§1 Approaching Galatians (session 3, part 1)—Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: A Presbyterian Adult Spiritual Formation Series
[The
series continues and now commences the third in-person session. Find
the last post here.]
McMaken: Welcome back, everyone. You may recall that we’re talking
about the history of interpretation. We talked last time about some 2nd century
stuff, with texts that seem to have come out of the Jewish Jesus-following
community, as well as Marcion and his problematic ideas. Then, we skipped ahead
and talked a lot about Luther—which of course, for us as Protestants, is a kind
of theological baseline for how we’ve been taught to think about salvation and
our relationship to God. Today, let’s shift focus and talk about Calvin a
little bit.
c.
John Calvin
Many of you know how much I love
talking about Calvin. Calvin is one of the folks that I always read when I’m trying
to interpret the Bible. He’s a very insightful biblical interpreter because he
was a very highly trained humanist. He understands rhetoric, so he can figure
out not only what the text is trying to say in a logical sense, like
making arguments and things like that, but also what the text is trying to do
to you—how it’s trying to convince you and shape you, your thoughts and your
feelings. Calvin reads scripture at that level.
I remember
how when I was in the first year of being a graduate student, I was working on
one particular interpretive project. There's a passage in the Gospel of
Mark—Mark 12:34—where Jesus is talking to a scribe. The scribe asks Jesus,
“Which commandment is the first of all?” (v. 28). Jesus answers, and the scribe
says that it’s a good answer. Then Jesus says to the scribe: “You are not far
from the kingdom of God.” When I looked at commentaries on this verse, interpreters
argued on and on trying to figure out whether that meant this scribe was
“saved,” or what Jesus meant by saying this. But then I read Calvin. Calvin says
that Jesus was trying to encourage the scribe, as opposed to making some claim
about his eternal mailing address. It takes Calvin, Calvin the humanist, to see
what Jesus is actually doing in that conversation with that particular human
being. Ever since then, I’ve been committed to reading Calvin whenever I’m
interpreting the Bible because he helps me see things like that.
Calvin
published his Galatians commentary in 1548. Luther's Galatians commentary was published
in 1535, so we’re jumping forward 13 years for Calvin’s. He first wrote his
first commentary on Romans in 1540. Then he moved on to 1st and 2nd
Corinthians, which he finished in 1546. Then he went to Galatians. Does anyone
know what order is Calvin was following?
Participant: I’m guessing the order that churches were established.
McMaken: Good thought. And I’d have to check to be sure. But
there’s a simpler explanation.
Participant: Is that the order they appeared in the cannon?
McMaken: Exactly He’s following the order of books in the New
Testament. You go through the Gospels, Acts, Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians,
Galatians, and on from there. Calvin is just working through the canonical
order, but he starts with Romans. Do you have any guesses as to why, based on
what we talked about last week? I'm testing recall. This is an important pedagogical
technique where you remind students of key information so that they remember it
better moving forward.
Participant: Because that’s how Paul expanded on Romans and Galatians?
McMaken: That’s a great thought and it is definitely something we
talked about last week. It’s not the exact answer, though.
Participant: Is it because Romans is talking about non-Jewish Jesus followers?
McMaken: That’s another great thought that ties into what we talked
about last week, but not the answer.
Participant: It’s the first book since the Gospels?
McMaken: Well, that would fit with
the canonical order, so that does make sense. But, even more specifically, it’s
because Luther did a commentary on Romans when he had his reformation
breakthrough. Think back to our discussion about Luther, and that he was
working on his commentary on Romans in 1515–16 leading up to his writing of the
95 Theses in 1517. So, Luther developed what gets called his reformation
breakthrough, his insight that leads to the whole thing, while interpreting
Romans. He actually cribs this insight from Augustine. And he actually cites
Augustine, so Luther knew where he got it and gives Augustine credit. But it
came while he was studying Romans.
