Calvin In Geneva: The Sociology Of Justification By Faith

By Rousas John Rushdoony

Owyhee, Nevada

TO THE average historian, the significance of John Calvin is limited to the fact that he loomed large in his era. He dominated the scene briefly, thinks the historian, and then disappeared, together with his influence, before the march of reason and tolerance, and his place in history is like that of a bare mountain which bulks large at a particular point in the horizon but has no significance or value other than prominence.

Such an approach is devoid of any understanding of the central significance of Calvin, and, in like manner, of Luther. The Protestant revolt was significant primarily, not for its rupture of the medieval church, but for its proclamation of the radical doctrine of justification by faith, which abolished not only the priesthood and the Church but the Holy Roman Empire and the whole social order which depended on the soteriology of mediating institutions. The full implications of the sociology of justification by faith were never realized by the Reformation, but in John Calvin there began a rigorous re-orientation of all theology and all society in terms of that concept, the development of which constitutes the most urgent responsibility today of Calvinist thinkers.

In order to understand the significance of this sociology of justification by faith, it is rewarding to review the relationship of John Calvin to Geneva and to understand why that city, which found itself in sympathy frequently with theologians who opposed Calvin, and showed actual disinterest in the theological divergencies of Servetus, still found Calvin a social necessity and executed Servetus. And that same city council, despite its sympathy with Calvin’s enemies and its distaste for Calvin, found it necessary to insist on an “intolerant” Calvinism.

No society can be tolerant of an assault upon its fundamentals. It can extend tolerance to opinions, actions, and beliefs peripheral to its foundation without harm to itself, and, in times of great peace and security, may temporarily countenance a measure of questioning with regard to its central dogmas. But let that probing grow to more than a trivial degree, and a tightening of defense follows, and the dogmas are enforced rigidly. The greater the threat or crisis in a society, the more rigid is the defense of the dogmas. The essence of Nazi Germany was not totalitarianism but rather a new racial foundation to society. Had the Nazi regime attained its ideal and made its dogma the common assumption of its era, the totalitarian methodology could have been relaxed, for its dogma would have become the “self-evident” truth of the age, even as in India, ages ago, the outcastes came to accept the caste system as self-evident truth. Similarly, Soviet Russia is not dishonest in maintaining that its totalitarian “dictatorship of the proletariat” is an interim regime, to be discarded when the workers’ paradise is established and the world-wide plotting against the workers’ state destroyed. For the present, to the vast majority of the world’s peoples and countless numbers of its own, the Marxist dogmas are not self-evident truths. To Russia, this attitude constitutes treason to history, and, on the part of the proletariat, is a disloyalty to their future, and must be dealt with accordingly. Every society has its own definitions of treason and loyalty, and defines them in terms of its faith.

The medieval Inquisition was the totalitarian defense of the Roman Catholic culture of its age, and it became a reality only when the seeds of decline began, even amidst the greatness of the culture, to give promise of an alien world. The declining culture was now intolerant of much that had been previously permissible. The growing insecurity of the central dogma led to a growing severity in its defense. It is not at all surprising that the first three chapters of a study of the Inquisition deal with the “Growth of Nonconformity” and the rise of the intolerance of it.[1] The fundamental dogma of medieval culture was the belief that society was ordained to be God-centered, and its interpretation of that God was Graeco-Christian and hierarchical. God had established one true Church and His will and word were expressed through that institution, which as the extension of the incarnation, as the body of the Lord, was God manifest in this world. Three forces challenged this God-centered culture. The first was the rise of the modern state, which, borrowing Greek thought from the church, established the state in natural law rather than the revealed will of God, thereby undercutting its earlier theocentric foundation. The second was the revival of the undercurrent of pre-christian paganism, which, although ruthlessly dealt with in the “witchcraft” trials, grew only stronger. Recent scholarship has clearly shown that the “witches” and “devils” of medieval trials were abusive terms applied to the leaders of this persisting and now reviving paganism.[2] The third was the rise of the burghers, who supplanted the supremacy of saint and bishop with merchant and banker and developed an economic-centered world. Their growth was the central element in the new humanism of which the Renaissance (a term too often used narrowly for art and literature) was a cultural product.

Because the foundation of medieval culture was God-centered, it was of necessity committed to the suppression of all that challenged it. Because the humanistic era dating from the seventeenth century to the First World War was politico-economic in its axis, it could tolerate religious diversity but not a political or an economic heresy. Citizens of the United States do not trouble their consciences about those Nazi sympathizers and agents who were executed by the Allies for treason during the Second World War because, even though they died for their faith, it was a wrong and treasonable faith. The middle ages could make the same defense with regard to its heresy trials and executions: they only killed the treasonable enemies of the just social order. The same is true of the Servetus case in Geneva. What people really object to nowadays in the death of Servetus is that a man should be executed for so trivial a thing as religion—heretical religion, of course, but still religion, a thing peripheral to life and this world. The United States loyalty purges of 1947 and later point to a growing rigorism because the source of present danger to its dogma is from Soviet Russia. If the danger abates, the rigorism will also, but if it does not, the rigorism will increase accordingly. Since monarchy is no longer a threat to American security, a man can hold monarchist ideas in 1952 which would have been a source of trouble to him in 1776. No society can allow its central dogma to be threatened. Because communism was not a threat to the middle ages, since it did not challenge its theocentricity, it was an opinion that could be tolerated: it was not heresy. Today the opposition of Roman Catholicism to Soviet Russia is not based on its communism but on its “Godless materialism”. Soviet Russia, having made a man-centered, this-worldly order ultimate, could not reconcile itself to Roman Catholicism with any economic order. But, if Soviet Russia were to grant the claims of the Roman Church to represent the truly ultimate and supernatural order, its economics could be tolerated through countless vagaries.

