A Shattered Vase: The Tragedy of Sin in Calvin’s Thought

The Enlightenment had high hopes for humanity. Emancipated from the church, tradition, and Scripture, the self-made individual aspired to attain intellectual or at least (after Kant) moral perfection. For this realization of the moral kingdom, Christ was not absolutely necessary. Not only is there no such thing as original sin in the Enlightenment perspective, but also the example or model of a life well-pleasing to God is already innate in our minds. Therefore, we may advance simply on the basis of the moral law within.

However, Pelagianism—the religion of self-salvation— is the default setting of the fallen heart ever since the fall. We find it even in the nineteenth-century American evangelist Charles Finney, and it remains a potent theology in practice even in many places where it is denied in theory. Accordingly, the emphasis falls on human activity and striving, self-improvement, and the moral transformation of society. In many ways, modernity represents a theological and spiritual movement: a Christian heresy that could arise only as the negation of the faith that offended its moral sensibilities.

Turning his back even on the supposed givens of nature, Friedrich Nietzsche insisted that truth is not discovered, but made—by us. Our lives do not have any purpose, given their accidental origin, but we can create a destiny for ourselves. Preserving the emphasis on blind willing, many of Nietzsche’s postmodern heirs have also deconstructed the sovereign self presupposed by their mentor. Michael Foucault realized that it was, to borrow a term from Nietzsche, “bad fiction.” In reality, the self is no more a fixed and stable entity than other notions, such as truth, being, God, or the world. We are not sovereign over our own lives, but are shaped by constantly changing power structures.1 From the sovereign self, emancipated from all authorities, to the vanishing self, imprisoned in a network of power-relations, humanity is unsure of itself now more than ever.

For a variety of reasons, John Calvin’s treatment of humanity provokes a host of questions and answers that remind us how powerfully Scripture still speaks to our condition. Wherever the realism of the biblical account of the human condition is taken seriously, the gospel is seen more clearly and embraced more deeply. Calvin would likely agree with Foucault that there is no such thing as an autonomous self that first exists and then enters into power-relations (i.e., social structures). Rather, human beings are inherently covenantal. That is, they are always already participants in a web of relationships. First of all, they are “in Adam”—both sinners and sinned-against, caught up in the paradox of being image-bearers of God accountable to God for their obedience or transgression. No one is an island of pure subjectivity, alone determining what one is or will be. Rather, we are conditioned by our relatedness to each other as children of Adam. Second, as they are “in Christ,” the elect are not only accountable and therefore liable to condemnation, but are chosen, redeemed, called, justified, sanctified, and glorified. They belong to the covenant community, including its practices of baptism, catechesis, discipline, communion, and so forth. There is no abstract self hovering above these two networks of power-relations. One is either a covenant-keeper in Christ or a covenant-breaker in Adam. Like Jesus’ generation, which he compared to children who did not know either how to mourn or dance properly, we—even in the church—seem to regard the verdict of the law as too severe and the verdict of the gospel as too good to be true. Our age does not seem to know either the grandeur of creation or the tragedy of the fall.

The Paradox in Calvin’s Anthropology

Not only Calvin’s critics, but sometimes admirers, are surprised to discover in his writings such lavish descriptions of the majesty of creation in general and the dignity of human beings in particular. Absent from Calvin is the traditional Augustinian and medieval notion of a donum superadditum –a gift of grace added to nature in order to orient human beings toward God, righteousness, and life.2 This view depended largely on a Platonic/Neoplatonic cosmology, with the intellect at the highest rung of the ladder, participating in divinity, and the body toward the lower rungs, with the soul ranged midway. Thus, with the superadded gift, Adam could either raise himself above the realm of the body and its passions, following the image of God imprinted on his mind, or allow his lower nature to drag him down.

