by Craig Larson
John Calvin turns 500 this year. I should know. For years I commemorated his influence on my thinking with the e-mail handle “Calvin1509.” Although he died in 1564, his posthumous voice still delivers timely instruction concerning self-awareness in Christian living. Amidst the seasons of dissatisfaction that self-awareness brings, believers acquire the ability to savor God and find happiness in Him. Book One of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion affords valuable insight into how this happens.
Thoughts of Self
An overarching idea in Book One is that the knowledge of God and self are interdependent. The bitter flavor of our own dissatisfactions re-directs us to God. For those under the Spirit’s influence, it becomes corrective. People don’t truly approach God until prompted to do so by displeasure with themselves. Indeed, self cannot even be contemplated without contemplating God, in whom we live and move. What greater evidence of God is there than that we exist? Calvin teaches us, like Edwards and Piper after him, that dedication to God cannot be achieved without establishing “complete happiness” in Him.
At first pass, one might then conclude that self is the beginning of the approach to God. That sounds like a notion our decadent day could run with. Not so, teaches Calvin, for glimpsing God precedes meaningful evaluation of self:
What is a little less vile pleases us as a thing most pure—so long as we confine our minds within the limits of human corruption. Just so, an eye that is shown nothing but black judges something…darkly mottled to be whiteness itself.
In other words, our restricted idea of good is but a primitive comparison to something more evil.
Each one of us “privately forges his own particular error,” fashioning a God to “match the absurdity of [his] trifling.” The price tag emerges in our dissatisfactions. It is divine influence that sways the fallen mind to nobler contemplation. The knowledge obtained from this influence is not primarily academic. A probe of God’s essence to answer “What is God?” is not only impossible by definition, but potentially arrogant. It is instead given to men to know “of what sort [God] is and what is consistent with his nature.” This progressive understanding yields a purpose: “reverence joined with the love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.” Within the knowledge of His benefits are found the catalysts of happiness.
This knowledge is born of experience more than description, yet the contexts for communion with Him can be described to provide guidance. Calvin gives us something to contemplate when temporal distractions fail us (and they will fail us as surely as life follows design).
Thoughts of Chance
Though God’s essence is incomprehensible, we find context for communion in that individual works are engraved with clear signals of craftsmanship. Calvin’s nature is not merely one of tree and deer, but human constitution itself. The skillful ordering of the universe is a mirror in which we can contemplate the otherwise invisible God, and human existence is the greatest natural proof of that divine ordering. Nature has an impulse that continues to ripple forth through humanity as part of obeying God’s eternal commands. Christ and the Father are always at work, and in Christ we all live, move, and have being:
“Man, finding God in his body and soul a hundred times, on this very pretense of excellence denies that there is a God?”
“What course of atoms…begets such industry in the several members to carry out their tasks, as if so many souls ruled one body by common counsel?”
“Manifold indeed is the nimbleness of the soul with which it surveys heaven and earth, joins past to future, retains in memory something heard long before [and] pictures to itself whatever it pleases.”
“Shall we think ourselves the inventors of so many arts and useful things that God may be defrauded of his praise even though experience sufficiently teaches that what we have has been unequally distributed among us from another source?”
“Most people, immersed in their own errors, are struck blind in such a dazzling theater…to weigh these works of God wisely is a matter of rare and singular wisdom.”
And yet, true believers recover their sight to see imago Dei. The human soul is immortal, created essence. As we observe our unlikely environs, we consider the soul’s essence. In doing so, we approach what, for Calvin, is the framework for understanding the image of God in man. The organs produce common sense; abstraction distinguishes what the senses perceive; reason connects it to universal judgment and internalizes it. Understanding, reason, and abstraction are the cognitive faculties of the soul. This is the image of God, and it is the interface between us and the world around us. It is partially restored in Christ in whom we move from “frightful deformity” to a restoration of “true integrity.” Embracing Christ is to embrace the sanity of what we “would have been.”
Thoughts of Circumstance
A journal entry of mine from a few years back reads, “I discovered my thirties to be a convergence of dissatisfactions.” And so it is at times. God beckons us to come through the furnace of our own discontent. We pause long enough to detect who we are and who He is…inklings of meaning making concise a verbose existence. His providence transcends time and dimension. Sometimes it works through an agent, sometimes without, and sometimes contrary to. Our preservation is accomplished through means and helps, precautions and remedies. God’s will is revealed through our circumstances, not apart from them. This should give us an expanding confidence that we need only see how our “reckoning fits in with the order of divine dispensation.” “God’s providence does not always meet us in its naked form, but God in a sense clothes it with the means employed.” Amongst these principles are found the felicity of the godly mind amidst innumerable evils. “What for us seems a contingency, faith recognizes to have been a secret impulse from God.”
Raise your hand before your eyes, slowly curl and release the digits. You observe, and you are aware. God’s individual works are assembled for observation and adoration as a therapeutic painting. Have you been struck blind in this dazzling theater? For the awakening soul, there exists a divine and secret impulse that reveals the home for self.