I’m beginning my fifth trip through Calvin’s Institutes this semester, which is my third trip with a group of students. I am always amazed at the power of Calvin’s writing, which is designed to bring the reader into direct confrontation with God. From the opening page, Calvin aims to make the reader conscious that theology is not a matter of cobbling together texts or concepts, but a matter of worship which requires an obedient intellect. He has written a book which is relentless in setting the young theologian coram Deo, before the face of God, so that doctrine is what one is bold enough to say about God while God is listening. Too often, theology is perpetrated as if we are merely talking to each other, perhaps with God eavesdropping. The best theologians of the Reformation reverse this: Calvin’s book, for instance, gives the uncanny sense that God is the primary auditor and that we the readers are the ones doing the over-hearing. The Reformers were animated by this sense of theology as the Christian community giving an account to God. Better leave out the silly stuff; better quash speculation; best not to trifle here. This is part of what they meant by the special sense they gave to the term confession, as in, a church’s “confession of faith.”

Where did Calvin learn to write like this? Where did he get the ability to teach doctrine in a way that doesn’t just fill out a topical outline, but leaves his readers stranded in the presence of God, forced to make a decision on doctrine after doctrine? Some of the techniques, no doubt, come from his Renaissance humanist training and close study of classical rhetoric. Another source is his immersion in the language of Scripture, so that he is able to transmit some of the tone of the Biblical writers as he puts his own project in their service. He also knows some of the best writing and preaching the Christian church ever produced: Augustine, Jerome, and Bernard of Clairvaux are frequently the stylists behind the scenes.

But I think the immediate source of Calvin’s coram Deo theological style can be found in his biography, in the person of William Farel. Farel (1489-1565) was an older Reformer who had already started a work in Geneva before Calvin got there, and invited Calvin to join him in the project. Okay, “invited” is too weak a word. What Farel actually did was announce to Calvin that the will of God called for Calvin to join the pastoral work in Geneva, and that if Calvin tried instead to sneak away and hide in the world of scholarship, that God would blight his future work. John Calvin knew how to stand up to bullies, but he interpreted Farel’s speech as something different from spiritual bullying. He took it to be the voice of God calling him to a life’s work. He believed that Farel’s exhortation (an “alarming adjuration” or “dreadful imprecation” Calvin later called it) was a form of speech which placed him in the presence of God where he was forced to a decision.
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