In order to become a person who can be taught by others, nothing less than conversion is required; and that is a work of the Spirit who tames our egocentricity so that we can learn as pupils, together with other pupils, in the school of Christ.

In the last issue, we closed Part Two of Rev. Dr. Richard Topping's article with this first sentence. Now we move into the third and final instalment of this wonderful reflection, which was originally presented at the Renewal Day in November 2009 at St. Andrew's Newton Presbyterian Church in Surrey BC. Dr. Topping is St. Andrew's Hall Professor of Reformed Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver BC. — Kit Schindell

What would this mean for sermon preparation and/or personal Bible study? Do we get our ideas of Christian scholarship more from the academy than from the Gospel and our Reformed tradition?

Jesus Christ by his death and new life has won the benefits that God intended for us. Salvation is won through Christ. God redeems what is broken in the world that He has made. However, these benefits lost in the fall and won back by the Son of God remain external to us. There is potential grace afoot in the universe through Christ. This grace is apart from us, external to us, because we are sinners; we don't receive grace automatically. Book Three of the Institutes of the Christian Religion is called, "The Way in Which We receive the Grace of Christ . . ." and the whole of this section is about how the benefits of salvation won in Christ come to us through our contact with God.

Christ is the mediator of grace and so to receive the benefits of his life into our lives we need personal contact with Christ. "He must become ours and dwell in us." Calvin loves to speak of our union with Christ, our engrafting into Christ, our being made one with him: "We are apparelled with him." So close is our fellowship, our personal contact with Christ that we are united with him more closely "than are the limbs with the body." Calvin says that our hope for resurrection and eternal life would be faint were it not for our "complete and entire" union with Christ. Fellowship with Christ is close, personal, intimate — he lives in us and we in him. What happens to Christ, death and resurrection, happens to us, because we are in him. Our union with Christ is the condition for our access to a spiritual life.

But Christ remains outside of us, apart from us, until by faith we are joined to him. And for Calvin, faith is always and everywhere the work of the Holy Spirit. Faith is confidence and trust that the benefits of Christ are mine. That what happened back there and then on the cross and at the empty tomb applies to me here and now. Jesus Christ by his death and new life achieves salvation and the Holy Spirit is the means by which this salvation reaches even us. It is the work of the Spirit to create faith, not just that God and Christ exist but faith in God come among us in Christ for us and our salvation. Faith is the channel opened by the Spirit, at the hearing of the Gospel Word and at the sharing in the sacraments, through which the blessings of salvation achieved in Christ flow to us. Faith is what is generated in us by the Spirit's work of breaking down our sinful resistance to God so that we can behold the love and grace of God come in Jesus Christ. By faith, which is the work of the Spirit, we are bound to Christ and his benefits. "Perfect salvation is found in the person of Christ . . . that we may become partakers of it, he baptizes us in the Holy Spirit and fire . . . bringing us into the light of faith in his gospel and so regenerating us that we become new creatures." And again, "The Holy Spirit is the cause of our enjoyment of Christ and of all his benefits."

The Spirit works (ordinarily) by means of the Word and Sacraments. In Calvin's thought, while it is certainly true that the Word read and proclaimed is never effective without the agency of the Spirit, it is also certainly true that Calvin is not an "enthusiast" or a spiritualist, and his thought could never give rise to a generic understanding of spirituality. While Calvin always respects the freedom of Almighty God to work as God chooses, he does note again and again that the Spirit works by certain regular means in the life of the people of God. These are scripture and the sacraments.

Scripture is a clear and sufficient witness to the Gospel in its own right. However, we misconstrue and misunderstand it because of sin. And so the Spirit illumines the Scriptures so that we see what we ought to see and know by means of it. Nothing is wrong with the Bible, for Calvin. It speaks clearly and plainly and sufficiently of God and the Gospel and of the benefits of Christ. However, something is wrong with us. God is broadcasting, but our reception is faulty. And so the Spirit, as we have noted, repairs what is broken in us so that we can know God and share in the benefits of Christ. The Spirit adds amplitude so that we get God and the Gospel and our need for them. The Spirit creates faith by means of the witness of the Word and we are united with Christ.

