The Christian Humanist Episode #2: Christian Humanism Meets John Calvin

This week, The Christian Humanist podcast discusses John Calvin's influence, for good or for ill, on Christian humanism.

A brief technical note: If you subscribed last week to our feed on iTunes, you need to delete that feed, re-search for the podcast, and resubscribe. We had to delete and resubmit the podcast because things didn't show up the way we wanted them to.

General Introduction
- Response to questions from CWC: The Radio Show.
- How can Christian Humanism include both Erasmus and Aquinas?
- We refuse to comment on the relationship between faith and reason?
- Nathan begs Christian colleges to hire David and Michial.

Our First Encounters with Calvinism
- No polemics here.
- Southern Baptists and Calvinism.
- Calvinism as a solution to total depravity.
- A moratorium on Calvinist dating strategies.
- Personal questions and intellectual debates.
- How much Calvin have we read, anyway?
- What does Reformed mean in terms of Calvinism?
- Is Open Theism an option?

Calvin's Minimalism
- The Institutes as apology.
- Calvin as cherry-picker of the classics.
- Calvin's intellectual theology.
- Is there a place for visual art in Calvinism?

Calvin in Our Own Research

- Calvin as a giant of the 17th century.

- Reading Anglo-Saxon literature through Calvin.

- Calvinism and Christian existentialism.

Predestination

- Is it fair to bind Calvinism to predestination?

- Is predestination a comforting or horrible doctrine?

Calvin's Legacy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anselm. Monologion and Proslogion with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm. Trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.

Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: A Selection. Ed. Helmut Gollwitzer. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1994.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960.

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

Perkins, William. “Perkins’ Diagram of the Path to Salvation.” Religion and Society in Early Modern England. Ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell. New York: Routledge, 2005. 139-140.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “The Humanism of Existentialism.” Essays in Existentialism. Ed. Wade Baskin. New York: Citadel, 1993. 31-62.

The Jewish-Presbyterian World of the Coen Brothers

I don’t write much about movies on this blog—aside from my numerous Disney posts—mostly because I haven’t seen enough of them to have much of value to say. The exception to my general ignorance, however, are the films of the Coen Brothers. I’ve seen all of them except this year’s A Serious Man (which I’m dying to see and which I will probably use in my dissertation once I do), and I like them all, even The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty.

The complaint you frequently hear about the Coens is that their movies are all style and no substance. They’re not—critics must be thinking of the beautiful but vapid work of Tim Burton. The Coens’ work is ripe with profundity, even as it defies analysis; they’re fond of playing tricks on the audience, throwing out red herrings and, presumably, laughing as the bad analyses pour in. (A few examples: the claims that O Brother, Where Art Thou is based on The Odyssey and that Fargo is a true story, both of which they’ve later denied.)

No, the meaning of the Coen movies are hidden beneath the flash and glitter of the cinematography (always perfectly planned and perfectly executed), beneath the complicated dialogue that almost never fits the characters, beneath the layers of postmodern “clues” that lead nowhere as surely as a Thomas Pynchon novel. The meaning, furthermore, belongs as much to John Calvin as it does to the Coens’ secular Judaism, to the first point of his famous TULIP, total depravity.

Calvin, as is obvious to anyone who’s read him or anything about him, is no fan of humanity. God has implanted in each of us an inborn religious drive, but it is “either smothered or corrupted, partly by ignorance, partly by malice” (Institutes I.IV). Man is totally depraved, which, despite the occasional defenses of Calvinists, does indeed mean that every single part of every single human being is tainted and untrustworthy.

This is not an optimistic view, to understate the obvious, and it becomes even darker when one disregards the other four points of TULIP, which serve to lessen and mitigate it. The Coens are forced to disregard the other four points, of course, since they all (unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints) require an active and gracious God. The Coens’ God, best I can tell, is absent and/or cruel, in the tradition of the darker books of the Hebrew Bible, and so there’s no room for election or grace in their theology. (Apparently A Serious Man makes this even clearer; someone should buy me tickets to this movie.)