Liberal, humanistic society is profoundly shocked by the intolerance of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, because they exacted so heavy a legal penalty in matters of religious aberration, which liberalism regards as the realm of the purely personal. But religion is the realm of purely personal faith only to modern man: it was not so to the Council of Chalcedon. That Council would have regarded economics as a private, or at best secular and peripheral, matter and, for its time, accurately so, for the civilization of the day hung on the correct definition of the nature of Christ. From 1933 to 1939, the common cause for concern and discussion in the western world was “What will Hitler do?”, and, in the United States, another common question was the success or failure of the Roosevelt economic policies. But, according to Gregory of Nyssa, the barber-shop conversation towards the end of the fourth century was different:

Constantinopole is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians, preaching in the shops and the streets. If you want a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; and, if you enquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of nothing.[3]

Modern man does not recall the grievous errors of the Lincoln assassination trials with the celerity that he does the trial of Servetus. Few are troubled by the ex post facto laws used to convict Nazi war criminals: they were guilty men. The modern man is only rarely, and then briefly, disturbed by accounts of police brutality and the third degree. The fact that prisoners occasionally die as a result of such treatment is of little concern to the general population: they were, after all, only criminals. A young prisoner, imprisoned for the first time and near the very end of his six-months’ sentence, hands his visiting wife a letter, addressed to her and the contents of which he has already described. He is therefore punished for smuggling by being penned in a cold cage, unable to lie down day after day, with no covering and only bread and water. But it concerns very few: he is, after all, only a particularly despicable law-breaker. The attitude of the middle ages toward the heretic was similar: he was a man who had wilfully sinned against God and society, and mercy and pity were displaced sentiments if applied to him. True mercy required the rigorous protection of the greater body, but he was always given the opportunity to recant and share in the salvation to come.

This is, certainly, no justification of either heresy trial brutality or police brutality, but simply an attempt to render them understandable in terms of their culture. The vices of a man are apt to be closely akin to his virtues, gaining thereby protective coloration. Similarly, the blind spots of a society are likely to be closely related to its central dogma. The conclusion of psychosomatic medicine that “the mind is the body” is true of society: its mind, or central dogma, or belief, is likely to be its total world as well. Even in philosophy, when Descartes began with the autonomous self in his dictum, Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”, he reduced the world to that autonomous self, as Kant and subsequent philosophy made clear. The self supplanted God and the world, and ended by absorbing and becoming God and the world. As Spengler has shown, each civilization has created a new world, even to the mathematics thereof. Christianity, by out-running several civilizations, has given western man a limited and tenuous detachment which makes criticism possible, but it has not always been operative. Liberal man can see clearly the weaknesses of the medieval scene, and his protest finally ended civil punishment in heresy trials, but it was earnest Christians, possessing a new detachment in the liberal era which they lacked previously, who inaugurated, for example, almost all the prison reforms of the humanistic western world.

The change from a God-centered foundation to a man-centered politico-economic orientation created a new world with its own peculiar problems and rendered obsolete the concerns of the previous era. The most dramatic instance of the contemporaneous existence and struggle of the two worlds was Calvin’s Geneva. The county of Geneva had become the possession of the house of Savoy in the fifteenth century when in 1401 Amadeus VIII, Count of Savoy, purchased it from Eude de Villars. Within the city of Geneva itself Amadeus had no right save to appoint the chief executive officer, the vidomme; otherwise the city was relatively independent under its bishop. Although not a priest, Amadeus became Pope Felix V in 1440 and secured in 1444 the bishopric of Geneva for himself. The result for Geneva was poor and inefficient government, which the burghers resented greatly. In the next century, a treaty of Combourgeoisie with Freiburg sought to destroy the power of Savoy but was unsuccessful. In 1533, after a long period of dissension and dissatisfaction, the Bishop of Geneva, unwilling to face the reviving storm, left the city, returning in 1534 with an army. The conduct of the Bishop gave the reformers a chance to make Protestantism popular in Geneva, and it speedily became so. The Council therefore was faced with the task of reorganizing the life of the State, deprived now of its Roman Catholic basis.

The burghers, however, were the conservative element in the European ferment in that they had no thought of social revolt and offered no conscious challenge to the medieval synthesis. Their primary concern was the profitably ordered society rather than revolution. They proved, nevertheless, to be new wine to the old skins of Europe. The Roman Church had long looked for the threat in terms of itself and hence visualized opposition of an analogous character. It could produce a Counter-Reformation to deal with Protestantism, but it had no answer to the burghers. It was unprepared for the new order, which came finally from a totally unexpected area and dealt, not with the familiar problems of medieval culture, but with, and in, radically alien categories. The Renaissance scholars were at the time readily absorbed, the ecclesiastical power of the emperor curtailed, and a Council of Trent was called to deal with the Reformation, but the Roman Church had no conception of the existence of the greater threat from the burghers, who with their daily hum-drum efforts were creating a new man-centered economic order. The society of the burghers was non-religious, but not irreligious. The burghers themselves were scarcely aware of this revolution they were creating: they were concerned primarily with a free and stable social order which would make profitable commerce possible. The only society they knew was the theocentric one of the medieval Church: they had favored now the Church and then the rising monarchies in their interpretations of that order in an effort to find stability. They could visualize no other society than the fundamentally Christian one, and therefore the Geneva Council turned to the reformer Farel to act as the trained technician of that order. And Farel commanded the assistance of John Calvin.

Neither John Calvin nor the Geneva experiment can be understood in terms of the contemporary picture of a grim, ruthless, inhuman, and autocratic Calvin. The picture has no reality whatsoever. Calvin was primarily a scholar, summoned unwillingly from his studies to apply his theories regarding the social order to a concrete situation. When Calvin first went to Geneva, the scholar was “a young man, nervous, sensitive and distrustful of his powers”.[4] He had pleaded a preference for scholastic research, but Farel had finally won him over with the blunt assertion: “I speak in the name of Almighty God. You make the excuse of your studies. But if you refuse to give yourself with us to this work of the Lord, God will curse you, for you are seeking yourself rather than Christ.” Calvin felt the force of this description of his desires and as a devout man yielded in terror. In his Strassburg exile, after his first experiment in Geneva, Calvin turned happily to his pastoral work, his studies, and teaching. He showed little concern over local church and state issues, but returned happily to his preferred destiny. When he was asked to return to Geneva, the news left him trembling with horror. It was a distasteful and revolting prospect, and he resisted it earnestly. Only when faced again with Farel’s ultimatum that by shunning this clear call to duty he would be fighting against God did Calvin reluctantly accede to the Council’s call.[5] For Calvin to the last was primarily a scholar and so described himself even in his death-bed speech to the ministers of Geneva:

I have lived through some extraordinary battles here. At night before my door I have been saluted in mockery with the shots of fifty or sixty arquebusses. You can imagine how that must have terrified a poor, timid scholar as I am, and as I confess have always been. Then I was hunted out and went to Strassburg; but when I was recalled, I found it as difficult as ever to fulfil my office. They would call out ‘Scoundrel,’ and set their dogs at me.[6]

