Sárospataki Füzetek 14. (2010)
2010 / 1. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Sell, Alan P. F.: Milyen megoldásra váró feladatok elé állítja Kálvin a 21. századi egyházat?
things God has made or given, from the lust of the flesh. God’s good gifts are not to be abused. Elsewhere he strongly opposed the economic exploitation of the poor by the rich." The argument is extended to creation as a whole. Human beings are to be good stewards of it and refrain from its wanton destruction.99 100 If they are not, they forget the Maker and divert his good gifts towards unworthy ends.101 Enough has been said to show that and how Calvin holds together doctrine and ethics. In this connection I think that his challenge to today’s Church is that we do likewise. Just as some of our Christian contemporaries lament the increasing specialization which has in some cases led to the divorce of biblical from systematic theology, so there are not wanting signs that some Christian social ethicists are so quick to plunge into pressing issues that they leave doctrinal considerations behind, and their findings can sound like those of any right-minded humanist. But to Calvin the motivating force of his socio-political ethics was intensely doctrinal, rooted in the Gospel. Nor was it simply an intellectual rooting in the sense of ‘If this is what you believe then this is what you should do.’ The doctrine was the articulation of lived experience, and thus it was a motivating force. Union with Christ by the Spirit on the ground of Christ’s saving work prompted gratitude of a kind which led to seeing one’s salvation, one’s life, and all of one’s possessions as gifts from God to be used for his glory, and in the service of others. To plunder Calvin’s writings for ethical principles of use today without reference to their doctrinal-««z?-experimental basis would be to miss Calvin’s main point. [W]e are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal.102 VII As I said at the outset, Calvin cannot do all our work for us, and at particular points we may well disagree with him. We are not tied to his exegesis of Scripture, or to his view of the dating and authorship of the biblical books. We should do well to query the way in which he left his church polity hanging with the elders and Calvin’s challenges to the twenty-first-century church 99 Commentary on Amos, 8: 6, trans. John Owen, 1846, 367. 100 Commentary on Genesis, 2: 15,125. 101 Commentary on the Psalms, 104: 35, trans. James Anderson, 1847, 171. This is not the place to address the familiar charge, flowing down from Max Weber, that Calvin or Calvinism instigated capitalism. My summary response to the charge is: 1. Capitalism was alive and well in fifteenth-century Roman Catholic business centres, sometimes in close relation to the Church. 2. It is true that Calvin sanctioned usury for the purposes of credit, but not as a means of avoiding work by living on interest. 3. He urged altruism to an unusual degree, and would not have countenanced antisocial economic individualism. 4. Critics of Calvin are inclined anachronistically to attribute to him a post-Enlightenment view of capitalism. His view that all of God’s bounty, including wealth, is held in trust by us, and that we are accountable for the way we use, or abuse, it is at a far remove from modern notions of free enterprise. 5. The range of economic activity in Calvin’s Geneva was circumscribed relative to our own - he knew the businessmen around him. He would have boggled at giant international business conglomerates, and still more at hedge funds. 102 Institutes, III.vii.1. SÁROSPATAKI FÜZETEK 97
