John Calvin: Christian Humanist and Evangelical Reformer

JOHN CALVIN

Christian Humanist & Evangelical Reformer

JOHN W DE GRUCHY

JOHN CALVIN

Christian Humanist and Evangelical Reformer

Copyright © 2013 J. W. de Gruchy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Published by agreement with Wipf and Stock Publishers (Originally published by Lux Verbi, an imprint of NB Publishers, Cape Town, South Africa in 2009)

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isbn 13: 978-1-62032-773-9

eisbn 13: 978-1-62189-750-7

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

de Gruchy, John W.

John Calvin : christian humanist and evangelical reformer / John W. de Gruchy

240 p. ; 23 cm. — Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-773-9

1. Calvin, Jean, 1509–1564. 2. Humanism—16th century. 3. Christianity and Religious humanism. 4. Reformation. 5. Reformed Church—Doctrines. I. Author.

BX9418 D42 2013

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Dedication

To the

Faculty of Theology

at the University of Stellenbosch on the occasion of the 150th celebration of the founding of the Kweekskool and to the many Dutch Reformed theologians whom I am honoured to count my friends and in memory of

Luke Stubbs

scholar, priest, friend who encouraged me to

write this book

A PERSONAL PREFACE

Confronted as we are today with a disoriented society where the awareness of human solidarity and the sense of social responsibility are ever becoming weaker, the time has come to reconsider and set forth Calvin’s teaching about Christian humanism. WA Visser ’t Hooft1

IN 1989 MY WIFE AND I WERE ON SABBATICAL AT UNION Theological Seminary in New York. My research project was to write the Warfield Lectures for Princeton Seminary the following year, later published as Liberating Reformed Theology.2 During our first week at Union I was asked to talk about my project to the seminary faculty. When I had done so, James Cone, the distinguished pioneer of ‘black theology’ in North America, remarked that what I had in mind was a waste of time. Why on earth, he asked, would anyone today want to retrieve Calvin’s legacy and the tradition associated with his name? Cone’s question, though friendly, was sharp then, and it remains pertinent now. Given the popular understanding of Calvin as grim moralist, proponent of predestination and a tyrannical God, why bother today with him? Even if one knows better than to accept such caricatures, there are undoubtedly aspects of Calvin’s legacy that have given rise to them. His context has disappeared in the mists of past history; we live in a new millennium. So after five centuries why not let him rest in peace?

I attempted to answer Cone’s unsettling question in Liberating Reformed Theology which, to my surprise, has since been translated into German, Korean and Portuguese – an indication that what I discussed there was of wider interest than I had expected. In the book I made the point that Calvin and the Reformed tradition had played such an important role in the shaping of modern South Africa, both for good and ill, and that it was necessary to re-examine that role. In doing so I offered a critique of the Calvinist defence of apartheid, and spoke of an alternative Calvinism that had co-existed in South Africa, one that had opposed slavery and apartheid, and participated in the struggle for liberation and democratic transformation.3 If the former represented the Reformed tradition as a reactionary conservative social force, the alternative Calvinism represents it as a transforming tradition. Yet both trace their ancestry back to Calvin and the Swiss Reformation. The fact is, Calvin’s legacy is ambiguous: its very strengths have sometimes become liabilities, already in Calvin’s Geneva, and generally where Calvinism has tasted political power – as was the case in Puritan New England and apartheid South Africa. But I believe that alternative readings of Calvin more correctly reflect the heart of his life and work, though they have been overshadowed by the dominant view held by supporters and opponents alike.

The alternative Calvinism or Reformed tradition in South Africa has included both black and white South Africans from different denominations, chiefly Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian or Congregationalist – my own tradition – who I believe have best represented what the Reformed tradition is really about. Interestingly enough, it was a Congregationalist opponent of slavery, James Read, who in 1800 established the Calvinist Society at the Cape. But there have been many others within this alternative Calvinist tradition – people such as Tiyo Soga, a nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister and poet from the Eastern Cape, and Beyers Naudé, the Dutch Reformed church leader and opponent of apartheid – who have represented the best within it. And, of course, this alternative tradition or more correctly, I would insist – this authentic Reformed tradition – found expression in the Belhar Confession of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (now part of the Uniting Reformed Church). This categorical rejection of apartheid as contrary to the Christian gospel, and its affirmation of the unity of the church beyond the constrictions of race and ethnicity, was a milestone in the recovery of the message that Calvin himself proclaimed.4