Calvin’s nature was well revealed in these lines. And the myth of his Genevan dictatorship is also answered: no dictator ever has the opposition’s dogs set on him, or shots, designed to frighten him out of the State, fired under his window. Calvin was a quiet, rigorous scholar, given to a gentle but lively sense of humor all his days. He relished intelligent and thoughtful friends, and remembered his favorite teachers and classmates with gratitude and real assistance in later years. As a student he had been shy and timid but with a real gift for making friends. He was generally charitably inclined towards his enemies (and in Geneva often naive in being too ready to forgive and assume all was forgotten), but towards foolish and irresponsible thinkers he was curt and contemptuous. Thus his pupil Castellio, over-ambitious and unstable, was praised for his work as a rector by Calvin but dismissed for his heresy. When Castellio developed a persecution complex and a virulent hatred of Calvin, who had discouraged his inaccurate attempts at a French translation of the Bible, and then drifted on into social and moral atomism, Calvin could only speak of him with contempt. He had a scholar’s scorn for the muddle-headed thinker. As a youth he had risked his life with a return to Paris in an attempt to convert Servetus, but when Servetus’ irresponsible thinking became more apparent in later years, Calvin could only dismiss him with a pitying and scornful contempt. He came to differ sharply with Laelius Socinus in his letters but regarded that scholar as worthy of communication and never quite broke off his correspondence. But of Luther Calvin declared that, even if Luther called him a devil, he would still believe him “an eminent servant of God”.

Calvin, the scholar, was called in as technical expert to help the Geneva Council re-establish and maintain the christocentric foundation of society. He functioned as the ruling bishop in a state which had abolished that office but required its function. Before Calvin entered Geneva for the first time in 1536, the Council had sought to function as both bishop and vidomme, assuming such ecclesiastical powers as to give absolution to excommunicated parishioners. A rigid control of morals was attempted in order to give stability to a social order that had grown corrupt and slovenly under bishop and vidomme. Although the Council consulted its preachers on such details as a bride’s head dress, and more important matters as well, it functioned as both church and state and treated the clergy as its civil servants. The Council established dogmas, gave absolution and appointed ministers, and the church had no independent existence. The four principles of the Genevan Protestant State, according to Foster, as it existed between 1528 and 1536, were:

1. The civil government was dominant over the church. (The same situation prevailed throughout Protestant Switzerland.)
2. Papal abuses were rejected.
3. The Word of God was adopted as the standard.
4. Universal primary education, free to the poor, was established.

According to Foster, the changes and additions made by Calvin were:

1. Establishment of the church as a distinct organism with co-ordinate and constitutional rights with the state (1541), thus limiting the latter’s ecclesiastical power and preventing absorption of church by state (caesaropapism).
2. Definite organization of creed and religious training including catechism (1537); discipline and supervision of morals (1541), including substitution of new marriage laws for old canon law (1561).
3. Unflinching enforcement of the “Word of God” in all matters of daily life—moral and social, private and public, and upon all inhabitants (1555).
4. University education, to train for church and state (1559).
5. A different temper and fibre—conscientious, unyielding, unflinching, austere (1555).[7]

The burghers were not interested in Calvin’s Institutes or in his doctrine of the church. They wanted stable christocentric government and, inexperienced in the technicalities of dogma, entrusted the matter to an expert, an unofficial bishop. Calvin’s place in Geneva is not understandable except in terms of the central role in the state of the Bishop of Geneva, and the continuing sociological necessity for that office. The state was still far from simply civil: it was still extensively ecclesiastical. Calvin proved to be obnoxious to the burghers in his high doctrine of the church and in his theology as well, but they had no other recourse, for he alone impressed the majority as the one man capable of providing the required leadership. When Bolsec was summoned before the Council, that body found itself in the embarrassing position of sympathizing with the theology of a man who disturbed the social order. Bolsec’s rejection of predestination seemed much more logical than Calvin’s strange dogma. But the Council backed Calvin and a doctrine that made no sense to them, even after correspondence with various scholars, simply because the stability of the social order required it. They were the fathers of liberal, economic man, and Chalcedon was as incomprehensible to them as to Edward Gibbon; but no man lives in the future, and most men live in the past. The only conceivable society was the Christian one: Calvin alone could provide them with a stable Christian order: hence Calvin must be supported even if incomprehensible. On the other hand, nothing would have suited the burghers better than to control Calvin’s implementation of the moral society of his scholarly vision, but to control it without losing Calvin and his vitality. More than once Calvin’s wings were clipped. In 1545, for example, he Council returned to its pre-Calvinian caesaropapism and promised to appoint Jean Trolliet to the next vacant pastorate. Later, in the midst of the Servetus case, the Council sought to undermine Calvin’s authority by removing the ban of excommunication on Berthelier, and when Calvin preached on the following Sunday, he told the people it might be his last sermon. Calvin faced then the double threat of caesaropapist burghers and Servetus, suspected of being in league with his enemies, challenging the christocentric foundation of society. There had, moreover, been constant conflict over the State’s attempt to control the Church by appointing a syndic, an officer of the State, to be the president of the Consistory, the court of the Church. Similarly, the State had early insisted on full authority in selecting Church elders, although later it was compelled to submit such names to the congregation for approval. The State neither understood fully nor accepted, other than politically, Calvin’s doctrines. What it did understand was that under Calvin’s orderly structuralization of society, trade had revived and the population increased. Geneva faced not a choice between Calvin and Bolsec, or Calvin and Servetus, but between Calvin and a once-again disordered society, declining trade, religious rupture, and civic decline. Thus the Council backed down rather than Calvin. Calvin could dispense with Geneva, but Geneva could not dispense with its Calvin. Calvin had to be retained and the Calvinistic interpretation of christocentric society defended as the only stable order. Thus when Servetus was arrested, the early hearings were bewildering, unintelligible and tiresome to the Council and judges. Such theological discussions as Calvin and Servetus waged over the term “hypostasis” were irrelevant. The man was a heretic, likely to disseminate dangerous ideas and a threat to the social order. The case was therefore turned over to the public prosecutor, Claude Rigot, who assumed the heresy and “Servetus was now called upon to show that his views did not subvert the bases of religion and the welfare of society”.[8] In 1535 Geneva had abandoned the Roman Catholic laws against heresy, and so the sentence was illegal in condemning his heresy, but to the Council the heart of the matter was the fact that it constituted treason to the State at a time when Geneva could not trust Swiss aid, when the Roman Catholic reaction was gaining power, and across the border in France Protestants were being executed in increasing numbers. Servetus’ doctrines were, like Calvin’s, incomprehensible, but the man was a menace to society and his ideas treason, while Calvin was its guiding engineer. Calvin himself, in defending the execution of Servetus, recognized that certain errors in dogma must be tolerated and that rigid conformity is impossible. Servetus, however, was going further than non-conformity: he attacked the very foundations and thereby rendered toleration impossible. A trinitarian Servetus could have preached democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy in Geneva and been tolerated, but he could not be suffered to attack the central dogma of Genevan society, and his presence on Genevan soil brought swift arrest.