But they’re almost wholly on board with total depravity. Their dramas, in particular, all feature a force of unrelenting and unexplainable evil. No Country for Old Men’s psychotic serial killer, Anton Chigurh, is the most obvious example, even though he was created by Cormac McCarthy. But all the dramas feature a similarly evil character—think of Gaear Grimsrud in Fargo, or Julian Marty in Blood Simple—that is almost unstoppable by the other, more sympathetic, characters. The amazing thing about the Coens, however, is that these figures of evil never lose their humanity; they maintain the image of God, however perverted and corrupted by violence it may be.

Of the dramas, Barton Fink has the most sophisticated and interesting portrayal of evil. No character in the film is good—even its protagonist, whom we’re set up to like given his similarity to the Coens themselves and his name’s presence in the title, proves himself a patronizing and pompous fool. He’s a “friend of the common man,” as Pappy O’Daniel will be nine years later, but he’s completely blocked out the stories around him.

No, the most likeable character in the movie is John Goodman’s Charlie Meadows, a traveling insurance salesman who lives next door to Barton at the Hotel Earle. He’s a big, gregarious guy, a little stupid perhaps, but he has a good heart and is the “only person in Hollywood [Barton] can talk to.” Problem is, Barton doesn’t listen to him; when he finds out his new neighbor is a writer, Charlie repeatedly declares that “I could tell you some stories,” but before he has an opportunity to do so, Barton launches into rant after rant on the state of American drama, which should belong to people like Charlie instead of “the fifth earl of Bastrop and Lady Higginbottom and . . . Nigel Grinch-Gibbons.”

So the audience likes Charlie Meadows much more than it likes Barton Fink, and that’s why it comes as such a shock when [SPOILER ALERT] he turns out to be the notorious serial killer Karl “Madman” Mundt, who “likes to ventilate people with a shotgun and then cut their heads off.” He’s done just that, it turns out, to a woman with whom Barton has slept—and he’s somehow done it silently, as Barton slept next to her.

The obvious question, of course, is, How could Barton have slept through a murder committed six inches from him? The answers are suggestions rather than statements. The movie takes place in 1941, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor necessitated U.S. involvement in World War II and several years after Hitler’s death camps became known. So one possible answer comes in the form of another question (in the Jewish tradition): How could the United States, and in particular the Jewish liberals in Hollywood and on Broadway, have slept soundly while millions of people were being gassed?

That’s the political answer. The theological answer is that we’re not quite sure that Karl Mundt committed the murder. He seems genuinely shocked when Barton goes to him for help, after all, and he doesn’t seem to have a key to the room, nor could he move silently through it. Barton claims he didn’t kill his lover, but he could have done so unconsciously, in his sleep, which would certainly fit with the Coens’ dim view of humanity. Charlie gives Barton a head-sized box just before he skips town; we never find out if it contains Audrey’s head or not, but when Barton is asked at the end of the film if it is his, he can only reply, “I don’t know.” He finally recognizes depravity—not just around him in individuals or in social structures, but in himself.

Evil is less obvious in the comedies, perhaps, though it’s still there in the form of Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona or Sidney J. Mussburger in The Hudsucker Proxy. More often, however, the Coens show the darkness of human nature in their comedies by flat-out stupidity. The three convicts in O Brother, Where Art Thou have to be three of the dumbest people ever to be projected onto a movie screen, for example; and nearly everyone in The Big Lebowski is so stupid they’d be ejected from a public kindergarten (and probably were).

This is in keeping with Calvin’s view of total depravity, in which God’s presence in the world is blocked not only by evil but by human ignorance, or, as Calvin prefers to call it, stupidity. And this stupidity is exacerbated by vanity: “their stupidity is not excusable, since it is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting, joined with a false confidence” (Institutes I.IV.1). If there’s a better description of Ulysses Everett McGill, I don’t know what it is—he even uses his limited knowledge of history, science, and society, to declare that the age of religion has passed, even as God clearly saves him and his friends from execution. The hardened and ignorant human heart denies the presence of grace.