My attempt to restate the Reformed tradition would have rested with the Warfield Lectures were it not that now, almost twenty years later, I have received an invitation from the publisher Lux Verbi.BM to write something about the Reformer in time for the 500th anniversary of his birth, in 2009. This coincided with further invitations, namely to give a lecture on Calvin at the International Congress to be held in Geneva, and a further one at the University of Stellenbosch, both to celebrate the same anniversary event. I felt honoured to be asked to give these lectures, but set about preparing for them with hesitation. Over the years my own theological journey has gone in other directions, notably in working on the legacy of the German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer; in exploring the connections between Christianity, art and iconography;5 and most recently in retrieving Christian humanism as an alternative to both Christian fundamentalism and secularism, as in my book Being Human: Confessions of a Christian Humanist.6 To my delight, the latter has elicited a very positive response, both at an academic level and at a more popular one, not least within some Dutch Reformed circles in South Africa.

Calvin, Calvinism and Reformed seem at first sight synonyms for dour, dull, puritanical and iconoclastic, quite the opposite of what Christian humanism is about. Much of this is caricature, but it contains sufficient truth to keep sticking. For this reason modern Genevans largely ignore Calvin’s legacy, though they keep calling Geneva ‘the city of Calvin’, for historic reasons. Many within the Reformed tradition in South Africa are equally hesitant to acknowledge him too loudly because of the way in which the Reformed tradition and Calvinism have become symbols for Christianity at its most repressive, not least in providing theological support for apartheid. Yet I know enough about the Reformed tradition and I know too many Reformed Christians to recognise that the negative image is at best a half-truth, and that there is much to retrieve and celebrate that is of importance for the ecumenical Church and global society in the twenty-first century.7

My genealogical roots provide no clues as to why I should have become a Reformed theologian. Though my paternal ancestors were French like Calvin, they were not Protestant Huguenots, but Catholics, the more recent of whom became Anglicans on the Isle of Jersey. And my maternal grandparents were Methodist, as were my parents when they married, giving me the name John Wesley at baptism. It was only by chance (or providence, as Calvin would have said) that my parents joined the local Congregational church when I was a youngster, thus determining in some way that I should eventually become a minister within the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa. I have few regrets that things worked out in this way, and I have always been glad that my denomination has been ecumenically engaged.

The local church to which we belonged as a family had a distinguished history. Constituted in 1820 as a united church of Congregationalists and Presbyterians and then, after a division occurred, reconstituted in 1824 as the Union Congregational Church, its first minister was the well-known superintendent of the London Missionary Society, Dr John Philip. I remember how, Sunday after Sunday, I sat in the pews in the church and, when the service seemed dull, read the plaque on the wall erected in his honour. Philip had played a key role in the emancipation of slaves at the Cape of Good Hope, and his role in fostering education amongst the children of freed slaves was well established. But at the time I had no idea that he was also a Calvinist, for the simple reason, I believe, that this was not something of which to be proud. By that time, the 1950s, Calvinism in South Africa was something of a swear-word amongst the more liberal, and our congregation was certainly liberal in orientation. Calvinism had to do with the Dutch Reformed Church, with the defence of apartheid, with narrowness of mind and purpose, with censorship and Afrikaner nationalism. It was not for us. At the same time, we were regarded by ‘them’ as the religious lackeys of liberalism, communism and, horror of horrors, humanism. Philip was, as I now have come to appreciate, a Christian humanist, as were others, like Johannes van der Kemp also of the London Missionary Society.

