John Calvin the Pastor. Interview with Dr. Elsie Mackee on John Calvin's Life as a Reformer, Pa

Interview with Dr. Elsie Mckee[1] by Samuel Arroyo.

In this conversation we will be discussing the life and work of John Calvin, focusing on Elsie Mackee's book called John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety.[2]

E= Elsie Mackee

S= Sammy Arroyo

S: Of all the areas that you could have studied, you chose Reformation studies, and you are a recognized John Calvin scholar. Why John Calvin?

E: There are several answers to that question. One of them will amuse you. My parents and grandparents w

ere missionaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I grew up in a world in which Scripture and the church were central. I also went to a missionary kids’ boarding school where we had chapel and Bible classes every day. The Bible class could be Old Testament, New Testament, life of Jesus, or it could be church history. I had my first church history class in sixth grade and my second church history class in the eighth grade; I still have the notebooks. One of the things we had to do in Eighth grade was to write a report on the major founder of our denomination, because there were children from other denominations: there were Mennonites and Methodists, and a whole number of different religious denominations. I wrote a report on John Calvin; that was all I did with Calvin at that point.

In college I chose to do an honors project, and I finally ended up deciding that I would do it on Calvin. I was looking at the Middle Ages and thought that I need a more precise focus. So I did my honors thesis on Calvin at college and realized that I had a great appreciation for his theology. I do not agree with everything, but he takes Scripture seriously. He doesn’t skip anything; he wrestles with it. If you take Scripture seriously, then Calvin is very good company. You may come out in a different place, but he is always a good conversation partner.

When I started my doctoral studies, I knew that I wanted to work in the Reformation and focus on Calvin, though obviously I am interested in other aspects of history and other aspects of the Reformation. But the more I read Calvin, the more interesting I found him; not necessarily that I agreed more and more, although I do agree with him on a number of things. I found him such a solid conversation partner, a person with whom you must grapple if you want to make sense of the Reformation and a very creative person with regard to the doctrine of the church; something that interests me a great deal. Church and ethics are parts of theology which particularly intrigue me; I am not as involved personally in arguments about the Trinity. That is okay, and I believe it, but it is not where my key interests are. But the doctrine of the church, the teaching about ethics, are particular strengths of Calvin’s and particular interests of mine, so it made a good fit.

S: What is the main focus of this book? There are many things that we learn about Calvin from it, but as I was reading it, I see that there is something different that you wanted the reader to know about Calvin. What specifically did you want them to know?

E: Good for you. Yes, that is exactly what I was hoping. I started teaching Calvin a good many years ago, but I had been taught by Princeton’s major Calvin scholar, Edward Dowey,[3] who taught Calvin’s Institutes, his 1559 Institutes. That is the way I was trained. But I am more of a historian than a theologian; I am a historical theologian, I really care about the history part. When I began teaching Calvin, I wanted to include more than the 1559 Institutes. That is very important, but it is definitely not all of Calvin. The more I taught, the more I realized that people read Calvin as if the 1559 Institutes is practically all that he wrote. Two things about that: one is the Institutes in 1559 is the fifth edition, and there were multiple changes over time. If you really want to understand the Institutes, you have to look at 1536, 1539, 1543, and 1550 in order to see the development. It is not the full picture, even of the Institutes, just to take the 1559.

That was one part of my historical orientation, I want a fuller developmental picture of the Institutes not just the theological conclusion. I want the development through time because it tells you something about how Calvin thought: Calvin is not going to change his mind radically, but he changes his mind about small things, and he develops particular points that were not evident at first as he explores Scripture more. Because he is writing commentaries and lecturing on the Bible alongside this, that has a very important impact on what he is doing with the Institutes. The Institutes is essentially his handbook for how to read the Bible, so, the more he read and lectured on the Bible, the more nuanced his handbook would become.

In a sense, my next step was pairing the development of the Institutes with the commentaries. That is how Calvin thought they should be read; he would never want us to read the Institutes by itself. The Institutes must be read alongside the commentaries because one of them tells you, in a sense, the methodology, the catechetical part, that is the Institutes. The other tells you the content, the development of the actual exegesis. Those are supposed to go together. From there, I realized that there is a lot more to Calvin. For example, at the end of each lecture (which became the commentaries), there is a prayer. He began and concluded with prayers, his prayers are important. Furthermore, he wrote the liturgy for Geneva, and he was the guiding mind behind the development of the Psalter.

