Posted on 06/19/2009 7:09:41 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
For the non-Calvinists or anti-Calvinists among us who may worry that this issue of WORLD has several articles about John Calvin, be not afraid: It happens only once every 500 years. July 10 brings the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth—and the great theologian, even with his warts, deserves a better press than he has typically received in recent decades.
Calvin was a fallen sinner, as all of us are, but was he especially mean-spirited? He taught that God created the world out of love and loved the world so much that Christ came down from the glorious kingdom of heaven and plunged into this world's muck. Calvin saw God as a generous giver and His mercy as an abundant resource. Jehovah's Witnesses would later insist that heaven has room for only 144,000, but Calvin understood that God's grace is infinite.
Did Calvin emphasize in-group harshness toward the poor and the alien? No: He wrote, "We cannot but behold our own face as it were in a glass in the person that is poor and despised . . . though he were the furthest stranger in the world. Let a Moor or a barbarian come among us, and yet inasmuch as he is a man, he brings with him a looking glass wherein we may see that he is our brother and neighbor." Everyone is created in God's image and worthy of respect.
Did Calvin want us to abstain from all material pleasures? He wrote that God "meant not only to provide for necessity but also for delight and good cheer. . . . Has the Lord clothed the flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils, and yet will it be unlawful for our eyes to be affected by that beauty, or our sense of smell by the sweetness of that odor?" He opposed any doctrine that "deprives us of the lawful fruit of God's beneficence."
Calvin also opposed doctrines that deprive us of political liberty. His understandings—that God-given laws are superior to those of the state, the king, and any other institution, and that individuals have direct access to the Bible, without dependence on pope or priest—are common now, but compare them to the political and theological theories fashionable before his time. In ancient times, pagan states revered leaders as semi-divine. Those who argued with such bosses were seen as deserving death. In medieval times, the interpretations of church officials often trumped the words of the Bible itself (which few people could read). They identified God's kingdom on earth with a church monopoly, and hanged, burned, or decapitated some with other ideas.
Calvin and other Reformation leaders, though, separated church and state while emphasizing the importance of believers working to lead the state. Calvin contended that, since God reigns everywhere, His followers should be entrepreneurs in every strategic institution, including government, civil society, commerce, media, law, education, the church, and the arts. This emphasis led directly to what has become known as the "Protestant ethic," with its unleashing of individual initiative and its emphasis on hard work in purportedly secular areas. Many kinds of labor are equally worthy, Calvin argued, and those in charge of one activity should not dictate to others.
Calvin's writings also had an implicit anti-statism. Since fundamental law comes from God, obeying the law means obeying God, not necessarily the state. Rebellion against an unlawful state act, led by "lesser magistrates" such as local leaders, is really a justifiable maintenance of true law. One Calvin disciple in 1579 wrote Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos ("Vindication Against Tyrants"), which emphasized the limits of power.
Would freedom ring? The English jurist Blackstone called "the power and jurisdiction of Parliament transcendent and absolute . . . sovereign and uncontrollable." English lawyers joked that "Parliament can do everything except make a woman a man, or a man a woman." (Some of our jurists and legislators are more ambitious.) But generation after generation of Calvinists read Vindiciae and emphasized that government must be under God. According to John Adams, its doctrines greatly influenced Americans of the 1760s and 1770s.
Calvin's birthday comes six days after the Independence Day that owes much to his teaching. Bake a cake and know that Calvin was not against enjoying it.
I would suggest that if the Catholic Church believes there are "other ways" to heaven other than believing in the Lord Jesus, then they have truly departed from the faith of the fathers.
... but the process of canonization allows the Church, at the end, to state with confidence that yes, this person is in Heaven.
It is rather laughable that one cannot know if a person is in heaven when they're alive but the Church can state they are when they are dead. Well...almost.
The God of Scripture does not damn souls to hell for failing to do what they cannot possibly do.
Laugh at Christ’s Church all you want.
If the Catholic Church could just erase the last 1500 years of goofiness then they probably could set their house in order. Of course then they be Reformers.
The only problem is that pesky "infallibility" edict. They can't say they were wrong when they said they were right.
It was Augustine who stated, “Command what you will, and grant what you command.” Do you believe this prayer?
This is the hubris of the Reformation...all of Christendom was wrong for 1500 years, but Luther and Calvin suddenly got it right.