At that time, Calvin faced a Council whose four new members were against him, and whose chief Syndic was his leading opponent. These men encouraged Servetus with false hopes simply to strike at Calvin, and gave rise to the erroneous idea of a common plot. Meanwhile, the rights of citizens of alien origin, Calvin’s allies, were abridged, and Calvin virtually ready to concede defeat.[9] The Council could have ousted Calvin, but it had no real alternative to him.

In the trial of Servetus, Calvin was aware of two conflicting demands, the social danger he felt Servetus represented (social because society was theological in basis), and his own antagonism to a state trial of a church offense. He resolved the matter in action but not in thought. Calvin was aware of a necessity for keeping the two spheres faithful to their task, but society had not changed sufficiently for any such distinction to be real. It was Calvin’s still young sociology rather than his integrity that proved inadequate.

What was it in John Calvin’s thinking which made him indispensable to Geneva, and, for a hundred years, the ferment of European revolt? Rome furthered the Counter-Reformation with the aid of the powerful monarchs. Lutheranism depended on German and Scandinavian princes. Anglicanism could only extend its influence to the limits of the king’s permission and authority. But Calvinism berated monarchs and overturned thrones, and it was not carried by princes and rulers, but carried them.

Calvinism’s power rested in its radical re-thinking of Christian faith, and its biblical re-ordering of all society. The essence of the new sociology which made Calvin the architect of Genevan society is to be found in two concepts: the kingdom of God and justification.

The kingdom of God, according to Roman theology, is closely identified with the church. All godly society must by its very nature be in and of Christ, whose visible manifestation in this world is the Church of Rome. The church is the kingdom in this world and holds within its power and jurisdiction every aspect and domain of life. Augustine and Ambrose had held that “the empire is in the church” as against current views that “the church is in the Empire”, and their view, later, in the middle ages, came to prevail. The church as the voice on earth of the kingdom, the extension of the incarnation and headed by the vicar of Christ, mediates the divine purpose to the world. No other institution has the right of interpretation. The church determined the nature of the Word of God, established a just price in economics, crowned monarchs in the state, decreed in some measure in literature and press what was permissible for publication, assessed and judged philosophy and science, and, in every area, claimed and sought to exercise power and jurisdiction as the ultimate authority by nature of its divine prerogative. The Roman Church was not without challengers. The Roman emperors sought to establish the state as the mediating institution and the manifest kingdom, and thereby precipitated the fourth century controversies on church and state so well analyzed by Williams. Ambrose stated the Nicene faith with clarity when he insisted: “The City of God is the Church and the Church is the Body of Christ; whosoever despises the laws of the Celestial City, sins against heaven and violates the sanctity of the immaculate Body by the filth of their vices”.[10] The victory, for a few centuries, went to the state in both east and west. The Roman Empire, as refounded by Otto I in 962, was the true Jerusalem, and, for many years, was so recognized by the Church. This Holy Roman Empire, as it was subsequently called, was, as Bryce has pointed out, “but another name for the Visible Church”, and the Emperor was called “Lord of the World”; claiming Pauline as against Petrine authority, Otto III signed himself servus Jesu Christi. Rome claimed to be no more than prima sedes, the first among many sees, and never una sancta in this era, and the “universal” title was disclaimed. From 800–1056, the Empire reformed the Church as it saw fit, and assumed the decision in forms of mass, ceremonial, ritual and creed. Under Otto III, the Emperor became the locale and voice of the Holy Ghost.[11] The medieval Roman Church subsequently assumed this role and placed the Empire under and in the Church and ruled as the true City and Kingdom. The sole possible challenge to its claims, the university, failed to develop a full and sustained argument, but its progress is significant. The first step came when the university claimed for its members the right of trial, on violation of secular law, in church rather than civil courts. The university thus declared itself a part of the kingdom and an arm thereof. The next step came when the university sought the same autonomy from the Church. This was never fully gained, although German universities eventually gained their own jails, English universities their own representatives in Parliament, and Paris briefly dared to correct the papacy, as with John XXII, speaking as the authentic interpreter of Christian faith.

The German universities came into their own as the voice of the kingdom with the Lutheran revolt, apart from which the German universities cannot be understood. As Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out, “the universities became the heirs of the bishop’s chair, the cathedra. The professor’s chair was called ‘Katheder’.”[12] The university became the representative of the Holy Ghost in the German nation, and princes were only “God’s hangmen and jailers”. “This salvation-character of scholarship, utterly foreign to the rest of the world, is the religious key to the political building erected by the Reformation” in Germany.[13] Petrine authority over the visible life of the Church was given to the prince, but Pauline authority, over the spirit, and the right of inspiration, interpretation and instruction belonged to the university. The university determined the nature of the law, and the prince assumed its operation. Unlike Calvin, Professor Luther believed in a just price: he subscribed to the old concept of a manifest kingdom whose voice carried jurisdiction in every realm, and that voice was now the Christian conscience and reason as revealed in the free university. The redeemed image of God in man re-opened Scripture, and as prophet, priest and king in Him, found its clearest voice in the free Lutheran university. But, with the decline of Protestantism in Germany, the restraining hand as well as the divine authority of the university disappeared, and the pre-Reformation man reappeared in Hitler.