Calvin is very much involved in what is happening in his worship practice on Sundays and in weekdays. That is another big piece of what he was doing, and worship includes his sermons. He spends a huge amount of his life preaching hundreds and hundreds of sermons. In one sense you could say that those are duplicates of the commentaries, but they are not. Think how we compare a sermon today and a commentary. They certainly are working with the same verses, they are addressing some of the same exegetical issues, but they are dealing with them, applying them differently, they are using what is learned in the exegesis differently. His commentaries and his sermons are not simply duplicates of each other. They are complementary. That is another piece to add to the picture of what he is doing. As I was teaching, I thought that I wanted students to be able to see a broader range of what Calvin was actually writing, and I wanted to point out that he was a life-long pastor. He was spending 80 to 90 percent of his time doing ordinary parish things: preaching, session meetings, consistory meetings, visiting the sick, doing his regular teaching of theology students. He is not writing the Institutes all the time. He is not even writing commentaries all the time. That is a relatively small piece of his time.

S: I wonder if that is why you decided to close the book with a section of his pastoral care work in the church.

E: Yes!

S: It is as if saying: If this is the last thing you are going to remember about Calvin - remember Calvin the pastor. And throughout the whole book, I see him constantly saying that we must surrender our lives to God because by surrendering we learn that we actually owe it to the community, because everything belongs to God. . . . And he spends a great deal talking about the image of God and humans and all of us as children of God. And everything seems to be very pastoral, which is a different way of thinking than what you see in a normal seminary class of theology where we systematize the person and then we forget the pastor or we forget the person who is doing the daily work.

E: Yes. The thing is that most of the time we forget that most of the theologians in history were pastors. Not every single one, but most of them. So, what we get as their theology is really only a small section of what they thought their vocation was. Their vocation was to be pastors, or in some cases preachers, but, I mean, the whole interaction with a community was a critical part of their work.[4]

S: Even Calvin struggled with that at first, when he was deciding, “Should I go to Geneva or not?” “Should I just stay and be a person of just writing and meditating, or should I have this higher calling, if you want to put it that way, that this whole nation, this whole town is calling me to do?” He seems to be struggling exactly with that, but we tend to forget that part. Because we see the writings and we want to study and we want to write a paper about him. And then we systematize him. I don’t know if that’s the right word.

E: Yes, it is.

S: And then we forget John Calvin the human, the one who was married, among other things.

E: Right. Who lived with death in his family, in his congregation, who lived with war around him and counseling people who had lost people, their friends, their family in the war, or lost them in the outbreaks of plague, the illness. We forget that he was also talking with other theologians about intra-church or inter-church business. There is a strong sense of a communal leadership as well, even if it is not just the pastoral part. It is pastors, theologians and Reformers interacting among themselves for the church. They are not doing it for the purpose of being intellectuals. They are doing it because they are pastors and are concerned for the church.

As a result, each time I taught the course, I expanded it in certain ways, and then in the middle of the 90's I was asked to do the volume on Calvin for the Classics of Western Spirituality series. I was in the middle of another project at that point, and I said, “I can’t do it now, but if you’re willing to wait until I’ve finished this project, I have a due date for it, then yes, I’d be delighted.” The editor, Bernard McGinn, said that they would wait for me to finish my other project. Then I started in on this and what I was doing with it was using or gathering many of the kinds of things that I wanted or had been using in my classes. They were not exactly the same, partly because I could not put everything in this book that I used in the class. There are more readings that I would fit into a class partly because there were some things that I wanted my class to use that I did not need to put in the book. For example, in this book there is not a section on the catechism. There is a very brief catechetical examination for examining students who know the catechism before their admission to communion, but there is not a section quoting the catechism. I think that is a very important thing to have, and I always include it in my class. But it’s easily available in many, many publications and translations, so that was not a practical thing to put in.

