CALVIN’S DOCTRINE OF GOD. Having expounded in the opening chapters of the Insti- tutes the sources and means of the knowledge of God, Cal- vin naturally proceeds in the next series of chapters (I. x, xi, xii, xiii) to set forth the nature of the God who, by the revelation of Himself in His Word and by the prevalent internal operation of His Spirit, frames the knowledge of Himself in the hearts of His people. He who expects to find in these chapters, however, an orderly discussion of the several topics which make up the locus de Deo in our for- mal dogmatics, will meet with disappointment. Calvin is not writing out of an abstract scientific impulse, but with the needs of souls, and, indeed, also with the special demands of the day in mind. And as his purpose is distinctively re- ligious, so his method is literar^ rather than scholastic. In the freedom of his literary manner, he had permitted him- self in the preceding chapters repeated excursions into reg- ions which, in an exact arrangement of the material, might well have been reserved for exploration at this later point. To take up these topics again, now, for fuller and more or- derly exposition, would involve much repetition without substantially advancing the practical purpose for which the Institutes were written. Calvin was not a man to con- found formal correctness of arrangement with substantial completeness of treatment ; nor was he at a loss for new top- ics of pressing impbrfarfce^f or discussion. He skillfully in- terposes at this point, therefore, a short chapter (ch. x) in which under the form of pointing out the complete har- mony with the revelation of God in nature of the revela- tion of God in the Scriptures — the divine authority of which in the communication of the knowledge of God he had just demonstrated — he reminds his readers of all that he had formerly said of the nature and attributes of God on the basis of natural revelation, and takes occasion to say what it re- 382 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW mained necessary to say of the same topics on the basis of supernatural revelation. Thus he briefly but effectively brings together under the reader’s eye the whole body of his exposition of these topics and frees his hands to give him- self, under the guidance of his practical bent and purpose, to the two topics falling under the rubric of the doctrine of God which were at the moment of the most pressing import- ance. His actual formal treatment of the doctrine of God thus divides itself into two parts, the former of which (ch. xi, xii), in strong Anti-Romish polemic is devoted to the uprooting of every refuge of idolatry, while the latter (ch. xiii), in equally strong polemic against the Anti-trini- tarianism of the day, develops with theological acumen and vital faith the doctrine of Trinity in Unity. It is quite true, then, as has often been remarked, that the Institutes contain no systematic discussion of the exist- ence, the nature and the attributes of God . 1 And the lack of formal, systematic discussion of these fundamental top- ics, may, no doubt, be accounted a flaw, if we are to con- ceive the Institutes as a formal treatise in systematic theol- ogy. But it is not at all true that the Institutes contain no sufficient indication of Calvin’s conceptions on these sub- jects : nor is it possible to refer the absence of formal dis- cussion of them either to indifference to them on Calvin’s 1 Cf. Kostlin, Calvin's Institutio, etc., in Studien und Kritiken, 1868, i, pp. 61-2: “On the other hand — and this is for us the most important matter, — there is not given there any comprehensive exposition of the attributes, especially not of the ethical attributes of God, nor is any such afterwards attempted.” Again, iii, p. 423 : “We cannot present and follow out the doctrine of the Institutio on the divine nature and the divine attributes, and their relations, as a whole, as we can its doctrine of the Trinity, because Calvin himself, as we have mentioned already, has nowhere presented them as a whole.” Cf. also P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn , 1883, p. 11 : “Neither by Zwingli nor by Calvin are there offered proofs of the existence of God” {cf. p. 16). Again, De Godsleer van Calvijn, 1881, p. 26: “A doctrine of the nature of God as such we do not find in Calvin.” Ibid., p. 38: “We find nowhere in Calvin a special section which is devoted particu- larly to the nature of God’s attributes”; “since he gives no formal doctrine of the attributes, we find in him also no classification of the attributes.” 383 ^ ( 3H C ujo-. calvin’s doctrine of god part or to any peculiarity of his dogmatic standpoint , 2 or even of his theological method . 3 The omission belongs rather to the peculiarity of this treatise as a literary product. Calvin does not pass over all systematic discussion of the existence, nature and attributes of God because from his theological standpoint there was nothing to say upon these topics, nor because, in his theological method, they were in- significant for his system ; but simply because he had been led already to say informally about them all that was necessary for the religious, practical purpose he had in view in writing this treatise. For here as elsewhere the key to the under- standing of the Institutes lies in recognizing their fundamen- tal purpose to have been religious, and their whole, not col- oring merely, but substance, to be profoundly religious, — in this only reflecting indeed the most determinative trait of Calvin’s character. It is important to emphasize this, for there seems to be still an impression abroad that Calvin’s nature was at bot- tom cold and hard and dry, and his life-manifestation but a piece of incarnated logic : while the Institutes themselves are frequently represented, or rather misrepresented — it is difficult to believe that those who so speak of them can have read them' — as a body of purely formal reasoning by which intolerable conclusions are remorselessly deduced from a set of metaphysical assumptions . 4 Perhaps M. Ferdinand 2 As Kostlin, for example, has suggested, as cited, p. 423, followed by P. J. Muller in his earlier work, De Godsleer van Calvijn, 1881, pp. 10, 46. 3 So P. J. Muller expresses himself in his later volume — De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, 1883,— modifying his earlier view: “Kostlin asks if it does not belong to Calvin’s dogmatic standpoint that he does not venture to seek after a bond between the several elements which come forward in God’s many-sided relation to men. This question can undoubtedly be answered in the affirmative, although we should rather speak here of the peculiarity of Calvin’s method.” That is to say, Muller here prefers to refer the phenomenon in question to Calvin’s a posteriori method rather than to his theological standpoint. . 4 Andre Duran, Le Mysticisme de Calvin, 1900, p. 8, justly says: “The Institutes are remarkable precisely for this : the absence of specu- lation. It is especially with the heart that Calvin studies God in His A 51689 384 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW Brunetiere may be looked upon as a not unfair representa- tive of the class of writers who are wont so to speak of the Institutes . 5 According to him, Calvin has “intellectualized” religion and reduced it to a form which can appeal only to the “reasonable”, or rather to the “reasoning” man. “In that oratorical work which he called The Institutes” , M. Brunetiere says, “if there is any movement, it is not one which comes from the heart; and — I am speaking here only of the writer or the religious theorizer, not of the man — the insensibility of Calvin is equalled only by the rigor of his reasoning.” The religion Calvin sets forth is “a religion which consists essentially, almost exclusively, in the adhe- sion of the intellect to truths all but demonstrated”, and commends itself by nothing “except by the literalness of its agreement with a text — which is a matter of pure philology — and by the solidity of its logical edifice — which is noth- ing but a matter of pure reasoning.” To Calvin, he adds, “religious truth attests itself in no other manner and by no other means than mathematical truth. As he would reason on the properties of a triangle, or of a sphere, so Calvin reasons on the attributes of God. All that will not adjust itself to the exigencies of his dialectic, he contests or he re- jects . . . Cartesian before Descartes, rational evidence, logical incontradiction are for him the test or the proof of truth. He would not believe if faith did not stay itself on a formal syllogism. . . . From a 'matter of the heart’, if I may so say, Calvin transformed religion into an 'affair of the intellect.’ ” We must not fail to observe, in passing, that even M. Brunetiere refrains from attributing to Calvin’s person the hard insensibility which he represents as the characteristic of his religious writings, — a tribute, we may suppose, to the relations with men ; and it is by the heart that he attains to complete union of man with God.” For a satisfactory discussion of the “heart in Calvin’s theology” see E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin , etc., Ill (1905), PP- 560-563. Compare also the third address in Doumergue’s L’Art et le Sentiment dans YOeuvre de Calvin, Geneva, 1902. 8 Discours de Combat, 1903, pp. 135-140. calvin’s doctrine of god 385 religious impression which is made by Calvin’s personality upon all who come into his presence, and which led even M. Ernest Renan, who otherwise shares very largely M. Brune- tiere’s estimate of him, to declare him “the most Christian man of his age .” 