John Calvin:
Marius, Richard
THE PROPHET OF ORDER JOHN CALVIN A Sixteenth Century Portrait William J. Bouwsma Oxford, $22.95, 310 pp. Richard Marius Among the Protestant Reformers, John Calvin has been the most influential...
...The geographical sweep of Calvin's influence is as vast as the course of Anglo-Saxon and Dutch imperialism...
...In a darkling world, predestination is a stern consolation, for even in its "impenetrable mystery," it affirms that God has reasons we know not of...
...He does not recognize secondary causes, for God's inscrutable power permits nothing to happen by chance...
...William J. Bouwsma's brilliant survey of Calvin's thought is therefore a double grace: It restores Calvin to general attention, and it is free of the special bias of confessional historians who know what they will find before they start looking for it...
...I wish we had a little more about Calvin in Geneva, but that was not the book Bouwsma wanted to write...
...Although Calvin's ideas were complex and unsystematic, they were relatively static...
...The Calvin who emerges in these pages is far different from the calm and flinty stereotype, an image engraved on our minds in part by the aloof serenity of Calvin's portraits, two of which appear in this book...
...John's University, Collegeville, Minn...
...Bouwsma's Calvin is haunted by terrors not only of sin, guilt, death, and salvation, but also of nature itself...
...Like Thomas More in England, he favored republicanism over monarchy, and he was outraged by tyranny, but for the sake of order he thought Christians should accept the governments they had...
...Bouwsma's focus is on the inner man rather than outward events...
...Though he could call philosophy a "noble gift of God," he more often assaulted philosophers for their vain and arrogant curiosity...
...This is my only complaint about the book...
...What can we know...
...Although he did not think wealth was wrong, he assaulted the pride of the wealthy which led to idleness and vice...
...Calvin had little sympathy for Job but on the contrary found good words to say about Job's comforters...
...No one should read an icy modern skepticism based on a scientific world view back into the sixteenth century...
...He hated the subordination of religion to politics which he thought turned the proper order of things upside down, and he loathed the ignorance of the ruling classes which led them to confusion...
...Since water is lighter than earth, Calvin supposed, it ought to cover the world, and, so Bouwsma says, in Calvin's view "the survival of the human race from moment to moment thus depends on God's keeping the seas under an unnatural control...
...But Calvin's relentless moralism obviously wearies Bouwsma, who says it resulted in "a loss of the openness to the complexity and mystery of human existence that he could display elsewhere...
...RICHARD MARIUS, director of expository writing and senior lecturer on English at Harvard University, is the author of biographies of Martin Luther and Thomas More...
...Final assurance lay in heartfelt faith in the divine message, though Bouwsma points out that Calvin was not averse to looking for external evidence...
...He denounced with particular harshness sins associated with unrestraint," Bouwsma says...
...Still it may be that we begin to see the century aright only when we think of both Catholic and Protestant theology not merely as efforts to establish the right kind of Christianity but as valiant attempts to vindicate Christianity itself against a meaninglessness compounded of a chaos of popular superstition on the one hand and a troubled awareness of classical skepticism on the other...
...ROBERT L. SPAETH, author of No Easy Answers: Christians Debate Nuclear Arms and The Church and a Catholic Conscience, (both Harper & Row) is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at St...
...compared to it, Lutheran-ism is a sect walled in by the minority of the German lands that became Lutheran...
...He admired "the consistency of the heavens, eternal and exempt from all change...
...He condenses a summary of biographical details into his first chapter...
...Luther and Thomas More...
...Bouwsma has breathed on the dry bones of Calvin's immense work and resurrected a troubled and contradictory human being whose theology endured because it was forged on the anvil of his own fears and yearnings...
...Like most thinkers amid the rebellions and wars of a bloody epoch, Calvin yearned for immutable order...
...He could write, "Adversity is a sign of God's absence, prosperity is his presence," and with a prattling ease reminiscent of a modern TV evangelist, he could hold that kingdoms that established true religion would prosper...
...Bouwsma keeps his focus on Calvin...
...To Calvin, nature does not function by its own rules but serves as a sort of glove for God...
...He recognized the fragility of political order in riot-prone European cities which, he said, "collect the wood and kindle the fire, and the fire then sweeps over the whole land...
...Most of these have been doggedly confessional if not apologetic...
...Calvin's ideas have been condemned or praised for everything from puritan intolerance to Anglo-American democracy, from apartheid to revolution...
...I have called this book a portrait rather than a biography," Bouwsma says, "because I think that in what mattered most to him, Calvin developed little between his break with the church that had nurtured him and his death some thirty years later.'' Unfettered by any need to trace chron-ological development in Calvin's thought, Bouwsma ranges over the whole of Calvin's writing to provide illuminating essays on Calvin's major ideas - order, rational religion, humanism, human nature or "being," society, polity, church, and so on...
...Burckhardt found Christian belief undermined by the superstitions, violence, and fears of the time and by the Renaissance passion for pagan antiquity-a view vigorously rebutted or simply ignored by today's confessional historians...
...The only religious certainty lies in what God reveals, Calvin thought...
...This he sometimes found in a chilling moralism...
...At the heart of Calvin's anxiety and the anxiety of the terrible sixteenth century was the problem of knowledge...
...It is a relief to know that he considered wine a gift of God "not only for necessity but also to make us merry...
...Yet his splendid book calls to mind the broader vision of the terrors of the period that we find in recent encyclopedic studies by the French scholars Jean De-lumeau and Jean Wirth, works that in turn call up the grim portrayal of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy...
...Disease and bad weather were punishment for sin...
...Bouwsma's anxious Calvin looks like a man toiling to throw up sandbags of certitude against a raging flood roaring out of a bottomless sea...
...Yet books about Martin Luther gush from the presses while books about Calvin-especially biographical studies- are rare...
...In storms "when God thunders from heaven, there is a sudden change that not only disturbs the air but also terrifies our souls...
...WILLIAM F. VENDLEY is associate dean as well as an associate professor of systematic theology at the Diocesan Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, N.Y...
...Richard Marius Among the Protestant Reformers, John Calvin has been the most influential in the world and the least interesting to historians...
...REVIEWERS JOHN J. judis's biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., will be published in May by Simon and Schuster...
...yet even the most faithful "frequently stagger in unbelief...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 9
