USA > Tennessee > Davidson County > Nashville > The First Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee : the addresses delivered in connection with the observance of the one hundredth anniversary, November 8-15, l9l4 > Part 12
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When, therefore, I set myself to the task of outlining the place of Calvinism in history, the first and most important thing is to define as clearly as possible what we understand by Calvinism.
Let me start out by saying that the system which bears the name of Calvin is wrongly so called. Of all men Calvin would have been the last one to sanction the use of his name for such a purpose, his very principles would have forbidden it. What we call Calvinism is a thing older than Calvin, and it survived him. It is not the narrow concept of an almost paralyzing view of the great doctrine of elec- tion, of which its historic enemies have drawn such lurid
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and repulsive caricatures. Whoever wants to know Cal- vinism as it is should study the exhaustive treatment of the subject in the incomparable Stone lectures, delivered at Princeton in 1898, by the world-renowned Calvinistic leader, Dr. A. Kuyper, of The Netherlands. Historically consid- ered, Calvinism bears a threefold aspect; you may consider it in its theological, its ecclesiological and its political bear- ings.
Says Dr. Robert Fruin, the celebrated liberal Dutch his- torian, not a Calvinist nor its apologete by any manner of means: "Calvinism came to The Netherlands with its own well-defined system of theology, with its own plan of demo- cratic church-order, permeated by a strong ethical sense and zealous as much for the moral as for the religious reformation of humanity" (Tien Jaren uit den 80 jarigen Oorlog 151). And Bakhuizen Van den Brink, a still more declared liberal, was compelled to say, "Calvinism was the highest development in the religious and political principles of the sixteenth century" (Het huwelyk van Willem van Oranje met Anna van Saxon, 123).
Calvinism is what the Germans call a "Weltanschauung," a broad philosophical view of the world. As such it differ- entiates itself from the Pagan, the Mahommedan, the Rom- ish and the modernistic views of the world. It sharply de- fines the believer's relation to God, to his fellowmen and to the world. It demands immediate contact with God, ex- cluding all priestly and ecclesiastical mediation. It regards all men as equal before God and before the law. It sees the curse of sin in this world stemmed by grace, it honors the life of the world in its substantiality and seeks the de- velopment of all the wealth of culture and intellect and power, placed in this world by God.
It will but glance in passing at the theological and eccle- siological aspects of Calvinism, since my main aim is to show you what Calvinism historically has meant to mankind.
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Theologically considered Calvinism did not originate and therefore could not have died with Calvin. The main outlines of the system are as old as the life of the church. Their norm is found in the teachings of Christ; Paul taught them and after him Augustinus and the venerable Bede, Alcuin and Anselm. St. Bernard and Thomas Aquinas, Bradwardine and Wickliffe and Huss, Wessel and Savona- rola. Calvinism, so-called, therefore stands for an organic process in the history of theology.
As such it is capable of extension and modification, its main principles only remaining absolutely fixed. But the very name unfortunately became a synonym for oppression and narrowmindedness through the shortsightedness of men. To the rationalistic mind of the Illumination, which began in Germany a century ago, the theology of Geneva seemed puerile and hopelessly passe. The French Revolu- tion, with its shameless motto-Ni Dieu ni maitre, neither God nor master-formed its veritable moral antithesis. The slavish imitation of the life of Geneva by the followers of Calvin, who stood nearest to him in point of time, caused his name to be execrated. The blue laws of Geneva, abso- lutely needed there to sear out the immoralities of the liber- tines, which cried to high heaven, were adopted in coun- tries and environments where they were wholly needless and thus a straight jacket was put on a perfectly sane pa- tient and the process was justly resented. But a reaction has come. Calvin is studied in Germany as he has never been studied before and the literature on the subject, ex- panding year by year, has grown beyond the possibility of keeping up with it. Calvin is dead, his very grave is un- known and unmarked, but Calvinism lives and will live till the end of time.