6 Nor can we help suspecting that the vio- lence of the invectives launched against the remorseless logic of the Institutes and of Calvin’s religious reasoning in gene- ral, is but the index of the difficulty felt by M. Brunetiere and those who share his point of view, in sustaining them- selves against the force of Calvin’s argumentative presen- tation of his religious conceptions. It is surely no discredit to a religious reasoner that his presentation commends his system irresistibly to all “reasonable”, or let us even say “reasoning” men. A religious system which cannot sustain itself in the presence of “reasonable” or “reasoning” men, is not likely to remain permanently in existence, or at least in power among reasonable or reasoning men; and one would think that the logical irresistibility of a system of religious truth would be distinctly a count in its favor. The bite of M. Brunetiere’s assault is found, therefore, purely in its negative side . He would condemn Calvin’s system of religion as nothing but a system of logic; and the Institutes , the most systematic presentation of it, as in essence nothing but a congeries of syllogisms, issuing in nothing but a set of logical propositions, with no religious quality or uplift in them. In this, however, he worst of all misses the mark ; and we must add he was peculiarly unfortunate in fixing, in illustration of his meaning, on the two matters of the 'attributes of God’ as the point of departure for Calvin’s dia- lectic and of the intellectualizing of 'faith’ as the height of his offending. 'Etudes d’histoire religieuse, ed. 7 (1880), p. 342: I’homme le plus chretien de son siecle. It must be borne in mind that this is not very tiigh praise on M. Renan’s lips ; and was indeed intended by him to be depreciatory. We need not put an excessive estimate on Calvin’s great- ness, he says in effect; he lived in an age of reaction towards Christ- ianity and he was the most Christian man of his age : his preeminence is thus accounted for. 25 386 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW In Calvin’s treatment of faith there is nothing more strik- ing than his determination to make it clear that it is a matter not of the understanding but of the heart; and he re- proaches the Romish conception of faith precisely because it magnifies the intellectual side to the neglect of the fiducial. “We must not suppose”, it is said in the Confession of Faith drawn up for the Genevan Church , 7 either by himself or by his colleagues under his eye, “that Christian faith is a naked and mere knowledge of God or understanding of the Scriptures, which floats in the brain without touching the heart . . . It is a firm and solid confidence of the heart.” Or, as he repeats this elsewhere , 8 “It is an error to suppose that faith is a naked and cold knowledge . 9 . . . Faith is not a naked knowledge , 10 which floats in the brain, but draws with it a living affection of the heart .” 11 “True Christian faith”, he expounds in the second edition of the Institutes , 12 . . . “ is not content with a simple historical knowledge, but takes its seat in the heart of man.” “It does not suffice that the understanding should be illuminated by the Spirit of God if the heart be not strengthened by His power. In this matter the theologians of the Sorbonne very grossly err, — thinking that faith is a simple consent to the Word of God, which consists in understanding, and leaving out the confidence and assurance of the heart.” “What the under- standing has received must be planted in the heart. For if the Word of God floats in the head only, it has not yet been received by faith; it has its true reception only when it has taken root in the depths of the heart.” Again, to cite a couple of passages in which the less pungent statement 7 Instruction et Confession de Foy dont on use en VEglise du Geneve (Opp. xxii, 47). The Strassburg editors assign it to Calvin’s col- leagues; Doumergue (Jean Calvin, II. 236-251) to Calvin. 8 Vera Christianae pacificationis et ecclesiae reformandae ratio, 1549 (Opp. viii, 598-9). 9 nudam frigidamque notitiam. 10 nudam notitiam. 11 vivum affectum qy,i cordi insideat. 12 Ed. of 1539: the quotations are made from the French version of 1541, pp. 189, 202, 204. Calvin’s doctrine of god 387 of the earlier editions has been given new point and force in the final edition of the Institutes: “It must here be again observed,” says he , 13 “that we are invited to the knowledge of God — not a knowledge which, content with empty spec- ulation, floats only in the brain, but one which shall be solid and fruitful, if rightly received by us, and rooted in the heart.” “The assent we give to God”, he says again , 14 “as I have already indicated and shall show more largely later, — is rather of the heart than of the brain, and rather of the affections than of the understanding .” 15 It is quite clear, then, that Calvin did not consciously address himself merely to the securing of an intellectual assent to his teaching, but sought to move men’s hearts. His whole conception of re- ligion turned, indeed, on this : religion, he explained, to be pleasing to God, must be a matter of the heart , 16 and God requires in his worshippers precisely heart and affection .” 17 All the arguments in the world, he insists, if unaccompanied by the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart, will fail to pro- duce the faith which piety requires . 18 This scarcely sounds like a man to whom religion was simply a matter of logical proof. And so far is he from making the attributes of God, meta- physically determined, the starting-point of a body of teach- ing deduced from them by quasi-mathematical reasoning, — as one would deduce the properties of a triangle from its nature as a triangle, — that it has been made his reproach that he has so little to say of the divine nature and attri- butes, and in this little confines himself so strictly to the manifest indicia of God in His works and the direct teach- ing of Scripture, refusing utterly to follow “the high priori” road either in determining the divine attributes or from 13 1 . v. 9. 14 III. ii. 8. 15 Cordis esse magis quam cerebri, et affectus magis quam intelli- gentiae. 18 fidem et veritatem cordis. 17 cor et animum (Opp. vi, 477, 479). 18 1. vii. 4. 3 88 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW them determining the divine activities. Thus, his doctrine of God is, it is said, no doubt notably sober and restrained, but also, when compared with Zwingli’s, for example,. — equally notably unimportant . 19 It is confessed, however, that it is at least thoroughly religious : and in this is found, indeed, its fundamental characteristic. Precisely where Calvin’s doctrine differs from Zwingli’s markedly is that he constantly contemplated God religiously, while Zwingli contemplated him philosophically — that to him God was above and before all things the object of religious rev- erence, while to Zwingli he was predominatingly the First Cause, from whom all things proceed . 20 “It is not with the 19 Cf. P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, 1883, p. hi : “A theologian like Calvin, Zwingli was not; but still in the history of the doctrine of God the pages devoted to Zwingli are more important than those devoted to Calvin. The loci de Trinitate, de Creation e, and de Lapso apart, Zwingli’s system is undeniably more coherent than that of Calvin, in which we miss the bond by which the several parts are joined. On the other side, however, we miss in Zwingli’s doctrine of God precisely what constitutes the value of a doctrine of God for the theologian, that is to say, its religious character. We do not find in Zwingli as in Calvin a recoil from the consequences of his own reason- ing, which leads necessarily to the ascription to God of the origination of evil, or sin, just because God is not with him as with Calvin con- ceived above everything as the object of religious reverence, but rather as the object of speculative thought.” 20 Cf. P. J .Muller, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, 1883, p. 6 : “If the doctrine of God for the theologian is determined by its religious character, the contemplation of God as the object of religious reverence will take a higher place with him than the merely philosophical contem- plation of God as the ultimate cause. Since it is not to be denied — as the following exposition will show, — that with Zwingli God is specula- tively contemplated much more as the ultimate cause than as the object of religious reverence, we may conclude that — so far as religious value is concerned — Zwingli’s doctrine of God must be ranked below Calvin’s.” Again (p. 20) : “In the nature of the case Calvin’s conceptions of the nature of God must be very sober. For to him, God was very pre- dominantly the object of religious reverence, and he could not therefore do otherwise than disapprove of the attempt to penetrate into the nature of the Godhead (I. v. 9)- With Zwingli, on the contrary, in whose system God is preeminently conceived as the ultimate cause, the doctrine of the nature of God must form one of the most important sections of the doctrine of God.” Once more (p. 23) : “Calvin, whose pride it was to be a ‘biblical theologian’, does not follow the method calvin’s doctrine of god 389 doctrine of God”, says the historian whose representations we have been summarizing, “but with the worship of God that Calvin’s first concern was engaged. Even in his doc- trine of God' — as we may perceive from his remarks upon it — religion stands ever in the foreground (I ii. 1). Before everything else Calvin is a religious personality. The Refor- mation confronts Catholicism with a zeal to live for God. With striking justice Calvin remarked that ‘all alike en- gaged in the worship of God, but few really reverenced Him, — that there was everywhere great ostentation in cere- monies but sincerity of heart was rare’ (I. ii. 2). Reverence for God was the great thing for Calvin. If we lose sight of this a personality like Calvin cannot be understood ; and it is only by recognizing the religious principle by which he was governed, that a just judgment can be formed of his work as a dogmatician. . . . ” 21 Again, Calvin “considers the knowledge of the nature and of the attributes of God more a matter of the heart than of the understanding; and such a knowledge, he says, must not only arouse us to ‘the service of God, but must also awake in us the hope of a future life’ (I. v. 10). In his extreme practicality — as the last remark shows us, — Calvin rejected the philosophical treatment of the question. The Scriptures, for him the source of the knowledge of God, he takes as his guide in his remarks on the attributes. . . . ” 22 Still again, “Already more than once have we had occasion to note that when of the philosophers, — the aprioristic method. He is therefore sober in his conceptions of the nature of God, since he had noted that in the Scriptures God speakes little of His nature, that He may teach us sobriety” — quoting I. xiii. 1 : ut nos in sobrietate continuat, parce de sua essentia ( Deus j disserit. 