As a result,
for Protestants, the way that you established yourself as a top-notch thinker was
to do a commentary on Romans—to show that you could hack it. In the medieval
universities, folks had to write a commentary on the Sentences by Peter
Lombard in order to become doctors of theology. The Protestant version of this
became writing a commentary on Romans. So Calvin writes a commentary on Romans.
Then he keeps going with his commentaries, working through them in the canonical
order. He works all the way through the epistles by 1551, and then he does what
we call a “harmony” of the Gospels. He takes all four Gospels and tries to put
them into a single chronological order, a single coherent narrative, moving
things around to try and make it all fit. He tells and interprets that story,
as a whole, finishing up in 1555. Then he goes to the Old Testament and starts
working his way through that. As a result, Calvin gave us commentaries on the
majority of the Bible; over 40 of the 66 books and pretty much all the New
Testament except for the Book of Revelation.
Participant: That would have been helpful.
McMaken: Yes, it would have been. But I don’t think Calvin cared
for it very much. He’s not an apocalyptic thinker, at all. If you were to ever
visit my office, you’d see a shelf and then three quarters of another shelf
that are just his commentaries.
Participant: Field trip!
McMaken: Yeah, field trip! That would be fun.
Interpreting
scripture was one of the main things that Calvin did in his work, considered as
a whole. He preached a lot and he gave us all these commentaries. His
day-to-day work varied over time depending on which decade he was in. The 1530s
looked one way, the 1540s looked another way, and so on. One historical
snapshot of his work on the commentaries says that, at the height of his
expository work in the 1550s when he was working on the Old Testament
commentaries, he lectured three times a week for 1 hour each time.[1]
Us professor types know that this is roughly equivalent to a three-credit
course. But he had only about half an hour to prepare for each of those
sessions. I can do this if I’ve taught the class two or three times, but not if
it’s brand-new material—which it was for Calvin. He’s just plowing forward
through his interpretation with half an hour to prepare. He would arrive at the
lecture hall, stand at the lectern, and begin by reading the text in the
original language. Then he translated it on the fly into Latin. Naturally.
Then, he does the rest of the lecture extraneously, without substantial notes.
Participant: In what language?
McMaken: Great question. I don't
know for sure, but my bet would be that he delivered his lectures in Latin. It
could have been French, but I think he would have had to use Latin because he
had people from a lot of different native languages in Geneva to learn from
him—especially in the 1550s—and Latin was still the scholarly language.
Participant: That makes sense.
McMaken: So there’s Calvin just
going at the task of biblical interpretation in these lectures. He’s going in,
he’s translating, and giving us these commentaries, all while also writing
other things, preaching 20 times a month, and carrying out various duties for
the government. He was a fully trained lawyer, so the Genevan government used
him for a lot of legal things. They had him reviewing contracts, treaties, participating
in negotiations. Calvin also spearheaded continuing education for the other
ministers in Geneva. His biblical interpretation lectures—his commentaries—were
part of that, but he was doing other things such as a session they had every
Friday called The Congregation. All the pastors in Geneva would gather and one
of them would preach on a topic. Then, they would all discuss the subject—kind
of like a discussion group or book club gathered around a text only, in this
case, the “text” is a sermon they just heard.
Calvin also
participated in the Consistory, which was the church discipline group. This was
a group of pastors and other elders who dealt with church discipline issues,
such as people engaging in superstitions or in immoral behavior. For instance,
one of my favorite stories of the Consistory is of when a guy picked up a woman
in a tavern and made promises to her, whispered sweet nothings in her ear, and
so on to the point where she believed they were engaged. The woman then allowed
this man to, let us say, take certain liberties. But it then become clear that
the man had no intention of following through on the engagement. So, they
hauled this guy in front of the Consistory. Usually,
the Consistory would first try to ascertain the facts of the case, and then one
of the members would “remonstrate” with the person they held responsible for
whatever the issue was. This means they would basically give them a tongue
lashing to motivate them to improve. They could also prescribe things, like
making them go to class to learn their catechism, or work with a pastor to
learn the Lord’s Prayer in their native language, and so on. In any case, when
he was present and not called away on some government business, Calvin usually
did the remonstrating.