In John Calvin, these concepts of the kingdom of God were swept aside by a rigorous biblical theology which made impossible the presumption of mediating institutions and voices. The Word interprets the Word, and Christ is the universal mediator. In his Institutes (III, xlii), he discusses the meaning of the kingdom of God in terms of the second petition of the Lord’s prayer, and thus establishes the kingdom of God as eschatological, not historical: it is to come, but it is not here in the form of an institution, such as church, state, or university. It is present in part where men’s hearts in obedience yearn for the fullness of His reign, but it has no mediatorial institutions. In its earthly manifestation, this “kingdom consists of two parts; the one, God’s correcting by the power of his Spirit all our carnal and depraved appetites, which oppose him in great numbers; the other, his forming all our powers to an obedience to his commands”. Because of Calvin’s belief in total depravity and his antagonism to perfectionism, he ruled out the possibility of redeemed man claiming to be the kingdom manifest. For him, man is never the kingdom. A favorite passage of Calvin, however, was Romans 14:17, 18, and in his Commentaries on Romans, he stated concerning the man who fulfilled these conditions “the kingdom of God fully prevails and flourishes in him…. Wherever there is righteousness and peace and spiritual joy, there the kingdom of God is complete in all its parts: it does not then consist of material things.” This, his boldest statement on the kingdom, needs this important observation: Calvin is here emphasizing the total lack of dependence of the kingdom on any material form, on meats or drinks, on any human activity. The kingdom of God is thus the presence or activity of God wherever found, and that presence or activity is pure grace, totally unrelated to the works or will of man, and eternity is its origin and its motive. Thus when Calvin seems to assert the human form of the kingdom, he is most rigorously separating it from the will of man. It is a kingdom of pure grace, wholly eschatological and never institutional and historical. Because it is eschatological, Calvin tended to distrust some human activities, such as art, which did not seem to bear directly on the framework of human daily life under the expectation, Thy Kingdom Come. But Calvin in part, and later Calvinists in full, by emphasizing Thy Will be Done, in relation to its implications for all of life, brought art into the circle of the kingdom. Kuyper is thus right in defending (in Calvinism) Calvinism’s relationship to art. Medieval theology gave art a relationship to God through the mediation and government of the kingdom, i. e., the church. Calvin, despite his distrust, opened the door to a direct and non-mediated relationship between the artist and the kingdom and gave art its charter of independence from man and its mandate from God. And that commission can only gain its full significance if the artist realizes that justification by faith places him under the direct sovereignty of God and within the eschatological sustentation. His concern therefore is neither realism, impressionism, expressionism or any other school of art as such but an exercise of the creation command to exercise dominion in obedience, under the framework of the redemptive hope. Calvin’s position, despite his distrust, was thus more significant to art than Rome’s patronage. The Roman Church can be the patron of art; the Reformed church is a co-laborer with art. Berkhof has summarized the Calvinist position on the kingdom by denying that Christian schools, labor unions, political organizations and the like are manifestations of the church as an organism. “The Kingdom may be said to be a broader concept than the Church, because it aims at nothing less than the complete control of all the manifestations of life. It represents the dominion of God in every sphere of human endeavor.”[14] More bluntly stated, Calvinism denies that the church can be equated with the kingdom: it is not the kingdom, but it is in the kingdom. Thus Calvin, because he saw economics, not as an aspect of the life of the church but of the kingdom, implicitly denied the jurisdiction of church, state or university over economics. To him, the just price made no sense whatsoever, imposing as it did an alien category over economics. As Tawney himself recognized, Calvin “throws on the conscience of the individual” the question of a fair rate of interest. It was not, as Tawney thought, because Luther’s eyes “were on the past” and Calvin alert to the future, but because Calvin’s conception of the kingdom eliminated the church as the manifest kingdom and made the individual Christian, in his activity, the citizen of that eternal order by virtue of divine grace. The individual was thus the primary area of responsibility. If the conscience of the individual made justice impossible, the state could not supply what the individual lacked. The state has its jurisdiction, the church its realm, art, economics, the university, the family, all have their respective jurisdictions, and the key to the life of each is the Word of God in the heart of man. The church’s place in the kingdom does not depend on a Petrine or apostolic succession, nor in any human conditions. In the Scottish Confession of Faith of 1560 (Arts. 18, 19, 20) it was insisted, after Calvin, that neither historical primacy, a majority rule, the rule of the elect, apostolic succession or any other authority carried any weight, but only the Word of God, the church existing within the kingdom of God rather than the kingdom of Satan only where there prevailed a faithful preaching of the Word, proper administration of the sacraments, and correct ecclesiastical discipline. The individual Christian is subordinate, whatever his position, to the Word of God, and the kingdom shows itself in the fruits of the Spirit in the man obedient to the Word. Thus no institution can claim jurisdiction where none is granted, and Calvin accordingly refused to recognize what Scripture had refused to confirm.

Closely related to Calvin’s concept of the kingdom is his interpretation of justification. His rigorous biblical exposition of justification needs no reviewing. For Calvin, justification was not by works, intelligence or institution, nor in faith, but of God by faith. Because God ultimately and immediately justifies, predestination is, as Scripture affirms, the corollary of justification. Salvation is thus wholly the work of God. This, of course, is offensive to man, who insists on finding the grounds of salvation in his own activity, thinking, or faith and credits God with assistance at best. To this Calvin replied, striking at autonomous man’s insistence on his own standard of justice: “On this hinge turns the whole question: Is there no justice of God, but that which is conceived of by us?” God as the Creator can be held to no standard of justice but his own, and “the great and essential end of man’s creation” is “for his own glory”.[15] Because justification and salvation are thus totally dependent on God, human activity and mediation are rendered irrelevant. The church and the saints in heaven have no mediatorial role left them. As Calvin pointed out, “the papists acknowledge Jesus Christ to be the only mediator of redemption; that it is He alone that redeemed the world: but as touching intercession, that He is not alone, that the Saints who are dead have this office as well as He”.[16] The Roman and Reformed theologies have their distinctive sociologies of justification. The sociology of Roman justification involves a hierarchy of mediatorial institutions under the rule and supervision of the manifest kingdom of God, the Church. The function of state, school, art, literature and economics are mediatorial: they guide man to salvation and act as instruments of the Church, the City of God, in the great task of justification. The duty o each is to be, to use a modern Roman category, Christophers, Christ-bearers to man. Thus none of these activities has any sovereignty in its own sphere: as instruments in the process of justification, they were and are subordinate to the jurisdiction, law and principles of the Church, and to its hierarchy. Thus Roman sociology sees man in at least a life-long process of justification (with purgatory also involved in the process) and orients all society in terms of this process. Society is tutorial and mediatorial.

