Approaching Calvin Today in “The Spirit of the Explorer”

A century ago at Union Seminary where I teach in Manhattan a public celebration was held in honor of the four hundredth anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. The speaker on that occasion in 1909, a distinguished theologian of the day, began his address by apologizing for the difficulty of saying anything original or new about Calvin. “There are,” he remarked, “certain great thinkers whose systems it is possible to approach in the spirit of the explorer, conscious as one turns each page of the chance of some new discovery; but with Calvin it is not so.”1 I am happy to have this opportunity to be with you today because I have found this judgment not to be true. For some years it has been my privilege to offer a seminar on Calvin’s theology for graduate students. Most, but not all, are Presbyterians or members of the Reformed Church in America, and they enroll in the course not because they especially want to, but because they are trying to meet ordination requirements. They often begin the course with a sense of apprehension, sometimes even dread, because of the negative associations that have come to surround the mention of Calvin. A typical example in my files is an editorial in The New York Times that once described the faltering prospects of a political candidate by saying that he sounded “buttoned-up, moral, serious to the point of sour,” in short, “like the model Calvinist” (NYT, 10/9/84). One very bright and committed student a couple years ago may serve as an illustration of what I mean by beginning the study of Calvin with a sense of apprehension. Ian and his wife had just had their first child a few months before and were overjoyed at this birth of a beautiful little boy. When he agreed to give one of the first reports on the reading early in the course he did a power point presentation in which he showed the class pictures of this endearing child. And then flashing beneath them on the screen lines from Calvin that speak of “the whole human race delivered to the curse and degenerated, bound over to miser-