Starting Point of Calvin's Theology, The

The Starting Point of Calvin's Theology. By George H. Tavard. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000. 199 pages.

John Calvin began his theological writings with a little book on immortality around 1534, about the time he left Paris and Noyon committed to the reform of the church. The earliest published copy in Latin dates from 1542 in Strasbour. Augustinian Assumptionist Father George H. Tavard calls it "the starting point" of Calvin's theology. In this thoughtful study, along with descriptive chapters on the Institutes of the Christian Religion and "The Main Theses of Calvin's Theology" showing its influence, Calvin's first theological discourse is introduced in what is called the only study of it in English. The name of Calvin's text is Psychopannychia. It means "the wake of the soul" or "the soul awake," as opposed to the sleep or death of the soul when the body dies, waiting for the general resurrection and the Second Coming of Christ.

The issue of the soul's state after physical death was crucial in theological debates of the sixteenth century. It was not a new concern, since Irenaeus, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and other ecumenical church fathers taught its impenetrable significance, and the sleep or death of the soul was condemned as early as the second Council of Constantinople in 553. The Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) condemned erroneous views on the soul, as Calvin and other Reformers undertook to do. It was a critical pastoral responsibility in a time of social and ecclesiastical turbulence. In that age, life after death and the salvation of the soul were the principle religious concerns, sculptured in the tympans of Romanesque abbeys and Gothic cathedrals all over Europe. Nothing mattered more than eschatology. The Reformers sought to draw inferences only from the Bible, in opposition to heretical views that souls do not have immortality until the resurrection and critical of the Renaissance recovery of classical pagans' views on the soul. The issue was joined by the evangelical rejection of the Roman Catholic belief in purgatory and the selling of indulgences.

Calvin defended the orthodox position not only to insure right doctrine but out of his spirituality and care for the inner life. His theology was based not on a version of anthropology, a humanist view of human nature, but on the New Testament conception of "eternal life." He quotes John 5:24, "I tell you, whoever listens to my message and believes him who has sent me, possesses eternal life, and will not come to judgment, but has passed out of death into life." Eternal life starts in this world. Eternal life is given when one hears the words of the Savior and participates in the Lord's Supper. That is the key to The Starting Point of Calvin 's Theology and its importance for our reading today. Calvin writes, "If only we could, with the right faith, perceive what the kingdom of God is that is within the faithful already when they live the present life!" (67).

The dualism of body and soul inherited from the Hellenization of Christianity and adopted by Saint Augustine had been assumed by Christians through the centuries in medieval orthodoxy and elaborated otherwise by countless "heresies." Various Anabaptists, Socinians, Waldensians, and presumably others taught the "sleep" of the soul to account for the period between the end of life in this world and the Parousia. Some said that the soul dies with the body and awaits the consummation of all things in Christ. Calvin said that the soul is immortal always because it has divine life within it, and that it is never separated from the love of God. His claim was based on a dynamic approach to faith rather than conjecture.

In Karl Earth's The Theology of John Calvin, reviewed in Encounter (Autumn 2003), Calvin's Psychopannychia is called "an apologetic against a mystical, quietistic spirituality" attributed princepally to the so-called Anabaptists. Barth sees a crucial concern of the young theological humanist in the question. Some would-be reformers disavowed the eternal life of the soul, which Calvin believed predestined to actively glorify and serve God unceasingly and forever. Barth sees this as critical to Calvin's lifelong theological position.

Psychopannychia was Calvin's challenge to speculation about the afterlife which has an historical interest, of course, but it relates to Christians today in a far more practical manner. His treatise shows how he understands eternal life in the New Testament to be participation in God's life here and now by faith, to be fulfilled in union with God at the time of death. "Life after death" is an existential grasp of eternal life already.

The Starting Point of Calvin's Theology has a biographical analysis of Calvin's theology in chapters called "The case against the Bishops" and "Christian Liberty." Father Tavard is interested in trying to find at what point Calvin separated from the papal church, because it is not evident in this first writing. With his distinguished ecumenical history, Father Tavard emphasizes the true devotion and catholicity which appear in the French reformer and which continue to underlie efforts to manifest Christian unity. He discerns Calvin's spiritual ties to medieval mysticism, with special indebtedness to Saint Bonventure and Saint Augustine. He sees Calvin's belief in eternal life assured by the gospel as the spiritual foundation of his whole theological system. He summarizes:

According to the Christian tradition, which of course reflects the Christian experience, the life of faith is a spiritual pilgrimage toward the vision of God. In this sense, however, vision implies more than sight. As the soul advances in this life along the way to God it is given the grace to taste God. Such an experience of the kingdom of God in the soul is itself a proof that the soul never dies. This experience is the soul's life within the earthly body. And the life of the soul is God, who never dies. (80)

Calvin's Psychopannychia - the "soul awake" - was translated into French in 1558, into English in 1851 (without a subsequent edition), and not into German until 1996. The word "psychopannychia" appears on the Internet in over 160 websites, permitting the student to research the theme further for historical or dogmatic reasons. It calls attention to the nature of faith in Calvin's argument and to the need to find that inward spiritual relation to God in the many church denominations of the Reformed faith today. It is not finally a question of what happens to the soul and body after death but of the changed life of persons of faith when God has entered deeply into spiritual communion with them. Immortality is fulfillment of being as we are presently and a hope of eternal beatitude as we shall be.

William J. Nottingham

Christian Theological Seminary

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