Reformed sociology, on the other hand, sees no such process. Man is either redeemed or reprobate by the sovereign act of God, and thus no mediatorial institutions exist. No social distinction between redeemed and reprobate is possible, because the separation of the tares and the wheat is the prerogative of God, who sends His rain on the just and the unjust. Society is a mixed field, and even the church is a netful of mixed fish, good and bad. Thus neither man nor his institutions, his reason, emotions or activities are to be trusted. Society has no mediatorial function: its role is not priestly but ministerial. The priest of the Jewish dispensation was not a priest in his own right: he was only a substitute whose dress, drink, food, marriage, and his very steps within the sanctuary were minutely prescribed, because he had no authority in his own right: he was merely a temporal and temporary priest, a substitute awaiting the coming of the eternal high priest, Jesus Christ, who fulfilled and ended the ritual. Likewise, Christian society, whose members are kings, prophets and priests in Christ, has only a ministerial role: it discharges an assigned task without any independent authority. Its purpose is not to justify—God has done that before the foundation of the world—but to assert the coming of the eschatological kingdom and attempt in limited form to exercise the duties of the redeemed image of God in man: to exercise dominion, to ascertain knowledge, establish righteousness, and live in holiness in family, church, state, economics, education, art, and every other sphere of human activity. Like the priests of the Old Testament, its actions are prescribed by Scripture, and it awaits the general resurrection and the coming of Him who shall usher in the true and full kingdom, with all its redeemed activity. Calvin’s conception of justification led inevitably to the concept of sphere sovereignty. No other theology has been able to develop the soteriology of justification by faith because none other is willing to accept the full meaning of that doctrine, namely, predestination. And unless this is accepted, the freedom under God of justification sociology is denied society.

Calvin, of course, was not always consistent in the details of application, nor are modern Calvinists who maintain church colleges, official church magazines, and medical missions, all functions of free Christian society rather than of the church. But the main outlines of his adherence to justification sociology are clearly seen in Geneva.

Of central importance to the new sociology was Calvin’s view of holy days, the Jewish Sabbath, and Sunday. Commenting on Galatians 4:10, he points out that while no condemnation of “the observance of dates in the arrangement of civil society” is involved, Paul condemns “that which would bind the conscience, by religious considerations, as if it were necessary to the worship of God …. we do not reckon one day to be more holy than another.” Although, in its early years, the Reformation saw daily preaching, its purpose was instructional. Roman sociology requires a constantly open church: since man’s justification is in process, there is a constant dependence on the church, and the supreme penalty on erring man and society is a closed church. For Calvinist sociology, the locked church on week-days is inevitable. When the church closes its doors, the day does not become secular and un-redeemed, because man is justified by God, and without the necessity of human mediation. Redeemed man, not the church, redeems the day, and this gives rise to the important Calvinist concept of the Christian calling. “Redeeming the time” (Eph. 5:16 ff.) is the task of man for Calvin, and involves, not the monastery, but circumspect living, sobriety, inner joy in and worship of God, and social order, which involves submission. “God has bound us so strongly to each other, that no man ought to endeavour to avoid subjection; and where love reigns, mutual services will be rendered. I do not except even kings and governors, whose very authority is held for the service of the community.” Redeeming the time thus involves obedience to God and “this mutual subjection” of men, and “we may not refuse the yoke … of serving our neighbours”.[17] Sunday worship is not a necessity for justification, but the celebration of the justified. The redeemed rejoice in redemption, and gather to give thanks and to learn more of the Word of God, so that in their daily life and activity they may more fully redeem the time. Thus Calvin freed the Christian from not only institutions but from days and seasons. Christian man and not the church redeems the time, and the church can lock its doors in the assurance that the kingdom of God consists of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. The locked church, a tragedy for the Roman, is the triumph of the Reformed believer and an assertion of the free and non-mediated activity of the Holy Ghost, who forgives, remits sins, and blesses man in his home and business.

Calvin, of course, did not thereby dismiss the need for observance of the seventh day. For him, corporate Christian worship and Lord’s Day observances are a spiritual necessity, but not a legal requirement. Christian man, under grace rather than law, is not subject to the damning penalty of the Law for infraction of the Sabbath, or to penitential requirements, as with Rome, to amend his Sabbath-breaking, because, being under grace and a redeemed man, Sabbath observance is for him a necessary part of redeemed activity rather than a necessary part of the redeeming process. While insisting on the observance of the Lord’s Day, Calvin pointedly stated, “the Lord’s Day is not observed by us upon the principles of Judaism; because in this respect the difference between us and the Jews is very great. For we celebrate it not with scrupulous rigour, as a ceremony which we conceive to be a figure of some spiritual mystery, but only use it as a remedy necessary to the preservation of order in the Church” (Inst. II, viii, 33). For him, the Sabbath was abrogated and fulfilled in Christ, and he cited Col. 2:16, 17, the Sabbath was “a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ”. This true Sabbath, wherein “we must rest altogether, that God may operate within us”, is still binding on us in its moral sanction, and hence the necessity for its observance to permit the preaching of the Word, the sacraments, and physical rest for ourselves and servants. But the true Sabbath “is contained not in one day, but in the whole course of our life, till, being wholly dead to ourselves, we be filled with the life of God. Christians therefore ought to depart from all superstitious observance of days” (Inst. II, viii, 29, 31, 32, 34). In this world, the moral necessity of the Lord’s Day was perpetual for Calvin, but only in terms of this true Sabbath, which he called the “substance” of the Christian man’s true observance. The Christian thus lives all his life in the eternal Sabbath, the heavenly rest of the redeemed Body of Christ. His participation in this remains fragmentary or partial in this world, but nonetheless real. He cannot be in Christ and outside the eternal Sabbath. Thus the chief end of man, as stated in the beginning of the Genevan Catechism by Calvin, is “to know God and enjoy Him forever” a Sabbath activity which finds fulfillment in the eternal Sabbath.

Calvin, in his interpretation of the Fourth Commandment, avoided mysticism, and he definitely placed the day under grace. This has, in a sense, fostered secularism with regard to the Sabbath. In Roman and pagan holy days, all observance is redeeming and the day is “open” to all men. Rome condones much on the Sabbath because its people are sinners in process of redemption. The Christian Sabbath in Calvin is for redeemed saints and thus has higher standards and automatically excludes as secular much of what the world previously condoned. It thereby makes secularism more self-conscious, and the tare begins to be seen as a tare.

