An illuminating segment culled from a book by Bernard Ramm examining the troubled interface between Calvinism and culture. A helpful correction to what he terms the "Calvin-stereotype". Worth quoting in full I think:
"Some of the things said about Calvin make one wonder if most people writing about Calvin have ever read him. It is hard even for scholars to break away from the Calvin-stereotype. Calvin’s theses are essentially those of Luther. Reason in sin makes man proud and defiant of God’s truth. Therefore, the supreme virtue of sinful man before God is humility. At this point Calvin begins a discussion of the fact that “man’s nature endowments [are] not wholly extinguished [by the fall of sin].” (Institutes Book 2, paragraph 12-17) He devotes six very impressive paragraphs to maintain that thesis. His style is so elegant and the language so clear that anything short of giving the full text itself leaves so much unsaid. I will, therefore, resort to a sampling of his thought.
Although the supernatural gifts of God to man in creation were lost through sin, the natural gifts were not, and enough reason remains in man so that man is to be distinguished from the beasts. Sin could not “completely wipe out” reason for “some sparks still gleam” in man. Nor did man’s will utterly perish. Then Calvin makes the following remarkable comment:
“For we see implanted in human nature some sort of desire to search out the truth to which man would not at all aspire if he had not already savoured it. Human understanding then possesses some power of perception, since it is by nature captivated by love of truth.” (Institutes Book 12, paragraph 2)
Next he states that man is a social creature and all men have within themselves “universal impressions of a certain civic faith dealing and order” and it is these seeds which give rise to specific laws for man knows “law and order” before he is ever taught it. The seeds of law have “been implanted in all men.” The conclusion that Calvin draws is that if all men have some sense of political order then “this is ample proof that in the arrangement of this life no man is without the light of reason.”
Next he discusses art and science and finds that the capacity for art and science are gifts of God for all men. They are not natural endowments as if independent from God, but they exist because of God. Calvin regards “the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of all truth.” Therefore if we despise art and science – fundamentalists take note! – “we condemn and reproach the Spirit himself,” for it logically follows that if the Spirit is the fountain of art and science, to despise art and science is to despise their author, the Spirit.
Calvin then puts in a commending word for ancient jurists, doctors, men of mathematical sciences, and pagan poets. Even though Scripture calls these men “natural men,” nevertheless they “were sharp and penetrating in their investigation of inferior things. Let us, accordingly, learn by their example how many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good.” This is not all in accord with the rantings one finds in so many books which claim Calvin thought human nature totally depraved and therefore totally corrupt and totally bereft of anything worthy of dignity and respect. This is the difference between Calvin of caricature and the Calvin of the Institutes.
In paragraph sixteen Calvin pushes further his thesis that “human competence in art and science also derives from the Spirit of God.” He makes the sharp observation that “if we neglect God’s gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer just punishment for our sloth.” Finally he speaks of the general grace of God as the source of all reason, science, art and learning. He concludes that “we still see in this diversity some remaining traces of the image of God, which distinguish the entire human race from the other creatures.”
This concept of the general grace of God has been developed by later Reformed theologians into the systematic doctrine of common grace. It is called common because it is, in Calvin’s word, general, that is, it applies to all men, unregenerate and regenerate. It is called grace because man has no right to it. By sin man has forfeited all. Special revelation, special grace, is that which redeems man. Man shall survive and not devour himself out of existence by his hatreds, nor degenerate into the life of a brute by loss of reason, but shall have a culture and civilization with government, law, education, art, science, and economics. In this God has given all men grace.
Abraham Kuyper has been called the greatest Calvinist since Calvin, and he has pursued this vein of Calvin’s thought with force and consistency. For example, in his book on Calvinism he indicates that Calvinism is not just a doctrine of salvation but a total life system involving politics, science, and art. He writes:
“Thus understood Calvinism is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and from this specific religious consciousness there was developed first a peculiar theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life, for the interpretation of the moral and world-order, for the relation between nature and grace, between Christianity and the world, between church and state, and finally for art and science.” (Lectures on Calvinism, pp. 10)
What Kuyper says of art is also important in showing that evangelical theology has a world-affirming dimension that so frequently gets dropped out in its exposition. Kuyper writes of art as follows:
“As image-bearer of God, man possesses the possibility to create something beautiful and to delight in it. This artistic ability is in man no separate function of the soul but an unbroken (continuous) utterance of the image of God…Understand that art is no fringe that is attached to a garment and no amusement that is added to life, but a most serious power in our present existence, and therefore its principal variations must maintain, in their artistic expression, a close relation with the principal variations of our entire life; and since, without exception, these principal variations of our entire human existence are dominated by our relation to God, would it not be both a degradation and an underestimation of art, if you were to imagine the functions, into which the art-trunk divides itself, to be independent of the deepest root which all human life has in God?” (Lectures on Calvinism, pp. 142)"
Certainly bucks the standard trend of interpretations that boils Calvin down to nothing more than a grim and puritanical ideologue.
Signing off -
The Scribbling Apprentice
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