By sheer providential goodness, I've gotten a job as a sort of editorial apprentice in my school's academic press. The job is turning out to be even better than I had expected, and when you are constantly battling a neurotically idealistic Anne Shirley within, that's nothing less than a miracle. A couple of weeks ago I got to claim the first outstanding employee benefit: free access to the boss's library. Among all the hippest new works in higher criticism, an ugly duckling of a book stood out like a A New Kind of Christian on the bookshelf of yours truly (and so it stood for a time, but that's a long story): across a tattered, once-blue cover my widening eyes beheld A Reformation Debate: John Calvin & Jacobo Sadoleto.
Score.
To descend to the actual point of this essay-ette, the book consists of two letters, both written in 1539, after the fight between the civil authorities and the reformers (foremost at this point were Guillaume Farel and John Calvin) had erupted in Geneva, where many had adopted the Protestant reforms under the leadership of these two men. An Italian bishop ministering in southern France appealed on behalf of the Catholic church to his Genevan neighbors, pleading with them to return to the faith and lambasting the schismatic Frenchmen who had led them away from the Church. Calvin's letter is a defense of his ministry and his former parishioners (he had gone to Strasbourg to work with Martin Bucer by then) in three parts: first, an address to Sadoleto himself, and then two speeches he constructed--for himself and for his average parishioner--that he imagined being given before the tribunal of God on Judgment Day.
In the first section, among the charges Calvin levels with no lack of fervor at Sadoleto, one especially caught my attention, and sets me up to pass on some biographical information about Calvin (the propagation of which I believe would set people rather more at ease with Calvinism in the first place) and a note about present attitudes toward what Calvin implies:
Hence, I observe, Sadoleto, that you have too indolent a theology, as is almost always the case with those who have never had experience in serious struggles of conscience.
Certainly "struggles of conscience" were known to Calvin, though he never wrote a Confessions to give us more than a glimpse into his conversion. Born into a family whose head was a Catholic bishop (later to be excommunicated), Calvin was studying to follow in those footsteps and had obtained the equivalent of an MA at age 19 when his father decided that law would prove to be more financially promising. Calvin complied and switched to studying law for three years, but when his father died he returned to classics and humanist studies. (Interesting tidbit - his first published work was a commentary...on Seneca's De Clementia!) Little is known about the particular circumstances surrounding his sudden conversion two or three years later, but we can glean something from his defense in this letter to Sadoleto, were he defends his assertion that none who sat under his ministry would be at a loss for what to say on Judgment Day. When the Protestant doctrine--a marked contrast to the Catholic teaching of God's "clemency toward men, but confined...to those who would show themselves deserving of it"--reached his ears, Calvin saw the light. But (keeping in mind that this was part of the imagined speech of any of his faithful parishioners, and not necessarily Calvin's own experience) he confessed, "Offended by the novelty, I lent an unwilling ear, and...it was with the greatest difficulty I was induced to confess that I had all my life long been in ignorance and error."
What strikes me is that this idea of tension and inner struggle in matters of faith is not foreign to the postmodern (or even postmodern-influenced) mind. Unfortunately, though, the idea that we should ever have to struggle with theology because there is one true God who deserves and demands to be worshipped particularly, in accordance with his particular and perfect qualities, is highly unpopular. Postmoderns are keen on wrestling with ambiguity as such, but when the end in mind is absolute truth, struggles with conscience are seen as certain signs of a budding dogmatist. For whatever reason---either for fear of the d-word or for lack of a different kind of fear for our God--we have become a Church full of lazy theologians. In a post-Enlightenment world where attributing authority to the invisible is vehemently scorned, we are, no matter how much reproach it draws, to "take captive every thought to obey Christ," who is the image of the invisible God.
