The Legacy of John Calvin and the Renewal of Christian Worship
Henderson Lectures, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary May 1, 2009
John D. Witvliet, Director, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Professor of Worship, Theology, and Music, Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary Grand Rapids, Michigan Lecture 3: Lift Up Your Hearts: Theological Imagination and Calvin’s Legacy for Contemporary Christians
This is an edited transcript of the audio recording.
It’s been very hard for me to save the theology till 4:30 in the afternoon. But finally we get to it, and I’m excited. This, of course, is such a dominant part of the appreciation of Calvin over the years and to this day. To this day, two-thirds of the nearly 100 books and articles over each of the last two or three years that have been published on Calvin focus on Calvin’s theology. My decision to wait till this afternoon though was to make sure that we could see it in a larger context that understood Calvin as a pastor in his work with people in a time of profound change. And it’s in that context that I think Calvin’s thought seems in a way even more luminous, and in a few places deeply challenging, and in a few places troubling too, but it allows us to explore it in a different context. I should say that in responding to some wonderful questions during break, that I want to be clear that in highlighting some dimensions of Calvin’s work and life that I
think are particularly noteworthy,
I also want to acknowledge that there are some
significant difficulties with aspects of Genevan practice. There were times when the consistory that we talked about this morning could become scrupulous in a way that was not helpful, that that scrupulosity over the generations fed a kind of worksrighteousness in piety that did not square with a theology of grace and in some ways undermined the theology that was there. In the discussion we had of Calvin and music, I did not linger long over Calvin’s disregard of instrumental music and of harmony in the context of church singing. An area, frankly, where I think, if I may, that he’s just plain wrong, and where I find his theological attention to certain scriptural themes to not match well with his approaches to other parts of scripture. Essentially one of his main arguments was, we see instruments in the Old Testament, we do not see them in the New, we do not have warrant for using instruments—despite, on so many other matters, a deep love for the Old Testament. There seems to be an incongruity there. I was going to have us sing on page 25 in your packet, there is the musical setting of Psalm 150, and you do feel the irony a little bit of what it must have been like in Calvin’s Geneva to sing Psalm 150, “Praise God with the trumpet blast, crash your cymbals, laugh, with dance; praise with flute with drums and strings,” and in your mind to have to add the words, “in the homes but not in church.” So just a little irony that we can see from our perspective. But now we turn attention to the theological framework to which all of this is set. Calvin’s own words, “It is an instance of the inestimable grace of God that so far as the infirmity of our flesh will permit, we are lifted up even to God by the exercises of religion. What is the design of the preaching of the word, the sacraments, the holy assemblies, and the whole external government of the church but that we may be united to God.” This is such a deeply charged vision of God’s activity drawing us ever closer, creating the opportunity to encounter nothing less than the creator of the universe and our redeemer, all through the work of the Holy Spirit. Turn with me next to page 9 in your handout. And here is some remarkable language that describes this kind of charged theological vision. We find there on the right-hand side of page 9, a treatise published midway through Calvin’s ministry called, “The Summary of Doctrine Concerning the Ministry of Word and Sacrament.” “The end
of the whole Gospel ministry is that God, the fountain of all felicity,” the generous fountain of every good thing, “communicates Christ to us who are disunited by sin and hence ruined, that we may from him enjoy eternal life. That in a word, all heavenly treasures be so applied to us that they be no less ours than Christ’s himself.” Fountain, felicity, enjoyment.
“And we believe that the communication is mysterious and
incomprehensible to human reason and spiritual, since it is effected by the Holy Spirit, to whom since he is the virtue of the living God proceeding from the Father and the Son, we ascribe omnipotence by which he joins us to Christ our head.
And not in an
imaginary way, but most powerfully and truly so that we become flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone.” This is marriage imagery. “And from his vivifying flesh, he transfuses eternal life to us.” Jesus Christ, in this present day, in heaven, Jesus Christ’s vivifying flesh. I sometimes give my students extra credit if they use that word in a paper. It’s just such a… it’s good, by the way, to wake up in the morning and you’re a little depressed just say that about 3 times: “vivifying.” “That we believe the Holy Spirit to affect this union rests on a certain ground, namely this. Whatever the Father or the Son does to bring the faithful to salvation, Holy Scripture testifies that each operates through the Holy Spirit and that Christ does not otherwise dwell in us through his spirit nor in any other way communicates himself to us than through the same Spirit.” And number 4, “To affect this union, the Holy Spirit uses a double instrument, the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments.” Jesus Christ’s vivifying flesh, our profound and not imaginary union with Christ, made possible by the work of the Holy Spirit and enacted through these very tangible sensory experiences.