Calvin in Geneva tried steadily to free the church in its realm from the jurisdiction of the state. For him, the church was “founded on the election of God” and thus not discernible to any but God alone. The visible church, containing both elect and reprobate, is our spiritual mother, and “out of her bosom there can be no hope of remission of sins, or any salvation” because through her the gospel is proclaimed and the sacraments administered. Calvin’s description of the church frequently suggests Roman theology in its high doctrine of the church, but with this significant difference: for Calvin the church was always the net, never the Fisherman (Matt. 13:47–50), whereas for Rome the Church was the Fisherman (Inst. IV, i). The church is Christ’s mystical body, but never Christ. The true church is present where the Word is faithfully preached and the two sacraments properly administered. In dealing with the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Calvin’s interpretation is generally misunderstood in that it is judged from the standpoint of Roman and Lutheran thought. He asserts unmistakably Christ’s real presence in this sacrament in which “we are incorporated into one body with Christ” and in which “we may confidently consider… Christ himself … presented to our eyes, and touched by our hands. For there can be no falsehood or illusion in this word, ‘Take, eat, drink; this is my body … this is my blood.’ … Though it appears incredible for the flesh of Christ, from such an immense local distance, to reach us, so as to become our food, we should remember how much the secret power of the Holy Spirit transcends all our senses, and what folly it is to apply any measure of ours to his immensity.” While asserting the real presence, Calvin specifically denies transubstantiation and consubstantiation, because “the bread is called the body in a sacramental sense”. To fall into the Lutheran or Roman error is to misunderstand the meaning of the sacraments, for a sacrament is a channel of grace, not an incarnation. To make it the latter is to pervert its meaning and attempt a false visibility that “while remaining on the earth, they might attain a proximity to Christ without any need of ascending to heaven”. The sacrament is not the incarnation itself but its ordained channel: thus it gives us the real presence, but not the incarnation itself (Inst. IV, xvii). Even as the kingdom is present in the world, but not incarnate in it, so Christ is present in the sacrament but not incarnate in it. The Holy Spirit has been given to the church and is present within her, but the church is not the incarnation of the Holy Ghost. Thus for Calvin the church can never extend its sway over all of life as Rome did. Hers is a ministry, not a priesthood, and it is a ministry of Word and sacrament.

Likewise, the state is not a priesthood nor the kingdom but the ministry of justice. As with all institutions and activities, Calvin places the state directly under God and His Word. He frees it from the church’s jurisdiction, and thus gives it more than Rome conceded; but Calvin limits its area, and thus gives less. “They are responsible to God and to man in the exercise of their power”, he comments on Romans 13:4. The magistrate is the sword-bearer, entrusted with the responsibility of waging war and maintaining justice. “They are constituted the protectors and vindicators of the public innocence, modesty, probity, and tranquillity, whose sole object it ought to be to promote the common peace and security of all” (Inst. IV, xx). Thus the limited state, a minister of the kingdom and not the kingdom, was the Calvinist concept. Calvinists could boldly reprimand kings, as fellow subjects of God, and correct rulers when they interfered in the realm of the church. For them, sovereignty was not derived from the church, state, or people, but from God, and the sovereignty was exercised in a world tainted by an original sin pervasive in the realm of the state as well as elsewhere.

Concerning the family, Calvin, like all the Reformers, expressed indignation over the “petulant reproaches” of men like Jerome “by which he attempts to render hallowed wedlock both hateful and infamous… God … ordains the conjugal life for man, not to his destruction, but to his salvation” (ad Gen. 2:18). For the Roman, marriage is tutorial and under the jurisdiction of the Church. For the Calvinist, marriage is the blessed union of the redeemed and a type of the union of Christ and His church, the mother as a type of the church and the father of Christ. As such, the father assumed a priestly role in the family, with the household as his congregation, and that essential Protestant ritual was born, family worship. As the sociologist Rosenstock-Huessy has observed, “Here lay the socio-economic reality of the Reformation, a field in which the Christian’s inward freedom could incarnate itself in daily life, in which living faith became works”. The Reformed family, “by transplanting the sacrament of the Word into every household”, “Christianized what had previously been simply a part of the natural world”.[18] By way of answer, the Church of Rome developed the cult of the Holy Family and of St. Joseph, but Rome subordinates this area to the Church, while the Reformation saw in the family, man’s first and last school, church, state, and society, directly under God and free of the jurisdiction of church and state.

Tawney has written with great learning but less insight on the relationship of Calvinism to a free economy in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. He has sensed the emphasis of Calvinism on “personal responsibility” and the significance of the Christian calling, but without any awareness of its theological foundations. He had delineated the failure of other reformers, including Calvin’s associates and successors, to show the same concept of freedom from ecclesiastical and magisterial control, but erred in seeing Calvin as a representative of urban modernity. Calvin was as limited in his outlook as were the men of his day: he showed a general conservatism towards change and new ideas, even to following the implications of some of his own. He was, for example, not convinced by the Copernican theory. The importance of Calvin to the rise of capitalism has no connection with the man’s personal nature or background. It was rather Calvin’s rigorous biblical theology which gave economics an independent role under God, freeing it from the jurisdiction of a kingdom on earth and placing it within the framework of the redemption of time. Calvin’s theology created a sociology of justification, the implications of which, though only fragmentarily realized at that time, were revolutionary, and are basic to an understanding of the Reformation and modern eras.

In terms of this programme, Calvin’s horror of Servetus is more understandable. Having defeated the concept of an incarnate and manifest kingdom on earth, Calvin saw in Servetus’ theology not only the return of a divine institution but a divinized humanity, Christ blasphemously reduced and humanity exalted. Such a society is the antithesis of Christian society and is the restatement of the demonic offer, “Ye shall be as God”, and, accordingly, constituted a fearful threat to Geneva, where Calvin’s programme was at best a frail success.

In many aspects of his programme, Calvin fell short of achievement. Even within the church, his primary concern, the goal was never reached. His desire for weekly communion, tempered to a request for monthly communion, was resisted successfully. Geneva had no desire to see high church Calvinism flourish: it was sufficiently overpowering in its limited status. In many respects, church government was always kept under state control, despite Calvin’s unrelenting struggle. On the other hand, the moralistic regime was on the whole approved of heartily, despite minor irritations. It provided the stable social order the burghers desired. Most of the objections came when the moral laws were applied against themselves: it was a desirable law for other people primarily. These “puritanical” laws were in fact common to Roman Catholic Geneva but had not been enforced, and serious moral laxity prevailed. Pre-Calvinist Protestant Geneva had made an attempt to enforce them, but it remained to Calvinism to create the power to do so. The rationale of the moralistic regime can be seen by examining that classic line of clandestine lovers, “We are married in the eyes of God”. This is nonsense to the Calvinist, because the eyes of God see man not in isolation simply but in terms of church, state, and family. Marital vows according to the rites of church and state are therefore not purely legal requirements: they are moral categories. No act of man is a solitary act: it is at all times a social act as well. This latter concept is especially stressed by Calvinism and hence its circumspection of all life. What a man thinks and does in the privacy of his home or in a solitary, closeted place, is a thread in the weave and pattern of human society. Allow a single thread to unravel, and the whole cloth is endangered. Society is thus a maze of interlocking responsibilities, none independent and none subordinated to the other. Calvinism from the beginning has often been tempted to make church or state the key to this maze, but its basic answer has become redeemed man under the Word of God.

