a devoted churchman. Instead of one who thoughtlessly put heretics to death, I see a man who was conflicted and struggled mightily with what to do with Servetus. Instead of someone who imposed his hard, pitiless, indifferent feelings about others on God, I see someone who is simply teaching what his honest reading of the Bible shows, even if it is a teaching that seems indigestible. And yes, Calvin was human. He had a wife and grieved over the loss of his only child.

On the other hand, Calvin is a man of the 16th century with all the flaws of his time. The language he uses to speak of Catholics and even other Protestants in the Institutes is shameful and uncharitable to an extreme. It reveals him to be an extremist who cannot tolerate in the least those who disagree with him. (To be fair, Luther is guilty on this count as well.) Calvin was an old grouch with a bad temper.
(I forgive him for this; I've got a really bad temper myself.) Calvin shares the responsibility for putting Servetus to death. Religious freedom was apparently anathema to him. Also, Calvin, even if he has a right view of human limits and the incomprehensibility of God, still tries to put God and his actions into a rational box. (I concede we need systematic theology, but it inherently trends toward putting God in a rational box.) And predestination to reprobation, even though I have come to accept predestination to salvation, is still an intolerable doctrine for me.

To conclude, I regard Calvin as one of my earthly fathers in the faith. I absolutely love him and praise God for him, but don't grown-up children reserve the right to argue with their parents?