BOOK REVIEW:
Sovereign Grace: The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought. By William R. Stevenson Jr. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0195125061. 

Somewhere in the middle of reading Sovereign Grace, I chanced upon a paper I heard John Leith deliver fifteen years ago on Calvin’s theological method. Stevenson has caught exactly Leith’s observation that the central unity in Calvin’s theology is not predestination or Christocentrism but “an explication of the personal relation between God and man [sic].” This means that systematic arrangement of the content of theology is always subordinate to scripture, to the role of experience, and the concrete situation in which Calvin wrote and preached, as well as that of his readers and listeners. It means that sometimes tensions arise that Calvin scarcely tries to resolve. Perhaps the most difficult of those tensions is that between predestination and human freedom, and the subsequent attempts by Reformed theologians to clarify that contrarity demonstrate how fully darkness can descend on a doctrine that Calvin hoped would bring clarity and comfort to his audience.

Since Christ’s sacrifice has freed the elect (1) from the curse of the law, and (2) has made obedience to God’s deeper law possible, and (3) freed them from adiaphorous customs and traditions, a revolutionary dynamic was released in western societies that has attracted the attention of scholars ever since Max Weber’s thesis that agonized Calvinists created entrepreneurial capitalism. More interested in the politically revolutionary results of Calvinist activity, Stevenson, professor of political science at Calvin College, asks why Calvinist freedom resulted in political revolution in lands like France, the Low Countries, England, Scotland, and (later) America. That there is a connection few historians doubt, and one of the impressive aspects of this study is his dialogue with such an army of scholars: Bouwsma, Eire, Graham, Hesselink, Höpfl, Kingdon, Little, McNeil, Monter, Skinner, Voegelin, Wallace, Walzer, Willis-Watkins, Wolin. I think only at Calvin College, having coffee with Richard Muller and Philip Holtrop and other scholars, could a political scientist have found the range of materials necessary to make this study.

His major purpose is to refute the 1989 study by Ralph Hancock (Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics).Hancock argues that Calvin’s emphasis on God’s arbitrariness and transcendence robs the public square of genuine spiritual purpose, that purpose being found only within the individual soul.

So the elect are absolutely free from all that binds them in the way of custom or tradition, ready to remake the world of kings and privilege. The result is the modern, liberal state, secular in meaning and purpose, brought about largely by the efforts of Calvinists. (In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, and the prominence of religion in various nationally televised memorial services, one may wonder just how secular our society really is.)

Beginning, of course, with Calvin’s essay “Christian Freedom” found in Book 3 of the Institutes, Stevenson examines carefully the tensions built into the biblical notion of the freedom of the believer, as interpreted by the Genevan Reformer. Space does not permit a full explication of Stevenson’s thesis, but a few points may be noted. First, there is tension between the freedom of the justified individual, and his role as part of the whole, of the church, the community, the nation. When the focus moves from the radical freedom of the elect to her responsibility within the community, one finds Calvin the conservative, anxious for his reader or listener to obey the magistrate. For Calvin, love is not absence of law, but its fulfillment, thus freedom is guided or channeled by law. And the outworkings of that doctrine on the Christian magistrate or citizen are profound.

Stevenson holds that the clearest revolutionary implications of Calvin’s teaching on Christian freedom center around the believer’s freedom from traditions and customs and authority (adiaphora). Certainly when Cromwell had Charles II’s head removed, a Calvinist was rejecting the customary reverence for monarchy that was breathtaking in its audacity (just read the cries of outraged Scots Calvinists when that stroke took the life of their “ill-advised king”). But, the author argues, Calvin also taught that there is grace in custom and tradition because God, in God’s providence, worked through human agencies to produce the authorities the Christian lives under and within. So in the providential ordering and reordering of history, God is not absent—as Hancock insists—but God’s providence is within that “woven cord” that is human history. The Calvinist may be free to revolt; but that freedom is tangled within a web of responsibilities and obligations that make action in the public square very much God’s arena as well.

That is Stevenson’s argument, and he makes it well. I think between him and Hancock, Sovereign Grace has the better argument than Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics.(Hancock gives us more history, and that’s useful, if not new, even when he wrote a decade ago.) This is more than just a good study. It is wise, penetrating, and opened up for the reviewer the political aspect of Calvin’s work that I have been(perhaps!) overly critical of. He deals carefully and respectfully and honestly with writers like me, and that makes his work a dialogue, not a diatribe.

I do have a couple of quibbles. R.T. Kendall pointed out two decades ago that among English Puritans, at least, the doctrine of election brought, not freedom, but untold anguish. Some young men even committed suicide in Cambridge, and pastors had to construct a theology where suicide under such stress was regarded as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s wrestling with the believer’s soul, hence a sign of election. I think the author might have worked more with those situations where predestination brought on such unfreedom. And I would have liked for him to explicate Weber’s thesis more fully before tossing it aside. That bit of historical nonsense does deserve to be tossed, but we should be clear about what it is we are discarding. Stevenson has used both Kendall’s book and mine, where I do deal more fully with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism so he knows this stuff, but perhaps felt pressured by how much can be put in one study.

But this is a good study, quibbles aside, and we learn a great deal we hadn’t seen before about Calvin and human freedom, enough to cause subsequent scholars to nuance their assumptions about Calvinism and the political arena. 

W. Fred Graham
Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus
Michigan State University

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, WINTER 2002, VOL. 2, #3.