In Calvin’s understanding, created nature was excellent simply by virtue of being generated by God’s unfailing word. “For not only did a lower appetite seduce him, but unspeakable impiety occupied the very citadel of his mind, and pride penetrated to the depths of his heart. Thus it is pointless and foolish to restrict the corruption that arises thence only to what are called the impulses of the senses; or to call it the ‘kindling wood’ that attracts, arouses, and drags into sin only that part which they term ‘sensuality.’”3 Human fallenness cannot be attributed to any weakness in human nature as created, which would place blame ultimately at God’s feet. Rather, it was the inexplicable apostasy from true righteousness and holiness. Calvin put it this way:

Now away with those persons who dare write God’s name upon their faults, because we declare that men are vicious by nature! They perversely search out God’s handiwork in their own pollution, when they ought rather to have sought it in that unimpaired and uncorrupted nature of Adam. Our destruction, therefore, comes from the guilt of our flesh, not from God, inasmuch as we have perished solely because we have degenerated from our original condition.4

To God alone is attributed human dignity. The imago dei can be properly defined only in relation to its renewal in Christ by the Spirit (1.15.4). “In this integrity man by free will had the power, if he so willed, to attain eternal life. Here it would be out of place to raise the question of God’s secret predestination because our present subject is not what can happen or not, but what man’s nature was like. Therefore Adam could have stood if he wished, seeing that he fell solely by his own will.” His faculties were rightly composed to obedience, until in destroying himself he corrupted his own blessings. Hence the great obscurity faced by the philosophers, for they were seeking in a ruin for a building, and in scattered fragments for a well-knit structure. They held this principle, that man would not be a rational animal unless he possessed free choice of good and evil; also it entered their minds that the distinction between virtues and vices would be obliterated if man did not order his life by his own planning. Well reasoned so far—if there had been no change in man. But since this was hidden from them, it is no wonder they mix up heaven and earth!5

Not abstract metaphysical speculation, but the concrete history of the covenant as interpreted by divine revelation, was Calvin’s way of approaching the tragedy of human corruption. Not nature as fashioned by the hand of God, but the willful decision of the covenant partner to violate the commission entrusted to him, was the locus of misery in the world. Ranged, like Irenaeus, against the Gnostic identification of evil with the warp and woof of creation itself—a view that has returned with a vengeance among Nietzsche’s heirs—Calvin emphasized the fall as the historical event of willful human transgression that spoiled a glorious theater.

This paradox of human dignity and human tragedy is apparent throughout Calvin’s treatment of sin, and it is far from unique to the Geneva Reformer. Especially among the younger reformers such as Calvin, humanism had made a deep impression. Although differences are sometimes exaggerated, in material terms humanism exhibited greater interest in human dignity, and in terms of methods was more concerned with history and the interpretation of texts than with the more speculative approach characteristic of medieval scholasticism. When Calvin heaped scorn on the “school-men,” he was simply echoing Erasmus, Lefèvre, Valla, and other humanists of his day. The Reformed scholasticism that followed in the wake of Bucer, Calvin, Vermigli, Musculus, and numerous other important figures, was imbued with this humanist spirit, however much it seems to have followed the more traditional method of scholastic systems. However, it is Scripture that shaped their anthropology, so that it could simultaneously affirm human nature as such and reckon with the gruesome reality of human misery.6 Much like our own day, there were humanists such as Pico della Mirandola who exalted the divinity of the human soul, and those whom Calvin identified as new Epicureans, who could scarcely distinguish humans from brute animals.

Of course, this somewhat paradoxical anthropology of what we might call simultaneously dignified and deranged is not always apparent in the work of everyone who claims Calvin’s legacy. Especially in more popular renditions, the summary often begins with total depravity. This may be due in part to the famous acronym “TULIP,” which is itself a shorthand summary of the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-19). However, it must be remembered that Dort was a response to the Five Points of the Remonstrants (Arminians) and as such never intended to offer a summary of Calvinism per se, but a defense of Reformed doctrines at stake in that controversy. Furthermore, even there, under the topic of human corruption, the canons begin, “Man was originally formed after the image of God. His understanding was adorned with a true and saving knowledge of his Creator, and of spiritual things; his heart and will were upright, all his affections pure, and the whole man was holy.” Only after saying this did the divines assembled at Dort think it possible to add, “But, revolting from God by the instigation of the devil and by his own free will, [man] forfeited these excellent gifts; and in the place thereof became involved in blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity, and perverseness of judgment; became wicked, rebellious, and obdurate in heart and will, and impure in his affections.”7

The same dual emphasis is found in the Belgic Confession, where, after commenting on the imago dei, it is added, “But being in honor, he understood it not, neither knew his excellency, but willfully subjected himself to sin and consequently to death and the curse, giving ear to the words of the devil.” Transgressing “the commandment of life,” he “corrupted his whole nature” and “lost all his excellent gifts which he had received from God, and retained only small remains thereof, which, however, are sufficient to leave man without excuse.”8 The same affirmation of created dignity and total corruption appears in the Heidelberg Catechism (Q.6) as well as the Westminster Confession (4.2) and catechisms (Shorter, Q. 10, 15-19).

