Godliness and Greed by Worden Skip;

Author:Worden, Skip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

We cannot even ascribe our own effort to ourselves.

Accordingly, Calvin does not allow for the efficacy of human effort in procuring one’s salvation. God chooses certain souls as his elect. Such souls are predestined to salvation from eternity by “his freely given mercy, without regard to human worth”; the remainder is consigned to eternal damnation “by his just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible judgment.”50 Calvin writes, “Scripture . . . teaches that we are not to consider that men merit of themselves but to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love.”51 Therefore, we err if we think we enrich ourselves by our own merit.52 In this regard, Calvin is in lock-step with Augustine’s later writings. In Calvin as well as his successors, we can distinguish human activity in the form of good works as a response to God’s grace from efficacy in gaining salvation. Tawney points out that in Calvinism, “Good works are not a way of attaining salvation.”53 Rather, they go right along with how the elect would be likely to respond to God’s glory in their lives. “Human effort, social institutions, the world of culture,” Tawney argues, are for Calvin (and succeeding Calvinists) “at best irrelevant to salvation, and at worst mischievous.”54 This is to say: there is nothing we can do to gain salvation, and thus worldly economic success plays no role in securing one’s salvation.

A human’s external actions, including success in terms of wealth, can at best be viewed only be a response—certainly not a contributory factor.55 This means that financial success does not reflect on our deserving of salvation. Calvin observes, “riches come not at all to men through their own virtue, nor wisdom, nor toil, but only by the blessing of God.”56 Harkness concludes that for Calvin, “God dispenses riches and poverty as he will.”57 Neither is wealth proof of having been saved, nor can even the right sort of external activity be counted as proof of election.

Tawney claims that for Calvin, “good works . . . are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been attained.”58 Fullerton places the “proof” from demonstrated moral discipline above one’s Beruf. “Within the sphere of this life lies one’s calling (so Luther), but calling now becomes the means of moral discipline (so Calvin); the Calvinist practiced self-discipline for the glory of God, and in the practice of it assurance came.”59 Fullerton argues that the Calvinist conception of “calling” itself can be viewed as being the life of strict discipline lived in the secular sphere—with the sole intent of glorifying God; however, the special contribution of Calvinism is here again the “blessed sense of assurance of election as its reward.”60 While these “proof” statements can refer to Calvin’s successors, they cannot characterize Calvin’s position, given the ontological and epistemological distance that he posits in his post-lapsarianism between Creator and Creation.

According to Calvin, an epistemological distance of understanding must lie between God’s mind and our neurons. This gulf manifests, for example, in a human being’s capacity as creature to construe his Creator’s will.

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