The sound of the preacher’s voice, the reading of
scripture, the water and the bread and the wine. These very tangible things used by God’s Spirit to unify us with Christ so that we may experience this vivification. But it’s important to realize that this was not just the document neatly summarized in this treatise, which is expansively treated in the multiple editions of Calvin’s Institutes, in a variety of theological treatises, in commentaries on nearly every part of Scripture.
Calvin’s writings on my bookshelves are very long and perhaps
there’s no theme as prominent that weaves through them than Calvin’s discussion especially of the sacraments, in part because he was so attentive to the different points
of view offered in his time by not only the Roman Catholic but also the Lutheran and Anabaptist traditions, and others with whom he was in conversation. But I want to add to this that Calvin also preached this on a fairly regular basis.
Reading Calvin’s
sermons is a crucial piece to those who really want to understand how life went in Geneva.
So the theology that worked itself out in these beautiful treatises and in
Calvin’s Institutes, was in fact preached on a regular basis. So the sermon that follows on page 10, and this is perhaps a third of it, this sermon went on for a full hour, a marvelous sermon called “The True Worship of God” on 2 Samuel 6, includes in it if you turn to page 11, a remarkable paragraph. First full paragraph on the left-hand side of page 11:
“Thus we must note that when God
declares himself to us, we must not cling to any earthly thing.” Here Calvin has his sights on Roman Catholic theology, the bread and cup in their transubstantiation into to the body and blood of Christ—an earthly thing. Calvin says, “Do not set your senses there, but elevate our senses above the world.” This is a summary of Calvin’s liturgical piety. “Lift up your hearts to the Lord.” The phrase that is still in many Lord’s Supper liturgies, the sursum corda, lift up your hearts. In many ways, it’s commentary on Colossians 3:1, “Set your minds on things above.” Going on. “And lift up ourselves by faith to his eternal glory. In sum, God comes down to us so that we might go up to God.” This descent and ascent. God’s accommodation to our human capacity and then by the power of the Spirit, lifting us up to commune with Christ.
“That is why the
sacraments are compared to the steps of a ladder. For as I have said, if we want to go up there, alas, we do not have wings. We are so small that we cannot make it. God, therefore, must come down to seek us. When he has come down, it is not to make us dull-witted. It is not to make us imagine that he is like us. Rather, it is so that we might go up little by little by degrees as we climb up a ladder one rung at a time. The sacraments are like this.” And then he adds, the ark was like a sacrament. Calvin actually thought that several Old Testament moments, the ark, the rainbow for Noah, were like sacraments in principle. The people had to be moved to seek God in a very tangible manner. God comes down, so that we might be raised. Sacraments as steps of a ladder.
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You could read this in a way that is very otherworldly, rather
Platonic. True reality exists above us. The world is merely a pale imitation and when we take this neo-Platonic journey up the steps of a ladder, it’s as if we begin to contemplate true reality in a mystical kind of way. We set aside the things of the earth. And a lot of people have actually treated Calvin that way, in a way that I think is actually quite unfair. Because when Calvin thought of heaven, when you take the steps of the ladder up to heaven, Calvin insisted that at the center of heaven was nothing less than Jesus Christ in his ascended human body with this vivifying flesh. This is not otherworldly Platonism at all. This is quite a different vision altogether. We could still pause and have a whale of a debate right at this point, and I will move on to other things, but to highlight it as one point of tension in interpretations of Calvin, but a rather remarkable image.
The
sacraments compared with the steps of a ladder. And then if you’ll turn ahead to page 16. We’ve already looked at Calvin’s order of service, but this morning I did not linger over the portion of the liturgy having to do with the Lord’s Supper. Actually, let’s back up to 14 and pick it up there a little bit. “The Manner of Celebrating the Lord’s Supper.” Several interesting things about this. He begins: “It is proper to observe that on the Sunday prior the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the following admonitions are made to the people. First, that each person prepare and dispose himself to receive it worthily and with reverence. Second, that children may not be brought forward unless they have been instructed and made profession of faith.”