I’m just explaining why I left some things out that I think belong in Calvin the pastor, but that were so easily available in other places that I didn’t think it was a good use of space to put them in here. There are other things that I could have put in, for example, I wanted to include a marriage service, but the page limitations were too great. I wanted to do a Sunday afternoon service with a marriage service because that was the time that was most commonly used for marriages. I would have included yet another sermon, that way we would have had yet another full liturgy, but there was not space. Another factor in putting this together, I’m talking about the liturgies, I wanted people to be able to experience a bit more what the liturgy was like. I do not think anyone else, at least before me, had published a liturgy with the sermon and the references to the Psalms in it so that you can read through the liturgy and know what the full sequence of the service was. I would have liked to put in actual quotations of the words of the Psalms, but again that was a little bit more space than I could afford. I decided to put just the titles of the psalms, and you could go and look up what would the psalm be that they would be singing. I wanted to be sure to have a sermon in it because most people treat Calvin’s sermons as if they are one thing and Calvin’s liturgies as if they are something else, and that is not true to life.

S: They were meant for a service, and he has a group in mind, and when you get to see the whole liturgy, how they were responding to it, then you can appreciate the whole context for that service.

E: Exactly. That was another factor. I could have fitted in more things if I had been willing to cut my liturgies, but I did not. I did not want to because I thought the experience of reading straight through the liturgy has a particular value in itself. When I began to put the book together, I wanted to be sure that there was some introduction to Calvin’s life in his own words, the letters and the autobiographical statement in the preface to the psalms' commentary. And a few other things, so that people could get a sense of Calvin himself. He was a very private person, he never talks about himself; most of what he says about himself is there. Except when he’s talking with one of his friends and arguing about other people, he sometimes will say something about his annoyance. But that’s not about himself personally. He was a very reticent person about his personal life.

I wanted to put some of that in to get a sense that he’s a real person. And then some of the different categories of things that go with what I’m calling his pastoral piety; I invented that phrase. Piety sometimes is a bad word. Today we might use the word spirituality. Remember, these are connotations, not definitions, but the connotation of spirituality, the way we use it today, tends to be individualistic: “my spirituality,” whereas, the connotation of “piety” tends still to have a more of a corporate connection. The piety of a people, the ways that they express their religious thought, feelings, ethos, that tends to be more corporate. And Calvin is corporate. Calvin is personal, but he’s not individualistic.

S: His main concern is the church.

E: His church, right. I wanted a way of demonstrating that corporate piety, or his pastoral approach to piety, and then taking the various different aspects of worship, whether it is the liturgies themselves, whether it is the psalms, prayers, or the sermons. All of those things which were the main means of teaching people in Geneva the Gospel. It was what they learned in church. Many of them were illiterate. They weren’t reading at home. If they had the ability to read, they were supposed to read Scripture, but they were mainly supposed to come to church, and they were supposed to learn the Psalms, because they learned to sing them and they became their prayers.

What was it that shaped the people of Geneva as the church? That’s part of what I wanted to be sure got in here. I also wanted to be sure to put in elements that make it clear Calvin’s ethical orientation, because there’s no such thing as worshipping that doesn’t have implications for how you live. The Genevans were not just supposed to go to church, and then say “now we’ve done it.” No. They were expected to live out what they learned in their daily lives. So the ethical implications, the particular focus, for example, on the 10 commandments is another thing that is a part of their corporate piety. In our modern sense, we tend to use the word “pastoral” for the more individual things, the visits to the sick and dying, the letters to the sick or the bereaved, those kinds of things. Calvin would actually include his daily work in the pulpit as part of pastoral care, because pastoral care in his day meant helping people know what they needed to know for their salvation. So preaching was a part of pastoral care.

S: Preaching and teaching.

E: Exactly, but in our modern times we tend to use pastoral care for the more interpersonal. So that is the part that I put toward the end, also intending that to show his connection with churches outside Geneva, that he was not focused only on the people in Geneva, but on the people in France, on people in prison, on people in other parts of the world who were suffering. What was his responsibility in relationship to them? All of that I see as part of his pastoral engagement. So that gives you a sense maybe of why I put it together the way that I did and where there are things that are left out that are important but that are easily available somewhere else.

S: We are talking about piety, and I think Calvin says that the beginning of piety, it starts in prayer, and it ends in prayer. Prayer is central for piety,[5] for living a life of righteousness and holiness. Calvin also talks about total surrender to God. That seems to be central in his writings. How do all of those things play in his everyday life, like prayer? We see in the book that he is constantly addressing prayer as a central aspect of the Christian life. It seems that he is systematic in his prayers, but they all had something specific, like for each sermon. I’m not sure if there’s a question here, but how was that daily prayer life of Calvin, how central was all this and how did it impact his whole theology and his whole way of thinking?