Participant: He’s one of those.
McMaken: Oh, yes, he definitely was. And Calvin also kept up an
extensive correspondence with folks across Europe. He’s doing all kinds of
stuff and that’s why, when it came to getting to his biblical interpretation
lectures, he basically just gets in the lectern and goes. It’s incredibly
impressive.
Another
point I want to touch on is the relationship between Calvin’s commentaries and
his Institutes of the Christian Religion.[2]
We’re all Presbyterians here, or at least Presbyterian-adjacent. The Institutes
is Calvin’s theology book. He first publishes it in 1536 and, if you ever read
the preface, he refers to it as a handbook. But if you go look for a copy
today, you’ll see it comes in two volumes and is about 1800 pages long. That’s
much too big to be a “handbook”! But Calvin wrote that preface for the 1st
edition, and it really was a handbook at that time. I think there’s one copy of
the 1st edition in the Western hemisphere, and it lived in the special
collections of Princeton Theological Seminary’s library. I used to work there
and so I’ve held it in my hands, and I can confirm that it’s the size of a
handbook. You could stick it in a suit jacket pocket. It isn’t very big when it
begins, but the Institutes grows and expands.
Calvin
revises the Institutes every few years. It lives primarily in Latin but
he also issues a number of French translations that he does himself. And each
time he works it over, he also adds more material. A lot of that material comes
from or is connected to things he’s working through in his commentaries. When we
see biblical references in the Institutes, we’re tempted to think: “Oh,
he’s proof-texting. He’s telling me what Bible verses support what he’s
saying.” Yes, that’s true to some extent. But Calvin is also telling you to go
read that section of his commentaries, because that will give you a fuller
discussion or some more detailed explanation. He viewed his commentaries and
the Institutes as working hand in hand.
In the Institutes,
Calvin gives you all the tools he thinks you need to be able to go read
Scripture: all the theological and conceptual tools. Then, when he’s working on
his commentaries, he doesn’t have to get distracted by all that. He can focus
on just trying to help you interpret the tex. He’s trying not to weigh that
interpretation down with a bunch of extensive theological conversations. Why?
Because people like Luther do that, and it takes forever to get through their
commentaries. Calvin’s trying to write much more concisely with a focus on the
interpretive bit. He sets the goal for himself in the preface of his Romans
commentary: he wants his commentaries to be characterized by “lucid brevity”—clear
and short.[3]
And they are, especially compared to Luther. Calvin’s commentaries can be clear
and short because his theology is in another book. He doesn’t feel the need to
rehash theological topics every time they come up in a passage. He can cross
reference back and forth between the commentaries and the Institutes. That’s
a neat feature of how he structured things.
What
does Calvin think the book of Galatians is about? Luther was focused on the
salvation issue and, as we saw, the different types of righteousness—active
righteousness and passive righteousness. There were three sub-sets of passive righteousness:
political, ceremonial, and legal. The active righteousness is the righteousness
of faith. That’s the main lens that Luther is bringing to it. Calvin has read
Luther. He knows that lens is out there, and he doesn’t disagree with the basic
picture of salvation that Luther paints. But Calvin highlights some different
things in the way that he talks about Galatians.
For Calvin,
the thing that really floats to the surface is the idea of observing
ceremonies. Calvin says this of the teachers that Paul is arguing with: “They
taught that the observation of ceremonies was still necessary” (p. 14).[4]
We see some supercessionism coming in here with the idea that Judaism observed
ceremonies but Christianity doesn’t have to now. Calvin certainly thinks within
that broad supercessionist pattern. The Reformed tradition is generally better
than other Protestant traditions at taking the Hebrew Scriptures or Old
Testament into account and including it in their theology, preaching, and so
on. But our tradition still saw the basic picture as Israel going along, then
they fall out, and Gentile Christianity gets plugged into the gap, and the
story continues on. That replacement idea is still very much there. But, in
Reformed Christianity, you see all of Christian scriptures and God’s history
with God’s people as a whole much more so than with the sharp distinctions that
Luther tends to draw.