Incidentally, Calvin thought that profession of faith would be
appropriate at about age 10. Later Reformed Presbyterian Christians often let that age move up to about age 18, not always. Practices vary, but for Calvin about age 10. “And third, that if strangers are there who may still be untaught and ignorant, they proceed to present themselves for private instruction.” So this practice of preparation and strong practice of fencing the table. You see on page 15, in Strasbourg at least, after the accustomed prayers have been offered, the congregation confesses the faith and it does so by singing the Apostle’s Creed. In Geneva, the Apostle’s Creed is spoken. So by now we have come to realize that the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, those
three things everyone was asked to memorize, are all liturgical actions, every one of them. What follows is a time of instruction and a set of prayers. A very in-your-face kind of fencing of the table statement on 15 that I do not recommend for use in the church today. Here it goes, you see on the right hand of page 15: “We have heard how our Lord observed His Supper with his disciples, from which we learn that strangers and those who do not belong to the company of his faith must not be admitted. Therefore, following that precept in the name of and by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, I excommunicate all idolators, blasphemers, despisers of God, heretics, those who create private sects, perjurers, all who rebel against father, mother or superior, all who promote sedition or mutiny, brutal and disorderly persons, adulterers, lewd and lustful men, thieves, ravishers, greedy and grasping people, drunkards, gluttons, and all those who lead a scandalous and dissolute life.” There are sources of some of the pictures of Calvin that persist there as a rather sour person, and it’s language like this that enforces that perception. It’s important to point out that a statement like this would not have been unique to Calvin and that a lot of 16th Century rhetoric makes that sentence look rather tame, but nevertheless, it is there and it is part of honesty for us to see the very strong language that would have been there. But then, with that as the backdrop, some of the more luminous language stands out in somewhat greater contrast or greater relief. Turning to page 16. Third line from the top, lines that I think have really fueled a great deal of the writing on Calvin’s theology on the sacraments in the last twenty years.
“Know therefore that this
sacrament is a medicine for poor sick souls, and that the only worthiness which our Lord requires of us is to know ourselves sufficiently to deplore our sins and to find all our pleasure, joy, and satisfaction in him alone.” Pastorally, a big part of me wants that read first and to frame any statement about excommunication. Even then, that’s a long conversation we need to have about how to get that all connected in just the right way. “Above all,” going on, “therefore, let us believe those promises which Jesus Christ, who is the unfailing truth, has spoken with his lips.” On down a couple lines. “Though we see but bread and wine, we must not doubt that he accomplishes spiritually in our souls all that he shows us outwardly by these visible signs, namely that he is the bread of heaven to feed and nourish us to eternal life.” And here Calvin draws on the
powerful imagery of John chapter 6: Jesus Christ, the bread of life. The Lord’s Supper then is not merely a time for us to remember Christ’s past deeds. It is a time to be fed and nourished spiritually in the present moment. Nourishment is one of the primary meanings, metaphors of what is enacted. “So let us never be unmindful of the infinite goodness of our Savior, who spreads out all his riches and blessings on this table.” And then skipping down a few lines. “Let us present ourselves to him with,” here it is again, “ardent zeal that he may make us capable of receiving it.” But notice that sentence. We present ourselves with ardent zeal, but it is God’s action which makes us capable of receiving it. The Holy Spirit is the one who allows us to receive it. “To do so, let us,” sursum corda, “lift our spirits and hearts on high where Jesus Christ is in the glory of his Father”—ascension: the ascent to Jesus—“whence we expect him in our redemption.
And let us not be fascinated by these earthly and
corruptible elements which we see with our eyes and touch with our hands, seeking him there as though he were enclosed in the bread and wine, then only shall our souls be disposed to be nourished,” and here’s the word again, “vivified by his substance when they are lifted up above all earthly things, attaining even to heaven and entering the kingdom of God where he dwells. Therefore let us be content to have the bread and wine as signs and witnesses seeking the truth spiritually where the word of God promises we shall find it.” To get this theological vision before us, then, we need at least three main ingredients.
