The Two John Calvins

John Calvin's 500th birthday occurred on July 10, and "Stevekazoo" wasn't very happy reading his local newspaper's coverage of the local celebration. Writing on The Grand Rapids Press's online comment page, he opined that "Calvin is the second worst thing to happen to Christianity, after Constantine. He has caused more spiritual and psychological damage with his doctrines than can ever be told."

Stevekazoo is mainly out of step with most of the recent scholarly celebrations of the Genevan Reformer's legacy, but he probably captures accurately much of the popular understanding of Calvin's influence. To the degree that most people know anything at all about John Calvin, words like "rigid" and "intolerant" would come quickly to mind.

As someone who not only appreciates the details of Calvin's theological contribution but is even proud to wear the "Calvinist" label, I do have to acknowledge the core of truth in Stevekazoo's assessment. There were indeed times when Calvin carried out with a vengeance the "Constantinian" project of wedding church and state. And there are too many stories of folks for whom the phrase "a Calvinist upbringing" denotes a form of spiritual and psychological abuse simply to brush them aside.

Yet there is also the John Calvin who wrote in his Institutes that "if you ask me concerning the precepts of the Christian religion, first, second, third, and always I would answer, `Humility.'" This gentler side of Calvin was recognized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a later Genevan thinker who was certainly no friend of dogmatic religion. In his classic The Social Contract, Rousseau wrote of Calvin that "as long as love of the homeland and liberty is not extinguished among us, the memory of that great man will never cease to be blessed."

One of Calvin's mostly sympathetic biographers, William Bouwsma, sees the tensions in the Reformer's theology as stemming from conflicts so deep in his psyche that Bouwsma resorts to positing "two Calvins, coexisting uncomfortably within the same historical personage."

On the one hand, says Bouwsma, we have the Calvin who favored a "static orthodoxy," and "craved desperately for intelligibility, order, certainty. Distrusting freedom, he struggled to control both himself and the world." But, says Bouwsma, we also have a second Calvin, "a rhetorician and a humanist" who "was flexible to the point of opportunism, and a revolutionary in spite of himself." This was a Calvin who "was inclined to celebrate the paradoxes and mystery at the heart of existence."

For those, like Stevekazoo, who know only of the first Calvin, the Genevan's 500th birthday is not an event to celebrate. There are others of us, however, who have are enamored with the second Calvin--to the point that we see him as a reliable guide in encountering "the paradoxes and mystery at the heart of existence." For we "second Calvin" types, we are quick to follow our "Happy Birthday" toasts, with the well-known follow-up: "and many happy returns!"

By Richard Mouw  |  July 11, 2009; 5:01 PM ET
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