The way that
the Reformed tradition looks at this whole is by tracking the development of different
“covenants” that God makes with God’s people. There’s one covenant with Noah,
one with Abraham, one with Moses, one with David, and a new covenant with Jesus,
and there are more besides those depending on which theologian you read. But
the story is all tied together in this way and has a certain overall coherence,
even though you can also distinguish between how the relationship between God
and God’s people worked under each covenant. We can think about this like a
country that moves through different constitutions. We’ve only ever had one constitution
in the United states, but France—for example—had, I think, four constitutions
in the 20th century and more if you go further back. Changing constitutions
means restructuring the laws and how things operate. This “covenant” frameworks
says that it’s a similar kind of thing in that God’s relationship with God’s
people gets restructured from time to time.
Calvin’s
complaint about Paul’s opponents in Galatians is that they taught the
observation of ceremonies was still necessary. For Calvin, this loses the focus
on justification by faith. He calls justification “a fundamental article of the
Christian faith” (p. 14). If you don’t have a proper understanding of justification
by faith, you don’t really have Christian faith or true Christianity. Calvin
made the same point in his commentary on Galatians: “if the doctrine of
justification is lost, the whole of Christian doctrine is lost” (p. 9). Calvin
and Luther are singing from the same hymnal on this. But then Calvin highlights
Paul’s rhetoric. We talked about it being a dynamic letter, even a volatile
letter. Calvin says that it’s fitting that Paul should speak harshly because
the Galatians are erring “by lightness and folly” (p. 15), by not taking things
seriously enough. Paul is picking them up and shaking them rhetorically, saying:
“Y’all need to pay attention and take this more seriously.” The reason it has
to be taken so seriously is because, if you lose this piece, you lose
everything. Calvin’s Reformation commitments shine through clearly in this
interpretation.
This was
also one of Calvin’s pressing concerns. He constantly criticized people he
called “Nicodemites” after the biblical character of Nicodemus. These are
people who thought Protestantism was correct, but who still pretended to follow
Rome and even outwardly participated in church services that were not
Protestant because they feared persecution or couldn’t bring themselves to go
into exile and find a place to live among other Protestants. Calvin thought that
these Nicodemites weren’t taking things seriously enough.
Calvin
says Paul emphasizes his credentials as an apostle. Those of you who sat down
and read it through in one go, which is most of us, will recall where he did
that. We’ll talk about it more when we get to the text. But Calvin says that
this emphasis is not about Paul. Paul is not emphasizing his credentials
because his credentials are somehow the point. It isn’t about him personally. Calvin
says: “in the person of Paul, the truth of the Gospel was assailed” (p. 16). By
undermining Paul, these other teachers are undermining the Gospel. The false
teachers emphasize their connection with other apostles, but they don’t
recognize Paul’s authority and therefore they argue that they don’t have to recognize
the authority of Paul’s teachings. Calvin’s point is that it may seem like Paul
is talking about himself, but it’s really all about Paul’s teaching of the
Gospel or the message that Paul proclaimed to the Galatians.
