Calvin and Calvinism

in this lecture we're looking at Calvin in Calvinism and this lecture kicks off the next series of this course where we're looking at the life and the times in the context of John Calvin himself but just like Luther we have to kind of frame the entire purpose as to why we're looking at this man and in particular with Calvin and Calvinism you have this ongoing problem of interpretation where some simply are unaware of the categories or of the main players on the stage when we're discussing the reformed tradition in fact it's one of the pains of historians that they have so often a whole welter of popular misconceptions about Calvin and Calvinism that they usually have to clear away before they can even do the historical work of who John Calvin was actually in his context ask just about anyone particularly in the north american scene what they think about Calvin and you're almost never going to get a bland answer its are they going to be fervent love for the man and the coherence of his theology and the clarity of the Institute's and these kinds of things or at times and often more frequently it'll be concerned about the myth of fatalism about the Calvinist doctrine of predestination or of some other features of who the man was that drives people crazy when they attempt to understand him in his context and that's certainly understandable on a certain human level I often tell students that have Luther were to walk into the room assuming he fit into the 21st century context in terms of dress in vocabulary and language etc that Luther by the end of the hour would have everyone sort of mesmerised he had this way about him Luther did he was larger than life in fact one of the most enduring legacies of Luther in his immediate context is just how much he was a powerful force in a room again and again and again from the time of the beginning of the Reformation all the way to the end of his death there was just something compelling about the man that often drew people to him with this enormous loyalty and respect Luther very much would like to have the room kind of waiting on his every word as he regales us with stories or Theological wisdom Calvin is a different personality if Calvin were into the room I often say he would be more of the shy type he would be the guy that would often shuffle off to the corner he was more bookish a little more introverted we might say today in not one really to talk much about himself in fact historically one of the things that historians always come up against is the fact that Calvin really never said much about himself at all now we do have a couple of biographies of Calvin's life from two of the men who knew him best which we'll talk about in our next lecture on his early life the by-and-large Calvin was a man to stick to the texts and so just in terms of personality you have a pretty stark difference between the man Luther and the man Calvin one of the other stark differences though is in terms of their writing most people who read a pretty sizable chunk of Luther often come away with not the best impression of his powers of organization when it comes to his treatises Luther writes like a rabbit runs he just kind of goes wherever he wants at times he goes on tirades or on side channels and it just kind of writes wherever his pen takes him Calvin by distinction was an enormous ly clear writer and that actually is the impression most people have when they come away from reading Calvin as long as they read a sufficiently large amount to understand the kind of tone of voice that he has in his writing style and in many ways and I don't wanna make this too fond a point the legacy of Calvin was at the expense of how people actually felt about him personally Calvin had enemies in Geneva he was kicked out actually once he never really was beloved in the city that he called home for the majority of his life Luther was beloved even when he was pummeling people there was always the sense that people were loyal to the man Luther but as the years wore on after their death it was really Calvin's clarity that won him more adherence to his understanding of the Reformed faith than anything else for whatever reason and I'm really sort of choosing at this point to say that it was the clarity of Calvin and the simplicity of access to his ideas but for whatever reason Calvin's writings always had more of an impact whenever they were translated into various languages they more quickly wanted here due in large part frankly to the clarity of what Calvin says it's actually that clarity of Calvin's writing that actually makes it all the more ironic that so many people over the centuries have these sort of preconceived notions about what the man was all about or about where his context fit we can think of a number of popular misconceptions about Calvin and Calvinism one of the more enduring ones is that Calvin and Calvinism all boils down to five points we've heard all kinds of debates in the 20th and 21st centuries about whether or not someone adheres to tulip in tulip of course is the acronym of the five points T for total depravity you for unconditional election L for limited atonement I for irresistible grace and P for the perseverance of the saints again and again and again I've had students come to me and complain about Calvin and his teachings of tulip now the problem with all this of course is that Calvin never said any of this the so-called five points of Calvinism actually come from the 17th century with the Senate of dort which was a conference held in the Netherlands that was meant to be a response to the five points of Arminianism the followers of Armenians had come up with five essential points of their views and the Senate of dort came together it came up with five answers to the views of arminianism so right on the gate you can see if the essence of Calvinism is the five points well it didn't originate within Calvinism it was an answer to an alternative set of presuppositions the other thing is the use of the word tulip as a memory device has no historical value outside of the 20th century no one used it frankly until the 20th century to describe Calvinism first and foremost if the five points of Calvinism comes from the