The Spirit also works in the sacraments. We are weak. Our imaginations, as we noted, lead us astray. We like tangible and visible things and so we fall into idolatry. Ah, but God, gracious and accommodating as God is, comes to us not just in a verbal witness (scripture), God presents Christ and his benefits to us in visible items/actions (the sacraments). We hear God's word in Scripture by the grace of the Spirit, and we see God's Word in the bread and the wine. Indeed, for Calvin and Calvinists, one of the reasons we break the bread — 'fraction it' — at Holy Communion is as a symbol of Christ's body broken for our benefit. And when we share together at our Lord's Table, praying, "Lift up your hearts," the Spirit actually and truly answers our prayers and we are raised up to commune with Christ at the right hand of the Father. We share spiritually in the life of Christ by the work of God's Holy Spirit — and faith is created and helped by this intimate communing, this fellowship with our Saviour.

What then are the benefits of Christ communicated to those who have faith by the Spirit? It is a double grace: justification — that is the imputation of Christ's good standing with God to us so that our sins are forgiven. Engrafted into Christ a blessed exchange takes place, our sins are laid on him and his new life is infused into us. We are in Christ, clothed in his righteousness. He is in us, and we are in him.

The benefits of Christ come to us from the Spirit and we make progress in holiness. If in the fall of human beings the image of God in us is corrupted, the Spirit is busy in the lives of the saints to restore it. We are, for Calvin, never made entirely holy in this life. In fact, part of sanctification (becoming holy) is found in the recognition of how far from it we are. Calvin sees regeneration, being made over again in the image of God, as consisting in two parts: mortification of the old person and vivification of the new person. The shape of the Christian life is in this way determined by the shape of the life of Christ who died and then rose again. We are "in Christ" by faith and the grace of the Spirit, and so what happened to Jesus happens to us. We die with him to an old way of living for sin. We rise with him to live our lives to God. The power of the reign of sin over and in us is done.

However, Calvin says that this life is "a perpetual battlefield" with sin. God by the Holy Spirit is continually at work in the saints killing in us what kills us so that God may fill us with the life of Christ. Calvin says, "This restoration is not accomplished in a minute of time nor in a day, nor in a year; but God continually abolishes the corruptions of the flesh in his elect in a continuous succession of time, and indeed little by little; and he does not cease to cleanse them of their filth, to dedicate them to himself as temples, to reform their senses to try piety, so that they exercise themselves all their lives in penitence, and know that this war never comes to an end until death. (I Corinthians 1:8)". Self-love and ambition were, for Calvin, particularly besetting sins. In the fall from right praise, the praise of self — ego-centricity — is particularly troublesome on Calvin's account.

On the other side is vivification — life — new life in Christ born of the Spirit. If mortification of the flesh is the answer to the fallen praise of idols, then vivification is the answer to our ingratitude and self-congratulation. We are raised with Christ to live gratefully all the days of our lives to God. Here and now in definite deeds of gratitude, the image of God in us begins to be restored. Every thankful deed offered at the prompting of the Spirit (our obedience) for new life in Christ is a restoration of what we have been created for. Obedience to God is for Calvin the form that gratitude and love for God takes in this life. "The Spirit nourishes and confirms in us the love of obedience . . ." and "The aim of regeneration is that people may perceive in our lives a melody and harmony between the righteousness of God and our obedience; and that thereby we ratify the adoption in which God has accepted us as his children."

New life in Christ includes the love of our neighbour. We praise God in the love of the neighbour for they are created in the image of God. It is regard for the neighbour as image bearer that stokes the believer into the service of others and so to praise God. In a striking passage, Calvin writes, "We ought not to dwell upon the vices of men, but rather to contemplate in them the image of God, which by his excellence and dignity can and should move us to love them and forget all their vices which might turn us therefrom."

Our gratitude to God — in the form of obedience to God and love of our neighbour — ought to be spontaneous and free. However, we resist the Spirit through sloth and we struggle, particularly in times of trouble, to be faithful. And so the law is given as a spur and help to guide us in the right direction. We require guidance in the new life God wants to give us. And here Calvin lays down a very different path to Luther. The law has a positive use in the life of the Christian, it guides, it leads us to life; the Spirit makes use of it to guide us toward right and grateful living in the love of God and neighbour — we were created for this.

The new life comes hard, on Calvin's view. For it is guided not just by the law but by the life of Jesus Christ himself. To live for Christ in this life is to suffer. Calvin doesn't say that the whole of the new life in Christ is suffering, but almost. Suffering and tribulation predominate in this life, and if there are moments of respite in the struggle to deny ourselves and take up our cross, those are allowed by God so that we may take up the struggle again with renewed vigour.