21 Cf. P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Calvijn, 1881, p. 11 7. 22 Cf. P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, 1883, p. 47. The author of the anonymous Introduction to the edition of the Insti- tutes in French, published by Meyrueis et Cie, Paris, 1859 (p. xii), says similarly : “Of a mind positive, grave, practical, removed from all need of speculation, very circumspect, not expressing its thought until its conviction had attained maturity, taking the fact of a divine revelation seriously, Calvin learned his faith at the feet of the Holy Scrip- tures” . . . 390 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW Calvin treats of God, he does this as a believer, for whom the existence of God stands as a fixed fact; and what he says of God, he draws from the Scriptures as his funda- mental source, finding his pride in remaining a biblical theologian, and whenever he can taking the field against the philosophic o more inter pretari of the Scriptural texts (see e. g. I. xvi. 3). His doctrine of God has the practical end of serving the needs of his fellow believers. It is also note- worthy that he closes every stage of the consideration with an exhortation to the adoration of God or to the surrender of the heart to Him. Of the doctrine of the Trinity he declares that he will hold himself ever truly to the Scrip- tures, because he desires to do nothing more than to make what the Scriptures teach accessible to our conceptions planioribus verbis, and this will apply equally to the whole of his doctrine of God.” 23 In a word, nothing can be clearer than that in his specific doctrine of God as well as in his general attitude to religious truth Calvin is as far as possible from being satisfied with a merely logical effect. When we listen to him on these high themes we are listen- ing less to the play of his dialectic than to the throbbing of his heart. It was due to this his controlling religious purpose, and to his dominating religious interest, that Calvin was able to leave the great topics of the existence, the nature and the attributes of God, without formal and detailed discussion in his Institutes. It is only a matter, we must reiterate, of the omission of formal and detailed discussion; for it involves not merely a gross exaggeration but a grave misapprehen- sion to represent him as leaving these topics wholly to one side, and much more to seek to account for this assumed fact from some equally assumed peculiarity of Calvin’s theological point of view or method. Under the impulse of his governing religious interest, he was able to content himself with such an exposition of the nature and attributes of God, in matter and form, as served his ends of religious P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Calvijn, etc., 1881, pp. 103-4. calvin’s doctrine of god 39i impression, and was under no compulsion to expand this into such details and order it into such a methodical mode of presentation as would satisfy the demands of scholastic treatment. But to omit what would be for his purpose ade- quate treatment of these fundamental elements of a com- plete doctrine of God would have been impossible, we do not say merely to a thinker of his systematic genius, but to a religious teacher of his earnestness of spirit. In point of fact, we do not find lacking to the Institutes such a funda- mental treatment of these great topics as would be appro- priate in such a treatise. We only find their formal and separate treatment lacking. All that it is needful for the Christian man to know on these great themes is here pres- ent. Only, it is present so to speak in solution, rather than in precipitate : distributed through the general discussion of the knowledge of God rather than gathered together into one place and apportioned to formal rubrics. It is commu- nicated moreover in a literary and concrete rather than in an abstract and scholastic manner. It will repay us to gather out from their matrix in the flowing discourse the elements of Calvin’s doctrine of God, that we may form some fair estimate of the precise nature and amount of actual instruction he gives regarding it. We shall attempt this by considering in turn Calvin’s doctrine of the existence, knowableness, nature and attributes of God. We do not read far into the Institutes before we find Calvin presenting proofs of the existence of God. It is quite true that this book, being written by a Christian for Christians, rather assumes the divine existence than under- takes to prove it, and concerns itself with the so-called proofs of the divine existence as means through which we rather obtain knowledge of what God is, than merely attain to knowledge that God is. But this only renders it the more significant of Calvin’s attitude towards these so-called proofs that he repeatedly lapses in his discussion from their use for the former into their use for the latter and 392 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW logically prior purpose. That he thus actually presents these proofs as evidences specifically of the existence of God can admit of no doubt . 24 If, for example, he adduces that sensus deitatis with which all men, he asserts, are natively endowed, primarily as the germ which may be developed into a profound knowl- edge of God, he yet does not fail explicitly to appeal to it also as the source of an ineradicable conviction, embedded in the very structure of human nature and therefore present in all men alike, of the existence of God. He tells us expressly that because of this sensus divinitatis, present in the human mind by natural instinct, all men without excep- 21 P. J. Muller’s view is different, as may be seen from the following extracts: “Neither by Zwingli nor by Calvin are there offered proofs of the existence of God, although there are particular passages in their writings which seem to recall them. The proposition ‘That God exists’ needed neither for themselves nor for their fellow-believers, nor even against Rome, any proof. It has been thought indeed that the so-called cosmological argument is found in Zwingli, the physico-theological argu- ment in Calvin (Lipsius, Lehrb. der ev. prot. Dogmatik, ed. 2, 1879, p. 213). But it would not be difficult to show that in the case of neither have we to do with a philosophical deduction, but only with an aid for attaining a complete knowledge of God” ( De Godsleer van Z. en C., p. 11, cf. p. 14). In a note Prof. Muller adverts to the possible use by Calvin, I. iii. i, of “the so-called historical argument”. “If Zwingli gives us no proof of God’s existence, the same is true of Calvin. It is true that the physico-theological argument has been discovered in the Institutes. Yet as he wrote over the fifth chapter of the first book: ‘That the knowledge of God is manifested in the making and continuous government of the world’, — it is already evident from this that he did not intend to argue from the teleology of the world to the existence of God as its Creator, Sustainer and Governor, but that he wished merely to point to the world as to ‘a beautiful book’, — to speak in the words of our (Netherlandish) Confession (Art. II), — ‘in which all creatures, small and great, serve as letters to declare to us the invisible things of God’. Here, too, we have accordingly to do simply with a means for a rise to a fuller knowledge of God” {Do. p. 16). “The Scholastics may indeed — although answering the inquiry affirmatively — begin with the question, Is there a God? Such a question cannot rise with Calvin. The Reformer, assured of his personal salvation, the ground of which lay in God Himself, could also for his co-believers leave this question to one side. Practical value attached only to the inquiry how men can come to know God, of whose existence Calvin entertained no doubt” {De Godsleer van Calvijn , p. 11). calvin’s doctrine of god 393 tion ( ad unum omnes) know (intelligant, perceive, under- stand) “that God exists” ( Deum esse), and are therefore without excuse if they do not worship Him and willingly consecrate their lives to Him (I. iii. i). It is to buttress this assertion that he cites with approval Cicero’s declara- tion 25 that “there is no nation so barbarous, no tribe so savage, that there is not stamped on it the conviction that there is a God”. 