FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA

Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth

 

June 14, 2009

 

CHRIST AT THE CENTER – THE FAMILY OF FAITH

JOHN CALVIN AND CALVIN KLEIN

 

Scripture:  Psalm 100, Romans 8:28-30, Ephesians 1:1-4

 

INTRODUCTION

 

I hold before you today two individuals who share the same name – “Calvin” -

 

-         John Calvin, the 16th century reformer and Calvin Klein, the 20th/21st century fashion designer…

 

-         John Calvin, whose 500th birthday we celebrate on the 10th of July (born in Noyon, France) and Calvin Klein, who will turn 67 years old this coming November…

 

-         John Calvin, from Geneva, Switzerland, and Calvin Klein from the Bronx in New York…

 

-         John Calvin, the founder of our Presbyterian form of government and who helped to forge our theology together with Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli and John Knox, and Calvin Klein, who founded what is now a multi-billion dollar fashion design company ranked somewhere alongside Ralph Lauren, Oscar De La Renta, Michael Kors and Carolena Herera…

 

So I hold before you today, two men who share the same name – Calvin – but as best as I can discern, they do not share the same world view.

 

John Calvin believed in the sovereignty of God, the centrality of the Bible, the depravity of humanity (we’ll come back to that in a few minutes) and the saving grace of Jesus Christ…while Calvin Klein, as far as I can determine, has made no personal or public profession of faith in any kind of religion…

 

Although, something apparently happened to him in the spring of 1988.  After a month of drug and alcohol rehabilitation, he admitted that his life had been geared to materialism and the relentless pursuit of success, that he had turned to drink and to drugs because of a sense of emptiness, and when he was released from rehab, this is what he said:  “(My treatment) was not about health or exercise, but about spirituality, a new way to live.  I’m living for different reasons from now on…”  (Washington Post, June 17, 1988 – from Pulpit Resource, Year C, Volume 17, No. 2, April, May, June 1989, pages 25-26).

 

Now if that is what Calvin Klein said more than twenty years ago, and I am quoting from an article in the Washington Post, then all of us can thank God for his sobriety with great affirmation.

 

Yet many, if not most of us have also heard similar words from someone at sometime describing their own sense of faith: “I am spiritual, but I don’t belong to any kind of organized religion.”

 

That, my friends, is a familiar and pervasive attitude today.  But it is not the same  faith that we adhere to as Christians and Presbyterians in the Reformed Tradition.

 

I

 

According to Dr. Elsie McKee, a Reformation scholar who teaches at Princeton Seminary, “Spirituality is a popular word today that expresses individualism (and feelings about God) often unrelated to theology and institutional religion.”  However, McKee goes on to say that from John Calvin’s perspective, spirituality is more clearly described as “piety” with this definition:

 

          “The ethos and action of people who recognize through faith that we have been accepted in Christ and engrafted into His Body (the church) by the sheer grace of God…Through this mystical union, the Lord claims us as belonging solely and wholly to Him in life and in death…by the power of the Holy Spirit.  This relationship, established by God in Jesus Christ with believers, restores the joy of fellowship with Him; it evokes and requires a response…to worship God publicly and privately…and to love God, to love our neighbors and to love ourselves. (See “John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety,” edited by Elsie Anne McKee, Paulist Press, New York, 2001, pages 4-5, paraphrased)

 

So, it would appear that we have a contest here between what some might call an “old fashioned spirituality,” or piety, according to John Calvin and the Reformers in the 16th century, our Presbyterian forbears…and a “new fashioned spirituality” expressed in a variety of ways by so many others today.

 

But I don’t think that is actually the case, because old-fashioned usually means “outdated and obsolete.”  This is what it looks like.  In the 1850’s, Mt. Holyoke College in New England held firmly to the following rules for its female students:

 

1.     No young lady shall become a member of this school who cannot kindle a fire, wash potatoes, or repeat the multiplication table.

2.     No cosmetics, perfumeries or fancy soap will be allowed.

3.     Every member of this school shall walk at least a mile a day, unless a freshet, earthquake or some other calamity prevents.

4.     No student may have any male acquaintances unless they are retired missionaries or agents of some benevolent society.

5.     No student shall tarry before the mirror more than three consecutive minutes.

6.     No student shall devote more than one hour each week to miscellaneous reading.  The Atlantic Monthly, Scott’s Novels, Robinson Crusoe, and immoral works are strictly forbidden.  The Boston Recorder, Missionary Herald and Washington’s Farewell Address are recommended for light reading.

 

Now that’s old fashioned, outdated, obsolete.

 

But it is not so with John Calvin’s 16th century perspective on spirituality and piety.  His theological and Biblical insights about living the Christian life have withstood the test of time, they are ingrained and embedded in our Reformed Tradition, and continue to guide us today as we affirm our faith in the sovereignty of God, the centrality of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the authority of the Scriptures, the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, and the gifts of grace which bless our life here in the church and are meant to be shared with the lost and lonely, hungry and hurting people out there in the world.

