Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)
2010 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Sell, Alan P. F.: Milyen megoldásra váró feladatok elé állítja Kálvin a 21. századi egyházat?
Sell, Alan p. f. Calvin’s Challenges to the Twenty- ft rst-Century Church O ne hundred years ago the Alliance of Reformed Churches holding the Presbyterian System held its ninth General Council in New York. The programme included ten lectures marking the 400th anniversary of Calvin’s birth. It fell to Mr. J. H. Stevenson of Edinburgh to adumbrate ‘The salient features of Calvin's life.’ No other speaker was so enveloped by the celebratory haze as Mr. Stevenson. Calvin, said he, was ‘destined in the providence of God to save the Christian world from its downward course into paganism, and restore it to its vision of God’s sovereignty and man’s duty.’1 This begs the questions, Did he really do that? Did he do it all by himself? But I must not be too hard on Mr. Stevenson, for, one hundred years on, my tide also begs a large question: How can a person born five hundred years ago challenge today’s Church? After all, Calvin lived before the challenges of the Enlightenment, before the modern missionary movement, before the rise of modern biblical criticism, before the industrial revolution and the explosion of modern science, before atheism, agnosticism and secularism became acceptable belief systems, before the modern ecumenical movement, and before globalization embraced the whole world for good and ill. Moreover, Calvin could assume Christendom in a way which is now quite impossible for us (it was always undesirable); his implication in the death of Servetus, though understandable perhaps in one who could only be a child of his time, is not something we should wish to emulate; and his strident anti-Roman Catholic polemic, though characteristic of those who need psychologically to distance themselves from much of what has gone before, would today be deemed ecumenically unhelpful, grains of truth in it notwithstanding. Before we begin to plunder Calvin’s writings for challenges to ourselves we need to address another question which my title begs: How far is Calvin’s confession the same as ours?2 Indeed, more generally, what do we mean when we say that 1 G. D. Matthews, ed., Proceedings; Ninth General Coundl of the Alliance of Preformed Churches holding the Presbyterian System held at New York, 1909, London: Office of the Alliance, 1909, 50. Mark Pattison had earlier, and somewhat more modestly, asserted that ‘Calvinism saved Europe.’ See Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Eincoln College, Collected and Arranged by Henty Nettleship, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889, II, 31 (my italics). 2 See further on this intriguing question Alan P. F. Sell, Confessing and Commending the Faith. Historic Witness and Apologetic Method, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002 and Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006, 79-89/ SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK 79