26 Thus he adduces the argument of the consensus gentium — the so-called “historical” argument, — with exact appreciation of its true bearing, not directly as a proof of the existence of God, but directly as a proof that the conviction of the divine existence is a native endowment of human nature, and only through that indirectly as a proof of the existence of God. This position is developed in the succeeding paragraph into a distinct anti-atheistic argument. The existence of religion, he says, presupposes, and cannot be accounted for except by, the presence in man of this “constant persuasion of God” from which as a seed the propensity to religion proceeds : men may deny “that God exists”, 27 “but will they, nill they, what they wish not to know they continually are aware of”. 28 It is a persuasion ingenerated naturally into all, that “some God exists” 29 (I. iii. 3), and therefore this does not need to be inculcated in the schools, but every man is from the womb his own master in this learning, and cannot by any means forget it. It is therefore mere detestable madness to deny that “God exists” (I. iv. 2). 30 In all these passages Calvin is dealing explic- itly, not with the knowledge of what God is, but with the knowledge that God is. It is quite incontrovertible, there- fore, that he grounds an argument — or rather the argu- ment — for the existence of God in the very constitution of 25 ut ethnicus ille ait: the allusion is to Cicero, de natura deorunt, I. 16. 28 deum esse. 27 qui Deum esse negent. 28 velint tamen nolint, quod nescire cupiunt, subinde sentiscunt. 28 imo et naturaliter ingenitam esse omnibus hanc persuasionem, esse aliquem Deum. 80 negantes Deum esse. 394 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW man. The existence of God is, in other words, with him an “intuition”, and he makes this quite as plain as if he had devoted a separate section to its exposition. Similarly, although he writes at the head of the chapter in which he expounds the revelation which God makes of Himself in His works and deeds : “That the knowledge of God is manifested in the making of the world and its con- tinuous government” (ch. v), he is not able to carry through his exposition without occasional lapses into an appeal to the patefaction of God in His works as a proof of His existence, rather than as a revelation of His nature. The most notable of these lapses occurs in the course of his development of the manifestation of God made by the na- ture of man himself (I. v. 4), where once more he gives us an express anti-atheistic argument. “Yea”, he cries, “the earth is supporting to-day many monstrous beings, who without hesitation employ the very seed of divinity which has been sown in human nature for eclipsing of the name of God. How detestable, I protest, is this insanity, that a man % discovering God a hundred times in his body and soul, should on this very pretext of excellence deny that God exists ! 31 They will not say that it is by chance that they are different from brute beasts; they only draw over God the veil of ‘nature’, which they declare the maker of all things, and thus abolish ( subducunt ) Him. They perceive the most exquisite workmanship in all their members, from their countenances and eyes to their very finger-nails. Here, too, they substitute ‘nature’ in the place of God. But above all how agile are the movements of the soul, how noble its faculties, how rare its gifts, discovering a divinity which does not easily permit itself to be concealed : unless the Epicureans, from this eminence, should like the Cyclops audaciously make war against God. Is it true that all the treasures of heavenly wisdom concur for the government of a worm five feet long, and the universe lacks this preroga- tive? To establish the existence of a kind of machinery in 81 Deum esse neget. calvin’s doctrine of god 395 the soul, correspondent to each several part of the body, makes so little to the obscuring of the glory of God that it rather illustrates it. Let Epicurus tell what concourse of atoms in the preparation of food and drink distributes part to the excrements, part to the blood, and brings it about that the several members perform their offices with as much diligence as if so many souls by common consent were gov- erning one body.” “The manifold agility of the soul”, he eloquently adds, “by which it surveys the heavens and the earth, joins the past to the future, retains in memory what it once has heard, figures to itself whatever it chooses; its ingenuity, too, by which it excogitates incredible things and which is the mother of so many wonderful arts ; are certain insignia in man of divinity. . . . Now what reason exists that man should be of divine origin and not acknowledge the creator ? Shall we, forsooth, discriminate between right and wrong by a judgment which has been given to us, and yet there be no judge in heaven? . . . Shall we be thought the inventors of so many useful arts, that we may defraud God of his praise . . . although experience sufficiently teaches us that all that we have is distributed to us severally from elsewhere? ...” Calvin, of course, knows that he is digressing in a passage like this, — that “his present business is not with that sty of swine”, as he calls the Epicureans. But digression or not, the passage is distinctly an employment of the so-called physico-theo- logical proof for the existence of God, and advises us that Calvin held that argument sound and would certainly em- ploy it whenever it became his business to develop the argu- ments for the existence of God. The proofs for the existence of God on which we perceive Calvin thus to rely had been traditional in the Church from its first age. It was precisely upon these two lines of argu- ment that the earliest fathers rested. “He who knows him- self”, says Clement of Alexandria, quite in Calvin’s manner, “will know God .” 32 “The knowledge of God”, exclaims 82 Paed. III. i. Cf. Strom . V. 13; Cohort, vi. 396 the PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW Tertullian, “is the dowry of the soul .” 33 “If you say, ‘Show me thy God’,” Theophilus retorts to the heathen challenge, “I reply, ‘Show me your man and I will show you my God ’.” 34 The God who cannot be seen by human eyes, declares Theophilus , 35 “is beheld and perceived through His providence and works” : we can no more surely infer a pilot for the ship we see making straight for the harbor, than we can infer a divine governor for the universe tending straight on its course. “Those who deny that this furniture of the whole world was perfected by the divine reason”, argues the Octavius of Minucius Felix , 36 “and assert that it was heaped together by certain fragments casually adhering to each other, seem to me to have neither mind, nor sense, nor, in fact, even sight itself.” “Whence comes it”, &sks Dionysius of Alexandria, criticizing the atomic theory quite in Cal- vin’s manner , 37 that the starry hosts — “this multitude of fellow-travellers, all unmarshalled by any captain, all un- gifted with any determination of will, and all unendowed with any knowledge of each other, have nevertheless held their course in perfect harmony?” Like these early fathers, Calvin adduces only these two lines of evidence : the exist- ence of God is already given in our knowledge of self, and it is solidly attested by His works and deeds. Whether, had we from him a professed instead of a merely incidental treatment of the topic, the metaphysical arguments would have remained lacking in his case as in theirs , 38 we can only 83 Adv. Marc. I. 10: Cf. De Test. Animae, VI. 34 Ad Autol. I. 2. 36 Do. I. 5. 88 C. xvii. 87 Adv. Epic. iii. 38 H. C. Sheldon, History of Christian Doctrine , vol. 1, 1886, p. 56: “Metaphysical proofs of the existence of God, such as those adduced by Augustine, Anselm, and Descartes, were quite foreign to the theology of the first three centuries.” But in the next age they had already come in; cf. Sheldon, p. 187: “We find a new class of arguments, something- more in the line of the metaphysical than anything which the previous centuries brought forward. Three writers in particular aspired to this order of proofs; viz., Diodorus of Tarsus, Augustine, and Boethius.” Augustine is the real father of the ontological argument: but Augus- CALVIN S DOCTRINE OF GOD 397 conjecture; but it seems very possible that as foreign to his a posteriori method ( cf . I. v. 9) they lay outside of his scheme of proofs. Meanwhile, he has in point of fact adverted, in the course of this discussion, only to the two arguments on which the Church teachers at large had de- pended from the beginning of Christianity. He states these with his accustomed clearness and force, and he illuminates them with his genius for exposition and illustration ; but he gives them only incidental treatment after all. In richness as well as in fullness of presentation he is surpassed here by Zwingli, 39 and it is to Melanchthon that we shall have to go to find among the Reformers a formal enumeration of the proofs for the divine existence. 40 tine only chronologically belonged to the old world ; as Siebeck (ZPhP, 1868, p. 190) puts it, he was “the first modern man”. “C/. P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, 1883, pp. 1 1 -16, where a very interesting account is given of Zwingli’s handling of the theistic proofs — though Prof. Muller thinks that Zwingli employs them not to establish the existence of God but to increase our knowl- edge of God. With Zwingli all knowledge of God rests at bottom on Revelation, which is his way of saying what Calvin means by his uni- versal sensus deitatis. Zwingli says, on his part, that “a certain seed of knowledge [of God] is sown [by God] also among the Gentiles” (III. 158). But he argues with great force and in very striking language, that all creation proclaims its maker. Cf. A. Baur, Zwingli’s Theologie, I. 382: “In the doctrine of God, Zwingli distinguishes two questions : first that of the nature, and secondly that of the existence of God. The answer to the first question surpasses the powers of the human mind ; that of the second, does not”. That the knowledge of the existence of God, which “may be justified before the understanding” (Muller, p. 13), does not involve a knowledge of His nature, Zwingli holds is proved by the wide fact of polytheism on the one hand and the accompanying fact, on the other, that natural theism is always purely theoretical (Baur, p. 382). 