Since July 10 is the birthday of John Calvin, can we say that Calvinism was born on this day in French history? Or, since Calvin did not align with the Protestant cause until his mid-20s, is the day of Calvin’s natural birth insignificant compared to the day of his spiritual re-birth? And that raises more questions — not addressed for some time here — about conversion and the way that Calvinists differ on the necessity and importance of a dramatic experience to mark the beginning of Christian life. The experimental Calvinists generally following Edwards take one side, the ordinary Calvinists who can’t remember a day when Calvinists questioned conversionism, look to folks like John Williamson Nevin for help in reconceiving the start of spiritual life.
To the rescue comes Henry M. Lewis, a long-time contributor to the Nicotine Theological Journal, who wrote the following (which is an excerpt from his October 2000 piece, “The Unconverted Calvin”) about Calvin’s own account of his spiritual development. First, Calvin’s account from the preface to Commentary on the Psalms:
God drew me from obscure and lowly beginnings and conferred on me that most honorable office of herald and minister of the Gospel. . . . What happened first was that by an unexpected conversion he tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years — for I was so strongly devoted to the superstitions of the papacy that nothing less could draw me from such depths of mire. And so this mere taste of true godliness that I received set me on fire with such a desire to progress that I pursued the rest of my studies more coolly, although I did not give them up altogether. Before a year had slipped by anybody who longed for a purer doctrine kept on coming to learn from me, still a beginner, a raw recruit.
Now Lewis:
Bouwsma interprets this passage as nothing more than “a shift and quickening of his interests,” certainly nothing incompatible with the evangelical humanism that many university students at Paris espoused, simply a willingness to be more teachable. In other words, there was no decisive break in Calvin with his former life until he ran afoul of Roman church authorities. But becoming a Protestant, something that was gradual and progressive, hardly qualifies as “going forward” at the time of an altar call or experiencing a unique and immediate sense of God’s presence somewhere in the woods outside Paris. Protestantism was a reformation, not a revival. Evidence of its transformation came in the form of changes in doctrine, liturgy and church polity, not in hearts strangely or normally warmed.
AS BOUWSMA ALSO OBSERVES, Calvin was not enthusiastic about conversion as a precise event in his discussions of Christian piety. He “always emphasized the gradualness rather than the suddenness of conversion and the difficulty of making progress in the Christian life.” In a statement that many contemporary Presbyterians would deem nonsensical, Calvin wrote that “we are converted little by little to God, and by stages.” In his commentary on Acts, Calvin was even reluctant to attach much significance to Paul’s encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus. “We now have Paul tamed,” he wrote, “but not yet a disciple of Christ.”
CONSEQUENTLY, BOUWSMA attributes more to family circumstances and educational influences than to the movement of the Spirit in explaining Calvin’s move into the Protestant fold in 1535. The death of Calvin’s mother and his subsequent exclusion from his father’s household, according to Bouwsma, imparted a sense of homelessness that would later befit a French exile in Geneva. Then at Paris Calvin learned the three languages — Latin, Greek and Hebrew — that were so much a part of the Christian reform movement spearheaded by Erasmus. Bouwsma concludes that whatever conversion Calvin experienced it was not a radical break with his past but rather the fruit of personal, spiritual and intellectual seeds sown earlier in his life.
