From Alister McGrath’s, A Life of John Calvin, pgs. 219-222:
The sixteenth century scholar Roland H. Bainton remarked that, when Christianity takes itself seriously, it must either renounce or master the world. Both these stances can be illustrated from the great upheaval which was the European Reformation. Many of the radical reformers rejected the coercive structures of contemporary society, refusing to swear oaths, hold any magisterial office, serve in any military capacity, or even bear arms. Such a radically apolitical and world-renouncing attitude inevitably entailed separation from the world. Perhapswith the pre-Constantinian church – which existed within, but not as part of, the Roman Empire – as a model, the radicals often conceived of their communities as an “alternative society” within, but not part of, the greater society which surrounded him
The contrast with Calvinism could not be more marked. If any religious movement of the sixteenthcentury was world-affirming, it was Calvinism. Yet Calvinism affirmed the world in order to master it, addressing its specific situations rather than luxuriating in abstract speculation. Time and time again, in both his theology and his spirituality, Calvin refuses to indulge in easy generalizations or abstractions. In a highly perceptive comparison of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Wortle’s School, Stanley Hauerwas points to the peculiarly abstract character of Barth’s ethics, which lends his account of the moral life an aura of unreality; this abstractness is made all the more evident through the comparison with Trollope’s concreteness, in that his account of morality is grounded in individual persons and societies, rather than impersonal principles. In short, Barth’s ethical thought is not adequately grounded in the realities of human existence.
This weakness is conspicuously absent from Calvin. Throughout his writings, we find a determination to engage with the objective social existence of human beings, along with the problems and possibilities this brings with it. It seems that Calvin learned in Strasbourg the lessons which Reinhold Niebuhr learned in downtown Detroit during the 1920s. In his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1929), Niebuhr wrote:
If a minister wants to be a man among men he need only stop creating a devotion to abstract ideals which everyone accepts in theory denies in practice, and to agonize about their validity and practicability in the social issues which he and others face in our present civilization. That immediately gives his ministry a touch of reality and potency.
Precisely this pattern stands out in Calvin’s spiritual and homiletic writings. Calvin addresses real and specific human situations – social, political and economic – with all the risks that this precision entails. Even his analysis of anxiety – a major element of sixteenth century thought – led his followers to regard the overcoming of anxiety as a specifically worldly, rather than other-worldly, activity.
It is perfectly fair to describe Calvin’s thought as “theology anti-theological,” proving this is understood not to entail the absence of a theology, but to highlight the distinctly world-affirming and anti-speculative trajectory of his ideas. Calvin’s secularization of holiness (Henri Hauser) involved bringing the entire sphere of human existence within the scope of divine sanctification and human dedication. It is this sanctification of life, of which the sanctification of work is the chief pillar, which stamped its impression upon Calvin’s followers…
Yet a note of caution must be entered. Those who seem to master the world are often those who have been mastered by it. Those Christians who are judged to be successes in the world are all too often those Christians who have capitulated to the standards of th world. The strongly affirmative attitude which undergirds the Calvinist outlook on life is perennially vulnerable; the delicate balance between church and world can too easily be disturbed, leading to their radical separation on the one hand, or – and herein the great danger was perceived to lie – their coalescing on the other. For latent within Calvinism is a purely profane approach to life, in that the failure to maintain a proper dialectic between God and the world leads to the collapse of the divine into the secular. Calvinist moral, economic, social and political structures are values, although firmly grounded in theology, could easily become detached from those theological foundations, and maintain an independent existence…
Calvin himself constructed a sophisticated dialectic between faith and the world which allowed scope for positive action within the world while identifying and averting the risks which this entailed. The form of life which is most praise worthy in the sight of God is that which is useful to society: “however much we may admire celibacy or a philosophical life cut off from everyday life,” the persons best fitted to govern church and society alike are those who have immersed themselves in the experience and practice of everyday life.
Christians are encouraged, even required, to invest in and commit themselves to the world. There is no place in Calvin’s thought for the medieval monastic attitude towards society, which led to the situation in which individuals renounced the world, while the institution which they served affirmed it. Yet the Christian, while immersing himself or herself in the affairs and anxieties of the world, must learn to keep it at a critical distance. Outward investment in and commitment to the world must be accompanied by inward detachment and the fostering of a critical attitude towards the secular. Believers must actively immerse themselves in the secular sphere, without passively allowing themselves to be submerged by it. “We are to learn to pass through this world as though it were a foreign country, treading lightly all earthly things and declining the set our hearts on them.”
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