For Calvin, the sufferings in this life, taken up in faithfulness to Christ by the power of the Spirit, are to be viewed in the light of eternity — if we share in Christ's life of suffering, we shall share in his glory as well. "We must," he writes, "always look to the end, to accustom ourselves to despise the present life . . . the Lord knows very well how prone we are to a blind and even brutish love of this word" and so God uses affliction "that our heart should not be too much attached to such a foolish love."

Calvin will also speak of prayer as the intended result of the suffering we undergo. When what faith seeks is not plain to sight, obscured as it is by present sufferings, we pray and ask for the fulfillment of God promises. In this movement toward God in affliction, it is the Spirit at work in us, inciting us to call out "Abba Father." "Wherefore God, in order to make up for our weakness, give us his Spirit for a master, who teaches us and tells us what it is legitimate for us to ask, and who also rules our affections."

Let me end with a question? Is this good enough? Is this a scriptural and Christ-centered enough way of speaking about the Christian life? Do we have sufficient warrant to summarize almost the whole of the Christian life in terms of suffering? Is the almost principal warrant to pray to be found in suffering? What about gratitude to God for so great a life and so great a salvation — doesn't the Spirit move us to thanksgiving too?

We might note that here Calvin follows the Apostles' Creed, which summarizes the whole of Christ's life in these terms: "suffered under Pontius Pilate." I've always wondered whether we might add a line in the creed here from Acts 10 — "he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed." It seems to me that Calvin's account lacks the liberating, healing, lifting work of grace, even in the here and now. He seems to equate vivification (new life in Christ) with suffering; new life with just about dying?

Karl Barth says that Calvin on the Christian life is "stern," "sombre" and "forbidding." He argues that, "Calvin suffers from a curious over-emphasis on mortification at the expense of vivification." And Barth asks, "Who authorized him to almost completely conceal . . . the clear and positive meaning and character of conversion as liberation by giving vivification only a minor position as the reverse side of mortification." And then here's how the Reformed tradition reforms: Barth writes: "The truth is that in the New Testament the real dying and passing and perishing of the old man is matched by a no less real rising and coming and appearing of the new."

Reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God; it is the perpetual work of the Spirit in our lives and in Christ's church. (Dogmatics, IV/2: 575, 579).

This book, Calvin's Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension, is published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2010, 286 pp.

The Rev. Dr. Richard Topping is the St. Andrew's Hall Professor of Reformed Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver BC.

This book comes out of Julie Canlis' doctoral work at St. Andrew's University, Scotland, where she worked under the direction of Professor Alan Torrance and for which she won the 2007 Templeton Award for Theological Promise. It is tightly argued, carefully expressed and, though focused on Calvin and Irenaeus, is a wide-ranging piece of "catholic" scholarship. I learned a great deal from reading it. Dr. Canlis' ability to situate participation/ascension within the overall context of the corpus of Calvin's work makes her argument quite powerful. Her ability to balance and relate — with theological subtlety — matters which are too often depicted in competitive/contentious terms or as zero sum games (divine and human life, Christocentricity and Trinitarian theology) was a delight to behold.

The burden of this superb piece of theological work is to demonstrate the centrality of the descent and ascent of Jesus Christ to Calvin's understanding of salvation as human participation in the life of God. In a precise statement of what she aims to demonstrate through the exposition of the works of Calvin, Canlis writes:

Calvin brilliantly synthesized the two movements of ascent and descent into one primary activity: the ongoing story of God himself with us. God has come as man to stand in for us (descent), and yet as man he also leads us back to the Father (ascent). The entire Christian life is an outworking of this ascent — the appropriate response to God's descent to us — that has already taken place in Christ. Thus, for Calvin, the only appropriate human ascent is a matter of participating in Christ (3).

Calvin was not, of course, the first to deploy the language of ascent and participation to articulate an understanding of salvation or as a way of relating human and divine life. Plato deployed a similar vocabulary as did substantialist medieval spiritual theologies of soul ascent, which ascribed powers of ascent to "anthropological endowment" (49) rather than to God or the incarnate Son of God or to the work of the Spirit engrafting us into Christ. Calvin's deployment of the language of human participation (koinonia) in the life of God, however, renders the language of ascent and participation Christologically and with a view to the church; he speaks of the Head of the church bringing his members with him (see 48ff). His use of the categories of participation and ascent are thus not general philosophical principles or statements about human potential or achievement, but "flow directly from Christ's sharing in human life. Because God himself, in the person of Christ, shared fully in our humanity, human beings are able to "share," or participate in God" (4).