Calvin cannot be conceived without Luther, Luther can be conceived without Calvin. The latter built on the massive foundation laid by the former. But of all the re-
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formers Calvin alone had the power of intellect to reach the logical ultimates of the reformed system. Luther for- mulated two principles, the formal-the authority of the holy scriptures and the material-justification by faith. Calvin adopted only the first, he neither needed nor wanted a secondary principle. Do not for a moment imagine that the doctrine of election fills that place in his system. He adopted Luther's major principle and that alone. Dr. Wil- liston Walker, of Yale, has seen and acknowledged this in his splendid biography of the reformer. The great doc- trines of salvation are perfectly coordinated in Calvin's In- stitutes, which tower like a mountain in a plain above all the reformatory writings of the sixteenth century. Kamp- schulte, a Roman Catholic biographer of Calvin, calls him the "Aristotle," and Martin, a liberal French historian, the "Thomas Aquinas" of the Reformation. And these titles are deserved. Standing on the basis of the absolute au- thority of the scriptures, Calvin formulated the compre- hensive principle of the Glory of God, as the mainspring of all existence. All his theology centers in this one idea, "Out of Him and through Him and unto Him are all things." Man in God's hands is like clay in the hands of the potter, and he must glorify God whether in life or in death, in time or in eternity. All this world, with its end- less manifestations of power and glory, exists to that end alone. All human institutions and relationships, all intel- lectual achievements, all science, all art, all civil power are to that end. God. God sovereign over all, is the center and circumference of all existence. Wonderfully bold and strangely inspiring idea !
In his ecclesiology Calvin apprehended the church as the totality of all believers, conceived as visible and in- visible. the mother of us all, outside of which there is no salvation. He conceived of the sacraments as signs and seals of divine grace. Leaning more toward Luther than
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toward Zwingli in his doctrine of the supper, he saw in it far more than a mere memorial of the death of Christ; to him it meant an actual and soul-nourishing communion with the living Christ.
The members of the church formed, in his view, a uni- versal priesthood, revealing itself in the representative office of the eldership, and thus he laid the foundations for that great body of believers, which, under various names and in various lands, bear the common earmark of Presbyterianism. Democracy is written large both over his, ecclesiastical and civil concept. There is only one sov- ereign, Almighty God, and before Him all the nations, kings and subjects, great and small, rich and poor, cultured and uncultured, are but as dust in the balances. All power that is is God's and the nations are as nothing before Him.
Can you conceive of such a system rightly apprehended as anything less than a "Weltanschauung," a view of the world, and do you wonder that it has modified the whole course of human history since its entrance on the stage?
Let us look at this phase of it a bit more closely. What place has Calvinism occupied and does it occupy in human history ?
As we all know, there are two main currents in the his- tory of the Reformation-the Lutheran and the Calvinistic. The first lies nearer the common source and might therefore logically be expected to mark the main channel. And yet, when we study the history of Protestantism, we find the opposite to be the case. Luther was a German, never more nor less, and the Reformation, founded by him, remained for all time characteristically Teutonic. It never attained to cosmopolitanism. In the Lutheran branch of the Reform- ation we find therefore only the German and Scandinavian groups of nations.
Calvinism, starting at Geneva, first of all absorbed the Zwinglian Reformation and conquered, or at least strongly
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invaded, successively France, The Netherlands, Bohemia, Moravia, the Palatinate, England, Scotland, Ireland and the new world. If it be said that England ecclesiastically presents almost an antithetical form of church life, hier- archial instead of presbyterial, let us not forget that the thirty-nine articles are Calvinistic in theology and that the Puritan and Independent movements clearly indicate the sway of Geneva in the national history.
And even pure Lutheranism lost itself in the mightier current when in 1817, under Frederick William III, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Reformation, the Re- formed and Lutheran churches of Germany melted together in the "United Reformed Church of Germany."
What, then, was the inherent weakness of Lutheranism which gave to Calvinism this overshadowing importance ?
The answer may be given in a word. Luther stopped at a halfway house. He never got entirely away from Rome; he never reached the logical ultimate of his own position. His doctrine of salvation sharply differentiated him from Rome, but his views of the church, of her wor- ship, of her clergy, of her sacraments, were but a day's journey removed from Rome. Above all his views of the relation between church and state were a deadly menace to the future of his enterprise. Princes and governments were given a status in the affairs of the Lutheran Church wholly unwarranted by Luther's own formal principle-the abso- lute authority of the holy scriptures. The motto. "cuius regio illius religio," laid the foundation for a Caesaropapay, which doomed the Lutheran Reformation to ultimate fail- ure. This attitude to the state, or rather this interference of the state in the affairs of the church, made the wide spread of Lutheranism impossible in a current of democ- racy, which since the days of the Reformation ever grew in strength.
