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Teaching Calvin at Berkeley

Earlier this month a professor of history at Berkeley shared in the New York Times how he uses John Calvin in his class to expand the imagination of his students. He lays out for them quotes from Calvin’s Institutes on Predestination and watches the anger rise from his students. Secular, Christian and non-Christian students alike protest the idea of this sovereign God undercutting our rights to liberty and autonomy.

None of the students are persuaded by Calvin’s logic. But again, Calvin probably knew that they wouldn’t be, since many of his own readers weren’t either. For this saying “no,” the rejection of this terrible idea, is a natural, even reasonable reaction. “Monstrous indeed is the madness of men, who desire to subject the immeasurable to the puny measure of their own reason,” Calvin exclaimed.

Human reason seeks to subject God to itself, but predestination tells us that we cannot. Reasoning itself needs to come to an end before humans can experience the proper relationship to God.

Here we can see something special about the theological reasoning that Calvin practiced. This is not philosophy, after all. His work is not aimed at an abstract audience. Instead it is a direct address to you. Confronting the doctrine of predestination is a kind of psychological experiment. Nothing else can “suffice to make us as humble as we ought to be” as “a taste of this doctrine” of predestination, as Calvin put it. Exactly here, in this rejection and anger, Calvin insists, you finally feel in your gut the greatness of God. You finally feel the difference between his Majesty and your limitation.

How Unreasonable IS Calvin really? 

I personally don’t find Calvin nor predestination unreasonable at all. It is humanity and our illusion of autonomy and self-determination that I find unreasonable. Every day the disabled, the weak, the vulnerable, the poor, the normal are born into this world and the vast majority of them will not live charmed lives. You may be born the wrong race, gender, color, nationality or to the wrong family or parent and no matter what you do you won’t live the life of Brad Pitt. Then again maybe Brad Pitt’s life isn’t that good either.

Enter God

God gets pulled into the equation on both sides of the argument. Secularism and atheist have convinced many people that it is simply up to us to get what we want, whether that be a selfish agenda of grabbing and shaking the world to provide to me what I desire, or it might mean marshalling the powers of this world to enforce whatever vision of equality or justice I believe to be right, beautiful or true. In either case it is up to us.

The cry of the Berkeley students is that God had better butt out, or at least we had better shout down any religious notion that he does not.

On the other hand the world is filled with religious people of nearly every religion that demand that God, however they conceive of him, her or it BE involved. We want God to hear our prayers, defend our team, listen to our side, deliver the outcomes that we believe are good, right and desirable to us and those we love. To this end we pray, do religious service, try to figure out what moral or monetary coin God desires that will prompt the use of divine power to make the world as we simply know it ought to be.

Within this power relationship two things keep coming back around. Will God give us the information we need to prevail over our adversaries, and when our arm is too short will God use divine power to intervene to overcome our more powerful human adversary.

We we read through the book of 1 Samuel  these issues are engaged. The text wrestled with these issues, not in abstract but in narrative form as we see God working through the drama of Saul and David.

David as Just a Refugee or King in Exile?  Continue reading →