Canlis argues the case that participation, as both concept and praxis, is central to Christian faith, present in the Old Testament, central to the New — particularly in the Pauline corpus — and of great significance in patristic theology. Her depiction of the way in which the N.T. and the Fathers of the church borrowed language from philosophy and shaped it for Christian use, with varying degrees of success, is instructive for contemporary theological endeavour. Canlis is mindful that koinonia understood as a sharing-in-being, participation, indwelling or communion with God will need careful articulation in our society, shaped as it is by an extrinsic individualism. However, such language will be a gift to alienated and isolated people who sometimes relate to God and each other, in the words of George Hunsinger, "like ball bearings in a bucket" (7). Moreover the language of ascent and participation has ecumenical promise central as it is to Eastern spiritual theology which derives in part from Irenaeus. Canlis believes that by showing continuity in difference between Irene's and Calvin on the matter of a Trinitarian understanding of divine-human koinonia, she can deliver on this promise.

The irony in Canlis' ecumenical motivation is that she is also aware that in the family of churches that trace their theological heritage to Calvin, the language of participation is suspect. She cites some examples and notes that these are representative of a wide-ranging phenomenon in Reformed thought. The reason for suspicion regarding the language of human participation in God as expressive of the meaning of salvation is anxiety about platonic and scholastic metaphysical residue. The language of participation has the potential to blur distinctions between the transcendent God, who is other than us, and us. The line between Creator and created when participation language is predominant tends to get blurred; intimacy with God is featured at the expense of the distinction between God's being and human being.

Canlis counters these anxieties by drawing attention to the conversion that the language of participation undergoes in Calvin's hands. Calvin redefines terms as he uses them such that participation is set free from platonic and neoplatonic associations and "is characterized by intimacy and differentiation, not consubstantiality" (13). In other words, participation, as both intimacy and difference, is oriented by the Trinity. What is more, Calvin also features the language of adoption when speaking of the reality of salvation in Christ. While the orientation of the Christian life is upwards (ascent) by the Spirit, in the Son, to the end of human life, which is communion with the Father, the nature (type) of this communion is specified by the term adoption, which is often paired with engrafting. While these terms affirm a spiritual theology of inclusion, and not just a change in status, they also give theological traction against absorption or pantheism. Describing the theological dividend that Calvin's understanding of adoption pays, Canlis writes, "Adoption . . . carries radical implications for participation in the divine life while also assuaging traditional reformed fears (i.e., loss of distinction between Creator/creature and neglect of atonement)" (136).

I offer the following comments as inquiries into the thesis of the book, the first two as ways in which more of the Calvin corpus might be brought into consideration in Canlis' argument and the third as a gentle questioning of the thesis itself.

The subtitle of the book — A spiritual theology of ascent and ascension — could be more expansive. What if Canlis included descent and incarnation/crucifixion? A spiritual theology which focuses on life in Christ as ascent by the Spirit to fuller participation/communion with and in the life of God ought, it seems to me, and I think certainly in Calvin, to include our death/descent "in and with Christ." Those who are baptized into Christ Jesus are baptized into his death so that with Christ we rise to newness of life. This move would certainly assuage some of the reformed hesitance regarding the neglect of the atonement, which can bedevil articulations of participation in Christ.

Calvin, speaking of the benefits of baptism writes, "Baptism also brings another benefit, for it shows us our mortification in Christ, and new life in him . . . through baptism Christ makes us sharers in his death, that we may be engrafted in it . . . just as the twig draws substance and nourishment from the root to which it is engrafted, so those that receive baptism with right faith truly feel the effective working of Christ's death in the mortification of the flesh, together with the working of his resurrection in the vivification of the Spirit." (Romans 6:8) (Institutes IV.15.5)

While Canlis refers to Calvin's sacramental theology, she treats principally his theology of the Lord's Table: there is virtually no treatment of Calvin on baptism and our engrafting into Christ's death and resurrection by means of it. The one exception that I could find is in a footnote, p. 135, n. 36. Given the thesis of the book and the corresponding importance of en Christo, an account of Calvin's theology of baptism would seem almost necessary.

