Calvin Revisited        2 Corinthians 12:2-10            July 5, 2009

“It’s not about you.”

That’s the first line of Rick Warren’s best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life. “If you want to know why you were placed on this planet,” he goes on to say, “you must begin with God.”

It’s not about you. It’s all about God.

Where did this idea originate? The obvious answer would be Scripture, but you also find yourself face to face with a 500-year-old pastor named John Calvin. This magnetic, but often-misunderstood, leader of the Protestant Reformation was born July 10, 1509.
 
Famous for his floppy hat, plain dress and stern expression, Calvin was convinced that knowledge of self requires knowledge of God. God was acting in love when he created the world and everything in it. “There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world,” said John Calvin, “that is not intended to make us rejoice.”

Someone compiled a list of top-ten quotes of John Calvin. Here are three samples of Calvin Bloopers:
 
6. “Man with all his shrewdness is as stupid about understanding (by himself) the mysteries of God, as an ass is incapable of understanding musical harmony.”

3. “I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.”

1. “Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”
 
Bloopers or not, maybe Calvin wasn’t such a cranky Calvinist, after all!
 
Calvin was a brilliant young man who intended to be a Catholic priest but entered law instead. After encountering the writings of Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther, Calvin had a conversion experience. “God subdued and brought my heart to docility,” he said.

Breaking away from Catholicism, he left France and settled in Switzerland as an exile. In 1536, Calvin published one of the greatest theological works ever written, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This major systematic theology, which begins with God the Creator and ends with reflections on civil government, stands as one of the most important expressions of Reformation thought. (Not bad work for a 27-year-old.)

Calvin’s writings impressed the people of Geneva, Switzerland, so he was invited to move there and help with the Reform movement.
The city of Geneva became a magnet for Protestant exiles from all over Europe. One of them, John Knox of Scotland, described Calvin’s city as “the most perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles.”

So what made Calvin and Geneva so magnetic? Here we want to remember that first of all Calvin was a pastor. He pastored a church and preached daily in it, wrote commentaries on almost every book in the Bible, authored dozens of Christian pamphlets, trained and sent out missionaries, and influenced the schools and the civil government. His desire was to help people understand and learn to live by God's word. Let us turn briefly to three often misunderstood themes of Calvin.

Sovereignty of God.
For starters, Calvin emphasized the sovereignty of God and wrote that “God is Lord over all!” (Institutes, 1.14.3). This was good news then; it’s good news now. He stressed that no human being — whether king or bishop — could demand our ultimate loyalty, and this attracted people who were suffering under the authority of oppressive churches and governments.
 
This belief in God’s sovereignty has shaped Christian thought through the centuries. It had a dramatic impact, before World War II, when a group of faithful Germans took a stand against Hitler in a statement of faith called “The Theological Declaration of Barmen.”
 
(It) rejected the attempts of the Third Reich to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life.” These faithful Germans gave ultimate loyalty to the Lord alone. Some were imprisoned and even killed for their beliefs. The Barmen Declaration is included in the Presbyterian Church’s Book of Confessions and I would encourage you to read through it.
 
It’s not about us; it’s all about God.

Prevenient Grace.
Calvin also emphasized the importance of grace and claimed that salvation is possible only through the grace of God. He believed that nothing earthly can save us, and he criticized the Catholic Church for becoming a religion of salvation by works.

My grace is sufficient for you,” said Jesus to the apostle Paul in the lectionary reading for today, “for power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul goes on to say, “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Calvin certainly agreed with Paul on the centrality of grace, and he quoted this verse from 2 Corinthians several times in The Institutes of the Christian Religion.

In his opening to the book, Calvin says, “Before God nothing remains for us to boast of, save his mercy, whereby we have been received into hope of eternal salvation through no merit of our own” (Institutes, PA 2).

VERSE
(8-9) Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.
 
Paul appeals to the Lord, and Christ answers with the promise, “My grace is sufficient” (vv. 8-9). “When Paul calls upon God in an absolute sense, he immediately adds the name of Christ,” says Calvin (Institutes, 1.13.20). So the grace of God is really the same as the grace of Jesus Christ.

Later, Calvin quotes Saint Augustine on this passage, saying, “God’s power must be made perfect to repress elation …. Grace alone brings about every good work in us” (Institutes, 2.3.13). In other words, we cannot earn God's approval.

On the other hand, Calvin uses the verse to warn us against an illusion of human perfection. “We must shake off sloth and carelessness,” says Calvin, lest “we be overwhelmed by the stratagems of our flesh” (Institutes, 3.3.14). We shouldn’t let ourselves become more self-confident than the apostle Paul, who discovered that Christ’s power was made perfect not in strength but in weakness.

It’s grace alone, according to Calvin. A completely free gift from the God who is Lord over all.

And Calvin’s insights continue to offer us hope today. Whenever we’re feeling overwhelmed, oppressed, unclean or unqualified, we can reach up and grab hold of the free gift that is offered by our loving Lord.
 
“My grace is sufficient for you,” says the Lord Jesus to us, “for power is made perfect in weakness.” We may feel weak, or even BE weak, but God's power in us makes us strong for whatever comes our way . . . I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, we read in Philippians.

And that is still good news. It’s not about us; it’s all about God.
                       
What about predestination? It’s Calvin’s work in this area that’s most misunderstood. Critics who haven’t studied him think Calvin is teaching fatalism and determinism. But he isn’t.

For Calvin, predestination was more a doctrine of comfort than a doctrine of eternal judgment. He knew that if you believe in a sovereign God, then your faith doesn’t have to be ruled by doubt and fear. “You don’t fret,” says John Hesselink, a professor at Hope College in Michigan. “You don’t worry yourself to death because you know, you are certain, that you are in God’s hands.”

Moreover, Calvin argued that predestination is based on the foreknowledge of God. In Calvin’s thought, there’s no sense whatsoever / that our actions, decisions and choices / are foreordained and pre-determined by God. We are not robots.

We can not blame our bad decisions on God. God didn’t make you do it. C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, says of these things, “There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

God offers us grace and invites us to receive what he in his mercy has taken the initiative to proffer. In life and in death, we belong to God. We don’t have to be ruled by doubt or fear, or constantly worry that we aren’t doing enough good deeds to earn a spot in heaven. Our sovereign God is in control and is offering us the gift of grace. That’s a promise we can hold on to, whether we believe in strict predestination or not.

In the end, Calvin believed it was all about God — not about him. He chose to be buried in an unmarked grave so people wouldn’t be tempted to make pilgrimages to pay him homage. He wanted our focus to be on the Lord who is God over all and on the grace that is truly sufficient for us. He tried to point us to J.C., Jesus Christ — not to J.C., John Calvin.

It’s not about you. It’s not about us. It’s not about Calvin.
It’s all about God. That’s right. It’s all about God.

And that’s good news for all of us. Let us conclude by singing Amazing Grace.
 
Rev. Rosemary Stelz


 
 
 
 
 
  
Sources:

Cochrane, Arthur. The Church’s Confessions Under Hitler. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962.

“John Calvin leads Genevan reform.” Glimpses of Christian History, March 2007. christianhistorytimeline.com.

Meehan, Chris. “John Calvin we hardly knew ye.” Banner, January 2009. www.thebanner.org.

Warren, Rick. The Purpose Driven Life. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.