40 In the earliest Loci Communes (1521) there was no locus de Deo at all. In the second form (1535-1541) there was a locus de Deo, but it was not to it but to the locus de Creatione that Melanchthon appended some arguments for the existence of God, remarking (C. R. xxi, p. 369) : “After the mind has been confirmed in the true and right opinion of God and of Creation by the Word of God itself, it is then both useful and pleasant to seek out also the vestiges of God in nature and to collect the arguments ( rationes ) which testify that there is a God.” These remarks are expanded in the final form (1543+) and reduced to a formal order, for the benefit of “good morals”. The list 398 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW That this God, the conviction of whose existence is part of the very constitution of the human mind and is justified by abundant manifestations of Himself in His works and deeds, is knowable by man, lies on the face of Calvin’s entire discussion. The whole argument of the opening chapters of the Institutes is directed precisely to the establishment of this knowledge of God on an irrefragable basis: and the emphasis with which the reality and trustworthiness of our knowledge of God is asserted is equalled only by the skill with which the development of our native instinct to know God into an actual knowledge of Him is traced (in ch. i), and the richness with which His revelation of Himself in His works and deeds is illustrated by well-chosen and strik- ingly elaborated instances (in ch. 5). Of course, Calvin does not teach that sinful man can of himself attain to the knowledge of God. The noetic effects of sin he takes very seriously, and he teaches without ambiguity that all men have grossly degenerated from the true knowledge of God (ch. iv). But this is not a doctrine of the unknowableness of consists of nine “demonstrations, the consideration of which is useful for discipline and for confirming honest opinions in minds”. “The first is drawn from the order of nature itself, that is from the effects arguing a maker. . . . The second, from the nature of the human mind. A brute thing is not the cause of an intelligent nature. . . . The third, from the distinction between good and evil . . . and the sense of order and number. . . . Fourthly : natural ideas are true : that there is a God, all confess naturally : therefore this idea is true. . . . The fifth is taken, in Xenophanes, from the terrors of conscience. . . . The sixth from political society. . . . The seventh is . . . drawn from the series of efficient causes. There cannot be an infinite recession of efficient causes. . . . The eighth from final causes. . . . The ninth from prediction of future events.” “These arguments”, he adds, “not only testify that there is a God, but are also indicia of providence. . . . They are perspicuous and always affect good minds. Many others also could certainly be collected; but because they are more obscure, I leave off.” . . . G. H. Lamers, Geschiedenis der Leer aangande God , 1897, p. 179 [687], remarks: “It should be noted that Melanchthon always when speaking of God, whether as Spirit or as Love, wishes everywhere to ascribe the highest value to God’s ethical characteristics. Even the particulars, nine in number, to which he (Doedes, Inleiding tot der Leer van God, p. 191) points as proofs that God’s existence must be recognized, show that ethical considerations calvin’s doctrine of god 399 God, but rather of the incapacitating effects of sin. Accord- ingly he teaches that the inadequateness of the knowledge of God to which alone sinners can attain is itself a sin. Men’s natures prepare them to serve God, God’s revelations of Himself display Him before men’s eyes : if men do not know God they are without excuse and cannot plead their inculpating sinfulness as exculpation. God remains, then, knowable to normal man : it is natural to man to know Him. And if in point of fact He cannot be known save by a super- natural action of the Holy Spirit on the heart, this is because man is not in his normal state and it requires this supernat- ural action of the Spirit on his heart to restore him to his proper natural powers as man. The “testimony of the Holy Spirit in the heart” does not communicate to man any new powers, powers alien to him as man : it is restorative in its nature and in principle merely recovers his powers from their deadness induced by sin. The knowledge of God to which man attains through the testimony of the Spirit is therefore the knowledge which belongs to him as normal man: al- especially attract him.” More justly Herrlinger, Die Theologie Me- lanchthons, 1879, comments on Melanchthon’s use of the “proofs” as follows : “The natural knowledge of God, resting on an innate idea and awakened especially by teleological contemplation of the world, Melanchthon makes in his philosophical writings, particularly in his physics, the object of consideration, so that we may speak of the ele- ments of a natural theology in him” (p. 168). Melanchthon heaps up these arguments, enumerating nine of them, in the conviction J;hat they will mutually strengthen one another. Herrlinger thinks that, as they occur in much the same order in more of Melanchthon’s writings than one, they may be arranged on some principle, — possibly beginning with particulars in nature and man, proceeding to human association, and rising to the entirety of nature (p. 393). He continues (p. 393) : “Clearly enough it is the teleological argument which in all these proofs is the real nerve of the proof. Melanchthon accords with Kant as in the high place he gives this proof, so also in perceiving that all these proofs find their strength in the ontological argument, in the innate idea of God, which is the most direct witness for God’s existence. 15. 564; ‘The mind reasons of God from a multitude of vestiges. But this reasoning would not be made if there were not infused ( insita ) into the mind a certain knowledge ( notitia ) or 71736X77^5 of God’. Similarly, De Anima, 13. 144. 169.” The relation of the proofs to the innate sensus deitatis here indicated, holds good also for Calvin. 400 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW though now secured by him only in a supernatural manner, it is in kind, and, so far as it is the product of his innate sensus deitatis and the revelation of God in His works and deeds, it is in mode also, natural knowledge of God. Calvin’s doctrine of the noetic effects of sin and their removal by the “testimony of the Spirit”, that is to say, by what we call “regeneration”, must not then be taken as a doctrine of the unknowableness of God. On the contrary it is a doctrine of the knowableness of God, and supplies only an account of why men in their present condition fail to know Him, and an exposition of how and in what conditions the knowableness of God may manifest itself in man as now constituted in an actually known God. When the Spirit of God enters the heart with recreative power, he says, then even sinful man, his blurred eyes opened, may see God, not merely that there is a God, but what kind of Being this God is (I. i. i ; ii. i ; V. I). Of course, Calvin does not mean that God can be known to perfection, whether by renewed man, or by sinless man with all his native powers uninjured by sin. In the depths of His being God is to him past finding out ; the human intel- ligence has no plumbet to sound those profound deeps. “His essense” {essentia), he says, “is incomprehensible ( incom - prehensibilis ) ; so that His divinity (numen) wholly escapes all human senses” (I. v. i, cf. I. xi. 3); and though His works and the signs by which He manifests Himself may “admonish men of His incomprehensible essense” (I. xi. 3), yet, being men, we are not capax Dei; as Augustine says somewhere, we stand disheartened before His greatness and are unable to take Him in (I. v. 9). 41 We can know then only God’s glory (I. v. 1), that is to say, His manifested perfections (I. v. 9), by which what He is to us is revealed to us (I. x. 2). What He is in Himself, we cannot know, and all attempts to penetrate into His essense are but cold and frigid speculations which can lead to no useful knowl- 41 In Psalmos, 144: ilium non possumus capere, velut sub ejus magni- tudine deficientes. calvin’s doctrine of god 401 edge. “They are merely toying with frigid speculations”, he says (I. ii. 2), “whose mind is set on the question of what God is ( quid sit Dens), when what it really concerns us to know is rather what kind of a person He is ( qualis sit) and what is appropriate to His nature ( natura )” (I. ii. 2 ). 42 We are to seek God, therefore, “not with audacious inquisi- tiveness by attempting to search into His essence ( essentia ), which is rather to be adored than curiously investigated; but by contemplating Him in His works, in which He brings Himself near to us and makes Himself familiar and in some measure communicates Himself to us” (I. v. 9). For if we seek to know what He is in Himself ( quis sit apud se) rather than what kind of a person He is to us ( qualis erga nos), — which is revealed to us in His attributes ( virtutes ) — we simply lose ourselves in empty and meteoric speculation (I. X. 2). The distinction which Calvin is here drawing between the knowledge of the quid and the knowledge of the qualis of God; the knowledge of what He is in Himself and the knowledge of what He is to us, is the ordinary scho- lastic one and fairly repeats what Thomas Aquinas contends for ( Summa Theol. I, qu. 12, art. 12), when he tells us that there is no knowledge of God per essentiam , no knowledge of His nature, of His quidditas per speciem pro priam; but we know only habitudinem ipsius ad creaturas. There is no implication of nominalism here ; nothing, for example, sim- ilar to Occam’s declaration that we can know neither the divine essence, nor the divine quiddity, nor anything intrin- sic to God, nor anything that God is realiter. When Calvin says that the Divine attributes describe not what God is apud se , but what kind of a person He is erga nos , 43 he is “We cannot know the quiddity of God: we can only know His quality: that is to say what His essence is is beyond our comprehension, but we may know Him in His attributes. 