If we begin with total depravity rather than creation, the former can easily lose the tragic element; sin too easily then becomes confused with our humanity as such rather than with its corruption. This is the popular caricature of Calvin’s critics, where human existence itself is a factor that must be endured with extreme reluctance and dissatisfaction, breeding an asceticism that makes its medieval versions seem appealing by comparison.

However, for Calvin and Reformed theology, it is not our humanity with its magnificent endowments, but the perversity of our willful suppression of the truth in unrighteousness, employing those gifts as weapons against a good Creator, that introduces the tragic element in nature and history. “This is the inherited corruption, which the church fathers termed ‘original sin,’ meaning by the word ‘sin,’ the depravation of a nature previously good and pure.”9 Calvin explicitly appeals to the double imputation in Romans 5—that is, the parallel between Adam and Christ. If human corruption is simply a matter of imitating Adam’s trespass, then salvation comes by imitating Christ’s good example.10 Calvin refuses to become mired in the finer historical debates over the transmission of the soul from one generation to another, content to assert with Scripture that Adam stood as the covenantal representative for the human race.11 Original sin includes both guilt and corruption.12

How Total is Total Depravity?

Calvin and Reformed theology generally differed from Luther and Lutheranism on the question of the effect of the fall on the image of God. For the latter tradition, the fall so corrupted human nature that there is no vestige of the image of God; it has been entirely lost and can be restored only by redemption in Jesus Christ.13 Again Calvin’s concern to uphold the integrity of God’s creation is exhibited in his refusal to accept a total eradication of the divine image. In fact, particularly against the radical Anabaptists, Calvin offers a challenge that is worth quoting at length:

Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in such slight esteem, we condemn and reproach the Spirit himself. What then? Shall we deny that the truth shone upon the ancient jurists who established civic order and discipline with such great equity? Shall we say that the philosophers were blind in their fine observation and artful description of nature? Shall we say that those men were devoid of understanding who conceived the art of disputation and taught us to speak reasonably? Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit? What shall we say of all the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen? No, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without great admiration…. Those men whom Scripture calls “natural men” were, indeed, sharp and penetrating in their investigation of inferior things. Let us, accordingly, learn by their example how many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good.14 The Spirit is at work savingly in the elect, but also in common grace toward the reprobate.15

Luther too, of course, spoke of the potential for unregenerate humanity in “things earthly,” but Calvin saw this as evidence not of the neutrality or indifference of earthly things in relation to God and his kingdom, but of the ineradicable and indelible imprint of God’s image. Indeed, it is this fact that humanity remains in some sense God’s image-bearer and covenant partner that motivates human beings in their sinfulness to idolatry and sophisticated schemes of religious distortion. Fallen human beings are not irreligious, but idolatrous. The image must be suppressed because it is still there. Like a mirror that reveals a reflection that we do not want to see, it must be distorted, covered over, smeared with mud. Because it reflects the God whose existence stands over against us in judgment, the image of God is no longer redolent of high office, but is a burden to be cast off. Precisely because it cannot be eradicated it is disfigured beyond recognition.

Again, this gives to Calvin’s doctrine of sin an irreducibly ethical determination. In the fall, humanity lost nothing of its created nature. There is no missing part, no weak faculty, that could account for disobedience.

Because of the bondage of sin by which the will is held bound, it cannot move toward good, much less apply itself thereto; for a movement of this sort is the beginning of conversion to God, which in Scripture is ascribed entirely to God’s grace…. Nonetheless the will remains, with the most eager inclination disposed and hastening to sin. For man, when he gave himself over to this necessity, was not deprived of will, but of soundness of will…. Therefore simply to will is of man; to will ill, of a corrupt nature; to will well, of grace.16

This requires a distinction between necessity and compulsion. Just as God’s immunity to sin derives from his own natural goodness rather than any external compulsion, so the reverse is true for sinners. Calvin appeals to Bernard’s argument that human beings are “oppressed by no other yoke than that of a kind of voluntary servitude.”