My denomination is a member of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and in England and Wales the Congregational Church became part of the United Reformed Church. But the Congregational tradition is not normally regarded as of the mainstream of the Reformed family in the same way as, for example, the Dutch Reformed or the Presbyterian Church. At the same time our roots lie deep in the soil of the Swiss Reformation, influenced by both Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin, and to a significant degree also by the Anabaptists who contributed much to the English Free Church tradition of which we are also a part. And in later years Congregationalism was influenced by the Evangelical Revival in England and Wales, which in turn led to the formation of the London Missionary Society and the sending of Congregational missionaries such as Reid, Philip and Van der Kemp to South Africa. In his characteristic rhetoric, the Scottish Congregational theologian PT Forsyth summed up the origins of the tradition when he wrote that Congregationalism was Calvinism flushed and fertilised by Anabaptism on English ground. It drew from Calvinism its positive and theological Gospel of the Word, from Anabaptism its personal and subjective religion of the Spirit, and from England its free constitution of the Church, non-dynastic, non-territorial, and democratic.8 So my hybrid past is undeniable and, I would suggest, has been an enriching and strengthening heritage now reinforced by an even broader ecumenical commitment.

As a theological student I was nurtured on the writings of many within the Reformed tradition, notably Scottish theologians such as HR Mackintosh, John Baillie and his brother Donald, and, of course, Karl Barth, the greatest Reformed theologian of the twentieth century, whose influence on my own reading of Calvin will become apparent in what follows. One of my teachers in South Africa was William D Maxwell, who was an authority on Calvin’s Genevan liturgy and a student of John T McNeill, a leading international Calvin scholar of the twentieth century. In subsequent years I came to know and appreciate what I learnt from many distinguished Reformed theologians around the world, amongst them Jürgen Moltmann, Hendrikus Berkhof, the ecumenical leader Lukas Vischer, and my one-time minister and friend of many years, Douglas Bax. I also benefited considerably from Edward Dowey’s seminar on Calvin during a year’s study leave at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1983. Living in South Africa and debating theology with Dutch Reformed theologians also meant that I had to become conversant with the teachings of the Dutch Calvinist theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper, as well as with his local followers. Being a Congregationalist, I developed an interest in some of the Puritan divines like Jonathan Edwards. And, to the consternation of some of my Lutheran friends, I wrote about the influence of Calvin and Reformed theology on Bonhoeffer.9

In speaking of the Reformed tradition, many people use the term ‘Calvinism’ synonymously, as I have done to this point, but I am reluctant to equate the two. The Reformed tradition certainly grew out of Calvin’s reforms, but Calvin did not establish a new Church or theology called by his name any more than Luther did. There is also considerable debate as to whether Calvin was himself a Calvinist in the sense in which that term was later used. I have read not only about ‘predestinarian Calvinists’ – the best known, if least liked – but also ‘sacramental Calvinists’.10 Calvin, incidentally, did not refer to himself as a Protestant, a name that derived from the ‘Protestation’ in 1529 in which certain princes and cities that espoused the Reformation rejected the demands of King Ferdinand of Hungary and Bohemia.

Calvin, like Luther, regarded himself as an evangelical in the historic sense of the word, not in the way it has subsequently been appropriated by right-wing fundamentalism and misunderstood in the mass media. ‘Evangel’ simply means ‘good news’, a reminder that the Reformation was essentially about recovering the gospel of Jesus Christ. Historically, the word ‘evangelical’ was used to distinguish between Roman Catholic and Protestant, and this is still the case in Europe. ‘Evangelical’ is also used to distinguish between those Protestants who are more committed to the Reformation tenets of faith than their liberal counterparts. Juxtaposing evangelical reformer with Christian humanist in the title of this book is not, however, a contradiction in terms; it represents a creative tension that goes back to the Reformation itself.

The situation in South Africa has dramatically altered since I wrote Liberating Reformed Theology. The transition to democracy in 1994 and the ongoing process of democratic transformation has changed the face of the country. This is so even though the legacies of apartheid linger on, not least the gap between the rich and the poor. Other serious problems have, in the meantime, come to the surface, notably the HIV and AIDS pandemic. And, most recently, the political landscape is going through what might turn out to be shifts of considerable significance. The future direction of South Africa and the status and interpretation of its Constitution are now the burning issues. Within this framework the Dutch Reformed Church is going through a painful metamorphosis. Once the monolithic church of the ruling power, its congregations are now divided into several factions. Some embrace the changes in the country and seek unity with the black United Reformed Church, others adopt a more apolitical charismatic piety and style, and yet others defend the past, hoping to keep the Church true to its perceived heritage within Afrikanerdom.