We need, first of all, and the order is important, first of all, a clear
perception of the trinitarian activity of God. The public assembly for worship is an arena for divine activity. God the Father is receiving our worship. Jesus Christ is mediating this worship. The Holy Spirit is empowering our worship and enabling us to become recipients of the grace of the table and to receive the grace that is preached. So, the Father is active, the Son is active, and the Spirit is active. And already you can feel the huge contrast between that and the theological vision that, I am afraid to say, thousands of worshipers have. The theological imagination so many of our congregations live with is the idea that we are active and that God is passive. That we sing, and we pray, and God receives. And sometimes, you even find a certain music leader or pastor who will say or come very dangerously close to saying, if you just sing a little louder, if you just
pray a little harder… If you just sing a little louder and pray a little harder, maybe God will like it, maybe God will bless you, which is a perfect theology of worship if you worship Baal. The contrast between that and a vision that says this: we come but we enter this arena where God is active, Father receiving, Christ mediating and nourishing, the Spirit uniting. All of this divine activity. Imagine yourself walking into church on Sunday and picturing a kind of beautiful glorious divine whirlwind in the middle of the sanctuary, a sanctifying breeze. That would be a closer picture to Calvin’s theological vision than the kind of passive view of the deity that so many of us live with. The second part of this, indispensible part of the picture is our deep engagement, and I want to say, contemplative engagement—and I would even go so far as to say if I define it carefully, a kind of mystical engagement. I hate to use that term because so often “mystical” implies a kind of ahistorical get-out-of-time sort of piety and I don’t mean that at all. But I do mean that we engage in this kind of profound perception of the grace of God that comes to us through the preaching of the word and the gift of bread and wine and the waters of baptism.
Here is some of Calvin’s language.
He’s
describing the people of worship in the Old Testament from his commentary on Psalm 9, one of my favorite texts from the Psalms Commentary. “It was not enough for the faithful in those days to depend on the word of God and to engage in those ceremonial services which he had required, unless aided by external symbols, they elevated their minds above these and yielded to God spiritual worship. God indeed gave real tokens of his presence in that visible sanctuary, but not for the purpose of binding the senses and thoughts of his people to earthy elements. He wished rather that these external symbols,” and here it is again, “should serve as ladders by which the faithful might ascend even to heaven.
The design of God from the commencement and the
appointment of the sacraments and all the outward exercise of religion was to consult the infirmity and weak capacity of his people, accordingly even at the present day, the true and proper use of them is to assist us in seeking God spiritually in his heavenly glory and not to occupy our minds with the things of this world, or to keep them fixed in the vanities of the flesh.” So this deep sense of contemplating heavenly reality and the kind of wonder that would attend to that language that comes through in so many of Calvin’s writings. In fact, Marilynne Robinson, the novelist, is a big fan of Calvin, she
edited one of the recent anthologies of Calvin’s work. She ends her preface in that anthology of Calvin’s works by describing those people who read Calvin, are inspired, who contemplate God, and she uses the phrase, “who are then filled with the Calvinist kind of wonder.” Now that would strike people as the strangest thing to say about Calvin based on their impressions and the myths about Calvin that are often out there. Calvin, a theologian of a kind of wonder. So the ingredients in this vision:
trinitarian action, our active deep profound
embodied contemplation, and third, it’s already been mentioned in the quote I just read, the indispensible role of tangible signs. A lot of Calvinists, frankly, don’t want to deal with this. It gets left out. But Calvin thought that the voice of the preacher, the bread, the cup, these tangible things, were living images by which God revealed himself to us. That the world itself was a living image which helped us to perceive God’s beauty. And these tangible signs are also indispensible, I would say, because in so much Protestant theology that followed, this piece was left off and the idea that we could have sort of an immediate communion with God apart from tangible signs, which is really kind of an otherworldly spirituality that has very little place for the material, even a tad bit Gnostic, really does not belong in the Calvinist way or approach. So now I’ve just stated all of these three main points: Trinitarian agency, the sursum corda on our part, and tangible signs. These are all indispensible. I’ve stated these in a kind of via positiva way, an assertion, a positive assertion way. But Calvin actually also got at the very same content via negativa, by describing antonyms to true worship.