Surely my readers will recognize that I am bringing forth nothing new, for it is something that Augustine taught of old with the agreement of all the godly, and it was still retained almost a thousand years later in monastic cloisters. But Lombard, since he did not know how to distinguish necessity from compulsion, gave occasion for a pernicious error.17

Reformed scholastics would invoke the distinction between natural and moral ability, which makes the same point perhaps more precisely. Yet the two sets of terms are related: depravity is natural in the sense that it is universally inherited, not in the sense that it is inherent in human nature as created; human beings retain the natural ability to contemplate God in his works because the image of God has not been completely lost, yet the moral ability to render gratitude, true worship, and obedience to God is entirely surrendered to the bondage of sin. Everyone still retains a sensus divinitatis: “a sense of divinity which can never be effaced is engraved upon men’s minds.”18 In fact, superstition and idolatry are evidence both of this general revelation and its distortion in the fallen heart.19

Some Calvinists may be embarrassed by Calvin’s repeated affirmations of the persistence of the divine image, particularly with the Reformer’s appeal to metaphors such as embers, lamps, and remnants. Indeed, total depravity is sometimes represented even by advocates as requiring something closer to the Lutheran view, with every vestige of original righteousness, holiness, and love extinguished in the unregenerate heart. However, Calvin is closer to Augustine in this respect. Although he does not attach himself (at least explicitly) to the theory of sin as mere privation of the good, he typically understands sin as parasitical. It cannot create, but can only undo; it cannot bring about its own state of affairs, but can only corrupt, distort, disfigure, and suppress an original state of affairs determined by God’s goodness. Ugliness is the marring of beauty; stupidity and foolishness are the derangement of an original intelligence and wisdom; injustice is, as its prefix suggests, the undoing of justice; error is the distortion of the truth. Sin and evil cannot create, but only destroy.

But not destroy completely. The rays of God’s glory in creation still manage to penetrate through the mud that human beings have smeared onto the mirror, and God’s gracious providence (what later Reformed theology would call common grace) enables humanity even in its perversity to arrive at some semblance of truth, goodness, and beauty in things earthly. For Calvin, then, depravity was total in its extensiveness, not in its intensiveness. In other words, there is no foothold of goodness anywhere in us—in our mind, will, emotions, or body—where we could rise up to God. Sin has corrupted the whole person, like a poison that works its way in greater or lesser intensity throughout the entire stream. Yet, despite ourselves, this does not eliminate the possibility of reflecting God’s glory. Humanity is therefore not as bad as it could possibly be, but as badly off as it could possibly be. There is no residue of obedient piety in us, but only a sensus divinitatis that we exploit for idolatry, self-justification, and superstition. Thus the same remnants of original righteousness that allow even pagans to create a reasonably equitable civic order in things earthly provoke them in their corruption to false religion in things heavenly.

As Calvin sees things, medieval theology had compromised both the integrity of creation and the sovereignty of grace. With respect to the former, creation lacked genuine integrity apart from a superadded gift of grace that elevated nature beyond itself. Yet with respect to God’s tribunal, general revelation yielded some saving truth to which at least the relatively unfallen intellect could assent and, as the will cooperated with grace, conversion could ensue. Calvin took creation and the fall more seriously. He took issue with the popular notion that God simply holds out his hand in an offer of pardon to those who turn themselves toward him—and that this constitutes the grace of God in regeneration. “We admit that man’s condition while he still remained upright was such that he could incline to either side. But inasmuch as he has made clear by his example how miserable free will is unless God both wills and is able to work in us, what will happen to us if he imparts his grace to us in this small measure?”20 Again, it is not that the will is rendered inactive by sin, but that it is bound by sin until grace restores it in a one-sided, unilateral, and unassisted divine act (2.3.14).

God’s revelation in creation renders us all inexcusable. “Yet let this difference be remembered,” Calvin adds, “that the manifestation of God, by which he makes his glory known in his creation, is, with regard to the light itself, sufficiently clear; but that on account of our blindness, it is not found to be sufficient.”21 Only by the light of faith can we properly discern even the revelation of God in creation, Calvin argues, appealing to Hebrews 11:3.22

Calvin’s repeated images are vivid: the burning lamps shine, but we immediately leap to extinguish them; embers continue to smolder, but we smother them; wherever rays of God’s glory break through, we smear the mirror with our filth; the tree is chopped down before it can bear the fruit of true righteousness. “Their unrighteousness was this—they quickly choked by their own depravity the seed of right knowledge, before it grew up to ripeness.”23 “As experience shows,” he says, “God has sown a seed of religion (semen religionis) in all men. But scarcely one man in a hundred is met with who fosters it, once received, in his heart, and none in whom it ripens—much less shows fruit in season.” Whether they explicitly deny God or embrace their own superstitions, “all degenerate from the true knowledge of him.”24 Creation is “a glorious theater”; indeed, “wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory,” especially in “this most vast and beautiful system of the universe in its wide expanse.”25 Even the most uneducated person can recognize this, but how much more can those who daily engage in “astronomy, medicine, and all natural science,” not to mention “the liberal arts.”26