On top of everything else, South Africa has become deeply immersed in global realities in a way that was not possible before, sharing in the promises and the agonies of globalisation, and seeking to find its way both on the African continent and in relation to the world of nations. As I write, the world has entered into a very deep financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to drag on, there is armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe has become a humanitarian disaster and another failed state, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues to erupt in violent confrontation. At the same time, the election of Barack Obama – incidentally, a member of the United Church of Christ, a sister denomination to my own, and one which reflects what I regard as the ethos of Christian humanism – has filled many of us with new hope in the same way as the election of Nelson Mandela did in South Africa in 1994. All of this provides the context in which I have turned again to consider Calvin’s legacy. But I am doing so from a different perspective, one shaped primarily by way of my explorations and espousal of a refashioned Christian humanism, and in the context of a South Africa and a world in search of a new direction in pursuit of justice and the common good.

In writing the book, I have three main types of reader in mind. First, it is written for those, whether insiders or outsiders, who are interested to find out more about Calvin’s legacy and the Reformed tradition, and who may be intrigued by the Christian humanist dimension. For that reason, much of the book takes the form of a historical narrative in which I tell the story and explain its significance. Second, it is written for those who, while formerly part of the Reformed tradition, are now disillusioned with Calvin’s legacy. I do not gloss over those parts in the legacy that have led to such a negative reaction, for I too find them unacceptable, though I also think that they have often been misunderstood. At the same time I believe that Calvin’s legacy provides us with insights that remain ecumenically significant. Members of other Christian traditions may well discover to their surprise how much they too are influenced by Calvin. So it is worth taking a second look at them. Third, the book is written for those who would like to know how I can possibly reconcile my commitment to Christian humanism and my claim to be a Reformed theologian. Chief amongst these readers is the author. In other words, anticipating that there may be others in a similar position, I simply wish to share with the reader what it means for me to be a Reformed Christian humanist. To that extent the narrative is personal and possibly a little eccentric, but hopefully also faithful to the subject and helpful to others who may be Reformed but also ecumenical and humanist in their outlook and commitment.

I have dedicated this book to the Faculty of Theology at the University of Stellenbosch as it celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2009, and in gratitude to the University for bestowing on me an honorary doctorate. The Kweekskool, as the Faculty has long been known, has produced many church and public leaders, some of whom I have disagreed with strongly over past years, and others whom I have admired greatly – amongst the latter are Professors BB Keet, Jaap Durand and Willie Jonker. The most celebrated is, however, Beyers Naudé. Vilified by many within his denomination for his opposition to apartheid, today he is revered and honoured. As sign of this dramatic change, his alma mater, Stellenbosch University, awarded him an honorary doctorate in the last years of his life.

Inevitably there are many people who play a role in the writing and publishing of a book like this. I have already mentioned several people who have influenced my theological development within the Reformed tradition, and there are many others who could be included in that list. But more immediately I want to thank Lyn Holness, Keith Clements and my wife, Isobel, who have read and made many helpful comments on the text. Thanks are also due to Luke Stubbs, who commissioned the book and, despite struggling with cancer, provided much helpful comment; to Biddy Greene for her very competent editing, to Lux Verbi.BM, the publishers who initiated the project; and to the National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town for their ongoing support of my research.

John de Gruchy

Hermanus

Easter 2009

1 From the foreword by WA Visser ’t Hooft, first General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, to André Biéler, The Social Humanism of Calvin (Richmond VA: John Knox, 1964).

2 John W de Gruchy, Liberating Reformed Theology: A South African Contribution to an Ecumenical Debate (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans; Cape Town: David Philip, 1991).

3 For a theological critique of apartheid based in part on Calvin’s writings and Reformed confessions, see Douglas S Bax, A Different Gospel: A Critique of the Theology Behind Apartheid (Johannesburg: Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa, 1979); Allan A Boesak, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation and the Calvinist Tradition (Mary-Knoll NY: Orbis Books, 1984).

4 A Moment of Truth: The Confession of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, edited by DG Cloete and DJ Smit (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1982).

5 John W de Gruchy, Christianity, Art, and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics and the Struggle for Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

6 John W de