Let Everyone Enjoy Ones Own Judgement
John Calvin was a master of language. Calvin’s education emphasized rhetoric, philology, and the “classics,” particularly Roman authors, as did the education of his contemporaries Erasmus and Luther. For instance, to learn how to persuade others to their points of view, students studied Cicero, the Roman orator and rhetorician, and his meth¬ods for winning civil cases and debating contests. Calvin and his classmates learned how to argue for their points, regardless of whether a point was true or false, right or wrong. Words could go any which way, and with the right skills, one could pretty much do what one wanted with them. They were tools of the communication “biz,” to serve a speaker’s or a writer’s purposes outside and beyond language.
When Calvin studied Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, he did not simply learn a language’s grammar, vocabulary, and syntax; he also learned how the language was used to express ideas, feelings, and values, and how these con¬tributed to the mores and particular character of a cul¬ture. Calvin was conversant and comfortable with the original languages of Scripture, so he felt that he could enter into the imagination of the biblical writer and his world. David, Isaiah, Timothy, and Jeremiah were col¬leagues and collaborators in understanding what God was up to. In addition to dictionaries, grammars, and extra-biblical texts, Calvin also used nonverbal aids such as his own experiences and feelings, and these allowed him to interpret Scripture empathically. Nonetheless, the languages of Scripture were only a door opening on the unfamiliar terrain of the biblical landscape. They could never substitute for that landscape but could only pres¬ent its contours to the interpreter.
Since the Renaissance, word masters understood that language was malleable and incapable of telling “truth” once and for all. The sign was not the thing stood for and could not replace it. The meaning and the purpose of a sentence lay within the user’s mind and heart outside and beyond words. Language was the writer’s clay, shaping meaning as he or she wrote, and a clue into values beyond words. No two people translate the same text in the same way, and it’s unlikely that they would agree on the meaning of a particular passage in a poem or a trea¬tise in their own languages much less in Holy Scripture.
To make matters more complex, a living language changes with use and circumstance, as biblical exegetes from Tyndall to Calvin and Luther knew all too well. The same word in Exodus has a different “feel” to it in Deuteronomy. During Calvin’s life, the “vulgar” or “common” tongues of German and French were inten¬tionally being molded into their contemporary forms by Martin Luther and John Calvin respectively. Not only were these men working with such languages as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin that spoke of the past, they were also consciously developing the grammar and syntax of their own mother tongues for the future!
From Calvin’s standpoint, Holy Scripture was not the Word of God but, rather, words through which a human being could surmise, intuit, and almost but never quite grasp what God wanted that person to know about the relationship between God and the human being. Words were items in God’s tool kit; they might be God’s whispers from a nursemaid to an infant to see if she could get a response from the child. Calvin took that image of a nursemaid from St. Augustine to illustrate how even words of Scripture were accommodations to human limitations. God meant them to serve a purpose outside and beyond the Bible.
The same words used in Scripture were also used outside Scripture. Methods of interpretation applied to a poem by Horace in Latin could also be usefully applied to interpreting the Song of Deborah in Hebrew and to Paul’s great ode to Love in 1 Corinthians 13 in Greek. No distinction was drawn between the words of the Bible and the words of everyday life. Faithful people were to read Holy Scripture as if it were God’s Word, knowing full well that God’s Word can never be fully appreciated much less understood by human beings through Scripture alone.
For instance, Calvin played up and played on the domestic woes of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with Gallic sarcasm to show that just because one is “faithful,” one is not necessarily “happy.” He reached his readers by bemoaning the fates of the Patriarchs: “Would you work seven years for a man who cheated you just to get the wife you wanted instead of the one you did not? This is happy? Jacob was miserable!” Calvin is writing Midrash, enjoying himself immensely, not trying to nail down truth once and for all, but only describing the difference between faith and happiness as best he could, the former being no guarantee of the latter. Of course, the Swiss Reformers did not practice bigamy, but that was not the point. The point was that Jacob was wretched and faithful. Provided we keep the limitations of words in mind, as Calvin and Luther did, preachers can have lots of fun with Scripture, set free by the very limitations of words to play, to re-imagine, to empathize with David, Jeremiah, Timothy, and Paul. As one rabbi has written, “Scripture is a blank page on which the human imagination writes.” Calvin and Luther, the two major reformers of the High Renaissance and shapers of modern French and German, often used Scripture as their blank page.