E: That is a very good question. I will have to divide it into a couple of pieces. One is to say that for Calvin prayer is the primary thing that we do as people of faith. He would call it the first fruit of our faith. Which means that it is absolutely fundamental to everything. He also calls his liturgy book the form of prayers. It is not that it only has prayers in it, because it has the sacraments and other things. Calvin is putting under the heading of prayer all the things we do in the worship of God, and prayer is the fundamental part of daily worship. It is a necessary part of every worship service, the corporate service, but it is also necessary for every individual and every household every day.

Calvin wrote prayers that we would call model prayers. Sometimes we think as Protestants that the only kind of prayer that is real or that is authentic is the prayer that is spontaneous. We are really a little odd in that, at least in terms of the rest of history, because most people in history have assumed that you learn to pray, and you learn to pray specific prayers. Not that they are holy in themselves, but they guide us to know how we should pray. I mean, obviously the model is the Lord’s prayer. And in the sixteenth century, Calvin and others say, that is the model of all good praying, directed toward God, praise of God, praying for God’s will to happen, God’s kingdom to come, God’s name to be hallowed. And then praying for the things that we need in our lives on earth, whether it’s daily bread or forgiveness or protection, all of those things. But you could always use many other kinds of words. The Bible has lots of kinds of different prayers in it. It’s not a case of being restricted in words, but the Lord’s Prayer is the model of what prayer should be. That is very important for Calvin. Everybody learns the Lord’s Prayer. He wanted them also to sing the biblical prayers, the psalms. He knew that the easiest way for people to learn was for them sing them. Even if you are illiterate, you can pick up the words if you are singing it. The tune helps you learn it. So those are prayers that are pervasive in your life. You say them in church: the Lord’s Prayer. You sing them in church: the psalms. You say them at home. You sing them at home. They are the texture of prayer for your whole life.

He also knew, though, that people need specific prayers for particular aspects of life. So there are prayers for when you get up in the morning, prayers for when you go to bed at night, two of the main times that lay people would pray. Calvin is reacting against the monastic movement where there are hours of prayer all through the day and night. That only works if you don’t have a job, if you don’t have a family, if you are not working to support your family. And Protestants said, no, work is what God has given us as our vocation. They focused on the priesthood of believers, the lay people. So the main times when you would pray would be when you get up in the morning, when you go to bed at night, but also before you begin either your studies, if you are a child, or your work, if you are a grown-up.

S: And for eating.

E: Before or after eating, yes. Sometimes there might be some other special prayers that would be added, particularly for people who are in prison. There might be intercessory prayers if you’re in prison or if somebody else is in prison. Or there might be prayers that would be useful when you visited a sick person. But they are very limited prayers. There are not prayers for every hour of the day because you’re supposed to use God’s prayers, The Lord’s Prayer, and the psalms as a part of the texture of your daily prayer life.

Calvin wanted families to pray in the morning and in the evening together. We assume he did that with his family. We do not actually have any specific records, but it is only, in a sense, accidental that we have records of what anybody did in his or her home. We have one story by a little boy, or an old man who had been a little boy in Geneva in the last years of Calvin’s life, and he’s writing his memoirs for his children. He mentions that the household got up for morning prayers and evening prayers and that, actually, the mother of the family led them, which is a little unusual. She was supposed to be under the father’s authority, but the father delegated it to the mother of the family, and the mother of the family led the whole family in prayers. We know that it happened, at least in some households. Without that kind of testimonial, we wouldn’t have real records of what actually happened. We assume that Calvin led his own household in prayers like that, but we don’t actually have any precise evidence.

S: Throughout the book we see Calvin talking about trials and tribulations and how God uses them to actually get us closer to God, which is a different understanding the of the way that we see trials and tribulations today in many groups. Would you talk a little bit more about that?