The Coens are not completely committed to total depravity, however, as a viewing of Fargo demonstrates. Frances McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen, plays small-town sheriff Marge Gunderson, whose politeness and kindness are very real (as opposed to every other aw-shucks Minnesotan in the movie) and whose detective abilities save the day. I spent the entire movie waiting for the very pregnant Gunderson to be savagely murdered, but it never happens; indeed, she performs the coda of the movie, the moral, a speech that demonstrates the way in which she accepts but can’t quite understand the depravity of those around her. (Fargo is to some extent Melville’s Billy Budd with a happy ending—Marge is as innocent as a lamb but as crafty as a serpent. She can recognize evil but refuses to participate, whereas Billy can scarcely believe it exists.)

This is in the end a very different vision of depravity than Calvin’s, in that it holds out the possibility of a human-based redemption or exemption from the big T in TULIP. (The Coens, who are getting bleaker as the years progress, may go back on it when they cast McDormand as the truly vain and vapid Linda Litzke in Burn After Reading, a comedy so black that it may be darker than No Country for Old Men.) They don’t hold out hope for a God who intervenes, at least not in benevolent ways, and so if there’s to be hope in this world, it must come in the form of genuinely “good people” like Marge Gunderson. Still, Calvin might approve their oeuvre with reservations. Out of the hundreds of characters in their fourteen movies, we’re given only one who is neither debased nor stupid—hardly a good sign for the human redemption of humankind.

Look Into My Heart, and You Will Sort of Understand

Shakespeare had good political reasons to set Macbeth in Scotland; he began writing the play in 1603, just as James VI of Scotland became James I of England. James was a Stuart, of course, and as Stephen Greenblatt helpfully explains in the footnotes to the Norton edition of Macbeth, Banquo, to whose descendants the weird sisters promise the throne, was mythologically the beginning of the Stuart line. So Macbeth, in a political reading, sounds a bit like the Aeneid, in that it exists to grant divine sanction to an earthly king.

But in the 17th century, Scotland was also the main hub of Presbyterianism in what would eventually be called Great Britain, and with that in mind, it’s hard not to pick up traces and hints of Calvinism in Macbeth, particularly in its intersection of divine providence, prayer, and human action and autonomy.

The events of the play are well-known—the weird sisters prophesy that Macbeth will be king of Scotland, and rather than wait for fate to make itself happen, Macbeth and his wife take matters into their own hands, slaughtering King Duncan and installing themselves in the castle. This works out well for awhile, until they are inevitably discovered and violently deposed.

It’s fundamentally a play about the depravity of man, a topic handled ad nauseam by Calvin in the Institutes:

Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath, then also brings forth in us those works with Scripture calls “the works of the flesh” . . . Those who have said that original sin is “concupiscence” have used an appropriate word, if only it be added—something that most will by no means concede—that whatever is in man, from the understanding to will, from the soul even to the flesh, has been defiled and crammed with this concupiscence. (II.i.8)

Humanity must follow God’s law, and yet we are utterly powerless to do so thanks to total depravity. Thus, to do the right thing and thus to please God, we must petition God for his instruction and aid. Calvin’s great 20th-century heir, Karl Barth, goes into further detail on the topic in his little book appropriately titled Prayer:

What is to be said, what is to be done, when we are confronted with the fact that no one obeys the law perfectly, whereas the law exacts perfect obedience, and when we do not perfectly fulfill it, we do not fulfill it at all? However, we are believers, that is, people who have the beginnings of faith . . . God says to me, “Put your trust in me, believe in me.” And I go forward, I believe; but while going forward, I say, “Come to the help of my unbelief.”

All of this is, predictably enough, bound up in the doctrine of providence. Calvin suggests that while God is in control of every action, we are nevertheless responsible for the wickedness we enact. (Here is where Calvin’s theology becomes very difficult to follow, and here is where Calvin says that we have to accept this intersection as a mystery, something beyond our understanding.) Thus, while the future is always already decided, God will also change it if we petition him to guide us. (As I said, this is a really tough doctrine to get your head around.)

