Review of Current Religious Thought: August 31, 1959

Readers of Christianity Today at least have no excuse for being unaware of the fact that 1959 is a year of special Calvin celebrations, marking as it does the 450th anniversary of the great Reformer’s birth and the 400th anniversary both of the publication of the final edition of his incomparable work The Institutes of the Christian Religion and also of the founding of the Genevan Academy. Much has been written and spoken in recognition of this occasion, and it is undoubtedly right and proper to remember with thanksgiving those whom God has in the past used as outstanding instruments of blessing.

But the question should also be asked whether it is enough simply to remember such a man, to keep his memory green, or whether John Calvin, so far from belonging to an age that is past, is not someone who even today has something significant to say to our modern age, which may justly be said to be unprecedented for the magnitude both of its scientific progress and of its human problems. On the face of it, no doubt, it must seem unlikely. The question will be found to be investigated with some care in a volume shortly to be published under the editorship of Dr. J. T. Hoogstra with the title Calvin—Contemporary Prophet.

Meanwhile, however, something smaller in compass, but not on that account to be despised, has appeared from the pen of Dr. Jean Cadier in the form of an article on the relevance of Calvin today (Actualité de Calvin) in the Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, which is published in Lausanne. Dr. Cadier is Dean of the Faculty of Protestant Theology in the University of Montpellier and President of the Calvinist Society of France.

While disclaiming any wish to make Calvin a modern man or to judge him with the spirit of the twentieth century, Professor Cadier maintains that he has relevance for us in the sense that in his day he enunciated certain guiding principles of life which continue to be applicable to our present situation, especially as certain not unimportant similarities may be discerned between his generation and our own. In the first place, his age, like ours, was an age of quite revolutionary change and discovery. The implications of the new astronomy of Copernicus were hardly less startling than are those of the new physics of our time. Then, explorers like Christopher Columbus were sailing across untried oceans and reaching unknown continents; now, too, man is probing into the mysterious ocean of outer space and stretching out his hands to new worlds. In his day, which for him (like our day for us) was a day that witnessed the breakup of accepted ideas together with remarkable scientific advances, Calvin turned to the Word of Holy Scripture and proclaimed the message of the majesty of God and sovereignty of grace.

“It is peculiar to these centuries of the passing of the old and the emerging of the new,” writes Dr. Cadier, “that there is a double feeling of both the greatness and the wretchedness of man. Greatness, because of his successes, his inventions, his boldness in the face of worlds and spaces unknown. Greatness, because of his accurate mathematical predictions, and because of his conquest of nature. But also wretchedness, for that same man feels himself outstripped by this new world he has discovered. He is afraid and he has reason to fear. He fears destruction by nuclear power whose terrible effects he well appreciates. Certainly he can always take refuge in indifference, refuse to think, envelop himself in an optimism that ignores the facts, and seek to forget in attempts at distraction. But this is an untenable position for the man who really wants to be a man and to think out the purpose of his existence. There is then another attitude, that of faith in the presence and sovereignty of God. That is the position of Calvin.”

This is an era, Dr. Cadier points out, in which the worth of the individual is threatened with destruction by mass movements and monopolies. And a still more formidable evil—“all the more formidable since it is no longer considered an evil”—is the denial of God throughout life. “We are witnessing a vast attempt at secularization, and using it as a means of escape from the presence and authority of God in every domain, a profanation of life itself. The characteristic note of modern life is its wish to evade the rule of God.” But this is a situation for which Calvin has a message of the highest significance. “Even when the world expands before our eyes, when rockets pass beyond the stratosphere, God is still the Lord of the universe, the God who created the heavens and the earth. Even at their farthest point the inventions of man have not gone past the realm where God reigns.” Calvin, in fact, put man back into his true perspective as a creature of God; and those who acknowledge this perspective become at the same time both humble and confident—“humble before the divine sovereignty and confident through their immoveable trust in this sovereignty.”

It is precisely, too, in this acknowledgment of the supreme sovereignty of Almighty God that man becomes once more a person and the dignity of the individual is recaptured. “The sovereignty which God exercises is not vague and remote. It is personal and addresses itself to men as persons. It is particular. God accomplishes His plan through men whom He calls and to whom He gives orders and confides a task, at the same time as He provides them with the strength to carry it to a successful conclusion. This is the meaning of the Bible, which is a history showing the action of God through men called by Him and living in His presence. The dignity of these men lies in the summons that God addresses to them. It comes from the vocation that they have received and which makes them rise out of the crowd to fulfill a precise task.” The humility of such men is “a humility without servility” and their certainty “a certainty without presumption.”

Professor Cadier emphasizes that this calling is for the whole of life, and that therefore Calvin’s message provides the antidote to that separation of the sacred and the profane and to that process of secularization by which humanity is menaced today. “We must, each in the affairs which concern us, effect that integration of the sacred in every department of our life, knowing that all our life is for God and from God, refusing all the convenient separations which are really evasions, and accepting the task of making our whole life a witness to the presence of God. In this too we are able to speak of the relevance of Calvin.”

Let our age give heed to the message of John Calvin, and it will be found to lead to blessing and liberation of the spirit just as it did in his age.

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