When Calvin
is interpreting this text in the 1540s, he is very much caught up in political
struggles within Geneva. He’s not from Geneva. He’s French, and Geneva is in
Switzerland. There are lots of refugees from France, who are Protestant but can’t
practice in France due to persecution, who are coming to Geneva because Calvin
is there. The locals who were born and raised in Geneva, and to leadership
roles and “nobility” in Geneva, aren’t necessarily happy to have all these
refugees and foreigners flooding the city. We’re talking about substantial
demographic shifts. Tension develops between the natives and the immigrants,
and Calvin becomes a lightning rod for this tension. Many negative things get
said about Calvin and other pastors in Geneva, who are also not native-born
Genevans, and that becomes part of the kind of political fighting. In that
context, Calvin argues that the question isn’t about respecting him and the
other pastors as people, but about respecting the office because they’re
preaching the gospel. The pastors are also government employees, so if you
don’t respect them pastors then you disrespect the government. This is the
context that Calvin brings to his interpretation of Galatians. He says that it
isn’t about Paul, but the Galatians need to respect him to respect his message.
Even if Paul is talking about himself, it isn’t about him. It’s about the
fundamental core of Christian faith that will be lost if you must continue
observing ceremonies. Consequently, they aren’t “assailing” Paul; they’re
assailing the gospel.
Speaking
of the observation of ceremonies, it is important to know that Calvin is
probably the major thinker of his time who sees most clearly that customs are
contingent. The customs and culture of any particular people in any particular
time and place are not absolute or necessary. They could all be very different.
This is Calvin’s humanism shining through. He understands history and
historical development and how things change over time. He has a broad enough
perspective to know that the way things are done in one place—say, in his home
of Picardy, a province of France—are going to be different than how they happen
in Asia Minor. And there’s nothing wrong with that. This is what it means to
say that customs and cultures are contingent. Calvin’s interpretation is that
the Galatians are being foolish: they are not being serious about important
things, and they are in danger of losing sight of justification by faith. The
problem with the false teachers is that they are being “peevish,” in the sense
of taking unimportant things too seriously.
Calvin has
some different people in mind here. He’s thinking about his Catholic opponents
who have all the specific ceremonies that they want everybody to do, and other
teachings that Calvin doesn’t find in scripture. He thinks they’re taking
unimportant things too seriously. But there are other Protestants in his mind
as well. Nearby Geneva, there was an even larger city called Berne. Geneva wasn’t
big enough to really defend itself militarily, especially because it was right
next to a principality within France that was governed by a Catholic Bishop. At
any moment, that bishop could launch an army and it would be at Geneva’s walls
by the afternoon. Geneva is in this little arm of Switzerland that sticks out
into France. They’re very close to the border, and they didn’t have enough
power to be deterrents to invasion all by themselves. So they needed this
political alliance with Berne, the next big Protestant city over, to let people
know that if they marched against Geneva, Berne was going to be marching over
as well and it would be a thing. Calvin was often involved in the treaty
negotiations between Geneva and Berne because the Bernese wanted Geneva to
adopt all their church policies as part of the deal. Calvin argued that Berne
can do church how they want, but that Geneva should get to do that as well—because
custom is contingent.
Here's a
longer quote from Calvin:
“This peevish
manner becomes highly pernicious, when the custom of a single church is
attempted to be enforced as a universal law. We are sometimes so devoted to an
instructor or a place, that, without exercising any judgment of our own, we
make the opinion of one man the standard for all men, and the customs of one
place the standard for every other place. Such attachment is ridiculous” (p. 17).
This quote makes me laugh
considering how some more conservative Presbyterian and Reformed types treat Calvin.
Some of these folks want to do everything exactly the way that Calvin did it,
or the way they did it with the Westminster confession nearly 400 years ago, or
the way they did it in the 1950s. For his part, Calvin thinks you have to
exercise judgment. You can’t just take things from other times and places without
thinking about how it fits and works in your time and place. For Calvin, church
order, the way you set up the functions of your church, the way you set up your
church services, etc.—all of this is contingent. It can look different; it
doesn’t always and everywhere have to be the same. Calvin also makes a
theological distinction between what he considers theologically essential and
theologically nonessential. The word for nonessential theological things is adiaphora.
