Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 8, 2009

John Calvin turned 500 this year. This October, I have five articles to write for the paper, which works out to one per century in honor of Calvin’s legacy. I trust this sounds as reasonable to you as it does to me.

Last week, we examined the claim that Calvin had Servetus burned in Geneva. This week, I want to take you into the beginning pages of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. The first sentence is well-known: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess…consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”

In order to possess wisdom, one must know God and know oneself. The two are intertwined. The more we know God, the better we know ourselves. The more we know ourselves, the better we know God. Unfortunately, our world is adept at inventing ways to eliminate God from the equation of true knowledge.

The problem however is that when one tries to understand life apart from God, that person lives a life of fiction. It may seem real, but it is an illusion that leads ultimately to despair. If God is the creator, and if we are made in his image, then life can only make sense in relation to him.

In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling is on a search for meaning. He talks about his vertical search, his search to understand God. After reading a chemistry book, he felt that there was no longer any need to consider God’s hand in the world. The natural world explained itself.

“The only difficulty,” Binx concluded, “was that though the universe had been disposed of, I myself was left over. There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next.” With knowledge of God no longer certain or necessary, one is hard pressed to explain why he should take another breath. Life is leftover and empty.

This emptiness manifests itself continually in our world. People shop to forge new identities. We divert ourselves from the despair within through leisure and entertainment. As Binx Bolling put it, “Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.” Devoid of meaning, we take our wandering seriously indeed.

If we seek to know ourselves apart from knowing God, we are left with a false view of ourselves. We’re looking in a mirror but seeing a cartoon staring back at us. There is a reason why we feel despair and unhappiness. It’s residual knowledge of who we were really meant to be by the grace of God. Calvin helps us see this truth even today.

Ada Herald - Pastor's Pen Article October 1 2009

Understanding the beliefs of Christian denominations is sort of like following a family tree. Differing beliefs and practices often trace back to key individuals who shaped the church in dramatic ways. Lutherans have their Luther. Methodists have their Wesley. Mennonites have their Menno Simmons. Catholics have their Aquinas, and Presbyterians have their John Calvin.

For some reason, Presbyterians find ourselves defending John Calvin from attack far more often than our friends in other denominations are called upon to defend their own spiritual ancestors. Calvin was much maligned in his own lifetime, and the standards of biographical writing in Calvin’s day, being much different from our own, have allowed myths about Calvin to stick in the Western mind.

Given that this year is the 500^th birthday of Calvin (July 10, 1509 – May 27, 1564), perhaps it’s time to clear the air. One persistent misrepresentation of Calvin is that he had Michael Servetus burned at the stake in Geneva. A closer look at the episode reveals that although Servetus was burned in Geneva, he most likely would have been burned in any number of cities at the time.

In 1530, Servetus published a book titled On the Errors of the Trinity. In it, he said that the Triune God was a three-headed dog and an invention of the devil. In the 16^th century, this was heresy in anybody’s book. The Emperor Charles V set down a law that anyone who denied the Trinity was punishable by death. Servetus wasn’t just attacking the church. He was attacking the state and the Empire.

He was tried by the Catholic Church and sentenced to die by burning. Had he not escaped, others would have put him to death, but he ended up in Geneva. Servetus was arrested by the City Council after Calvin reported seeing him in the church were Calvin preached.

Calvin went to Servetus in his time of imprisonment and tried to convince him to recant. He argued for a less painful death sentence than the one imposed by the Council but to no avail. Servetus was burned, and as one biographer put it, “the smell of smoke has clung to Calvin’s clothes for centuries.”

Considering the many mitigating factors surrounding Calvin’s involvement, one would be wise to resist the knee-jerk reaction, “Servetus!” upon hearing Calvin’s name mentioned in polite conversation. Instead, it would be wise to consider Calvin’s contributions to the larger church and world. “To omit Calvin from the forces of Western evolution,” as the English scholar Lord John Morley put it, “is to read history with one eye shut.”

Just as Bad in Geneva

I recently finished a new biography of John Calvin, titled John Calvin: A Pilgrim's Life. I was strangely encouraged by Calvin's complaints in Geneva about people's attitudes towards the service of worship. During the administration of the sacrament of baptism, people would be in the back of the church discussing business or walking around. I don't feel so bad now when people get up in the middle of a sermon and wander around or when the kids drop the pencils on the hardwood floor and they roll all the way to the front of the sanctuary. Even Calvin had to put up with distractions and people distracted from the service of worship. And that was before TV and texting....

