Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace Ch. 1

Recently I’ve begun reading Nicholas Wolterstorff’s 1981 Kuyper Lectures Until Justice and Peace Embrace.  Wolterstorff begins with a brief historical investigation into two broad forms of Christianity, which may be respectively categorized as avertive and formative. To the former belongs the medieval tradition, with its thoroughly otherworldly outlook and its regard for the contemplative life of withdrawal from the world. Formative Christianity agrees with avertive Christianity in finding something inferior in our present existence (the two do not exhaust all variants of Christianity, as there are those that find nothing much amiss in the world), but it differs in seeking the reformation of that existence rather than turning away from it. Wolterstorff’s focus in his first chapter is the question of why the particular world-formative Christianity of Calvinism arose when and where it did.

Brief as it is, the chapter can only provide a sketch of an answer to this vast question. Wolterstorff points out the close connection between medieval Christianity’s avertiveness and its hierarchical worldview. This view was cosmological in scope: God, highest of all beings, had created an ordered and continuous chain of being in which every creature had its ordained place (from within this view, the life of contemplation of the supernatural easily assumes the nobility it is accorded in avertive religion). From this point of view it is possible for humans to rebel against their proper place, but the order itself is something given from above, not subject to reform.

For Calvin, on the other hand, the social order was the result of human acts, and thus liable to corruption and in need of judgment and reform. Moreover, whereas in the medieval worldview the Prince was responsible for the welfare of his subjects and the maintenance of the social order, Calvinism laid that obligation on the shoulders of the saints (the suggestion that democractic roots may be found to some extent in Calvinism is echoed by Marilynne Robinson in her collection of essays, The Death of Adam).

Wolterstorff adduces four factors that may explain this fundamental shift in worldview within Christianity. The first was the collapse of feudalism and the rise of urban society; the latter fit far less well into a hierarchical worldview. The second, related, factor was increasing social mobility, which made reform by citizens (formerly subjects) plausible in the first place. A third was the trajectory of currents of thought, especially humanism, during the late Renaissance, which tended to narrow the gap between the secular and the sacred (Erich Auerbach has traced a similar narrowing, with a similar chronology, in his 1953 work of literary criticism Mimesis). This worked in two directions: the secular world grew in its esteemed worthiness for contemplation and study, but at the same time Calvinism held that all in the created order was the possession of God, sacralizing the secular as belonging to his Kingdom. Finally, as to where Calvinism obtained its specific program of reform, Wolterstorff notes that the increasing availability of scripture was the driving ideological force. Calvin’s social reformation was a Biblical reformation, informed in particular by the Old Testament model of the very good world God had created, and to the redemption of which he calls his Church.

Calvin, Wolterstorff notes, began his Institutes in classic form with the doctrine of the knowledge of God: for him, however, this consists in acknowledgement of God as God, giver of good gifts, to whom gratitude is owed. To Calvin, gratitude motivated obedience for the Christian, not only in his inward life but with respect to his role within the social order. To obey within one’s vocation was not merely, as for Luther, to remain obediently within the station to which God had called, but to see that the actions carried out within that station were themselves in congruence with the will of God. This would inevitably lead, in some cases, to questioning the roles themselves, and would call for reform of the social order. Avertive and formative religion both hold up the actions of their adherents for judgment, but avertive religion restricts itself to the inner life; world-formative religions, by contrast, recognize the prevailing social order as the result of a collection of social acts, which may themselves be judged.

One wishes that Wolterstorff’s psychological insight that modern Christians of a Calvinist bent are either restless reformists, or guilty that they are not, were a caricature (of course, one also wishes that social reform and justice were on the minds of more Christians to begin with). That it so often is not a caricature is evidence that Calvinists themselves forget that obedience is motivated by gratitude, that God’s kindness leads to repentance, and that the same God who requires his people to love mercy and to walk in justice and humility also exhorts that our salvation lies in rest and repentance.