Senate of dort which is from the Netherlands why in the world would they use an English spelling of a flower name the Dutch word for tulip is tool which actually doesn't have the I in it so maybe the five points of Calvinism doesn't have irresistible grace built into it the other thing is is the Senate of dort had very few English speakers at it so the idea that they each came up with this idea of tulip as the five points of Calvinism it's just one of the great myth that's endured all the way down until today more pervasive though is this sort of fundamental belief that Calvin and Calvinism sort of boil down into five basic points no one believed this even after the scent of dort no one believed that the essence of their own faith was five simple points the other issue and the other belief is that Calvin himself was the originator of everything that we called reformed tradition this is more of an Americanism than anything else but it's equally uh historical as we already sold our lectures on Luther there already was a reformed tradition long before Calvin even converts Calvin comes to the faith in the 1530s and he converts and then he moved to the Swiss regions where he really functions more like the younger brother to men like boots sir and bullinger into others in the reformed tradition and we'll see this as we go through the life of Calvin he was not the originator of the reformed tradition but still because of the myth that's out there the Calvin was the originator of the reformed tradition you have all kinds of again popular misconceptions about Calvin's theology in its relationship to modern reformed thinking I can remember being in a class at one point in my education and having a very developed Presbyterian professor tell me that Calvin was the inventor of the Presbyterian system of government and that it was Calvin who invented Presbyterianism and I remember finding his all-together strange because it simply ignored the fact that Presbyterianism was Scottish and then it comes from the Scottish world in the reforms of John Knox now obviously John Knox loves Calvin and he is a supporter of Calvin's ideas but Doc's was his own man but Calvin was not the inventor of Presbyterian forms of government but what I realized over the years is that that instinct to trace every single doctrine back to the man Calvin himself is one that really is perennial it makes Calvin simply the inverse of Luther now obviously in Luther and Lutheranism the connection between Luther himself and later Lutheranism is relatively equivalent as we said in last lecture about the legacy of Luther it's quite hard to think of anyone calling themselves Lutheran really frankly until the 20th century that did not bind the vast majority if not every single one of Luther's doctrinal positions and so people always reach for Calvin and they expect him to always be sort of a Luther for the reformed tradition but it simply is not and so the issue for historians and for new students the subject of Calvin is we have to get right and get in our minds I the proper understanding of the relationship between Calvin and Calvinism and again there have been enormous amount of debates on this but thankfully in the context of right now in today's world we have been enormous Lee helped in particular by the scholarship of a lot of different scholars but in particular the work of Richard Muller out of Calvin's seminary has become really the standard bearer for a real clear focus on the relationship of Calvin and the later reformed tradition and Molly's position I can really sum up really quickly and it's the position that I hold as well and I think it's a simply bares out an historical record when Muller looks at the question what is the relationship between Calvin and Calvinism we can summarize what people mean by that by looking at two tendencies the first tendency as we've already seen is the belief that Calvinism is simply the theology of Calvin it says that Calvin either taught or implicitly taught all types of doctrinal debates that arise for a century or a century and a half after the death of Calvin issues like church polity different forms of government doctrinal issues like super lapse Arianism and infra lapse Arianism and a whole bevy of different ideas that are associated with what we call reformed scholasticism which is the real serious theological debates and writings by reformed thinkers extending long after Calvin's death and Muller is frankly pretty scathing on this if we say that Calvin and Calvinism means that Calvin's theology is exactly the same as later Calvinism then the answer is now now here's the problem when most people say that they like Calvin but they hate Calvinism or that Calvin wasn't a Calvinist usually what's in play here is some kind of barb at modern Calvinists or modern neo Calvinists in this position some people hold from time to time they say they like the man Calvin they like his theology but all these Calvinists running around or really kind of pains in the neck and I can sympathize on some level with that issue it can be frustrating I'm sure to find people who call themselves Calvinists to have never read Calvin or whose ideas or theologies seem to differ quite a lot with Calvin's understanding of biblical theology and so we're not going to insert a wedge between Calvin and Calvinism by saying we like one and hate the other but Muller is very clear on this it's actually anachronistic to say that there is something called Calvinism because for a century or longer in every country frankly except for England those who would pejoratively call Calvinists actually never called themselves this even the most zealous defenders of Calvin's doctrines never frankly historically tended to call themselves Calvinists rather the word that they used was that they were reformed in reformed in a matter of speaking is an appeal not to one man Calvin but to what I call a Band of Brothers and these were all kinds of theologians in the first and second generations of the Reformation who shaped and codified this alternative position to Lutheranism and it's a position that we do they call the Reformed faith or the reformed tradition and this certainly includes Calvin but it also includes