In Praise of Churches

I finished Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck's new book, "Why We Love the Church," this afternoon. It's written primarily to those who are quitting church in favor of more informal meetings--gathering with a few Christian friends at Starbucks or on the Golf Course. It's a good read overall.

The authors quote J.C. Ryle on the need to take the church more seriously on page 101:

"Let me warn all careless members of churches to beware lest they trifle their souls into hell. You live on year after year as if there was no battle to be fought with sin, the world, and the devil. You pass through life a smiling, laughing, gentlemanlike or ladylike person, and behave as if there was no devil, no heaven, and no hell. Oh careless, churchman, or careless dissenter, careless Episcopalian, careless Presbyterian, careless Independent, careless Baptist, awake to see eternal realities in their true light! Awake and put on the armor of God! Awake and fight hard for life! Tremble, tremble and repent!"

Then the authors make their own point by way of follow-up:

"Church isn't boring because we're not showing enough film clips, or because we play the organ instead of the guitar. It's boring because we neuter it of its importance." (pg. 102)

In other words, the problem with church, for many people, doesn't actually reside with the church institution; rather it's a problem with their own perception of the church's value in God's plan to redeem us. If they understood its importance, nothing about it would be boring.

Spurgeon Sabbatical Part 2

It's now Saturday night, and we've had a full five days of class work and reflection. We finished up Romans chapter 2 this morning. One of the more interesting issues raised in our study is the doctrine of imputation of Christ's righteousness and what that means. This is a pretty hot topic in certain quarters of Christendom these days. If you'd like to read more about it, you could click here for an overview.

The conversation with fellow pastors continues to be really good. It's been good to see that the "problems" we face aren't all that unusual. I'm also encouraged by the caliber of pastor's here--it's hopeful for the church.

We had some time off tonight and more tomorrow. I ate over at Woodmans in Essex this evening, which is one of the area's best for seafood. I had a plate of fried sea scallops with fries and onion rings. You just can't find places like this in Hardin County!

Spurgeon Sabbatical

I arrived in Boston on Monday to attend the Spurgeon Sabbatical at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (my alma mater). It's Thursday, so I'm at the start of the third full day. We're meeting for worship each morning at 8:45 and then moving into a study of Romans from about 9:30 - noon. So far we've covered about the first 7 verses.

We're working through a lot of the material in Greek and it's been really invigorating and exciting to study at this level again. It's about 30 hours of content altogether, so it's like a full seminary course (but without the grading and papers!).

So far one of the more interesting issues has been how to understand the phrase "obedience of faith" in vs. 5. The theme of obedience creeps up in Romans more than you'd think at first glance. We've been talking a lot about how obedience is an organic expression of our faith.

After class, we meet for lunch and a pastor will take a turn sharing some of his life story and then we pray for him. We have time off in the afternoons then reconvene around 5:30 for dinner followed by more pastoral reflections about issues in our churches. Then we conclude with worship in the evening by about 9:30.

I made it over to Manchester, MA yesterday afternoon, which was where Deb and I lived when we were here. Took a walk on singing beach, which is a great little place to see the ocean here.

The weather however has been typical New England stuff. I haven't seen the sun yet. It's been foggy, drizzly, and cool since I got here. Yesterday, the car was telling me the temperature was 59 as I was driving around.

Is Teen Rebellion Inevitable?

I recently watched the movie Astronaut Farmer staring Billy Bob Thorton.



Thorton plays an eccentric farmer who builds a rocket in his barn on his rural farm and dreams of flying into space. He has a family, and the amazing thing about the movie is the way his family supports him in his craziness. He has a teenage son who worships him. In nearly every other "family" movie I watch, the teenage children hate their parents or are embarrassed by them. Here, when the father pulls his children out of school to help with the project, they support their dad and want to be part of what he's doing.

The most memorable line in the movie comes from his father-in-law, who complains that when he was growing up, he could barely get his family to eat together, but he (Thorton) has his family dreaming together. The movie has one or two sexual references that may not be appropriate for younger children (but they'd probably go over their heads). It's definitely one of the more pro-family movies I've seen out of Hollywood.

There is a sense, even among Christians, that children will naturally rebel and dislike their parents. It doesn't have to be that way. In fact, the whole teenage experience is a recent social creation. See Mardi Keyes excellent article for more on this point.