Calvin writes, "Baptism is the sign of the initiation by which we are received into the society of the church, in order that engrafted in Christ, we may be reckoned among God's children" (Institutes, IV.15.1).

"[Our] faith receives from baptism the advantage of its sure testimony to us that we are not only engrafted into the death and life of Christ, but so united to Christ that we become sharers in all his blessings" (IV.15.6).

What follows the citation above is a discussion of baptism in which Calvin holds together in the very same sentences the language of adoption (children of God) and participation (union, fellowship). There is intimacy and distinction, distinction and intimacy.

This is only a brief passage to be sure, but it does raise a question central to the thesis of Canlis' work: does Calvin give such prominence to participation that adoption and engrafting ought to be understood in the light of it? or is the relationship between these descriptions mutual, oscillating, perichoretic? Calvin may mix his metaphors — "we are children from the fact that we put on Christ" (IV.15.6) because he wants to keep alive, and in dynamic tension, the full range of biblical language related to salvation. Intimacy and distinction seem to be preserved, at least here; not so much by specifying participation by means of adoption and engrafting but rather by keeping both "more than metaphors" in mutual interpreting play. The section on baptism in the Institutes may be particularly reliable in this regard since in his exposition of baptism Calvin is writing in a less polemically charged context.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. God give us more books of this quality and depth in Christian spiritual theology. I will recommend it to my students and include it in my courses on reformation theology.

This edited article is the second of a three-part series originally presented in a ninety-minute keynote session by the Rev. Dr. Richard Topping, St. Andrew's Hall Professor of Reformed Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver BC, at the Renewal Day in November 2009 at St. Andrew's Newton Presbyterian Church in Surrey BC.

Let's turn now to what Calvin has to say about the operation of the Holy Spirit.

I. Calvin is not a Secularist.

What do I mean by that? There is a temptation where it comes to the doctrine of the Spirit to confine the Spirit's operations to church, scripture and the Christian life: to do so, however, is to leave a great swath of human life absent of the operations of the Spirit. Calvin resolutely does not do this. Although Calvin takes sin and the fall very seriously he sees the Spirit at work in the whole of creation.

At the most general level, the Holy Spirit is the very life force of the world, animating creation and infusing the whole of the world with life. "For it is by the Spirit who, everywhere diffused, sustains all things, causes them to grow, and quickens them in heaven and on earth . . . in transfusing into all things his energy, and breathing into them essence, life and movement, he is indeed plainly divine." (Institutes 1.13.14).

The Holy Spirit is divine and is the effective power by which the whole of creation is sustained. But this doesn't mean that the Holy Spirit of God is an impersonal force in the world. Calvin is very careful to speak of the Spirit as the agent of God's personal care for the world and for the creatures God has made. Providence over the course of history and human creatures together with the preservation of creation are works of the Spirit. God is involved by the Spirit in "a watchful, effective, active sort [of care] engaged in ceaseless activity . . . an omnipotence that is directed toward individual and particular motions" (1.16.3). The Spirit moves providentially in the world and in human history directing the course of human life — whether elect or reprobate.

The Spirit works in the world and also in the cultural and social life of the whole of humanity. Calvin refers to the "glorious gifts of the Spirit spread throughout the whole human race" (Genesis 4:20). The cultural, social and political life of all people has been blessed with "endowments far from negligible." Such gifts are evident even among those "deprived of the Spirit of regeneration." These gifts ought to be admired, not only as achievements of human ingenuity and skill, but as "the riches of his grace which God has poured out." (Ibid).

Calvin praises God for all the fruits of the liberal arts and sciences, philosophy and medicine, political science and music for they are the result of the Spirit's work in the world. God has left many gifts to human nature, even after it was despoiled by the fall. And so Calvin cautions, not unbelievers, but Christians against despising such gifts. Listen to Calvin:

Whenever we (Christians) come upon these matters [natural gifts] in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God's excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonour the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we condemn and reproach the Spirit himself (2.2.15).

For Calvin, human competence in arts and sciences is a gift of God. And Christians in particular ought to be grateful to God for those most excellent gifts of the Spirit distributed through the whole realm of humankind for the common good. For this is a means of the providence (the personal care) of the Holy Spirit for the world that God so loves.

Calvin writes, "If the Lord has willed that we be helped by physics, mathematics (rhetoric, medicine, philosophy) and other like disciplines by the work and ministry of the ungodly, let us use this assistance. For if we neglect God's gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer punishment for our sloth" (2.2.16).