Another popular analogy is that of a labyrinth.27 In the theater of this world, “so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its Author. Although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no way lead us into the right path. Surely they strike some sparks, but before their fuller light shines forth these are smothered.”28

In his Romans commentary, Calvin follows Paul’s logic closely: the consequence of human wickedness and suppression of the truth in unrighteousness is not atheism, but idolatry, speculation, and the measuring of God’s majesty according to human standards.29 “[Paul] then intimates, that they, making a depraved choice, preferred their own vanities to the true God; and thus the error, by which they were deceived, was voluntary.”30 Romans 1 targets the obvious vices of the Gentiles, but chapter 2 “is directed against hypocrites, who dazzle the eyes of men by displays of outward sanctity, and even think themselves to be accepted before God, as though they had given him full satisfaction. Hence Paul, after having stated the grosser vices, that he might prove that none are just before God, now attacks saintlings (sanctulos) of this kind, who could not have been included in the first catalogue.”31 If “the Lord sings to the deaf as long as he does not touch inwardly their hearts,” it is only because of our own perversity.32

God continues to give general or common graces to the wicked. “For this reason, we are not afraid, in common parlance, to call this man wellborn, that one depraved in nature. Yet we do not hesitate to include both under the universal condition of human depravity.”33 Therefore, in the court of human justice and opinion, there is great diversity. Some people are more vicious, others more virtuous; some more intelligent, artful, just, and generous than others. Yet before God’s tribunal, all mouths are stopped.

Calvin’s distinctions between God’s general gifts in providence and God’s saving grace in the church, necessity and compulsion, nature-as-created and the corruption of nature, things heavenly and things earthly, a righteousness before God and a righteousness before humanity, allow him to continue to affirm the goodness of creation as such alongside the most unflinching appraisal of human wickedness. So although we are swimming in revelation, our minds are drowning in self-imposed ignorance and vanity. Not until God speaks in the Scriptures is there a proper knowledge of God.34 Only with the Scriptures as our spectacles are we able to recognize truly what before we had seen only confusedly and distortedly.35 Now, we apprehend God’s works, “while these very works are appraised not by our depraved judgment but by the rule of eternal truth.” To be sure, even here we see through a glass darkly, but “it is better to limp along this path than to dash with all speed outside it.”36 Human beings are the loftiest examples of divine wisdom,37 which makes their willful ingratitude in turning away from God all the more culpable.38

Is God the Author of Sin?

As the quote above from the Canons of Dort attests, Calvinism in its official expressions attributes original sin to the transgression of Adam, “by his own free will.” It is not God’s sovereignty that holds human freedom in bondage, but sin. Here too, confessional Reformed theology is obligated to hold together two apparently conflicting theses: God has decreed whatever comes to pass, yet this in no way infringes on creaturely freedom. It would be easier, of course, for finite intellects to resolve this dilemma in the direction of either human autonomy or fatalism, but the Bible does not allow these options.

Calvin’s theological heirs are therefore simply affirming with their mentor the futility of speculation, which can only lead finally to error and ultimately to idolatry. God is not the author of sin, since he does not directly cause or bring it about. (In his treatment in the Institutes, Calvin freely employs the Aristotelian categories of primary and secondary causality.) That is, God does not make, create, or coerce creatures toward evil. This conclusion, in fact, Calvin regards as blasphemy.39 At the same time, the fall did not catch God by surprise. From all eternity, God had elected a people from the human race in Christ for eternal life. Supralapsarians and infralapsarians have both found statements in Calvin to support their positions (that God’s decree of election was made with regard to humanity either as created or as fallen, respectively). However, this is a later debate that can only be anachronistically inserted into Calvin’s thinking.