43 Cf. the passage in ed. 2 and other middle editions in which, refuting the Sabellians, he says that such attributes as strength, goodness, wis- dom, mercy, are “epithets” which “show qualis erga nos sit Deus”, while the personal names, Father, Son, Spirit, are “names” which “declare qualis apud semetipsum vere sit” (Opp. I. 491). 26 402 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW not intending to deny that His attributes are true determina- tions of the divine nature and truly reveal to us the kind of a person He is ; he is only refusing to speculate on what God is apart from His attributes by which He reveals Him- self to us, and insisting that it is only in these attributes that we know Him at all. He is refusing all a priori methods of determining the nature of God and requiring of us to form our knowledge of Him a posteriori from the revelation He gives us of Himself in His activities. This He insists is the only knowledge we can have of God, and this the only way we can attain to any knowledge of Him at all. Of what value is it to us, he asks (I. v. 9), to imagine a God of whose working we have had no experience? Such a knowledge only floats in the brain as an empty speculation. It is by His attributes ( virtutes ) that God is manifested; it is only through them that we can acquire a solid and fruitful knowledge of Him. The only right way and suitable method of seeking Him, accordingly, is through His works, in which He draws near to us and familiarizes Himself to us and in some degree communicates Himself to us. Here is not an assertion that we learn nothing of God through His attributes, which represent only determinations of our own. On the contrary, here is an assertion that we obtain through the attributes a solid and fruitful knowledge of God. Only it is not pretended that the attributes of God as revealed in His activities tell us all that God is, or anything that He is in Himself : they only tell us, in the nature of the case, what He is to us. Fortunately, says Calvin, this is what we need to know concerning God, and we may well eschew all speculation concerning His intrinsic nature and content ourselves with knowing what He is in His relation to His creatures. His object is, not to deny that God is what He seems, — that His attributes revealed in His deal- ings with His creatures represent true determination of His nature. His object is to affirm that these determinations, of His nature, revealed in His dealings with His creatures, constitute the sum of our real knowledge of God : and that calvin’s doctrine of god 403 apart from them speculation will lead to no solid results. He is calling us back, not from a fancied knowledge of God through His activities to the recognition that we know nothing of Him, that what we call His attributes are only effects in us : but from an a priori construction of an imag- inary deity to an a posteriori knowledge of the Deity which really is and really acts. This much we know, he says, that God is what His works and acts reveal Him to be : though it must be admitted that His works and acts reveal not His metaphysical Being but His personal relations, — not what He is apud se, but what He is quoad nos . Of the nature of God in the abstract sense, thus, — the quiddity of God, in scholastic phrase — Calvin has little to say . 44 But his refusal to go behind the attributes which 44 Cf. P. J. Muller, De Godsleer van Calvijn, p. 26 : “A doctrine of the nature of God as such we do not find in Calvin.” To teach us modesty, Calvin says, God says little of His nature in Scripture, but to teach us what we ought to know of Him he gives us two epithets — immensity and spirituality (p. 29). Again, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, pp. 30-31: “The little that Calvin gives us on this subject (the Divine Essence) limits itself to the remark that God’s essence is ‘immense and spiritual’ (I. xiii. 1), ‘incomprehensible to us’ (I. v. 1).” Again, p. 38: “If the aprioristic method [as employed by Zwingli] is thus not favor- able to the development of a doctrine of the Trinity, Calvin’s aposterior- istic method is on the other hand the reason that his conceptions of the nature of God — apart from the Trinity — are of less significance than Zwingli’s. Since our understanding, according to Calvin, is incapable of grasping what God is, it is folly to seek with arrogant curiosity to- investigate God’s nature, ‘which is much rather to be adored than anxiously to be inquired into’ (On Romans i. 19: ‘They are mad who seek to discover what God is’; Institutes I. ii. 2: ‘The essence of God is rather to be adored than inquired into’). If we nevertheless wish to solve the problem up to a certain point, let this be done only by means of the Scriptures in which God has revealed His nature to us so far as it is needful for us to know it. The warning he gives us is therefore certainly fully comprehensible, — that ‘those who devote them- selves to the solving of the problem of what God is should hold their speculations within bounds ; since it is of much more importance for us to know what kind of a being God is’ (I. ii. 2). How can a man who cannot understand his own nature be able to comprehend God’s nature ? Let us then leave to God the knowledge of Himself: and — so Calvin says — ‘we leave it to Him when we conceive Him as He has revealed Himself to us, and when we seek to inquire with reference to Him, nowhere else than in His Word’ (I. xiii. 21) ...” 404 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW are revealed to us in God’s works and deeds, affords no justi- fication to us for going behind them for him and attributing to him against his protest developed conceptions of the nature of the divine essence, which he vigorously repudi- ates. Calvin has suffered more than most men from such gratuitous attributions to him of doctrines which he emphat- ically disclaims. Thus, not only has it been persistently asserted that he reduced God, after the manner of the Scot- ists, to the bare notion of arbitrary Will, without ethical content or determination , 45 but the contradictory concep- 45 This is fast becoming the popular representation. Cf. e. g. Wil- listora Walker, John Calvin, 1906, p. 149: “Thus he owed to Scotus, doubtless without realizing the obligation, the thought of God as almighty will, for motives behind whose choice it is as absurd as it is impious to inquire.” Again, p. 418: “Whether this Scotist doctrine of the rightfulness of all that God wills by the mere fact of His willing it, leaves God a moral character, it is perhaps useless to inquire.” But Calvin does not borrow unconsciously from Scotus : he openly repu- diates Scotus. And Calvin is so far from representing the will of God to be independent of His moral character, that he makes it merely the expression of His moral character, and only inscrutable to us. Cf. also C. H. Irwin, John Calvin, 1909, p. 179: “Holding as he did the theory of Duns Scotus, that a thing is right by the mere fact of God willing it, he never questioned whether a course was or was not in harmony with the Divine character, if he was once convinced that it was a course attributed to God in Scripture.” But Calvin did not hold that a thing is made right by the mere fact that God wills it but that the fact that God wills it (which fact Scripture may witness to us) is proof enough to us that it is right. The vogue of this remarkable misrepresen- tation of Calvin’s doctrine of God is doubtless due to its enunciation (though in a somewhat more guarded form) by Ritschl ( Jahrbb . fur deutsche Theologie , 1868, xiii, pp. 104 sq.). Ritschl’s fundamental con- tention is that the Nominalistic conception of God, crowded out of the Roman Church by Thomism, yet survived in Luther’s doctrine of the enslaved will and Calvin’s doctrine of twofold predestination (p. 68), which presuppose the idea of “the groundless arbitrariness of God” in His actions. Calvin was far from adopting this principle in theory or applying it consistently. He is aware of and seeks to guard against its dangers (p. 106) ; but his doctrine of a double predestination (in Ritschl’s opinion) proceeds on its assumption : “In spite of Calvin’s reluctance, we must judge that the idea of God which governs this doc- trine comes to the same thing as the Nominalistic potentia ahsoluta” (p. 107). The same line of reasoning may be read also in Seeberg, Text- Book of the History of \ Doctrines, § 79, 4 (E. T. 11. 397), who also is compelled to admit that this conception of God is both repudiated by calvin’s doctrine of god 405' tions of a virtual Deism 46 and a developed Pantheism 47 have with equal confidence been attributed to him. To instance but a single example, Principal A. M. Fairbairn permits himself to say that “Calvin was as pure, though not as con- scious and consistent a Pantheist as Spinoza ”. 