God the Holy Spirit fills and moves and quickens the whole world — natural, human and cultural — and Christians not only ought to be grateful for the ministries of knowledge and care found in the world, they ought to make use of them for their own flourishing in thankfulness for them (the gifts and the people) and in gratitude for God. Calvin says we ought to be ashamed if we can't manage gratitude to God for the ministries of the ungodly since even pagan poets confessed that the gods have given philosophy, law and the useful arts.

Wow! Can you imagine that by means of a secondary agent, your dentist or doctor or even your lawyer, God the Holy Spirit is at work for your good? What if we took that sense of gratitude to the work of others for our sake in the world? What if instead of looking at the ministrations of our government (through health care and public works) not so much as entitlements due us, but as the grace of the providence of God the Holy Spirit? Imagine telling your radiologist that he or she is a minister of the grace of God to you. What if we thought of the work of the guy who digs up the street to fix gas mains as the agent by means of whom God the Holy Spirit cares for us? What if we said so to them? Not only would we create some interesting godly mental distress, we would, I think, live more integrated and grateful lives under God. Calvin helps us to pay attention to the so called "secular" world outside church as the sphere of God the Holy Spirit's gracious and humanizing work: something to imagine, to think about, something to practice.

II. The Problem of Sin: Ingratitude and Idolatry

The fact that God gives gifts to all of humanity by the Holy Spirit does not mean that humanity is grateful for them. In fact, the failure to give thanks for the gifts of God is universal. Apart from redemption in Christ, fallen humanity does one of two things with the gifts God gives. The source of the gifts is wrongly identified (the sin of idolatry); or we use the gifts as an occasion for self-congratulations (the sin of ingratitude). "We are," writes Calvin, "naturally bad interpreters of God's works" and "habituated to errors . . ." (Acts 14, 7:6-7). For Calvin, — as with Paul — the fundamental human problem is doxological. We ascribe praise incorrectly and we accept praise incorrectly. Our praise stops short of God, we praise ourselves, our lives come unglued. The disordering of our lives and of the world, the corruption of the image of God in us, all begins with bad doxology. Here I think G.K. Chesterton and Calvin are on the same page. Chesterton said, "When you stop worshipping God, you don't worship nothing, you worship anything."

A question: how does this important point of Calvin's figure into our thinking when we speak of the ways and means of worship? We tend to focus on how — by what electronic technology — our songs are accompanied. Calvin tended to bet it all on whom we worship and whether our songs speak truly of God. I think Calvin's reticence regarding musical accompaniment, whether we go with him or not, has to be seen in this light.

In Calvin's commentary on Romans he emphasizes the judgment and disorder that issue against those who will not praise God. We fall into sin as we fall from the praise, adoration and service of God. Three times humanity is "given up" because what was to lead us to God — the contemplation of the gifts of God in nature and in us, which do speak loudly of God's authorship (sensus divinitatus) — we distort. We praise gods that are the result of "giddy imagination" or we praise ourselves. Idolatry and ingratitude with their corresponding vices are our lot because we culpably distort the knowledge of God and God's gifts given to us.

III. A More Certain Saving Knowledge of God

Because of idolatry and ingratitude, we no longer know God. Sin in these forms has corrupted and distorted our sense of the divine revealed in nature and in us. Through the gift of Scripture (which Calvin describes as "spectacles") our vision and knowledge of God can be renewed. Three qualifications are necessary here: first, for Calvin scripture is something you look at and look through — hence the metaphor of glasses. Calvin's sermons reflect this movement: exposition and then application — looking at and looking through. We make sense of the text and then we make sense of the world by means of the Bible.

A second qualification is this: some read the Bible and don't benefit from its corrective vision because they don't read it toward and around Christ. The Bible for Calvin is a Christocentric book: dissect its members, isolate its testaments and it doesn't correct vision; it isn't reading the Bible scripturally. The Bible, for Calvin, moves from promise to fulfillment in Christ. There is for Calvin a scriptural way to read the Bible and that is as a Christ-centered story. It is perfectly acceptable and indeed incumbent upon the preacher to speak of Christ when expounding on the Psalms and the rest of the Old Testament — there is hermeneutic current passing through the whole of Scripture and it is generated by the coming of the promised one: Jesus Christ.