And being a good Calvinist, he had a rather robust vocabulary for false
worship. He had four terms that he loved to preach on, the antonym to right and true worship. And by the way, that’s an interesting thing for us all to think about. If you describe a vision for worship, how would you describe its opposite? For him, false worship consisted of any one of four things. Disobedience, hypocrisy, superstition, and idolatry. Now there are days when I read those four terms and they all kind of sound like the same thing to me. It kind of blurs together. But Calvin actually had rather precise definitions for all four. In Calvin’s view, you could actually succeed at avoiding three of them, but still slip into the fourth. Disobedience consists of ignoring God’s commands for worship. Hypocrisy was the practice of separating the external action
from one’s internal dispositions, you might say. There was a disconnect between your external actions and your heart. Superstition was confusion about how those external actions and signs related to the being and work of God, the idea that our action could manipulate God’s action, for example. And idolatry was fixation on the wrong, I hesitate to say, object, but the wrong vision of God to whom we worship, which for Calvin could be what he called “grosser idolatry.” Worship of an idol, hence all the images had to go. But also there was a form of idolatry which consisted of our misconstrual of God, false ideas that creep into our minds about God. Calvin called our minds “little idol factories.” We are always remaking God into a conception of God that is either a little more sentimental or a little more triumphalistic than really is warranted. So Calvin communicates this positive vision in a positive way and in a negative way, and then as I’ve already alluded to, in the way I love to explore: through a host of metaphors. Calvin may not have liked a lot of visual arts in church but, my goodness, he was an artist when it came to using language. So here is a brief anthology of different metaphors that Calvin used to describe what happens spiritually in worship. You’ve already heard one, worship is like a ladder. He also said worship is like a fruit tree. Worship is also like a conversation, a dialogue between God and us. Worship was also like a mirror. In the practices of preaching the sacraments, it’s as if we’re able to perceive the glory of God mirrored before us. He called the Lord’s Supper a feast. In a very narrow and limited way, he referred to worship as a sacrifice, not the Mass as a sacrifice of propitiation, but all of worship in the sense of Hebrews, as a sacrifice of praise. He referred to worship as a school in which Christ the Master Teacher was teaching us. And he referred to worship as a testimony that we made before the world. Every one of those could be the subject of a full lecture. So the basic picture is here: trinitarian action, indispensible role of physical elements, and then our piety of contemplating God and raising ourselves up by the power of the Holy Spirit through which we commune with Christ. With that in mind, I’d like to dive into the work of a couple contemporary writers that I find particularly challenging, interesting on some of the sub- points of that vision. And this is a tough case, and actually we’re not going to have time for all of them. In my text up here, I probably have ten sections. We’re only going to have time for a couple here.
I can think for example, a recent work by Notre Dame theologian, Randall Zachman, two recent books on Calvin, where he attends particularly to this metaphor of living images or mirrors. All of creation and these sacramental signs as living images or mirrors of God’s beauty. Or I think of Todd Billings, a marvelous new book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift, where in light of a lot of 20th Century discussions about the nature of gift exchanges, Todd writes so compellingly about how Calvin brings together forensic images and adoption images.
Legal language, and family language for
conveying how the divine-human relationship is conceptualized. I won’t go into detail into those two right now, but I do want to pause over the work of an Anglican theologian, Douglas Farrow: work on the Ascension. Because so much of Calvin’s view, over against Lutherans in particular, is based on this vivid idea that Jesus Christ is located today right now in heaven in his ascended body bearing the marks of suffering in his hands, and that if we were to really let Jesus Christ’s ascended body in heaven define how we think of heaven, it would change our whole theological worldview. Doug Farrow essentially is saying, a lot of us take this matter of the Ascension and we try to pair it with a rather theological heretical idea of heaven that we get from Hollywood movies and all kinds of other places that depict heaven as a very otherworldly reality. The place we go when we die, or the place at the end of time that’s opposite of hell, or who knows what other popular conceptions there might be. And Farrow says, in effect, what if we were to really take seriously the ascended body of Jesus as it were not the exception of what we will find in heaven today but in fact the paradigmatic center of what we would find. Here are a couple passages that will help us get into this. Calvin, writing about the ascended body of Christ in a treatise later in his career. “The same body, which the Son of God once offered to the Father in sacrifice, he daily offers us in the supper as spiritual food.