48 Astonish- ing as such a declaration is in itself, it becomes more aston- Calvin and is destructive of his “logical structure” ! For a sufficient refutation of this whole notion see Max Scheibe’s Calvin’s Prddestina- tionslehre, pp. 113 sq. “Calvin”, says Scheibe, “could therefore very properly repudiate the charge of proceeding on the Scoto-nominalistic idea of the potentia absoluta of God. . . . With Calvin, on the con- trary, the conception of the will of God as the highest causality has the particular meaning that God is not determined in His actions by any- thing lying outside of Himself, . . . while it is distinctly not excluded that God acts by virtue of an inner necessity, accordant with His nature.” 48 Cf. e.g. A. V. G. Allen, The Continuity of Christian Thought (1884), p. 299 : “The God who is thus revealed is a being outside the frame- work of the universe, who called the world into existence by the power of His will. Calvin positively rejected the doctrine of the divine immanence. When he spoke of that ‘dog of a Lucretius’ who mingles God and nature, he may have also had Zwingli in his mind. In order to separate more completely between God and man, he interposed ranks of mediators. ...” Also, p. 302: “In some respects the system of Calvin not merely repeats but exaggerates the leading ideas of Latin Christianity. In no Latin writer is found such a determined purpose to reject the immanence of Deity and assert His transcendence and His isolation from the world. In his conception of God, as absolute, arbitrary will, he surpasses Duns Scotus. . . . The separation be- tween God and humanity is emphasized as it has never been before, for Calvin insists, dogmatically and formally, upon that which had been, to a large extent, hitherto, an unconscious though controlling sentiment.” Prof. Allen had already represented the Augustinian theology as “resting upon the transcendence of Deity as its controlling principle”, — which he explains as a tacit “assumption of Deism” (pp. 5, 191). 4T Cf. Principal D. W. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation, p. 282, where he speaks of “the Pantheism . . . with which Calvin is log- ically chargeable — strongly as he might resent the imputation — when he says: ‘Nothing happens but what He has knowingly and willingly decreed’ ; ‘All the changes which take place in the world are produced by the secret agency of the hand of God’; ‘Not heaven and earth and inanimate creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which He has destined.” To Dr. Simon providential government of the world implies pantheism! 48 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 1893, P- 164. Even H. M. Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, etc., 1906, II. 226, having spoken of Calvin as “taking over from the Scotists” his conception of God as 406 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW ishing still when we observe the ground on which it is based. This consists essentially in the discovery that the funda- mental conception of Calvinism is that “God’s is the only efficient will in the universe, and so He is the one ultimate causal reality”, 49 — upon which the certainly very true re- mark is made that “the universalized Divine will is an even more decisive and comprehensive Pantheism than the uni- versalized Divine substance ”. 50 The logical process by which the Calvinistic conception of the sovereign will of God as the prima causa rerum — where the very term prima implies the existence and reality of “second causes” — is transmuted into the Pantheising notion that the will of God is the sole efficient cause operative in the universe; or by which the Calvinistic conception of God as the sovereign ruler of the universe whose “will is the necessity of things” is transmuted into the reduction of God, Hegelian-wise, into pure and naked will, 51 — although it has apparently appealed to many, is certainly very obscure. In point of fact, when the Calvinist spoke of God as the prima causa rerum — the phrase is cited from William Ames 52 — he meant by it only that all that takes place takes place in accordance with the divine will, not that the divine will is the only efficient cause in the universe; and when Calvin quotes approvingly “sovereign and inscrutable will”, adds that he needed only to suppose further that “the divine will” is “necessitated as well as inscrutable” to have taught a Pantheistic system. But as he thus allows Calvin did not suppose this, and had just pointed out that Calvin explains that God is not an “absolute and arbitrary power”, we probably need not look upon this language as other than rhetorical : it certainly is not true to the facts in either of its members. 49 P. 164. Cf. p. 430. It is Amesius to whom Dr. Fairbairn appeals to justify this statement: but he misinterprets Amesius. 50 P. 168. 61 Cf. Baur, Die christliche Lehre von d. Dreieinigkeit, III (1843), PP- 35 sq. 52 Medulla, I. vii. 38: “Hence the will of God is the first cause of things. ‘By thy will they are and were created’ (Apoc. iv. 11). But the will of God, as He wills to operate ad extra, does not presuppose the goodness of the object, but by willing posits and makes it good.” calvin’s doctrine of god 407 from Augustin© — for the words are Augustine’s 53 — that “the will of God is the necessity of things”, so little is either he or Augustine making use of the words in a Pantheistic sense that he hastens to explain that what he means is only that whatever God has willed will certainly come to pass, although it comes to pass in “such a manner that the cause and matter of it are found in” the second causes ( ut causa et materia in ip sis reperiatur ). 54 Calvin beyond all question did cherish a very robust faith in the immanence of God. “Our very existence”, he says, “is subsistence in God alone” (I. i. 1). He even allows, as Dr. Fairbairn does not fail to inform us, that it may be said with a pious meaning — so only it be the expression of a pious mind — that “nature is God” (I. v. 5 end). 55 But Dr. Fairbairn neglects to mention that Calvin 63 The phrase is quoted by Dr. Fairbairn (p. 164) as Calvin’s, to sup- port the assertion that he was “as pure a pantheist as Spinoza”. But it is cited by Calvin (III. xxiii. 8) from Augustine. The matter in immediate discussion is the perdition of the reprobate. 64 III. xxiii. 8. 85 Cf. Muller, De Godsleer van Zwingli en Calvijn, p. 26 : “Accordingly also Pliny was right — according to Zwingli ( De Provid. Dei Anamnema, iv. 90) — in calling what he calls God, nature, since the learned cannot adjust themselves to the conceptions of God of the ununderstanding multitude; while by nature he meant the power which moves all things together, and that is nothing else but God.” Again, on the general question of the charge of Pantheism brought against Zwingli, pp. 27-8: “As is well known, it has been supposed that there is a pantheistic element in Zwingli’s Anamnema. It cannot be denied that there are some expressions which sound Spinozistic ; and for those who see Pantheism in every controversion of fortuitism, Zwingli must of neces- sity be a Pantheist. Yet if we are to discover Spinozism in Zwingli, we can with little difficulty point to traces of Spinozism also in Paul. Such a passage as the following, for example, would certainly have been subscribed by Paul : ‘If anything comes to pass by its own power or counsel, then the wisdom and power of our Deity would be superfluous there. And if that were true, then the wisdom of the Deity would not be supreme, because it would not comprehend and take in all things; and his power would not be omnipotent, because then there would exist power independent of God’s power, and in that case there would be another power which would not be the power of the Deity’ (Opp. vi. 85). In any case, Zwingli cannot be given the blame of standing apart from the other Reformers 408 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW adds at once, that the expression is “crude and unsuitable” {dura et impropria) , since “nature is rather the order pre- scribed by God”; and, moreover, noxious, because tending to “involve God confusedly with the inferior course of His works”. He neglects also to mention that the statement occurs at the end of a long discussion, in which, after re- buking those who throw an obscuring veil over God, “retire Him behind nature”, and so substitute nature for Him, — Calvin inveighs against the “babble about some sort of hidden inspiration which actuates the whole world”, as not only “weak” but “altogether profane”, and brands the spec- ulation of a universal mind animating and actuating the world as simply jejune (I. v. 4 and 5). Even his beloved Seneca is reproved for “imagining a divinity transfused through all parts of the world” so that God is all that we see and all that we do not see as well (I. xiii. 1), while the Pantheistic scheme of Servetus is made the object of an extended refutation (II. xiv. 5-8). To ascribe an essentially Pantheistic conception of God to Calvin in the face of such frequent and energetic repudiations of it on his own part 56 is obviously to miss his meaning altogether. If he “may be said to have anticipated Spinoza in his notion of God as causa immanens ”, and “Spinoza may be said ... to have perfected and reduced to philosophical consistency the Cal- vinistic conception of Deity”, 57 — this can mean nothing more than that Calvin was not a Deist. And in point of fact on this point. Calvin certainly recognizes (Inst. I. v. 5) that — so it occurs, simply — ‘it may be said out of a pious mind that nature is God’ (cf. Zwingli, VI. a. 619: ‘Call God Himself Nature, with the philosophers, the principle from which all things take their origin, from which the soul begins to be’) ; although he adds the warning that in matters of such importance ‘no expressions should be employed likely to cause offence’. Danaeus (Lib. I. 77 of his Ethices Christ, lib. tres ), marvels that those who would fain bear the name of Christians, should conceive of God and nature as two different hypostases, since even the heathen philosophers (and like Zwingli, he names Seneca) more truly taught that ‘the nature by which we have been brought forth is nothing else than God’.” . . . B# Cf. instances in addition at I. xiv. 1, I. xv. 5. 