Calvin for the World

The faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary invited me to write a reflection on the 75th anniversary of H. R, Niebuhr's lectures at Austin Seminary (1949) which were published as the landmark book Christ and Culture (1951). Given the proximity to the publication of my book on the theology of John Calvin, Calvin for the World: The Enduring Relevance of His Political, Social, and Economic Theology (Baker Academic, 2024), I wrote a reflection on Niebuhr's use of Calvin as a model for the "Christ Transforming Culture" paradigm.

The article was published in the most recent issue of Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary (Spring 2004), and can be read here: 
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issuu.com/austinseminary/docs/insights_summer_2024_christ_and_culture_final_sing

Also in anticipation of the book launch on August 27, 2024, I was interviewed by Jillian Timberlake of Common Good magazine, and that conversation was published in Issue 16 (July 26, 2024). Those comments can be read here:

commongoodmag.com/from-the-mind-of-calvin/

In twenty years of teaching at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic university in the midwestern United States, I have used John Calvin’s Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1550) in my Theological Foundations class, a required course for all undergraduate students, and I have always been surprised by how students relate to and interact with this devotional classic. From the Muslim student who appreciated Calvin’s understanding of piety as humble submission to the will of God, to the Catholic seminarian who found himself closer to Calvin’s understanding of the Lord’s Supper than to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, to the community organizer who admired Calvin’s social ethics in creating a social welfare network in sixteenth-century Geneva, the theology of John Calvin continues to resonate because it meets people where they live.

Yet the verdict of history continues to weigh the scales contra Calvin, always pointing accusingly to his role in the execution of Michael Servetus and his defense of double predestination (which Calvin called that “dreadful decree”) in an attempt to cancel him. Karl Barth, who would have found life in Calvin’s Geneva personally restrictive and suffocating, nevertheless challenges modern Christians to continue to plumb the richness of Calvin’s thought: “In Calvin studies we cannot keep Calvin to what he once said as though he had nothing more or new to say today! His work did not simply occur then; it still occurs today. In what he once said he still speaks, saying what he wanted to say. We may not speak merely of Calvin’s historical impact; Calvin himself has an ongoing history into which we insert ourselves when we deal with him, in which we have a part to his honor or dishonor and to our own good or ill.”

Does my book overcome all objections? Hardly. Have I made the case that Calvin is worth reading in 2024 and beyond? I hope so. Because, like so many others, I find myself in deep waters with Calvin, and while I do little more than tread water, I am not afraid of drowning because I have the assurance of faith that in the end my own abilities have little impact on the outcome.