The virtue of the Spirit being sufficient to break through all the
impediments and surmount any distance of place. Therefore, in the sacred supper, we acknowledge a miracle which surpasses both the limits of nature and the measure of our sense. The secret virtue of the spirit that makes things separated in space to be united with each other and accordingly enables life from the flesh of Christ to reach us from heaven.” Farrow takes this point and develops it some. Here’s just a little bit in
Farrow’s own words. “Calvin saw that neither Eutychian response”—now we’re evoking some patristic sources, in other words, where Jesus is omnipresent—“nor a Nestorian one”—which says Jesus is absent in one nature but present in another, the idea that Jesus’ human body is in heaven but his divinity is kind of everywhere. Calvin saw that neither of those “will do, since in either way, Christ’s humanity is neutralized and his role as our mediator put in jeopardy.” The idea that Jesus Christ in the present day ever lives to pray for us in heaven in his human ascended body is so set aside in either of those theological visions. Farrow goes on, “One of Calvin’s most impressive moves as he struggled to preserve the particularity of Jesus without sacrificing sacramental realism, was to reach out toward a relational Christocentric concept of space that would resolve the conflict. The ascended Lord is not everywhere, but he is by the power of the Spirit, everywhere accessible.” Now that sentence bears some thought: The ascended Lord is not everywhere—that’s Luther—but Jesus Christ is everywhere accessible. There is no place we can go—Psalm 139—in which the Holy Spirit cannot unite us to Christ. And then you start realizing, if you conceive of Jesus’ own presence today in that way, you have to have room for a pretty expansive pneumatology, a pretty significant view of the role of the Holy Spirit, because it is the Holy Spirit who creates this union with Christ, allows the sacraments and the preaching of the word to become for us the bread of life. It’s a vision, finally, that redefines how we think of heaven, and of Jesus, and of Jesus’ ongoing mediatorial role. Doug Farrow on the Ascension—it’s a remarkable piece of writing and work that’s been done and a number of recent theologians who’ve quoted Farrow, and a lot of dialogue around that theme. We could spend, again, a good portion of the rest of the time going into just that. I do want, in reviewing a couple of the other recent treatments of this, I do want to gratefully acknowledge Brian Gerrish’s work on Calvin and the Lord’s Supper in particular. It’s Gerrish, who probably more than any other person, has insisted that we see this view of Christ as nourishing us, this John 6 vision of Christ nourishing us as central in Calvin’s theological vision.
There’s a marvelous section of the Institutes
where Calvin writes, “When bread is given as a symbol of Christ’s body, we must at once grasp this comparison: as bread nourishes, sustains, and keeps the life of our body, so Christ’s body is the only food to invigorate and enliven our soul. And when we
see the wine set forth as a symbol of blood, we must reflect on the benefits which wine imparts to the body, and so realize that the same are spiritually imparted to Christ by his blood.” At which point, I always ask my students, now just what benefits do you think wine imparts to the body? And then they stumble for a minutes, and then I say, let’s see what Calvin says. “The benefits of wine to the body in the cup for us is that it nourishes us, it refreshes us, it strengthens us, and it gladdens us.” I don’t think that got quoted a lot in some of the descriptions of Calvin’s work, but it’s just right there in the Institutes. I’m not making that up. It’s been a remarkable work—I talked with some of you earlier in the day, drawing on this tradition—by the Torrances, Tom Torrance and James Torrance, and I know that their influence is frequently cited here by faculty members and others at Pittsburgh Seminary. It’s really remarkable to see the influence that the Torrances have had in a number of conversations. I was telling a group at lunch today: There are a group of contemporary musicians that meet in England. They produce a lot of kind of pop rock Christian contemporary music, the kind of music that’s been faltered for being theologically shallow, but a couple of years ago, one of the mentors of this group put them on to James Torrance’s little book, Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace. And it’s been a transforming experience for this group of musicians, so actually there is a small but emerging body of trinitarian contemporary Christian pop rock music that is working very hard on this vision of God’s trinitarian activity, the Spirit prompting, Christ perfecting, mediating, the Father receiving, and that being the primary activity of worship into which we are drawn, rather than worship being an activity that we create. One of the musicians described it as an overwhelming experience of theological conversion encountering that work, and it strikes me that in that moment, in that encounter between that musician and the Torrance’s work, mediating themes that are in Calvin way back to the early church and indeed back to Ephesians and Romans, that there is the kind of conversion of the theological imagination that ultimately seminaries are about, and ultimately such a life-giving contribution of this kind of theological work. Also, among contemporary work, I want to pause and notice the wonderful way in which Calvin’s theology, especially the points I’ve made, have created moments of ecumenical if not convergence, at least profound ecumenical understanding.