67 Fairbairn, op. cit., pp. 165-6. CALVIN S DOCTRINE OF GOD 409 he repudiated Deism with a vehemence equal to that which he displays against Pantheism. To rob God of the active exercise of His judgment and providence, shutting Him up as an idler ( otiosum ) in heaven, he characterizes as nothing less than “detestable frenzy”, since, says he, “nothing could less comport with God than to commit to fortune the aban- doned government of the world, shut His eyes to the iniqui- ties of men and let them wanton with impunity” (I. iv. 2). 58 Calvin’s conception of God is that of a pure and clear Theism, in which stress is laid at once on His transcendence and His immanence, and emphasis is thrown on His right- eous government of the world. “Let us bear in mind, then”, he says as he passes from his repudiation of Pantheism, “that there is one God, who governs all natures” (I. v. 6, init.), “and wishes us to look to Him, — to put our trust in Him, to worship and call upon Him” (I. v. 6) ; to whom we can look up as to a Father from whom we expect and receive tokens of love (I. v. 3). So little is he inclined to reduce this divine Father to bare will, that he takes repeated occa- sion expressly to denounce this Scotist conception. The will of God, he says, is to us indeed the unique rule of right- eousness and the supremely just cause of all things; but we are not like the sophists to prate about some sort of “absolute will” of God, “profanely separating His right- eousness from His power”, but rather to adore the govern- ing providence which presides over all things and from which nothing can proceed which is not right, though the reasons for it may be hidden from us (I. xvii, 2, end). “Nevertheless”, he remarks in another place, after having exhorted his readers to find in the will of God a sufficient account of things, — “nevertheless, we do not betake our- 08 Cf. I. xvi. 1 : “To make God a momentaneous creator, who entirely finished all His work at once, were frigid and jejune”, etc. Also the Genevan Catechism of 1545 (Opp. vi. 15-18) : The particularization of God’s creatorship in the creed is not to be taken as indicating that God so created His works at once that afterwards He rejects the care of them. It is rather so to be held that the world as it was made by Him at once, so now is conserved by Him; and He is to remain their supreme governor, etc. 4io THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW selves to the fiction of absolute power, which, as it is pro- fane, so ought to be deservedly detestable to us : we do not imagine that the God who is a law to Himself is exlex, . . . the will of God is not only pure from all fault, but is the supreme rule of perfection, even the law of all laws” (III. xxiii, 2, end ). 59 In a word, the will of God is to Calvin the supreme rule for us, because it is the perfect expression of the divine perfections . 60 Calvin thus refuses to be classified as either Deist, Pan- theist or Scotist; and those who would fain make him one or the other of these have nothing to go upon except that on the one hand he does proclaim the transcendence of God and speaks with contempt of men who imagine that divinity is transfused into every part of the world, and that there is a portion of God not only in us but even in wood and stone (I. xiii. I, 22) ; and on the other he does proclaim the immanence of God and invites us to look upon His works or to descend within ourselves to find Him who “everywhere diffuses, sustains, animates and quickens all things in heaven and in earth”, who, “circumscribed by no 89 It is not uncommon for historians of doctrine who are inclined to represent Calvin as enunciating the Scotist principle, therefore, to suggest that he is scarcely consistent with himself. Thus, e. g., H. C. Sheldon, History of Christian Doctrine ( 1886) , II. 93 : “Some, who were inclined to extreme views of the divine sovereignty, asserted the Scotist maxim that the will of God is the absolute rule of right. Luther’s words are quite as explicit as those of Scotus. . . . ‘The will of God’, says Calvin . . . (VI. iii. 23). . . . Calvin, however, notwithstanding this strong statement, suggests after all that he meant not so much that God’s will is absolutely the highest rule of right, as that it is one which we cannot transcend, and must regard as binding on our own judgment; for he adds, ‘We represent not God as lawless, who is a law to Himself’.” 80 Cf. Bavinck, Geref. Dogmatiek. II. 226, who after remarking on Calvin’s rejection of the Scotist notion of potentia ahsoluta, as a “pro- fane invention” — adducing Instt. III. xxiii. 1-5; I. xvi. 3, II. vii. 5, IV. xvii. 24, Comm, in Jes. 239, in Luk. 118, adds: “The Romanists on this account charge Calvin with limiting and therefore denying God’s omnipotence (Bellarmine, De Gratia et Lib. Arbitrio , III. c. 15). But Calvin is not denying that God can do more than He actually does, but only opposing such a potentia absoluta as is not connected with His Being or Virtues, and can therefore do all kinds of inconsistent things.” calvin’s doctrine of god 41 i boundaries, by transfusing His own vigor into all things, breathes into them being, life and motion” (I. xiii. 14) ; while still again he does proclaim the will of God to be inscrutable by such creatures as we are and to constitute to us the law of righteousness, to be accepted as such without murmurings or questionings. In point of fact, all these charges are but several modes of expressing the dislike their authors feel for Calvin’s doctrine of the sovereignty of the divine will, which, following Augustine, he declares to be '“the necessity of things” : they would fain brand this hated conception with some name of opprobrium, and, therefore, seek to represent Calvin now as hiding God deistically be- hind His own law, and now as reducing Him to a mere stream of causality, or at least to mere naked will. 61 By thus declining alternately to contradictories they show suffi- ciently clearly that in reality Calvin’s doctrine of God coin- cides with none of these characterizations. The peculiarity of Calvin’s conception of God, we per- ceive, is not indefiniteness, but reverential sobriety. Clear- ing his skirts of all Pantheistic, Deistic, Scotist notions, — and turning aside even to repudiate Manichaeism and An- thropomorphism (I. xiii. 1) — he teaches a pure theism 51 A flagrant example may be found in the long argument of F. C. Baur, Die christl. Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, III. (1843), pp. 35 ff., where he represents the Calvinistic doctrine of election and reprobation as postulating in God a schism between mercy and justice which can be reduced only by thinking of Him as wholly indifferent to good and evil, and indeed of good and evil as a non-existent opposition. If jus- tice is an equally absolute attribute with God as grace, he argues, then evil and good are at one, in that reality cannot be given to the attri- bute in which the absolute being of God consists without evil. Evil has the same relation to the absolute being of God as good; and “God is in the same sense the principle of evil as of good”; and “as God’s justice cannot be without its object, God must provide this object”. “But if evil as well as the good is from God, then on that very account evil is good: thus good and evil are entirely indifferent with respect to each other, and the absolute Dualism is resolved into the same absolute arbitrariness ( Willkiir ) in which Duns Scotus had placed the absolute Being of God.” This, however, is not represented as Calvin’s view, but as the consequence of Calvin’s view — as drawn out in the Hege- . lianizing dialectic of Baur. 412 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW which he looks upon as native to men (I. x. 3). The nature of this one God, he conceives, can be known to us only as He manifests it in His works (I. v. 9) ; that is to say, only in His perfections. What we call the attributes of God thus become to Calvin the sum of our knowledge of Him. In these manifestations of His character we see not indeed what He is in Himself, but what He is to us (I. x. 2) ; but what we see Him to be thus to us, He truly is, and this is all we can know about Him. We might expect to find in the Institutes , therefore, a comprehensive formal discussion of the attributes, by means of which what God is to us should be fully set before us. This, however, as we have already seen, we do not get. 62 And much less do we get any meta- physical discussion of the nature of the attributes of God, their relation to one another, or to the divine essence of which they are determinations. We must not therefore suppose, however, that we get little or nothing of them, or little or nothing to the point. On the contrary, besides inci- dental allusions to them throughout the discussion, from which we may glean much of Calvin’s conceptions of them, they are made the main subject of two whole chapters, the one of which discusses in considerable detail the revelation of the divine perfections in His works and deeds, the other the revelation made of them in His Word. We have already remarked upon the skill with which Calvin, at the opening of his discussion of the doctrine of God (ch. x), manages, under color of pointing out the harmony of the description of God given in the Scriptures with the conception of Him we may draw from His works, to bring all he had to say of the divine attributes at once before the reader’s eye. The Scriptures, says he, are in essence here merely a plainer (I. xi. 1) republication of the general revelation given of God in His works and deeds : they “contain nothing” in