Go Calvin, it’s your birthday
As far as Christian thinkers go, John Calvin is so old school. A stickler for doctrine, his approach stands in contrast to some of the more colorful, feel-good church movements: ecumenicalism, universal salvation, pop-Christianity.
Or is he? This year marks Calvinism’s reemergence (and his 500th birthday!), and it appears it’s the 16th-century, pointy-bearded reform theologian for the win. In March, TIME named the New Calvinism one of “10 ideas changing the world right now,” as more and more Christians are turning to his teachings on predestination and human depravity.
Put simply, Calvin asserted the absolute power of God over the corruption of man, advocating a strict moral code, the doctrine of predestination and Bible-based theology. And when he taught in France and Switzerland, on the tails of Martin Luther, Protestantism was the hot new thing. Today’s religious landscape, though, is dotted with dozens of denominations and Calvin’s legacy traditionally fell to Reformed churches.
As Calvinism goes from “old” to “new” though, as explained by Mark Driscoll, the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, the voices of Calvinist discourse are resounding with enthusiasm and innovation in traditional places as well as major cities. At Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.—a hotspot for Calvinist thought—the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship has set up prayer feeds on Twitter. At an emergent church on Chicago’s West Side, Calvinism plays into a debate on church and state.
Calvin in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Students on the woodsy campus of Calvin College can get pretty intimate with their college’s namesake, flipping through vellum-covered first editions of his works.
Paul Kuyper, who will be a junior at Calvin in the fall, gently opened a thick copy of Calvin’s most famous piece, “The Institutes of the Christian Religion.” Its unfamiliar stylized typeface made it hard to read, as all the words seemed to run together.
“It doesn’t even look like English,” he said.
Here, Calvin has his own section of the library, including more than 5,000 books he wrote or were written about him. The gloves come off: Students are free to touch the centuries-old pages, see artifacts from Calvin’s life and legacy and study deeply into Christian history.
“For many of our students, these are the oldest things they’ve ever seen,” said Karin Maag, the director of the library’s Meeter Center for Calvin Studies. On July 10, she’s dressed in Puritan garb after speaking at Calvin’s birthday party that morning, where more than 150 students, staff and alumni gathered in an echo-y gymnasium to sing to him and eat pieces of a sheet cake iced with “Happy Birthday John Calvin.”
Renewed interest in Calvin, she says, comes from a desire to know more about tradition and to ground faith in doctrine, rather than emotion.
“They look to Calvin and see in him a very structured understanding of belief,” Maag said. “For people who are looking for more than simply feelings in church, want some grounding in thought and in knowledge and reflection about how doctrines fit together, Calvin is very appealing.”
Kuyper, who grew up in the Christian Reform Church, a Calvinist and Evangelical denomination with strong Dutch roots, agrees.
“To me,” he said, “the Reform faith, it makes the most sense. Everything clicks together. And as Christians, I think it’s important to be reforming, not necessarily changing, but reforming our faith.”
Calvin in Chicago
Miles away from Grand Rapids – which is not only home to Calvin College, but also the headquarters of the Christian Reformed Church – another group flips open the “Institutes.” Instead of a library, they’re in an art studio on the West Side of Chicago. And instead of fancy, bound books, they’ve got photocopies, passed around the table along with slices of pizza on paper plates.
At the monthly discussion on faith and politics at Wicker Park Grace, an emergent Christian community, an atheist, a former Hindu, a curious Christian and two University of Chicago Divinity School students turn to Calvin’s “Institutes.”
Faith and politics isn’t an easy topic to begin with, and the group finds that adding in this reformed theologian—best known for his doctrine of predestination—only complicates things.
“I was late to the game when it comes to these guys, Calvin and Luther and Augustine. I didn’t start until grad school,” said Tristan Orozco, Masters in Divinity student at U of C who initiated the discussions at Wicker Park Grace as a part of his theologian-in-residence program at Wicker Park Grace, where the group gathers around folding tables in the middle of room lined in huge, colorfully painted canvases from ACME Art Works. “I wanted to see what response they’d get if they’re actually read (outside of) an academic setting, how they affect believers.”
“The Institutes” offers a Calvinist take on the law, the government and political leaders, but its historical context makes it difficult to directly apply to the contemporary church and society. Writing in 1536, centuries before democracy, Calvin references books from the Catholic apocrypha—one paragraph into the reading, someone interrupts to ask: “What’s ‘Baruch’?”—and addresses Christians’ role in a monarchy, as subjects and rulers.
So, Tim Vermeulen, brought up the meeting’s central question: How can Calvin inform people now, centuries after his teachings debuted? Even after being raised in the Calvinist tradition and attending Calvin College, the 49-year-old had never read “The Institutes.” Vermeulen, an artist who describes himself as “fascinated and frustrated” with religion more, compared the reading’s message of human depravity with the political involvement urged by Neo-Calvinists.
“It was about the transformation of society, Christ transforming society,” he said. “This was the mandate of being a Christian, to usher in the Kingdom. The Kingdom was not some pie in the sky.”
James Hoey, the 23-year-old Masters of Divinity student leading the discussion nodded along with Vermeulen and tapped his feet, in yellow Converse sneakers, under the table.
“It’s hard to be a Calvinist and not have political conceptions,” he agreed. “You’re here to bring about His glory and manifest it in the world.”
In between bites of barbeque chicken pizza, Nicholas Croston went back and forth on Calvinist ethics. A libertarian and atheist, Croston ultimately admitted: “All I ask is that I be allowed to believe what I want to believe and people don’t force their beliefs on me.”
The 27-year-old was raised in a Christian household and then spent his early 20s following Islam. He has since lost all belief in God, but remains intrigued by religion.
“I’m curious about the ways religions benefit people and why certain religious beliefs are the way they are,” he said.
Dev Majunder, a former Hindu, also brought a pan-religious perspective to the group.
“I haven’t known about Calvin at all, but there are some things which are strikingly similar to when I was growing up with a different religion,” said Majunder, 30, who described the concept of humility before God.
While Calvin glorifies God’s power and goodness in the “Institutes,” his conception of man is the opposite: “He was stripped and divested of all wisdom, righteousness, virtue and life, which cannot be possessed except in God.”
At the end of the discussion, the idea of humility was one that each of the participants saw as part of their relationship with God and the world.
“People have vastly different backgrounds and believe vastly different things, but they all believe in the concept of humility in some way,” Orozco concluded at the discussion’s close. “So I guess that’s the practical ministry student in me.”
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:11 pm
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