On John Calvin's 500th Birthday

Back from vacation and helping my folks move into a new house. One with one storey and no steps, a good thing for them.

John Calvin's 500th birthday was last week and this has given rise to many newspaper and blog articles. Here's excerpts from this Christian Century Article by Paula Cooey. She is intimate with his writings. I found this interesting.

"In the Institutes he wrote of spectacles: the spectacles of Scripture that allow our dim eyes to see, he wrote of creation as a theater for God’s glory....

He knew that was what we were here for—to rejoice in divine beauty and holiness, to glorify it, to wallow in it, to sing with the rest of creation in praise of the Creator....

At the same time, if Calvin’s God the Creator was awesome, his God the Redeemer, in the divine roles of both perpetrator and victim of cruelty, horrified me. Even in 1970, I found Book II of the Institutes on God the Redeemer deeply disturbing. I loathed Calvin’s doctrine of the Atonement, in which Jesus’ death served as perfect sacrifice for my sin. In many respects a legal transaction, Jesus’ righteousness stood in the place of my corruption so that God would not hold that sin, so thoroughly permeating my will, against me. Thus, if elect, was I justified. I wanted no part of the deal. A father-God who would not simply allow, but would will such a thing to happen was and is a child abuser of the worst kind in my eyes....

The legacy Calvin left is ambiguous at best. The dominant strain that runs through consists of an accentuated Augustinian proclivity to the transform world, a stewardship characterized by leaving the place better than one found it. “Better” is subject to interpretation and debate, of course. Many of his followers, somewhat more scholastic and ever more into policing human life and less into rejoicing, were and are a tough and all-too-often nasty lot, to say the least. In fact, Calvin, with others (that fiery redhead John Knox who smashed the stained glass windows of St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, to name the most notable among them) gave birth to the various denominations that make up the Reformed Protestant Church: Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and others all share the name Calvinist. In this country, these Calvinists range in their political and social world-transforming behaviors from avid theocrats, still capable of spewing a vituperative anti-Catholic polemic, to equally avid radical supporters of gay and lesbian marriage...."

And note this by one of the commenters, Rita.

"Because of Calvin's idea of redemption, his wonderful views of creation, become, in effect, abstract and dislocated from the present into the future. He taught suspicion of the senses as tainted by sin and was among the most iconoclastic of all Protestant reformers. My college religion professor summed it up in a joke. "Whenever Calvin walked to work from his home to St. Peter Cathedral along Lake Geneva surrounded by white-capped alps and sparkling huge and blue in the early sunlight, he held his Bible up to the side of his face and mumbled, 'Don't look! Don't look!"

His iconoclasm has encouraged both left and right wing Calvinists to distrust the present (ie the world of the present available through our senses) and to live in a vaguely dissociated "spiritual" relationship to this life and this place. This dissociated focus on futurity and progress enables the kind of cruelty and benevolent paternalism we see in right and left wing American Protestant culture today."

I perceive many aspects of my personal spiritual heritage in the above.