Calvin’s achievement was a great one: a scholar entrusted with the engineering of a social order, he had in the main succeeded, and after eighteen years of service, the Council finally admitted this foreign expert, its unofficial bishop, into the rights of bourgeoisie, of citizenship. The aging Calvin counselled Knox to undertake his experiment with more moderation of spirit and charity. Certainly ex-priests, even though unworthy, should be treated with humanity and allowed to draw pensions, and surely the children of the excommunicated as well as the illegitimate should certainly be accepted for baptism. And episcopacy could be retained if it were not sacramental. When the great scholar died, his new ordering of Christian society seemed an enduring one, destined to be a pattern for Protestant civilization, but he had not reckoned with the order being created by the burghers who understood neither predestination nor hypostasis. The plain citizens of Constantinople understood the significance of hypostasis, but the burghers of Geneva, although their Council required weekly church attendance of itself to set an example for the people, remained hopeless outsiders to the problems of theology. Those were matters for John Calvin to deal with as painlessly as possible and with the least disturbance to their social order. They were finally grateful for his work, but they never understood it.

Calvin understood them much more clearly. A thoughtful realist, he knew that a new economy prevailed and had, in fact, been in existence for some time. Unlike Roman Catholic and Lutheran thinkers, he made no attempt to force the principles of scholastic thought onto capitalism. As Tawney has pointed out, Calvin frankly recognized “the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large-scale commerce and finance, and the other practical facts of business life”.[19] As such, Calvin was the successful social engineer of his day, and his appeal to the bourgeoisie was a powerful one. Calvinism thus won its victories in commercial and urban areas. It finally failed because neither Calvin nor Calvinism could visualize capitalism as anything more than the new economy whereas it was in fact the new culture. The early Renaissance movement had derived considerable backing from the burghers, from the rising capitalists of Europe. It appealed to them with its neo-Platonist emphasis on the integrity and essentiality of the individual soul. Society was reduced to simple, “elemental” terms. But the Renaissance lacked the moral virility and the economic awareness the burghers needed: this Calvinism supplied, and carried the day. Giannozzo Manetti, the Florentine humanist, wrote On the Excellency and Dignity of Man, before the middle of the 15th century, as a counterpart to Innocent III’s On the Misery of Man. Marsilio Ficino glorified man’s universality and his cosmic centrality: man became the measure, and his liberty the essence of true culture and society. Yet none of these humanists had any grasp of the real revolution of their time, nor did Erasmus, who simply repeated the conventional criticism more ably. Luther provided the religious catalyst but viewed the social revolution with horror and incomprehension, in traditional Roman Catholic categories mainly. Calvinism alone recognized the new economy as part of a new order and had a sociology to meet it and thus briefly commanded the situation. But because Calvinism by its very nature was all or nothing, it was soon discarded; the pilot was dropped, and capitalism continued to develop along its earlier Renaissance lines, with the benefit of Calvinist rigorism and morality, into the civilization of liberalism or humanism, of politico-economic man. As such, nothing was more remote to it than Calvin and Calvinism.

Today, the sociology of justification is all but forgotten, and the free society it created in part disappearing. Man has become the visible deity, whose general will is manifest in the state. As the visible kingdom, the state concerns itself with all areas of human life: church, school, family, economics, literature, art, all things live and move and have their being within the state. What Rome was in the thirteenth century, the state has become in our era, even to the dream of one universal see in the United Nations. Against this, Rome proclaims her ancient creed, while many Protestants, under the influence of the social gospel, declare that the kingdom of God is and is becoming in that order known as the state. Calvinism, whose main activity has often been limited to a defense of Scripture, needs anew to launch forth the fullness of Scripture. The proclamation of the eschatological kingdom and of predestination means the responsibility to develop the sociology of justification and to destroy all human idols set up as images of the kingdom whose builder and maker is God.

Notes

1. G. G. Coulton: Inquisition and Liberty, London: Heinemann, 1938.
2. M. A. Murray: The God of the Witches, London: Sampson Low, n. d., and The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Oxford: Clarendon, 1921.
3. J. S. Whale: Christian Doctrine, New York: Macmillan, 1942, p. 111, from Migne: Patr. Gr., xlvi, 557.
4. R. N. Carew Hunt: Calvin, London: Centenary Press, 1933, p. 56.
5. Ibid., pp. 55, 105-113.
6. Ibid., p. 309.
7. H. D. Foster: Collected Papers, Hanover, N. H., 1929, “Geneva before Calvin”, p. 23, and “Calvin’s Programme for a Puritan State”, pp. 31 ff.
8. Hunt: op. cit., p. 211.
9. For a fair and Unitarian review of the case, see Earl Morse Wilbur: A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents, Cambridge: Harvard, 1946, pp. 150–185
10. George Huntston Williams: Church History, XX, 3, pp. 3–33 and XX, 4, pp. 3–26, “Christology and Church-State Relations in the Fourth Century”, citing Ambrose: Expositio in psalmum cxviii, sermo xv, 35.
11. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: Out of Revolution, New York: Morrow, 1938, pp. 485–515.
12. Ibid., p. 390; see pp. 359-450.
13. Ibid., p. 399.
14. Louis Berkhof: Systematic Theology, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946, p. 570.
15. Calvin: “The Eternal Predestination of God”, in Calvin’s Calvinism, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950, pp. 32, 85.
16. Calvin: The Mystery of Godliness, sermon on “The Only Mediator”, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950, p. 203.
17. Calvin: Commentaries on Galatians and Ephesians, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948, pp. 314–333.
18. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: The Christian Future, New York: Scribners, 1946, pp. 34–42.
19. Tawey: op. cit., p. 104