E: One thing to remember is that Calvin lived in a world in which pain, sickness and death were fairly common, like almost every day. They didn’t have the kind of medicine we have today, they knew nothing about germs, they had no idea about many of the things that we in the modern west use to protect ourselves from illness or from death. They lived with a world in which there were famines, in which there were draughts, in which there might be really cold winters and not enough food. So suffering was a fact of life. As a matter of fact, this is how life had been for hundreds and hundreds of years. If you look at the Old Testament, it also deals with the question of suffering and punishment for sin. There is a sense that what we might call negative experience, whether it is suffering or pain or sickness or deaths in the family, or whatever those kinds of things are, not only is that a constant in the world, it is just simply a given and nobody can imagine a world that doesn’t have it. They cannot conceive of a world where that does not happen. But it also figures into their reading of Scripture, and the experience of the Old and the New Testament people, in which very often, particularly with the prophets, the people go astray, they follow the Baals, and God punishes them. It comes even to the extent of exile into Babylonia. There is a very clear biblical strand (even if it is not all of Scripture, it is clearly a very important strand) that says that suffering is part of God’s disciplining God’s children.

Calvin shares this. It comes across to us as odd, but that is because we read only a few voices, Calvin and some others, and we don’t read all of the people around them. If we did that, if we could know what their larger context was, we would realize that nothing they say is particularly unusual. The way they say it can be distinctive. Calvin does give a particular orientation to what he says in a number of ways, because he is trying to be faithful to Scripture and he is trying to make sense of Scripture. One of the things he does which other people do not do, is to say, look, everybody knows that God punishes us when we are sinful. God means it to correct us. The object is to bring us back into right relationship with God. Do we really need to wait for God to bring the punishment upon us, or can we use our eyes and listen to what God is teaching us, and keep our eyes open for the kinds of things we are doing that would call such punishment upon us? That is one of the things that he does differently, not the idea of whether God is disciplining us, but his idea that we need to pay attention because if we repent, God will not need to discipline us.

That does not mean that we repent and therefore we are not still sinners. Of course we are still sinners. But in terms of a particular thing that we are doing that we know is wrong, if we keep on doing it, we are just asking God to correct us. So we should keep our eyes open and pay attention to those kinds of things so that we can be conformed to what God wants us to be. It is not a case of just trying to escape punishment. Calvin is quite clear. We are not doing it simply to keep from being punished. We are doing it because we want to look like Jesus. We want to be conformed to Jesus’ image. The things that come to us as punishments are God’s way of getting our attention to...

S: To bring us back to God.

E: Exactly. Beyond that, Calvin, like the biblical narratives, like the people around him, the middle ages, the early modern people, thinks that suffering is a normal part of life. As again, I say, they couldn’t imagine a world like ours in which there are pain killers, in which there are ways that you can actually go through life not hurting or not hungry or never getting sick, I mean seriously sick. That’s inconceivable to them. At no time in history has that been possible.

S: Another thing that is very important for Calvin: What is his view on holiness?

E: Holiness is dedication to God. Holiness means that we don’t belong to ourselves. One of the pieces in the Institutes, which I really love—some of his most beautiful writing turns up in passages in the Institutes—is a section on the Christian life. And he says, “We are not our own. We belong to God. Therefore we should not make it our goal to do what pleases us in this life. We are not our own. We belong to God. Therefore we should seek God’s will in everything. We are not our own. We belong to God. Therefore God’s will should be our guidance in every aspect of life.”[6] That’s a rough paraphrase. But that gets at the center of my sense of what Calvin’s Christian life is about. It does not mean that we are not responsible individuals who need to take responsibility for ourselves. What it means is that we are not ultimately our own. Our holiness is the fact that we belong to God. Holiness gets expressed in a variety of ways.

For Protestants, there isn’t a place that’s more holy than others, or people who are more holy, or times that are more holy. Because holiness, being dedicated to God, is by justification, faith, grace, alone. In one sense you can say holiness goes straight through everything. I’m both holy and dedicated to God, and a sinner at the same time. This building is both holy because we are using it to worship God, and not holy because it is where the cows are sheltered. There aren’t nice, neat distinctions. Sunday is not more holy than the other days, but it is set apart for a particular purpose, to serve God, not because we don’t serve God all the other six days, because in some sense every day is supposed to be dedicated to God, so every day is holy. When we set something apart we do it, you might say, for a practical reason. We cannot humanly spend seven days a week worshipping God in church. We would never have enough food to eat. God intends for us to work. The fact that we set apart one day doesn’t make that day holier. It makes it different, because we are using it differently. So for Calvin, clearly, everything that we do has to do with holiness or with what is profane. Because it depends on whether it’s dedicated to God or not.