It’s this paradox that’s at the heart of Macbeth. The weird sisters—the play’s thematic replacement for God—predict and perhaps control the future, and when Macbeth and Banquo are hailed as the king and the father of future kings, respectively, they’re almost immediately thrown into a battle with the big black heart at the center of their souls. We see this as early as the top of Act I, Scene 7, where we find Macbeth arguing with himself over the correct action:

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly. If th’assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success: that but this blow
Might be the be-all and end-all, here,
But here upon the bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. (I.vii.1-7)

His better angels may not want him to do the right thing for its own sake, but they at least recognize the threat of divine punishment inherent in wicked actions. (Calvin calls this a totally legitimate reason for seeking God in Institutes II.viii.4.) But his sin is a sin of omission long before it’s a sin of commission—never in the play does he seek God’s help or guidance, and further, instead of submitting to divine providence, he attempts to take control of it.

We see this clearly much later in the play, when he hires three murderers, a clear human perversion of the three witches who reveal his fate—and then again when he picks which parts of the sisters’ final prophecies to him to believe, choosing to believe that no man of woman born will be able to kill him but ignoring for all intents and purposes, their advice to fear Macduff.

Lady Macbeth, as the traditional readings say, is even worse, not because she urges Macbeth to kill Duncan (milk of human kindness aside, he was going to do that eventually anyway, since he’s incapable of doing the right thing without divine intervention and since he doesn’t bother to seek it), but because she has no inkling that there’s a right thing to do. She’s depraved to an extent that Macbeth is not because she no longer recognizes the law of God that’s written into the world. (She’s not alone, by the way—Calvin says that none of us is capable of correctly applying general revelation.) When the hound of heaven finally catches up with her in Act V, her depravity is more than she can bear, and instead of petitioning for forgiveness, she takes matters into her own hand in the most extreme way possible.

Banquo is our model of man’s proper attitude toward his depravity. He’s given a similar prophecy to Macbeth, one that suggests that he may be able to kill the new king and occupy the throne himself. And he, too, wrestles with the dark side of his own nature. The difference, however, is that he pleads for divine aid: “Merciful powers, / Restrain in me the curséd thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose” (II.i.7-9). Thus, while he’s murdered, he’s murdered as a righteous man, one who has relied on God to overcome his depravity and one who will ostensibly be rewarded in the afterlife, not for his action, but for his lack of action.

It’s for this reason that I find Macbeth to be fundamentally different in theme and tone from Shakespeare’s other tragedies, such as Hamlet and King Lear. This play, best I can tell, is one of his few plays where the bad guys genuinely get it in the end with a relative minimum of innocent death. Where God was capricious in Lear and, perhaps, nonexistent in Hamlet, here he seems to have a real sense of justice, answering prayers and punishing those who are too proud to offer them.

Know Thyself, Pt. 2

Part One

It's been awhile since my last post, so I apologize in advance for any discrepancies in tone or content.

As I mentioned last time, Reinhold Niebuhr suggests that the classical and biblical worldviews are necessarily distinct but brought together on the issue of man's contingency. Man is subject to the world around him; really this is to say that he is the object of the world around him, that things happen to him beyond his control and his understanding.

The Jewish tradition differs from the Greek, of course, in its monotheism, from which most of the other differences spring. Suddenly we are presented with a singular God, rather than the capricious and contradictory pantheon of the Greeks--and while there's an argument to made that the God of the Hebrews is capricious and bloodthirsty, He enters into a covenant relationship with Noah, then Abraham, then Isaac, then Jacob, and down through the line. He seeks a relationship with mankind, and if it comes primarily through the nation of Israel, there are at least glimpses in the Hebrew Bible that He wishes to extend it to humanity as a whole. (See, for example, the Book of Jonah, my favorite part of the Hebrew Bible, in which God reveals not only His sense of humor but His concern for those outside of the fold.)

