Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction by Jon Balserak

Author:Jon Balserak
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191068201
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Knowledge

The character of what, according to the Reformed tradition, can be known about God is captured beautifully in these words from Job 26:14: ‘Lo, these things are but the fringes of his ways’—words which the Puritan, Stephen Charnock, took for his lemmata in the tenth discourse of his On the Existence and Attributes of God. This image of the fringes, parts, or edges of a garment nicely captures Reformed understandings of all theological knowledge. It is firm and sure knowledge, but extremely limited.

While much of this limitation is due to the inscrutable nature of God’s being, it also flows from the fact that God is a person. Theological knowledge, according to Calvinism, is knowledge of a person and as is true with all persons, if God does not reveal what is on his mind, we will never know it. We can guess at it, just like someone can guess why their friend did not meet them at the theatre the way she was supposed to, but, at the end of the day, the real reason will remain mysterious until it is revealed. The same, according to Calvinism, is true of God; unless he reveals his mind, people will not know it. The corollary is also true, namely, that gaps will invariably exist in human knowledge about God when God chooses to remain silent about something.

A further limitation to this knowledge about God is, according to the Reformed faith, located in the human heart. Due to sin’s effect on human thinking, people do not want to know the true God. Rather, people are, the Calvinist insists, continually trying to invent their own God and to reduce God to something manageable and fully comprehensible. This has the effect of contaminating or corrupting true theological knowledge.

One of the best examples of this God-reducing tendency is the human propensity to create counterfeit gods, or what are called idols. Reformed theologians have traditionally exhibited great concern over this, so intense among 16th-century Reformed Christians that it prompted outbreaks of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is the act of smashing icons, statues, and anything that was deemed to represent an idol. In parts of Switzerland and Germany, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere Calvinists rampaged through cities smashing statues, breaking them into pieces—a visceral reminder of the intensity of religious beliefs and the feelings they can provoke. To these men and women, anything—any image, be it a statue, sculpture, or painting—that was supposed to represent an image of the invisible God or of the saints to whom Roman Catholics offered veneration was so offensive that it should be obliterated (Figure 5). The same intense concern is shared, though thankfully without the accompanying physical destruction, by Reformed ministers and theologians today, as can be seen in books like Tim Keller’s recently published Counterfeit Gods.

5. Calvinists destroying statues in Catholic Churches, 1566 (engraving).

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