A Calvinist has no point in making such a prayer, since it has all been preprogrammed anyway.
You're skirting the issue.
I really like your tag. 8~)
Don't blame Augustine for your tragic error.
You’re not answering the question....
I’m waiting...and waiting...
Good luck with that.
One would think they would be a bit squemish knowing that they’re taking the side of condemned heretics of the early Church. But hey...this is the 21st century. Let’s just give everyone a hug and move on.
Who, Pelagius?
You're compressing all the space between Augustine and Pelagius into nothingness: a classic Calvinist preference for binary thinking, a race to the false dichotomy.
Meanwhile, Calvin is himself a condemned heretic of the later Church.
Amen, Harley! I just read your excellent post to my husband as a beautiful example of one saint's fearless witness that it is ALL of God - by, for and through Christ Jesus.
When those scales fall from our eyes to reveal God alone it is a clarifying moment from which we thankfully do not turn back.
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist." -- Colossians 1:16-17"...all things were created by him, and for him:
Who told you you have only the choice between two slaveries?
That sounds like another of Cauvin's classically-flawed false dichotomies.
Than God did not create us in His image and likeness,Therefore God does not have free will either
Ummmm...excuse me. Isn't that what He did with Paul?
No! Saint Paul could have rejected Christ.God pines for even the most horrific sinners and Saint Paul WAS in that category in his persecution of sinners
Please note that St Auginas tends to be more philosophical than theological. He rarely uses scripture
That's just ignorant of you ,Harley. Saint Aquinas backs up almost everything with scripture
Amazing how many Cauvin convinced to use their free will for the purpose of denying that free will and pretending it does not exist.
LOL!Lets see...
Prayer to Our Lady of Mercy - St. Augustine of Hippo
Blessed Virgin Mary,
who can worthily repay you with praise
and thanks for having rescued a fallen world
by your generous consent!
Receive our gratitude,
and by your prayers obtain the pardon of our sins.
Take our prayers into the sanctuary of heaven
and enable them to make our peace with God.
Holy Mary, help the miserable,
strengthen the discouraged,
comfort the sorrowful,
pray for your people,
plead for the clergy,
intercede for all women consecrated to God.
May all who venerate you
feel now your help and protection.
Be ready to help us when we pray,
and bring back to us the answers to our prayers.
Make it your continual concern
to pray for the people of God,
for you were blessed by God
and were made worthy to bear the Redeemer of the world,
who lives and reigns forever.
Saint Aquinas Prayer
“O most blessed and sweet Virgin Mary,
Mother of God, filled with all tenderness,
Daughter of the most high King,
Lady of the Angels,
Mother of all the faithful,
On this day and all the days of my life,
I entrust to your merciful heart my body and my soul,
all my acts, thoughts, choices,
desires, words, deeds,
my entire life and death,
So that, with your assistance,
all may be ordered to the good
according to the will of your beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. ...
From your beloved Son. ..
request for me the grace to resist firmly
the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. ..
My most holy Lady,
I also beseech you to obtain for me
true obedience and true humility of heart
So that I may recognize myself truly
as a sinner—wretched and weak—
and powerless,
without the grace and help of my Creator
and without your holy prayers. ..
Obtain for me as well,
O most sweet Lady,
true charity with which from the depths of my heart
I may love your most holy Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
and, after Him,
love you above all other things. ..
Grant, O Queen of Heaven,
that ever in my heart
I may have fear and love alike
for your most sweet Son. ..
I pray also that, at the end of my life,
you,
Mother without compare,
Gate of Heaven and Advocate of sinners. ..
will protect me with your great piety and mercy. ..
and obtain for me, through the blessed and glorious Passion of your Son
and through your own intercession,
received in hope, the forgiveness of all my sins.
When I die in your love and His love,
may you direct me
into the way of salvation and blessedness.
Amen. “15
It's the only way Cauvin could psychologically convince himself that God was the reason for his own evilness.
Chesterton has it backwards. No surprise. Reformed churches are overwhelmingly conservative because they are bound by the clear, unambiguous word of God.
Whereas the church in Rome is predominantly liberal, the majority of its membership voting of B. Hussein Obama.
Further, Chesterton reveals himself to be a deluded humanist who actually thinks an unfettered "freedom" exists outside the will and purpose of the Triune God.
"O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." -- Jeremiah 10:23
"Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God..."
And the church at Rome attempts to take away the freedom from God and give it to man.
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