Whatever the merits of Bouwsma’s historical scholarship, his point about Calvin’s conversion or, better, evolution should not come as a shock to those who claim to follow in the French Reformer’s spiritual footsteps. That it does amaze is testimony to the way that pietistic influences have eaten away Presbyterian and Reformed brain cells. Once upon a time the Calvinistic branch of Protestantism was not so gullible when it came to the gushes of emotion that are supposed to count for the work of the Spirit among revivalistically inclined Protestants. For most Presbyterians, affirmative answers to questions commonly asked at a public affirmation of faith were a sufficient gauge to a man or woman’s standing before God. But these more formal and objective measures of Christian zeal began to look bland once the converts of the revivals of the First Great Awakening began to tell about the ways in which they had been slain by the Holy Ghost (as if they had, to borrow Luther’s phrase, swallowed him, “feathers and all”). At that point, the great and ongoing struggle between dying to sin and living to righteousness was reduced to a moment, a crisis, a specific time when the convert experienced Gawdah. And ever since the eighteenth century when Presbyterians began to look for signs of grace where no one had looked before, they not only started to insist on the kind of conversion narratives that make Calvin look like a non-evangelical, but they also introduced an element into their religious sensibility that would prove to be destructive of Reformed piety and worship. They began to insist upon experiences and encounters and restrictions and insights that their theology could not deliver. (This explains, by the way, the great disparity between the biblical and theological disciplines in Reformed theological education and the area of study misnamed as practical theology. Prospective pastors learn for two-thirds of their classes that it is God who saves his people and then are told that to be successful in the ministry they need to be enthusiastic, warm and caring. Go figure.)
THE REVIVALIST IMPULSE IN American Protestantism has played itself out in such a way that many conservative Presbyterians and Reformed fail to remember that God executes his decrees through the works of creation and providence. Revivalism is good at affirming God’s creative power, that is, his ability to create ex nihilo, such as when he breaths new life into a heart of stone. But it stumbles over God’s providential power in ordering things through secondary causes. For this reason, revivalist Protestantism demands that John Calvin had to undergo a conversion, a dramatic change of life, in order to demonstrate God’s work in his life. A person is either alive or dead, and to go from the wretched state of the latter to the exalted state of the former requires a monumental form of divine intervention. But if God superintends all things in the lives of his saints, even down to the hairs on their heads, then it could just as likely be the case that the movement from spiritual death to spiritual life is gradual and life-long. It may begin a particular moment, though the movement of the Spirit being fairly invisible is hard to detect. But it may also come in fits and starts that depend on such secondary causes as family, school and especially church. It may even be something that is inherited, such as in the case of Isaac, the model covenant child who grew up never having known otherwise than that he was a child of God. Indeed, the damage that revivalist Protestantism does to a proper understanding of baptism and any notion of covenantal religion is huge, to put it mildly, but that’s a subject for another time.
IN THE END, TWO THINGS ARE pretty clear. One is that Calvin’s understanding of conversion was wrapped up with his conception of the Christian life and the ministry of the church. Take away his understanding of conversion as a life long slow process of dying to self and living to Christ, and you have a hard time holding on to his image of the church as mother, whose nurture is necessary to the Christian throughout his whole life. Immediate, one-time-fix conversions, in other words, leave little room for the means of grace in the word preached and the sacraments administered. This is why the Christian life for those who experience the crisis-styled conversions is usually little more than Bible reading (i.e. the search for daily guidance), seeking other converts (i.e., witnessing) and spiritual retreats where batteries get recharged. Conversion of the quick variety lacks an understanding of the sin that still pervades the believing heart and the need of that heart for forgiveness week-in and week-out.
THE SECOND THING THAT IS clear is that the prevailing conception of conversion in American Presbyterian and evangelical circles is a novelty in the history of Western Christianity, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant. The idea of an immediate encounter with God through a crisis experience began in the North American British colonies in the eighteenth century and has been the norm for most Protestants ever since. If contemporary Presbyterians and Reformed are ever going to recover some of the depths of Calvin’s theology, worship and piety, they will have to get over their crush on the First Great Awakening. Awakenings may change individuals. But what is often missed is that they also change churches. And that’s because revivals feature a form of Christianity in which the church, her clergy, creeds, and worship are peripheral. Many conservative Reformed and Presbyterians in the United States might be willing to do the American thing and minimize the importance of office and liturgy. The hope at least is that if they can see revivalism as an intrinsic threat to their theology, they might reconsider the parts of their confessions and catechisms that talk about conversion in the right manner.
Postscript: move along, nothing happening here.
Old Life 