Zwingli and Boots er bullinger John Knox baeza and a host of others across various nations with various languages and all kinds of connections back to this wellspring of what we call reformed theology they don't agree on everything but it's international and it's varied within a pretty generous orbit of what we call reformed so when Muller says is Calvin related to Calvinism and if someone means by that that Calvin's theology is the only standard bearer for the reformed tradition this is why he says this is simply not true to say that puts Calvin on a pedestal and ignores the vast majority of all these other thinkers who are part of the Reformed faith and who are the cauda fires of it in the first couple of generations so Calvin is not a Calvinist in the sense that Calvin either created or somehow implied the doctrinal or the theological or even the ecclesiological developments that happened for a century or a Center and a half after his death he certainly was part of the headwaters he certainly was part of that initial push in the reformed tradition and it wouldn't be wrong to say that Calvin was the most celebrated in successful author out of the reformed tradition his works are translated vociferous li they go to all manner of different countries and they are translated into a variety of different languages and they're typically very successful the same for example cannot be said for boots er who is a dramatically important reformer but whose writings frankly didn't catch on so we have to kind of pump the brakes here Calvin is not the only person to shape this tradition but and this is why we're focusing on him for this course given the enormous attraction of Calvin's writings in particular his Institutes for centuries after his death and the relative reduction of interest in the writings of Bullinger or boots ER or peter mortar or others as the centuries were on does mean that Calvin's theology in Calvin's writings really can and then some ways should be juxtaposed with those of Luther but we want to get this right throughout these lectures you're going to hear me often not saying the word Calvinism but you're going to hear me talking about the reformed tradition or the Reformed faith by which I mean that this band of brothers this initial push of a variety of different people who relied on each other and interacted with each other and at times had to compromise with each other forms the actual wellspring of everything that we call today sometimes Calvinism in its that usage that Muller talks about as the second issue in terms of Calvin and Calvinism talks about for example the sort of pejorative or the popular use of the phrase Calvinism there are even to this day scholarly books top-notch top-flight really great books that still use the word Calvinism in muller takes the position and I share it which is while that certainly is an anachronism and in some ways that carries on the problem of the belief that everything boils down to the teachings of Calvin still for a lot of people they're very used to saying the word Calvinism there are lots of people running around today that call themselves Calvinists and generally what they mean by that is they either have a personal affinity for the writings of Calvin in particular or they use the word Calvinism to distinguish themselves from say Wesleyan or arminianism or perhaps that has simply mean benignly when they say Calvinism that they are referring to the reformed tradition but the essence of who Calvin was cannot be traced to a simple one-to-one correlation of five centuries of development within the reformed tradition that occur after his death so what we're going to be doing in these lectures is trying to actually come to the understanding of who the man john calvin actually was we're going to be focusing a great deal in this course on his context on his interaction with this band of brothers in particular his interaction with men like boots ER and bulgur and to a lesser extent john knox because we want to understand who he was in his own skin in his own context in geneva in other words the concern for Calvinism or the reformed tradition down the line is not our primary focus in these lectures rather we want to get Calvin right first who was John Calvin and so in the end when we look at this question of Calvin and Calvinism we have to take into account that it's more complex than we might have thought before now it's not overly complex but it's still complex when so many people believe they understand what Calvinism is and they boil it down to things like tulip or five points or they expect the Institute's to tell us everything about everything that's going to happen for five centuries it's more complex than that but as we'll see some real hard spade work in learning who john calvin was himself with in his actual context of Geneva and Switzerland as well as France and other countries will I think help us better appreciate where Calvin fits into the Reformation and more importantly will give us a good foil and a good contrast in the latter part of this course when we compare the teachings of Calvin with those of Luther okay that's it next we're going to actually dive into Calvin's life we're going to look at his earliest years and where he came from in the country of France

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 88,841

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: John Calvin (Founding Figure), Calvinism (Religion), Religion (TV Genre), Protestantism (Religion), Protestant Reformation (Event), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, Christianity (Religion), Lutheranism (Religion), Martin Luther (Founding Figure), 16th Century (Event)

Id: 9ucUn2HevEw

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 09 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/PrestoVivace]

Calvin's Institutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEOzRP8WXcA

[u/PrestoVivace]

Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Audio book, by John Calvin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWhxypX7dIA ...
Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 2, Part 1 by John Calvin (Audio Book)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJYIpDY3-nM