Now our blockishness arises from the fact that our minds, stunned by the empty dazzlement of riches, power, and honors, become so deadened that they can see no farther. The heart also, occupied with avarice, ambition, and lust, is so weighed down that it cannot rise up higher. In fine, the whole soul, enmeshed in the allurements of the flesh, seeks its happiness on earth. To counter this evil the Lord instructs his followers in the vanity of the present life by continual proof of its miseries. . . .
    Then only do we rightly advance in the discipline of the cross, when we learn that this life, judged by itself, is troubled, turbulent, unhappy in countless ways, and in no respect clearly happy; that all those things which are judged to be its goods are uncertain, fleeting, vain, and vitiated by many intermingled evils. From this, at the same time, we conclude that in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle; when we think of our crown, we are to raise our eyes to heaven. For this we must believe: that the mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it be previously imbued with contempt for the present life.
Institutes, III.ix.1
Old Life 
Yeow, what a polish-stowing-Dispy-too-heavenly-minded-for-any-earthly-good-pietist Fundamentalist Gnostic.
This must be why the gray Psalter removed Calvin’s prayer to “not be too tied to this world.”
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Keep reading to ch. 10, where Calvin talks about proper use of this present life (one could even say, a rightly directed use of creational structures).
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Yes, he moves on to talk about vocation as a “sentry post” from which we are to keep a look out for Christ’s return. I have read both chapters — the whole “Golden Booklet,” as it’s called, and it is hard to find the rhetoric of taking captive for Christ. Could it because Calvin grounds the discussion in the theology of the cross?
Russ, do you really think neo-Calvinists whom you read have much of a sense of that theology?
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On several counts, of course, Calvin was no neocalvinist. Kuyper addresses a part of this well in his Stone Lectures (see “sovereignty of church,” third/last part of third lecture).
But there is nothing at all in what Calvin says here that is at odds with neocalvinism. Understand that in section 3 of that same chapter (two paragraphs below the quotation above) Calvin says that (proper) contempt for this life is only cultivated when we first proceed, not from a hatred of it, but from a grateful appreciation of this earthly life as the gift of God and the very foretaste of glory.
The “non-gnostic” sense of contempt which Calvin urges is a reflection, in part, on 1Cor.7:31, and is a fundamental tenet of neocalvinism (the violation of which we sometimes refer to as “absolutization” and idolatry).
I do have to say that all of Darryl’s objections to various attitudes and positions that turn out not to be supported by neocalvinism, only serve to bolster an informed confidence that worldview neocalvinism is utterly compatible with theological and ecclesial reformed confessionalism.
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