I still
remember the shock I experienced when working on my doctoral thesis, I pulled out the volume that the Torrances were heavily involved with describing the ReformedOrthodox theological discussions. Reformed-Eastern Orthodox theological discussions. One of the paragraphs comes out this way in that document: “The Reformed churches appreciate the theological foundations of Orthodox worship and share with the Orthodox the conviction that all earthly forms of worship in the church are a participation through the Spirit and the ongoing worship which the risen and enthroned”—ascended—“Christ, the Lamb of God, whose both offer and offering constitutes in his own high priestly selfpresentation before the Father, on behalf of all those whom he has redeemed and consecrated in union with himself.”
That was a fairly long sentence there.
They
believed that this sharing in the worship of the Father which Christ himself is, is the heart of the church’s eucharistic worship and communion, and that it is from that center that the life and activity of the church on earth are nourished and directed.
It’s a
remarkable statement. When my students visit an Eastern Orthodox congregation and they hear about the great dome and conceptualizing worship as the place where heaven and earth meet, sometimes they are astonished to discover that not only is that language a part of Orthodoxy, but it is a part of Calvin. That part has not been handed on to them, those students in the broader Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, but it certainly must be. That ecumenical potential in Calvin is also realized in a provocative way by George Hunzinger in a recent book on ecumenical consensus around theology of the Lord’s Supper, and it’s really the reason why my teacher at Notre Dame, Regis Duffy, could describe himself as the other Calvinist at Notre Dame. Because when we are talking about the Triune God, our union with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit through the tangible things that God has made as part of the universe, I would argue that we are talking about simple Christian orthodoxy.
You can’t have Christian
orthodoxy without any one of those points. And when we spend our time in those themes, we are at a moment of great union and intersection with Christians in different parts of the body of Christ. It is true that Calvin, like Luther, Augustine, and Chrysostom, takes that basic vision and describes it in ways that are sometimes so complex and fine-tuned that it’s a
little hard to find our way through it. And it’s on this point that I’m grateful for Pittsburgh faculty member Charles Partee’s work on Calvin, where he says it’s occasionally when Calvin describes this vision and the intricacies of the language of substance and participation that sometimes there’s a level of precision in a language that does not fit well with this over-arching vision and the scriptural metaphors that inform it.
But
nevertheless, Calvin is a representative of this broadly small-“c” catholic Christian insight: Worship is God’s trinitarian work in which we participate through the Spirit through tangible signs. Which brings us to the gearshift: ministry today. The renewal of worship in the church today. The beatitude I propose is this: Blessed is the congregation in which these three elements are indispensible and actively lived in the theological imagination in all kinds of ordinary people. Ultimately the theology that becomes pastoral to us is not the theology in the textbook. It might even be theology that’s unarticulated, but it is in the world that is pictured by all kinds of ordinary people who when they sing hymns with lines like, “We sing praise to God in heaven above”—what do people think of when they think of heaven in singing a line like that? When the orthodoxy that we’ve talked about in Calvin’s metaphors and ways of picturing begin to shape the imagination that people live with, all kinds of giftedness breaks out and we set aside that vision of worship as before Baal for a vision of worship as a graced activity. And so the proverb: Wise is the leader who evokes, who teaches, who proclaims, who prays, and who sings with expectant awareness of this trinitarian activity, and the overlap between earth and heaven. Now it seems to me, to return to the themes of earlier in the day, that this has to happen in a very practical down-to-earth way. I’ve always been impressed with aspects of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. This book got started when C.S. Lewis was giving radio addresses over the BBC. I always sort of picture C.S. Lewis saying, “Today, I am waking up to the opportunity to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to all of England. I have 11 minutes.” And that’s really how the book came about. So Lewis, one day, does in fact, this is toward the end of the book, have to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to all of England over the radio. How does he do it? He does not use the words
“persons” and “substances” and how three can become one. This is how he does it. He said, I want you to picture yourself as you pray. What do you think of? Do you imagine that God is sort of up there, out there? If that’s what you picture God to be, then—my paraphrase—I love you still, but that’s not really the Bible’s vision. When you pray to God, the Bible would say imagine this: Imagine that God is before you to receive your prayer. And imagine that God is beside to take the words that you speak and to perfect them. And imagine that God is at work within you by the power of the Spirit. Where is God when you pray? God is before, and with you, and in you, all at the same time. It would be wrong, my language now, to say, it would be a little selfcentered to say, that we are in the center of all this divine activity. But it would not be wrong for us to say, that we are in the middle of the divine activity. We are in the middle of all kinds of divine activity. The Spirit’s prompting, Christ perfecting, Christ praying for us, the Father receiving. That is the Christian theological imagination. And then I think of what I consider some of the most remarkable writing on a very popular level explaining Christianity in our time.