And here is the very essence of the place which Cal-
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vinism occupies in history. We commit a mistake when we call Calvin's political ideal a theocracy. In Calvin's system the state and the church were strictly coordinated, God being sovereign in both spheres. The state had the law, the church the gospel and prayer. All church members, ministry and laity alike, were subject to the civil power and its law. But inversely all magistrates, as believers, were subject to the church and her discipline. Both spheres were sovereign in their own domain. It is therefore wrong to speak of the government of Geneva as a theocracy. Per- sonally Calvin was inclined to a self-perpetuating aristo- cratic oligarchy. But he builded better than he knew. His principles reached farther than his practice, and it was his system which laid the foundation of and became the guar- antee for civil liberty and an ever-expanding democracy.
It was he who created individualism in national affairs, who laid the foundation for a new order of things, in which each citizen was to have a part. The principle of individual- ism once asserted, the rights of the people once recognized and the great structure we call popular sovereignty must arise. Rome stood for church absolutism, Luther for State absolutism, Zwingli for Erastianism or paternalism, Calvin and he alone for sovereignty in church and state alike, bound only by the will of God and therefore for a free church in a free state.
Thus Calvinism became the pioneer for political Mod- ernism and his influence on the development of modern his- tory and modern man can never be overestimated. And it was not the political aspect of Calvinism, not the civic principle of human individuality or of the right of man over against man, which wrought the miracle and achieved the great historical success which it did achieve; but it was the potency of the religious principle underlying it which did it all.
A cursory glance will convince the most skeptical or
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REV. THOMAS A. HOYT, D.D .. Pastor 1873-1883.
the most hostile of the rejuvenating influence which Cal- vinism has exerted over the nations which fell under its sway. Says Dr. Kuyper, in his Stone lectures: "This change in the history of the world could not have been brought about except by implanting a new principle in the human heart and by opening up a new world of thought for the human spirit." And again: "From Western Europe the mighty impulse proceeded which caused science and art to flourish, which opened new channels for commerce and industry, which illumined family and civic life, which elevated the burgher class to a position of honor, which equalized the rights of employer and employee, which caused philanthropy to bloom and which above all, by its puritani- cal seriousness, has elevated the moral life of humanity and purified and ennobled it."
The countries which came under Calvin's influence were the strongest in the world. Where it was absent, govern- ments are aristocratic, autocratic, tyrannical even. Where it was present, constitutional government and the democracy flourish. Calvin's touch created men and women of steel and marble, men and women of fixed purpose, exalted prin- ciples and large hopes, liberty-loving men and women, fear- ing God and Him alone and dreading no man in whose nos- trils is the breath of life.
Calvinism recognized that since sin is in the world we need magistrates to curb and control it, as the bearers of divine sovereignty, but also that, by virtue of our individual rights, we must continually watch against the menace of state power. Ages ahead of his time, Calvin did not hesi- tate to announce the idea of popularly elected magistrates as "by far the more desirable liberty." The political con- fession of Calvinism is therefore thus formulated by Dr. Kuyper: "I. God. and He alone, possesses sovereign rights over the nations, because He created them, sustains them by His Almighty power and rules them by his ordinances. 2. In the realm of political life sin has broken down the
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direct divine government, and therefore, as a mechanical substitute, human governments and their authority have arisen. 3. Whatever may be the form of this government one man never possesses power over another man except by an authority which has been conferred on him by the majesty of God." (Stone Lectures, III.)
Do we wonder that the liberty-loving races of Western Europe received these new doctrines as the prophecy of hope for a new future?
Calvinism came to them like the dawning of a new day. It subverted all the old ideas of life, it broke the shackles of the ages, it swept away traditions, which had kept the minds of men in a thrall of unbreakable mental and spiritual dominion, it glorified God and lifted man, common man, to an undreamed-of position of independence; it quenched the age-long thirst for individual liberty and it pointed prophet- ically to a future where a new free man would stand in a new free world, bathed in the light of the sovereign glory of God.