S: To finish. He has a very high view of women, from what I see in the readings, his letters to them and the sermon that he writes on the women coming to the tomb and being the first ones to see Jesus resurrected. And he asks why them, why not the men? And he seems to be very far advanced from his time. Am I right? And then, just so that you transition from there, what is the message that you think John Calvin is still speaking to us today?

E: That is a good question. It is very interesting that you point to that, because I wanted to try to give as clear a picture of his understanding of women as possible. He is not actually terribly different from the other Protestants of his day. He is somewhat different, but by and large what Protestants did, there were two or three things. One of them was to say that sexuality is God’s good gift. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were sexual beings and they were not fallen. It was good. I say that because most of history has said, “Men are rational, women are emotional. Men are strong, women are weak. Men are capable of living just as they are. Women are identified with sexuality.” So if you have got that attitude, then you are going to have a more negative view of women than of men. The medieval nuns were praised for being manly because they had renounced sexuality. They had become men by renouncing sexuality, by becoming nuns. That was the general picture, if you talk about the religious attitude toward women, then it is always pretty much correlated with your attitude toward sexuality. If you have a negative opinion of sexuality, then you are going to have a negative opinion of women. Protestants said, sexuality is God’s good gift. Now what we do with it after the fall is another story, but that has nothing to do with God’s good creation. That has to do with how we as fallen human beings have twisted it. If you say that sexuality as it is created is God’s good gift, then you’re not going to have automatically a negative picture of women in comparison to men, because they are both created as sexual beings in the creation, and both are good. For Protestants, that takes away the grounds for one of the negative stereotypes about women.

The other thing is, Protestants say we are justified by faith alone and grace alone, that means everybody who has faith and grace, whether you are male or female, your salvation doesn’t depend on whether you are male or female. Some of the medieval theologians thought that in the perfect life, women would become men in heaven. So, Protestants would say, no! God made male and female, and God made them both in God’s image, and they both are perfectly good as male and female. Now the way we behave as sinful human beings, we are both bad, we are both sinful. That has nothing to do with whether we are male or female. In that sense, Calvin and other Protestants elevated the understanding of women as women and basically said we are all saved or damned on the same basis. Which means that when he writes to the women who are in prison for their faith, he is assuming that they have the same faith as the men, and can stand martyrdom just as the men do. It is true that he, like the other people of his age, says, but in this earthly world, women are subordinate to men, because God meant for men to be the dominant ones, and wives are their helpmeets. They are not their slaves, but they are subordinate. In matters that have to do with this-worldly polity, women are subordinate. In matters that have to do with whether they are equally spiritual or equally devout, and in God’s sight, then the question is whether you have faith and grace. It is not whether you are male or female. In that sense, there is an equalizing.

The big divide comes between the justified and the unjustified, not between male and female, but there are still real repercussions of their culture. The Protestants do not make women equal in the church or in society. They are very much men of their own time. They see them as subordinate. So, you cannot say that Calvin would have approved of women being ordained. On the other hand, he is remarkable among Protestant reformers as the first one who actively incorporated women into the orders of ministry as the second sort of deacon. Calvin was determined to take seriously everything in the Bible. Many Protestants did not consider it necessary to deal with the texts about Phoebe (Rom. 16:1-2) and the widows who were elected to an office at age sixty (1 Tim. 5:9-10), but Calvin did not think he could skip them. In addition, he believed that the traditional Catholic interpretations were wrong, so he had to figure out how all these passages about church office fitted into a Protestant doctrine of the church. One text in which St. Paul lists ministries is Rom. 12:6-8; two of the ministries are “those who give let them do it liberally” and “those who do mercy, let them do it cheerfully.” Calvin identified the first ones as the male deacons who administer the church’s charity and the second ones as the women who nurse the sick. We may consider this rather odd eisegesis, but the curious thing is that other Protestants often adopted this interpretation even if they did not define an office for women deacons. So Calvin’s determination to pay attention to every verse actually led him to identify a specific church office for women, as other Protestants did not. This part of Calvin’s teaching fits very well with his idea that in matters of earthly polity women are subordinate to men, but it also illustrates how seriously he took the need to live by scripture even when it was not part of his culture.