Finally, and most importantly, the gift of the Spirit is absolutely crucial. The inner teacher in whose hands the Bible is an instrument of the saving work of God in Christ is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit must light up the room in which the spectacles of Scripture are worn or all is still darkness. The Spirit must illumine the mind and activate the will and move the heart (again and again), or Scripture reading lingers at the level of information gathering, a quaint past-time, the gathering of ammunition to beat up your opponents to the left or the right.

Notice that for Calvin, the Spirit doesn't just illumine and teach, liberate and move, for the sake of our gathering up knowledge about God. Calvin doesn't really talk very much about the mastery of the content of scripture as an end in itself. For Calvin, Bible reading that begins with a prayer for the Spirit is to lay oneself to know God revealed in Jesus Christ and to get swept up into Christ's saving work. Perhaps this is why for Calvin, reading the Bible under the illumination of the Spirit in a Christ-centered fashion is likened to eating — it is to take it into oneself in the deepest manner possible. It is never just information. The Holy Spirit credentials the Bible, but in a manner in which the reader is addressed, comforted and accosted. It is as if, writes Calvin, "God himself speaks" through Scripture. And so when it comes to our proper deportment, Calvin will tell us: we are pupils and learners and we who hear ought to be ready to relent and give way.

In the Genevan Catechism (1541) Calvin has the child ask:

How are we to read scripture in order to profit by it?

By receiving it with the full consent of our conscience, as truth come down from heaven, submitting ourselves to it in right obedience, loving it with true affection by having it imprinted on our hearts, that we may follow it entirely and conform ourselves to it.

And this manner of reception is the work of the Spirit in us; it is the answer to our prayers for illumination: "Give us ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church."

Just a brief word about friends: Calvin practiced the interpretation and application in community. He dedicated most of his commentaries on the Bible to other commentators from whom he learned. Simon Grynaeus, Melanchthon, Bucer and Bullinger are among the names mentioned in his commentary on Romans. He has had friendly discussion with them (as well as ancient commentators), and more locally the Company of Pastors in Geneva, about how best to interpret the Bible. The point being that he has learned from others. The point being that he is not the only one to whom the Spirit is given. Calvin maintained that the chief characteristic of a Christian is "a teachable frame." And a teachable frame is not natural. In order to become a person who can be taught by others nothing less than conversion is required; and that is a work of the Spirit who tames our egocentricity so that we can learn as pupils, together with other pupils, in the school of Christ.

This edited article is the first of a three-part series originally presented in a ninety-minute keynote session by the Rev. Dr. Richard Topping, St. Andrew's Hall Professor of Reformed Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology, Vancouver BC, at the Renewal Day in November 2009 at St. Andrew's Newton Presbyterian Church in Surrey BC.

B.B. Warfield, renowned theologian, wrote that John Calvin is "pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit." On predestination and God's sovereignty, Calvin simply picks up the theological tradition (Augustine, Aquinas and others) and repeats it. Where it comes to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, however, Warfield says we arrive at "Calvin's greatest contribution to theological science. In his hands for the first time in the history of the church, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit comes to its rights."

It is interesting to puzzle over why the Reformed tradition — one that takes its cue and has its roots in the theological work of John Calvin — has not always drawn unto itself Calvin's doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Let me suggest three possible reasons for why this might be the case.

Could it be fear of losing control? The Reformed tradition — and Calvin — are big on order and structure, and the Spirit can be perceived as a threat to institutional and personal continuity. On his deathbed, among Calvin's final words, were these: "Change nothing." And to be fair to Calvin, he had struggled long and hard to reform the city of Geneva and didn't want these gains lost.

On the other hand, an understanding of church and the Christian life that features the work of the Spirit tends to play up disruption, rupture, amazement, bewilderment– and that's hard on us ordered types. Settled structures, patterns of order and liturgy do serve to promote the life of the church, and some institutional shape is a requirement for the life of the people of God.

However such structure can be both instrument of and barrier to life in the Spirit. The Gospel, I believe, is a great deal less serene than we may be tempted to believe. Before ever church is institution with a natural history and organization, the church is a creature of the Word — a gathering that is animated by the Spirit of Christ. And the Spirit is wind and fire; the Spirit blows where he will, which is to say the Spirit is not under our control. Maybe that's why the movements of the Spirit sometimes suffer death through protocol. We hear what the Spirit is saying to the church, and it could change our direction — as a minister it creates more work for me; as a parishioner I could be displaced in the new arrangement; and so on and so on. When the fire of the Spirit ignites, we are at least tempted to extinguish it by presenting the 74 steps that will be necessary according to wont and usage to make the idea a reality. Control (and sloth and envy) sometimes means we quench the Spirit.