There’s one point in the Institutes where Calvin lists what he considers
theologically essential, and that list boils down to basically the doctrine of
the Trinity and justification by grace through faith.[5]
Everything else you can argue about. Now, Calvin will argue with the best of
them that he’s right on any given theological point, but he doesn't think that
you stop being Christian for disagreeing with him. You can be wrong and still
be a Christian.
So, Calvin
has this distinction between essential things and nonessential thing (adiaphora),
and he’s very well aware that things don’t have to be exactly the same in every
time and place. That’s one important reason why we in the Reformed tradition don’t
have one authoritative confession of faith. In our own Presbyterian Church USA,
for example, we have a whole Book of Confessions from different times and
places.[6]
The confessions in this book are snapshots to help guide us, shape our
thinking, and inform us. But we don’t have to adhere to just one of them all
the time. We can also come up with new ones, if we think we need a new one. And
we did that a few year back when we added the Belhar Confession.
This idea that
culture and custom is contingent is not just a marginal thought for Calvin. It’s
deeply built into how he thinks as a whole, and that includes how he thinks
about ethics and justice. Calvin says, “When custom is forthwith converted into
a law, injustice is perpetrated” (p. 18). We see this often in our own day. One
example that you might have noticed if you have been following the news comes
from our own state of Missouri, which recently updated its rule to institute a
stricter dress code on women lawmakers.[7]
It sounds to me like a particular set of customs about gender norms has been
transformed into something like a law, at least in that context.
Participant (frustrated over this rule change): Don’t get me started on
all that...
McMaken: Also, think about dress codes in the missionary context
over the past few centuries. Christian missionaries from the West go out to the
various non-Western peoples around the world and see that they dress very
differently. Maybe neither the women nor the men wear tops, and they certainly
don’t wear linen trousers and shirts. Oh, the scandal! So you’ve got to change
that. Soon, anybody associated with the Christian mission is dressing like they’re
a Western European because anything else must be immoral. Here are more contingent
customs translated into laws.
As if that
isn’t bad enough, the last quote I read from Calvin continues:
“When
a custom is forthwith converted into a law, injustice is perpetrated. But a
more serious evil was involved in the wicked and dangerous doctrine, which held
consciences to be bound to them by religious considerations, which made
justification to depend on the observation of them” (p. 18).
Calvin is thinking about the law not
just in a civil sense, even though he thinks translating customs into civil law
is an injustice. But it is even worse when you tell people that they can’t be
saved unless they observe this ceremony or align with that custom. Then the
problem is even more serious and wicked because you shouldn’t try to ‘bind’
consciences like that. And that’s the language Calvin, Luther, and the whole
tradition will use to talk about when you try to put a spiritual or religious
burden on somebody that God doesn’t put on them. You’re binding their
conscience, and that’s the worst thing you can do. On Calvin’s reading, that’s one
of the most important themes in Galatians.
[This is an edited transcript from
an adult spiritual formation group that met at St. Charles
Presbyterian Church in St. Charles, Missouri. It was transcribed and edited with the help of a student
worker at Lindenwood University who wishes to remain anonymous, but who was also a big
help. Click here to find an index of the full series.]
[1] For an entry point into this
biographical information, see Willem van 't Spijker, Calvin: A Brief Guide to His Life and Thought
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 110; see also my blog post
here: https://derevth.blogspot.com/2017/11/reckoning-with-john-calvins-brain.html
[2] John
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Library of Christian Classics, 2 volumes, edited by John T.
McNeill, translated by Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1960).
[3] John
Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, translated
and edited by John Owen (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library).
[4] John Calvin,
“Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians,” in Commentaries
on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, William Pringle,
trans. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003).
[5] Calvin,
Institutes, 4.1.12: “For not all the articles of true doctrine are
of the same sort. Some are so necessary to know that they should be certain and
unquestioned by all men as the proper principles of religion. Such are: God is
one; Christ is God and the Son of God; our salvation rests in God's mercy; and
the like. Among the churches there are other articles of doctrine disputed which
still do not break the unity of faith.”
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