Another aspect of the question about women’s roles in the church is the fact that Calvin – like Luther and others – believed that preaching the Gospel is so important that if there is no properly set apart minister in the community, a woman or other lay person who knows the Gospel may preach. The pure proclamation of God’s word is more important than the sex of the preacher. Of course, when there is a properly set apart minister, the emergency preacher has to step down.

S: What about Calvin’s legacy for today? Does he still speak to us today?

E: A good question. I would say that he does, although not necessarily in precisely the ways that we sometimes think. The two adjectives which I most often use to describe Calvin are “Biblical” and “practical,” and I think those are important guides to what we can learn from Calvin. The idea that he was “Biblical” is certainly common, but what I mean by that may not be so obvious.

Calvin was passionately determined that people should listen to what God wants to communicate, and to listen to all of it, not just what we happen to want to hear. We are not the ones in charge. He understood the Bible to be God’s word to God’s people all through the ages, which the Holy Spirit moves our hearts to believe and our minds to understand. We must take it all seriously, not pick and choose. That is the authority of the Bible. But it still has to be understood and Calvin was clear that it must be understood with our minds as well as believed with our hearts, so how does one put all of it together? God’s word is accommodated to the human capacity to hear. One example: Calvin was fascinated by astronomy and he said that Moses had learned the wisdom of the Egyptians, so Moses knew that the stars are bigger than the moon. However, in recounting the creation Moses was not trying to teach the people astronomy so he described the creation the way people could see it. Calvin was also perfectly clear that there are different styles in the Bible, and poetry is different from prose and has to be interpreted as poetry. Every part of Scripture must be read in its literary and historical context. So taking the Bible seriously does not mean taking it absolutely literally. Naturally, Calvin took more of it literally than we might, and he had a more limited knowledge of the historical context than modern scholars, but the point is that for Calvin understanding God’s will in the Bible takes every bit of our attention and intelligence. It also requires knowledge of Christian teaching. It is not enough to use my own intelligence; the Bible belongs to the whole people of God, not to anyone individually, and so we need the wisdom of faith and of the whole community in order to understand it properly. That includes the voices of Christians down through the ages as well as across the world. To me, this says that we recognize that God speaks in a special way in the Bible and we need to devote both our minds and our hearts to understanding it and listening for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but we must also learn from others how to understand God’s word.

To say Calvin is “Biblical” must also include ethical. The teaching of the Bible has to be implemented in daily life and the Bible is quite clear about the need for justice. In fact, Calvin will say that the truest worship of God can often be seen in the way that believers treat each other.[7] If people say they love God but do not treat others as Jesus did, then they are being hypocrites. Calvin gives a great deal of attention to the prophets and their insistence on justice and care for the poor and sick and afflicted as a necessary way to serve and honor God. And our neighbors are all people. One startling thing about Calvin’s teaching on the Lord’s Prayer is that he says we must pray for all people who dwell on earth.[8]

Calvin is also practical, and that means both pastoral and realistic. He did not look at the church from an ivory tower, he was right in the midst of it, day by day. That means he was also engaged with the world, because Christians are in the world though not of it. Along with the evidence of the Bible that God’s people are redeemed sinners, Calvin knew from experience that the church is never perfect. Among other things, this means that leaders and people must look squarely at reality and identify what they are called to do – and what they are not called to do. There is no vacation from being a Christian in the real world; it is our calling 24/7.

But it is also vital that we distinguish what is God’s job and what is ours, and not mix up the two. So for example on those touchy questions of predestination and church discipline, Calvin says that one is God’s job and the other is ours. Being elected by God means being part of Christ’s body, which includes election to the cross as well as to eternal life. Each of us knows this inwardly by faith: we are accepted by Christ because the Holy Spirit has made us recognize and accept our sinfulness and know and experience Christ’s grace for redemption. We don’t know certainly anyone else’s election but we do not need to know it. (The letter to the Duchess of Ferrara in the Pastoral Piety book is a great illustration of this.) To fulfill our calling we only need to do our job which is working to make the church a true witness to Christ. The church preaches and exercises discipline to teach us about Christ and form us as witnesses to the Gospel; it should correct those who do not show Christ’s character, but that is an earthly judgment, not equivalent to salvation or damnation. When I say Calvin is practical, I mean that he is very determined to be clear about what is God’s job and what is the job of a human being. We are to point to God’s work, honor it, proclaim it, and rejoice in it, and we are to do our own. So we speak of God’s love which led God’s Son to suffer death so that we may be freed from the sin that separates us from God and may live with each other as God’s children. And we work to build lives and communities which reflect God’s love and justice.