Do I exaggerate or overstate my case?
Let us see how the problem has worked out, what Cal- vinism actually has done for the nations which fell under its sway.
Dr. Fruin, quoted above, justly reminds us that in Switzerland, Holland, Scotland, England and wherever Protestantism had to grasp the sword, it was Calvinism, and it alone, which was always victorious.
Before we glance at the actual achievements of Calvinism in history, let Dr. Kuyper tell us what would have happened had Calvinism not arisen: "First of all Spain would have conquered the lowlands, the Stuarts would have remained masters in Great Britain, in Switzerland a liberalizing type of Zwinglian reform would have prevailed, and the begin- nings of American life would have been wholly different. The balance of power in Europe in the sixteenth and seven-
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teenth centuries would have been differently adjusted and Protestantism would have been unable to maintain itself. Nothing could have thwarted the Romish conservative powers of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons and the Stuarts, and the popular liberties of Western Europe and America would have been inconceivable. History would have been written differently and with darker ink." (Stone Lectures, I.)
I will even go further than Dr. Kuyper and affirm, with- out danger of contradiction, that Protestantism would have shared the fate of the pre-reformatory movements of Wick- liffe, Huss, Savonarola and Wessel. For it was Calvinism which rescued the decaying and instable type of the Lutheran Reformation from extinction and, infusing new life and new courage in it, recreated it and made it unconquerable.
Look for a moment at the Calvinistic current as it sweeps northward from its humble source in the little bor- der city of Geneva.
The redwood tree is the very monarch of the forests and yet its seed is infinitessimally small. Geneva was the least among the centers of the Reformation, and yet from it sprung a force which was destined to encircle the world and to renovate humanity.
In the days of the Reformation three forces were fight- ing for the mastery in France: I. Humanism, extremely lib- eral in its views, led by men like Rabelais and Montaigne. 2. Rome, strongly influenced by Jesuitism and controlling the seats of power. 3. Calvinism, immensely popular among the masses and a portion of the nobility, but finally crushed by the government, dreaded on account of the changes and sacrifices it demanded.
The main principles of Calvinism, in its theological sense, had been foreshadowed by James Le Fever at Paris long before the German Reformation had begun its history. The story of the Huguenot struggle is one of endless suf-
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fering. No country in Europe was so drenched by martyr blood as was France, nowhere was the struggle between Rome and Protestantism fiercer or more protracted. It lasted the better part of a century. And yet the Huguenot cause survived it all. Neither the eight religious wars nor the bloody massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572, suc- ceeded in destroying it. Like a phoenix it ever rose trium- phant from its ashes. With the promulgation of the edict of Nantes by Henry IV, in 1558, its future seemed guar- anteed. But its revocation, a century later, in 1685, by Louis XIV, seemed to mark its utter destruction as a national force. What that date stands for let another date, again a century later, witness.
By the revocation of the edict of Nantes, France evis- cerated herself; she committed political suicide. The Cal- vinistic Huguenot buffer between the proletariat and the throne, the nobility and the clergy was removed, and in the inevitable clash between the two, in the cataclysm of the revolution, both the throne of the Bourbons and the church, which had been made drunk with the blood of Protestant- ism, went down to one common doom. And yet the under- lying principles of this horrible catastrophe were a carica- ture of one of the fundamental demands of Calvinism-the equality and brotherhood of man. The French revolution was but a grotesque reflex of the Huguenot past.
Where, pray, did Montesquieu, one of the pioneers of the revolution, get his idea of a threefold form of govern- ment, the executive. the legislative and the judicial depart- ments, expressed about 1750, in his great work, "The Spirit of the Law," except from the organization of the Huguenot Church? French Calvinism. as organized, if we may be- lieve Professor Baird, in his "Rise of the Huguenots," looked to nothing short of a representative government, protected by suitable guarantees and to complete religious liberty. (Vol. I, 49.)
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And again he says in his "Revocation of the Edict of Nantes": "The jealousy with which the crown viewed the political assemblies of the Protestants was not altogether unreasonable, for in truth those periodical gatherings of the representatives of the Reformed communities revealed very clearly the growth of the tendencies, which in more recent times have given birth to free institutions, whether in the form of republican government or of constitutional mon- archy." (Vol. I, 10, 12.)