But God's covenant with the Jews does not result in freedom from contingency. It may change man's place in the universe but it certainly does not change the fact that he has one and that it is inescapable. Man's place becomes less fragile but more defined:

"Come now, and let us reason together,"
Says the Lord.
"Though your sins are as scarlet,
They will be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They will be like wool.
If you consent and obey,
You will eat the best of the land;
But if you refuse and rebel,
You will be devoured by the sword." (Isaiah 1:18-20, NAS)

This is the message we get over and over again from the prophets: Do what God requires of you, and He will bless you; refuse to do so, and He will cripple you. There's little room in this for self-made morality or for choice as choice. If you submit, you will receive what is coming to you; if you don't--well, you'll also receive what's coming to you, although you may not like it. Either way, God sets the terms of the covenant and the penalties for breaking it.

Note that there is no theodicy in this covenant. God, as far as I can tell, does not promise understanding of the way He works. Nowhere is this more clear than the Book of Job, in which God makes a deal with the devil that he may destroy a righteous man's life. Job keeps his cool for thirty excruciating chapters, at the end of which he finally questions his lot in life. He is innocent, he claims; he has kept the Law of God; he has done what is right, even through the extreme trials he's suffered:

Have I not wept for the one whose life is hard?
Was not my soul grieved for the needy?
When I expected good, then evil came;
When I waited for light, then darkness came.
I am seething within, and cannot relax;
Days of affliction confront me . . .
Have I covered my transgressions like Adam,
By hiding my iniquity in my bosom,
Because I feared the great multitude,
And the contempt of families terrified me,
And kept silent and did not go out of doors?
Oh, that I had one to hear me!
Behold, here is my signature;
Let the Almighty answer me! (Job 30:25-27, 31:33-35)

This is not a harsh statement, exactly; Job does not curse God, as his wife tells him to. He merely asks questions, questions we've probably all asked at some point. But God doesn't explain. He gets angry (and sarcastic--I love it when God gets sarcastic):

Who is this that darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
Now gird up your loins like a man,
And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth!
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements, since you know?
Or who stretched the line on it? (38:2-5)

He continues in this vein for two entire chapters, until Job collapses under the weight of his own questions. The moral is clear here--man is what he is, and he can neither understand nor question God's decisions about the operation of the universe. He can only accept it.

The New Testament extends more or less logically from the Old, but it also has the advantage of showing up after Plato and Aristotle had already set the rules for philosophy. As such, St. Paul's admonitions to the Church sometimes read like a combination of Hebrew theology and Platonic philosophy. Nowhere is that more clear than in 1 Corinthians. (I shamefully admit that I shamelessly stole this analysis from Nathan Gilmour, great or otherwise.):

Now you are Christ's body, and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, various kinds of tongues. All are not apostles, are they? All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they? All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? But earnestly desire the greater gifts. (1 Corinthians 12:27-31)

The echoes of The Republic should be clear--each has his place in life and in the life of the Church, and one must act within one's place. (Paul leaves open a desire for greater gifts but leaves it at desire--you can't make those happen; they must come from God, if they come at all.) Further, that your station depends on gifts rather than merit suggests there's not a whole lot you can do about it. You are what you are, and you have to operate as such.

Christian theologians through the years have softened these hard truths, for better or for worse. This post is already getting long, so I'm not going to go through a lot of them, but I do want to address John Calvin's view on contingency, both because I'm a Presbyterian and because I'm reading through The Institutes right now. Calvin expands and explicates the Book of Job on understanding God. Calvin's God is more understandable than Job's, it is true, but the end result is essentially the same:

Our knowledge should serve first to teach us fear and reverence; secondly, with it as our guide and teacher, we should learn to seek every good from him, and, having received it, to credit it to his account. For how can the thought of God penetrate your mind without your realizing immediately that, since you are his handiwork, you have been made over and bound to his command by right of creation, that you owe your life to him?--that whatever you undertake, whatever you do, ought to be ascribed to him? (Institutes I.ii.2).

Calvin thus collapses knowledge about God into submission to Him; in the end, knowledge and submission become the same thing, since knowledge without submission gets corrupted due to human stupidity--which "is caused not only by vain curiosity but by an inordinate desire to know more than is fitting" (I.iv.1). True knowledge, true wisdom, and true submission are thus all the same thing, all bound up in what Calvin calls piety. To know anything requires a recognition of one's place in the universe and a submission to it.

Next time: Where it all went wrong, at least in America.