Thank you for this invitation to talk about Calvin! You are a very good listener and very careful reader, and it was a pleasure to discuss both the book and the reformer with you. Many thanks!

[1] Elsie Anne McKee is the Archibald Alexander Professor of Reformation Studies and the History of Worship, earned her Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary and the Diploma in Theology from Cambridge University in England. Her research has focused on John Calvin‘s theology and ministerial practice, and the lay reformer Katharina Schuetz Zell. Besides Calvin and the Reformed tradition, themes of her courses include biblical exegesis, worship, and women‘s history in the Reformation, liturgical time, and prayer life (especially women‘s piety) through the centuries. McKee has been a guest professor in Europe (Goettingen) and Africa (Kananga, Democratic Republic of Congo where she was born and reared), and lectured on Calvin around the world. She is an ordained elder at Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton, and serves with several North American organizations that support theological and medical work in the Congo. Major Publications include: John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009); Katharina Schuetz Zell, Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany (University of Chicago, 2006); John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety (Paulist, 2001); Katharina Schuetz Zell: The Life and Thought of a Sixteenth-Century Reformer (Brill, 1999); Elders and the Plural Ministry: The Role of Exegetical History in Illuminating John Calvin’s Theology (Droz, 1988); John Calvin on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving (Droz, 1984). Forthcoming is The Pastoral Ministry and Worship in Calvin’s Geneva (Droz, 2015).

Taken from the Princeton Theological Seminary's webiste, faculty profiles, www.ptsem.edu; accessed on April 30th, 2015.

[2] John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety, The Classics of Western Spirituality. Elsie McKee, editor and translator (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001).

[3] "Edward A. Dowey was a Presbyterian theologian and educator. After hearing a speech from John A. Mackay, President of Princeton Theological Seminary, he reconsidered theological training. He entered the Seminary later that year, renewing faith after reading Karl Barth. Under the tutelage of Emil Brunner, he completed his Doctorate of Theology at the University of Zurich in 1949 with his dissertation, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, now an introductory cornerstone on the subject. From 1954-1957, he taught at McCormick Theological Seminary. Finally, in 1957, he began teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary where he stayed for more than 30 years. At Princeton Theological Seminary, Dowey taught several classes in theology and church history with a special focus on Calvin, Luther, Bullinger, and Zurich centered theologians. He retired from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1988. He died at the age of 85 in Princeton, New Jersey on May 5, 2003 following complications from Parkinson’s Disease."

Taken from The Edward Dowey Jr. Manuscript Collection at http://manuscripts.ptsem.edu/collection/252 (accessed July 2, 2015)

[4] John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety, Dr. Elsie McKee says that "part of the problem for interpreting Calvin as a spiritual leader is his reputation as one of the most gifted and intellectually rigorous theologians of the sixteenth centurty. This view is not false, but, as is true of most figures who have played a significant role in history, Calvin's reputation has become somewhat caricatured and more narrow and syllogistic than the man himself. The reputation as an intellectual is also one that modern readers have inherited shorn of the vital pastoral context in which the theology was written, a context which made it clear that the doctrine was an expression of the faith, the mind following after the heart. Commonly a strong emphasis on systematic theology is not considered conducive to a very deep sensitivity to spirituality. Or, to put it this another way, too much attention to lex credendi, the pattern of believing, is regarded as somewhat detrimental to lex orandi, the pattern of praying. For the reformers of early sixteenth-century Europe, however, as for those in many other times and places, faith and worship, prayer and doctrine, were inextricably interrelated. In fact, although Calvin's theology is regarded as primarily intellectual, he himself put the greater weight on the heart; heart and head must go together but the heart is more important." 3.

[5] John Calvin, Writings on Pastoral Piety, "Prayer is the 'Chief exercise of piety' (Institutes, 3.20 title)," 247.

[6] Institutes 3.7.1, which first appeared in 1539, pp. 272-73 in the Pastoral Piety book.

[7] Elsie McKee, John Calvin on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving, see chap. 10, esp. pp. 254-59.

[8] Institutes 2.8.38, and the Sunday and Wednesday liturgies, in the Pastoral Piety book, pp. 198-99, 128, 177