I have quoted Professor Baird to substantiate my views expressed above. It is evident that republican France today is building on the shattered foundations laid by the great statesman of Geneva, that the democracy of modern France roots itself in the graves of the Huguenots, that wavering and vaccillating as it may be, stunted and dwarfed in its growth as it unquestionably is, the democracy of France was robbed of what it might have been by the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
Calvinism reached The Netherlands, after two futile waves of reform had passed over the country and re- ceded, viz: the Lutheran and Anabaptist types of the Reformation. The first exalted man's position in the church till he became its overlord, the second secluded itself from the world and revived the ancient ascetic view of life. Cal- vinism did neither ; it did not overvalue man nor did it un- dervalue the world. It captivated the popular regard, it imbedded itself in the Dutch life and it fulfilled its every implied promise in the lowlands, for there it created a free church in a free State. Here the democratic spirit of Cal- vinism had an untrammeled opportunity. Here it created the first true republic in modern history, since the Swiss were an Amphyctionic confederacy, entirely distinct from a true republic.
And what marvels this Calvinism has wrought in these lowlands! It enabled a weak commercial people, wholly
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unfit for war, to burst fully armed into the arena of political life and to humble the Spanish empire, the greatest of con- temporaneous powers, after a struggle so protracted that the time element of it seemed to be lost. In The Netherlands it proved what it might do under favorable conditions, for the full tide of its development there bore on its crest the golden age of Dutch political power, the greatest triumphs of Dutch art and science and literature. True are unques- tionably the words of Froude in his "Julius Caesar": "Cal- vinism, while it was believed, produced characters grander and nobler than any which republican Rome produced, but when doubt had once entered the spell of Cal- vinism was broken." The lowlands lost their virgin grip on Calvinism, rationalism replaced it, the republic went under and gave place to the "Little Holland" of modern times.
And was it different in Great Britain?
Poole, of Balliol College, Oxford, had a clear vision when he wrote, in his "Huguenots of the Dispersion" (page I): "But men were no sooner reconciling themselves to the altered conditions (referring to the changes wrought by the Lutheran Reformation) than there arose in an ob- scure republic, just freed from its bishop's tyranny, another system, taking its color from the polity of its birthplace, destined in time to transform the national life in Holland, England and Scotland, and to organize in France an anti- monarchial party, only to be quelled by a measure involv- ing the temporary ruin of the country. The Presbyterian theory could not flourish in the face of the absolute views of the sovereigns of the time. Everywhere it avowed or encouraged a frank spirit of resistance, the diffusion of the system being uniformly accompanied by a strenuous ten- dency towards public freedom." Poole evidently appre- ciated the political creed of Calvinism. Yes, it is true, wherever it goes the democracy follows: James I of England understood it when, on his ascension of the throne,
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he said that the terms king and presbytery were about as well agreed as God and the devil, or words to that effect. Between the fundamental Calvinistic principle of human individualism and royal tyranny a gulf impassable is fixed. Elizabeth had seen it before James, and, recognizing the danger, had waged a desperate war against Puritanism.
It was the Calvinistic spirit of independentism which laid the axe to the tree of the absolutism of the Stuart throne. In Scotland, under the leadership of John Knox, the typical Calvinist and the founder of Presbyterianism in the more restricted sense, it had overwhelmed the existing order of things, it had succeeded in linking itself to the clan spirit of the country, it had fused absolutely hetero- geneous elements into a deeper and spiritual homogeneity, and it had regenerated the people, as it had done in Holland. The indomitable spirit of John Knox kept marching at the head of the clans, as it does today, although his dust has ages ago mingled with its kindred dust. Calvinism spoke in the riot in St. Giles against the usurpation of an oppress- ing ritualism; it spoke in the Melvillian movement, which saved Scotch Presbyterianism from itself; it spoke in the bitter persecutions under Claverhouse, a name thrice cursed in the annals of Scotland; it signed the solemn league and covenant as it bound the souls of those "dour" Presbyte- rians together with bonds stronger than iron and steel. It made the sturdy, independent Scotchmen what they have been ever since, in the history of the world.
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