Against Idolizing Heroes

The Record has expended a fair amount of ink on John Calvin over the past year. It was a reasonable project, for Calvin was one of the great figures in the intellectual history of western Christianity. But for all his talents, the man was only human, subject like all of us to the limitations of time and space.

Don MacLeod’s article in the July/August issue points out that when Calvin went to Paris as a young student, he found himself in a cauldron of new ideas. No doubt, but those ideas were being developed in a society which had been technically Christian since the baptism of Clovis, the Frankish king, in 496, 1,027 years earlier. For over a millennium the intellectual life of France had been shaped by the Christian tradition. The exciting ideas floating around the University of Paris in the 1520s made sense, lots of sense, in a city which had been formally Christian for centuries.

The slogans of the Reformation — by faith alone, by grace alone — have to do with salvation from sin. The authority of scripture alone was declared in opposition to the authority of the church. These arguments were relevant in a society where sin was a central problem, and where the authority of the church was a serious concern. What happens in a society where the church does not exist and where sin is no big deal?

I have long believed that what preachers say is less important than what people hear. I have a hunch that what made most sense to people was Calvin’s critique of idolatry. Reformation studies stress what is written down, the intellectual debate, and tend to skip lightly past the issue of popular support. What made the Reformation a popular movement, as distinct from an academic one?

My evidence is skimpy but suggestive. Knox habitually referred to medieval Christianity as idolatry. That may have been no more than a rhetorical flourish, but he may have meant exactly what he said. He saw the church of his youth as idolatrous. The gods and spirits of medieval Europe had been baptized as saints and admitted to a pantheon. Isaiah’s vision of God as one who “sits upon the circle of the earth” and for whom “the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers,” had faded away; popular Christianity was essentially polytheistic and therefore idolatrous.

Iconoclasm, the destruction of images, was widespread in the wake of Reformation acceptance. Protestant leaders were anxious to restrain their followers, but were not always successful. On one occasion the Duke of Conde threatened to shoot a Protestant soldier unless he stopped pushing the statues off the roof of a church in the city of Orleans. The soldier replied, “Sir, have patience with me until I have overthrown this idol, and then let me die if that be your pleasure.” This man was no academic; he was probably a country boy. But he was prepared to die for the right to destroy idols. Is it any wonder that where Calvinism triumphed the churches were stripped bare?

Since missionaries normally worked in polytheistic societies, the most useful part of Calvin should have been his critique of idolatry. But as far as I can make out they never used him. They could do just as well with Isaiah chapter 40.

The mark of conversion in China was the renunciation of idolatry, of polytheism. So important was this change in the initial acceptance of Christianity that Jonathan Goforth sometimes felt he should tell his Chinese preachers to “give the idols a rest.” But these were men who had been converted from traditional Chinese religion. They knew what they were talking about.

The initial surge of conversions in southern Nigeria came in the wake of the British conquest. Why then and not some other time? Everybody who has studied the period has a different theory. Mine is that the conquest posed a serious question for Nigerians. Where did the British get the power to overturn a well established and functioning society so easily? The answer they gave themselves was in Christianity; something the missionaries were only too anxious to provide. Ogbu Kalu’s recent study of Pentecostalism in Africa tends to a similar conclusion. Africans are looking for power — spiritual power — in religion, the power to live creatively, victoriously if you like, in a shifting society.

In India the mark of conversion was breaking caste, usually by eating from a common pot. It was a symbolic act, signifying rejection of the order of Indian society. Caste is a peculiar institution, fixing society in a strict hierarchical order based on occupation. Once a carpenter, always a carpenter, at least in this life. Caste was predominantly a feature of subcontinental Asia and the Far East. In all probability Calvin had never heard of it and if he had he didn’t think it worth spending time on.

In other words, once outside of Christendom, Calvin’s relevance is less and less obvious. The critique of idolatry is an exception, but, as already noted, Presbyterian missionaries probably preferred Isaiah to the Institutes. The authority of scripture, a Reformation idea, had sunk so deeply in the missionary consciousness that they didn’t mention its origins. They took the Bible for granted.

Don MacLeod, in his article, calls on us to be ruled by the preaching of the word. Which word? Isaiah 40:22 or John 3:16? That which makes sense in Christendom may be incomprehensible outside it.
Are we still in Christendom? I doubt it.

Roberta Clare, now of the Elders’ Institute, used to be chaplain at McGill University. In those days she referred to undergraduates as “pre-church.” Many of those born after 1965 may have no prior experience of Christianity, and no reason to look for it. Once upon a time church going was normal; now it is an option, and usually not the preferred one.

What then is the word? A clue may be found, strangely enough, in another article in the July/August Record.

Barry Mack submitted a review of Michael Ignatieff’s new book True Patriot Love. Ignatieff is descended on his mother’s side from George Monro Grant, one time principal of Queen’s University and very much Mr. Presbyterian at the end of the 19th century. Much of the review is devoted to contrasting Grant’s view of liberalism with Ignatieff’s. Grant’s liberalism was rooted in his Christian faith. Ignatieff’s is sui generis, born of itself, like Milton’s Satan, “self begot, self raised.” Even worse:

For Ignatieff … the (Canadian) Charter of Rights … is a free standing object of faith, A Holy Writ. In the process Jeffersonian democracy — a form of political organization that has served the West reasonably well for 200 years — becomes a ‘sacred cause.’

G.M. Grant would have called that, rightly, idolatry. Malcolm Muggeridge once remarked that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything at all. Personal liberty and private property have been around so long they are part of our intellectual furniture; they are ideas which shape the way we understand the world. In that sense they function in a religious way and may be described as idols.

I am not sure how far Calvin will take us with his critique of idolatry. His problem was the pervasive use of images, not the subtle influence of ideas. It is easy to make fun of idols, when a carver decides that one part of a log will be firewood and another part a deity. It is much harder to argue that ideas of obvious usefulness have become articles of faith, sacred causes.

Calvin was undoubtedly a great Christian thinker, but like the rest of us, he was a man of his times. As a guru for all times and places he has definite limitations. Outside of Christendom, missionaries hardly used him at all. Our society is not Christian but secular, even though we live with many vestiges of the past.