And I could pull any number of
examples here. But very briefly, let me simply point out that among all the publications of N.T. Wright, and I imagine many of us have had a chance to read N.T. Wright along the way, either the big books about the resurrection or those little introductions to the books of the Bible he does on a very popular level, take note of how often N.T. “Tom” Wright pauses to redefine heaven for people. I think it’s part of his basic stump speech, where he basically has to pause to explain, do not think of heaven as simply something light years away. Think of it as God’s dimension of ordinary reality. Or, as he does in his book, Simply Christian, think of heaven and earth—his language now—as overlapping, interlocking realities. He writes, “The sense of overlap between heaven and earth and the sense of God thereby being present on earth without having to leave heaven, lies at the heart of Jewish and early Christian theology.” I pause with that now because I’m often struck by how often my students will circle that line, or a line like it as a source of a question or theological conversation. And the more students have responded around that point, the more I start to realize that we really are haunted by the ghost of Immanuel Kant: that we have no access to heavenly reality.
So that we either live in a world in which heaven and earth are
completely separated, no boundary crossing there that are possible, or we live in a world in which heaven and earth are merged—that’s called pantheism. But rather what the Bible gives us from the start is this picture of heaven and earth being interlocking. The Temple in the Old Testament was a place of interlocking. In some Celtic circles, it’s called the Thin Place. An interlocking world is what Calvin writes in a beautiful way about the miracle that took place with Stephen in Acts 7, where you know Stephen sees right into heaven. Hear this from Calvin: “As far as I’m concerned, I consider that nothing was altered in the nature of the heavens, but rather a new sharpness of vision was given to Stephen to penetrate past every obstacle right to the invisible glory of the kingdom of heaven. Stephen says that the heavens are open to himself, in the sense that nothing impedes him from the sight of the glory of God, and from that it follows that the miracle was produced not in the heavens, but in Stephen’s eyes.”
In Larry
Stookey’s little textbook, On the Christian Year, he gets to the Ascension Day and says the big problem we have, come Ascension Day, is that most of us picture the Ascension as being somewhat similar to the shoot off of a rocket from NASA. Our theological worldview is so literalized that we think the Ascension is a move inside physical space. Or, as he would say for most of us, we think about that for 10 seconds, realize it is incomprehensible, and decide not to attend Ascension Day worship whatsoever. But you see, if we don’t get this clear, really the entire Christian way of imaging the world theologically falls apart. In Revelation 5, when John is caught up in the vision on the Lord’s Day, he is before the throne in heaven. He sees the lamb looking as if the lamb has been slain, and then some remarkable things start happening. He sees this vision of the sevenfold Spirit of God. The eyes, which from heaven’s side, perceive all of the earth. He hears the prayers of the saints represented as incense before the throne.
What John
experiences in heaven are boundary crossings between heaven and earth. The Spirit goes from heaven to earth, and the prayers go from earth to heaven. The boundaries are crossed all the time. And then my favorite spot at the end, there John caught up in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day says, “And then I heard the singing. I heard the singing from those gathered around the throne, and I heard the singing from those on earth, and I heard the singing from those under the earth.” Even the singing of beluga whales
in the sea, are sometimes, somehow heard through the boundary crossing between heaven and earth. And so those who inherit Calvin’s theological vision in fact inherit something that we often think of as being simply a property of those in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but in fact there really is so much more here. I’m going to close with this quote, take some questions, and we are going to end with singing after that. In light of all the things that I’ve said about this highly charged divine activity, Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 52 provides a good summary for our work today.
Let us engrave this useful lesson upon our hearts that we should consider it the great end of our existence to be found numbered among the worshipers of God that we should avail ourselves of the inestimable privilege of the stated assemblies of the church which are necessary helps to our infirmity. By these and our common sacraments, the Lord who is one God and who designed that we should be one in Him, is training us up together in the hope of eternal life and the united celebration of his Holy Name.
Amen.