The important thing for Calvin is simply to affirm simultaneously that God is neither the author nor the passive victim of creaturely aggression. He cautions,

Let no one grumble here that God could have provided better for our salvation if he had forestalled Adam’s fall. Pious minds ought to loathe this objection, because it manifests inordinate curiosity…. Let us accordingly remember to impute our ruin to depravity of nature, in order that we may not accuse God himself, the Author of nature.40

In fact, we call this corruption natural only “in order that no man may think that anyone obtains it through bad conduct, since it holds all men fast by hereditary right.” Thus, it is not nature itself but its corruption that is in view.41

Sin and Grace

We have seen that for Calvin human dignity rather than depravity must be the starting point for anthropology. It should be added that his stark appraisal of sin was but a prelude to the gospel. Just as creation measured the tragedy of the fall, redemption in Christ measured the triumph of grace. Throughout Calvin’s discussion of the first chapters of Romans, it is repeatedly observed that the apostle’s grave commentary on human depravity is calculated to drive the sinner to God’s mercy in Christ. The purpose was not simply to expose human perversity, but “Paul’s object was to teach us where salvation is to be found,” namely, “in the grace of God alone”—in Christ rather than in us.42

The targets of Calvin’s polemics are “the Pelagians of our own age, that is, the Sophists of the Sorbonne.”43 At the heart of this heresy, even in its more moderate forms, was the failure to distinguish the nature of humanity as originally created from the state of humanity after the fall. Before the fall, humanity was indeed oriented toward God and righteousness, capable of doing all that God had commanded. “Law” is humanity’s native tongue. After the fall, however, at least if there is to be any hope of rescue, another word must be announced. The gospel is not innate. It must be revealed from heaven as good news. “In this ruin of mankind no one now experiences God either as Father or as Author of salvation or favorable in any way, until Christ the Mediator comes forward to reconcile him to us.”44

The natural order was that the frame of the universe should be the school in which we were to learn piety, and from it pass over the eternal life and perfect felicity. But after man’s rebellion, our eyes—wherever they turn—encounter God’s curse…. For even if God wills to manifest his fatherly favor to us in many ways, yet we cannot by contemplating the universe infer that he is Father. Rather, conscience presses us within and shows in our sin just cause for his disowning us and not regarding or recognizing us as his sons. Dullness and ingratitude follow, for our minds, as they have been blinded, do not perceive what is true…. Therefore, although the preaching of the cross does not agree with our human inclination, if we desire to return to God our Author and Maker, from whom we have been estranged, in order that he may again begin to be our Father, we ought nevertheless to embrace it humbly. Surely, after the fall of the first man no knowledge of God apart from the Mediator has had power unto salvation.45

It was this faith in Christ, directed by the shadows of the law and the prophetic promises, that kept a remnant in Israel looking toward the future in hope.46 God can be considered the object of faith only with the qualification that “unless God confronts us in Christ, we cannot come to know that we are saved.” And “in this sense Irenaeus writes that the Father, himself infinite, become finite in the Son, for he has accommodated himself to our little measure lest our minds be overwhelmed by the immensity of his glory…. Actually, it means nothing else than that God is comprehended in Christ alone.”47

Apart from Christ, then there can be only a “fleeting knowledge of God” that quickly turns to the vinegar of idolatry and superstition, however much “they [Calvin refers to Moslems here] proclaim at the top of their lungs that the Creator of heaven and earth is God.”48

According to surveys, most professing evangelicals, along with the wider culture, deny original sin.49 In his recent study, sociologist Christian Smith has characterized religion in America as “moralistic, therapeutic deism,” with no distinction between those who have been raised in evangelical churches and those reared in liberal, Unitarian, or unchurched backgrounds.50 Having witnessed the baneful effects of Pelagianism on mainline Protestantism, the evangelical movement in North America seems increasingly to be reaping the whirlwind of the seeds sown by its revivalist legacy. Pragmatism, consumerism, self-help moralism, and narcissism are simply the symptoms of a disease that is, at its heart, theological: namely, the drift toward Pelagianism. Whatever the formal creed, and regardless of whether it appears in the form of a rigorous legalism or a sentimental antinomianism, a seriously deficient appraisal of sin surely lies at the heart of the church’s lack of confidence in the gospel to create and empower the church’s life, worship, and witness.

I leave it to the reader to evaluate this gloomy appraisal, which is increasingly observed with considerable alarm even by mainline theologians. If it is indeed accurate, or even partly accurate, then the condition of at least American Christianity may actually be worse than that of the medieval church. In any case, it is hoped that the richly biblical wisdom that Calvin offers—both in the speculations that he eschews and the frank if unpleasant exegesis that he so vividly expounds—will prove its worth again in our faith and practice today.

This article appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Mar/Apr 2009).