 

That is what John Calvin envisioned as he wrote the first edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1535, which he continued to expand until he died in 1564, when all of Geneva, Switzerland and many more across Europe mourned his death and gave thanks for his life as this faithful leader of the Reformation joined the Church Triumphant.

 

And we are here today, just a month away from John Calvin’s 500th birthday, to celebrate the great legacy that he has passed on to us.

 

 

 

 

II

 

But before we close, there are two doctrines in John Calvin’s legacy that have created some tension down through the centuries, and I am speaking now about total depravity and predestination.

 

A preacher up in rural West Virginia let loose with a sermon one Sunday morning about total depravity, focused on the text from Romans 3:23, that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  After the benediction, an older woman greeted the preacher at the door and said “What you told us today about total depravity was really good – if only we could live up to it”!

 

Well, John Calvin dealt with it – with total depravity and original sin – in Book Two of The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  And he quotes not only from Romans 3:23, but also from the Book of Genesis and other texts in the Bible to tell us that something went wrong a long time ago.

 

No one can say for certain exactly how or when it happened, but Calvin described it as “the inherited corruption called ‘original sin,’ meaning the depravation (total depravity) of our human nature previously good and pure.”  (Institutes, Book Two, Chapter 1, page 246).  Calvin drew from and quoted the theology of Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa during the 5th century, and his book “The City of God,” all of which leads us to the conclusion that because none of us can rescue ourselves from sin, we need a Savior to set us free.  And we believe, said Calvin, that Jesus Christ was and is that Savior, who died on the cross to atone for our sins and has assured us through His sacrificial death and glorious resurrection that we have been forgiven and restored to a right relationship with God.

 

So, total depravity, as negative as it sounds, actually means that in our sinful, helpless and hopeless condition, God has redeemed us and welcomed us back into His open arms and loving heart through His Son our Savior Jesus.  That is Reformed Theology, my friends, and it is not bad news, but rather the Good News of the Gospel!

 

So what about predestination?  All right, since you asked… in Book Three of The Institutes, Chapter 21, drawing again from Augustine and from the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially Romans 8, our text for today, John Calvin developed the Doctrine of Predestination for the Church.  This is how he began:

 

          “We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which He compacted with Himself what He willed to become of each man…Salvation comes through the grace of God alone, and is not based on works or righteous living.”  (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, Chapter 21, pages 921, 926)

 

Now, predestination, in part, means that God has a plan and a purpose for you and for me and for all of us as Christians.  Remember, Paul put it this way:

 

          “For those whom God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.  And those whom He predestined He also called, and those whom He called, He also justified, and those whom He justified, He also glorified.” (Romans 8:29-30)

 

So, said the Apostle Paul, God is involved in our lives, and “in everything, He works together for good for those love God, who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)  Most Presbyterians I know do believe that is true, that God has a plan and a purpose for them, for the church and for this world.  And when we come to faith in Jesus Christ, we can discover that plan – who we are, to whom we belong, where God wants us to go and what God wants us to do.

 

But when we read the second half of Calvin’s definition of predestination, we move from the theological frying pan into the fire.  Listen:

 

          “We are not all created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.  Therefore, as man has been created to one or the other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life or to death…God adopts some to hope of life, but sentences others to eternal death.”  (Institutes, Book II, page 926)

 

Now I don’t know exactly how or why John Calvin moved in that direction, which is called “double predestination,” but I do know that a lot of Presbyterians have serious reservations about it.  And back in 1903, a contingent of American Presbyterians repudiated “double predestination” by attaching a declaratory statement to the Westminster Confession (See the article “Calvin and the Church Today” by Jane Dempsey Douglass, from Theology Today, July 2009, page 137).

 

Why?  Because there are other Biblical texts that seem to lead us in a different direction, like John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that He gave us His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but will have eternal life,” and II Peter 3:9 – “The Lord…is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance,” and Ephesians 1 – “God destined us for adoption as His children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.  In Him we have redemption through His blood and the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace that He lavished on us…He has made known to us the mystery of His will…set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.”

 

Now, if John Calvin were here today, as the father of our Presbyterian system of government, my guess is that in the midst of this debate about predestination, he might recommend that we form a committee to talk about our interpretations of scripture, decently and in order.  That’s my guess.

 

CONCLUSION

 

But of this I am absolutely certain: we don’t have to worry about whether or not Presbyterians believe in predestination, neither is it up to us to figure out who is going to heaven – John Calvin, Calvin Klein or anyone else.  Our calling as Christians is to preach and teach and bear witness to the life saving, life changing love of Jesus Christ, and then, having done our best, to leave the rest in the hands of Almighty God.

 

I dreamed death came the other night

And heaven’s gate swung wide;

With kindly grace the Lord came

And ushered me inside.

And there to my astonishment,

Stood friends I’d known on earth –

Some I had judged and labeled as

Unfit and without worth.

Indignant words rose to my lips

But never were set free,

For every face showed stunned surprise,

No one had expected me.

 

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

 

 

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