Nor was Scripture composed of esoteric or secret knowledge too wonderful for ordinary people to grasp. The Renaissance reformers followed the lead of fourth-century Bishop Ambrose, who had captured St. Augustine’s imagination with the value of “plain text.” Scriptures were written in the languages of the people who spoke and wrote them. No in-house jargon or pecu¬liar spin on ordinary words, Scripture was written “in plain text” for all the world to hear and read.
The reformers criticized the Roman Catholic Church for its use of Latin. Canon law, treaties, contracts, and the Bible itself were written in Latin, and that lan¬guage was restricted to the Church hierarchy. As a result, Latin was used to distance the learned from the merely faithful, as if Latin were a private language only spoken by God among God’s princes and priests.
Today, unfortunately, some church members tend to use “religious” language to proclaim secret knowledge that only “true believers” possess. Not only would this privileged and private use of ordinary language have driven Calvin and Luther ballistic (not to mention Ambrose and Augustine), but Paul himself had ranted against such “privileged communication” expounded by some members of early house churches who leaned toward Gnosticism’s focus on special and secret mean¬ings available only to the “in-crowd.” Plain text means public accessibility. When church members today define “love” or “Grace,” for instance, with private definitions that individuals outside the church neither use nor understand, these saints unwittingly shut themselves off from the world that Christ came to save, and they remove the Body of Christ to a ghetto of one-way, empty slogans. “Where’s my magic decoder ring?” an inquirer may ask. “Join the Church,” a medieval bishop might have answered. Today, whether from a storefront or mainline congregation, that answer, “Join the Church,” is only one of a dozen magic decoder rings out on the street purporting to solve all the problems of life and love and the search for meaning.
For Calvin and the humanists, there is no “Christian” or “Church” language or any magic decoder ring; there is only “language,” and what we do with it is pretty much up to us. If ordinary language does not work in preach¬ing and if we are driven into a corner spouting and some¬times shouting slogans of salvation desperate for a hook or a handle, it may mean we are running on empty, not taking the world Christ came to save seriously on its own terms. Perhaps we are not even willing to grapple with Holy Scripture and all its words morphing into images, stories, jokes, puns, and prophecy as seriously and as playfully as we are expected to do as preachers. We might still be riveted to the notion that we can and must get it exactly and totally right every Sunday instead of accepting the fact that interpretation yields approximations but never totality, as Luther and Calvin knew quite well. And if they obsessed over words, as Luther certainly did, they never worshipped them. Words were never absolute, that is, absolved from their contexts, their usage, and their users.
Despite being on intimate terms with language, Reformers tended to give their deepest trust and person¬al authority to the nonverbal, to Grace and to Faith. (Only Scripture, Only Grace, Only Faith.) No less than Luther, though in a more understated way, Calvin stipu¬lated that his fundamental hermeneutical principles were dispositions toward God and Sacred Scripture, prior to interpretation. The first disposition was piety, a synthe¬sis of reverence and love for God. The second was “a sin¬cere heart,” where “heart” for Calvin was the Hebrew lev, the mind-heart that would know God as intimately as God knew the human being. The starting point for interpreting Scripture, then, is an attitude or a feeling that cannot be pinned down or proved by doctrine or dogma, by words, that is. With a “sincere heart,” awe, wonder, and love, an exegete was set free to interpret Scripture, knowing that the complete and final meaning would never be gained until the world is fulfilled, and what modicum of truth we do make of the words of the text comes from the Holy Spirit, not from ourselves, and then only for the time being. All interpretations are pro¬visional. We disagree and shall continue to disagree, but if we share in that piety with a sincere heart, we can all add our contributions to the tradition, to the history of trying to figure out just what’s going on in that text we call Holy Scripture.
Nor are we tethered, glued, or pinned to God by Holy Scripture. Rather, Calvin believed that the Word of God is actively uniting our nature with God’s nature through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, deep in the heart where silence reigns. He felt that this work goes on 24/7 and lies outside our will, a work of God’s Word in progress and in silence, the playground of faith and Grace, where the Holy Spirit and the human spirit play hide and seek with each another.