But maybe there's another related reason for this reticence where it comes drawing more deeply upon Calvin's understanding of the Holy Spirit. We Presbyterians tend to lead with the mind — understanding is the lead human faculty for Calvin (and Plato), the one by which others (will and affection) are ordered. That might not in itself be all that bad; it keeps us from what Peter Matheson calls, "glandular excess in worship," which is the root of superstition. We don't let our enthusiasms run away with us, we Presbyterians. Piety is theologically controlled by Scripture and the cool Reformed mind.

However, reasonableness — on this side of the Enlightenment — tends toward expunging divine agency out of everything. What do I mean? Well, it usually means that like most secular people, we make sense of our lives, our denomination, and the church in terms that almost always leave God out of account. We don't, like Calvin, see reason as a servant of the Gospel but as a capacity independent of faith for making sense. Church meetings take place in which (after we pray to open them) the predominant language is psychotherapeutic, sociological-demographic, or marketing. And to my surprise, this happens right across the theological spectrum. Whether it's budget time or we're trying to envision what the future of our precarious institutional life might look like, we've been lulled into naturalist (one-dimensional) ways of figuring out the world and even for figuring out the probable future of the church. What's "really important" is a rational business plan that takes account of church as a human and historical artefact, as if that's all there is and no more. Talk of the Spirit, prayer for the Holy Spirit, can be regarded as so much "avoiding the real world; pious talk; escapism" when and where people live in the shrunken-down world of rational secularity.

I'd suggest one final reason (and I sure you can think of others), why Calvin's really delightful doctrine of the Holy Spirit doesn't always filter into the life of the Reformed tradition. If you love Calvin, I'm sorry, but here comes a criticism: he never once mentions imagination in a positive light. It's not that Calvin didn't have an imagination, clearly he had a wonderful architectural imagination, and it's not that his work didn't give rise to a distinctly reformed imagination. His work at Geneva, it might be argued, was the work of sanctified or faithful imagination. However, he never once says a good word about it as a human capacity, and there were from the classical writers he knew positive senses of imagination in circulation.

He does speak of reason, will, and affection as fallen human faculties which, through the sacrifice of Christ and the communication of His benefits by the Spirit, begin to be regenerated. God initiates setting right what is wrong with our minds, hearts, and wills by the grace of the Word and the Spirit. Imagination, however, is at the center of the human predicament where it comes to God. Imagination is the faculty where sin has its way with us. Where our sense of God from creation and from within ought to move us toward piety, imagination interposes and starts churning out idols. For Calvin, Voltaire was right: "God created us in his imagine, and we've returned the favour." Here's a typical passage from Calvin on imagination:

Man's mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity (deum pro captu suo imaginari audet); as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God. (1.XI.8)

Imagination always takes us in the direction of idolatry — the imagination generates blueprints for images which the hands make. Imagination however, unlike reason, will, and affection, never gets reordered for use in the fellowship of the redeemed.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but my theological sensibilities tell me that imagination and the work of the Holy Spirit are related. Faith, which for Calvin is the principal work of the Spirit in the believer, is the ability to live by and see what is not yet. Faith, according to the book of Hebrews, is trusting God's promises for what doesn't yet obtain on the ground; trusting God for what is around the corner… receiving promises at a distance. And it seems to me that imagination enlarged and formed by the promises of Scripture and the grace of the Spirit is crucial here.

Calvin will speak of the Holy Spirit's comfort to us in the present when what will be — eternal life, happy resurrection, our full actual justification, God's coming fully to us in our need, abundance of blessing — is not yet.

Commenting on Hebrews 11, he writes, "The Spirit shows us hidden things, the knowledge of which cannot reach our senses." And he asks, "What would become of us were we not supported by hope and did our minds not emerge out of the midst of darkness above the world through the light of God's word and of his Spirit." (Commentary on Hebrews, 11:1, 157-158)

I think that Calvin is writing here about sanctified imagination, imagination stoked by Gospel and Spirit — it's just that he doesn't use the word. I think that's too bad for the history of the Reformed tradition not only at the level of the Spirit's creative conjuring of hope in imagination by the Word, but also in the form of an austere, white-wash aesthetic. Alas we are Reformed and always reforming…