A Kinder, Gentler John Calvin
More than 100 students, teachers and others gathered Monday morning in the Commons Annex Dining Room at Calvin College to eat cake, sip punch or coffee, and, most of all, to celebrate the 502nd birthday of John Calvin. Celebrating the birthday of Calvin, after whom the college is named, has become an annual tradition at the Christian Reformed Church college in Grand Rapids, Mich.
A key part of the tradition is the annual two-minute Calvin lecture, given this year by James Vanden Bosch, a professor of English at Calvin. Before he took to the stage, he said his focus would be on trying to break down some of the stereotypes that have grown up around Calvin.
Following the tradition, Vanden Bosch was wearing a special cloth hat with ear flaps and flowing, dark robes, just as John Calvin — one of the driving forces behind the Protestant Reformation — wore in his church in Geneva, Switzerland.
As the audience ate their cake and drank from their cups, Mike Van Denend, executive director of the Calvin Alumni Association, stepped onto the stage to introduce this year’s stand-in for John Calvin.
“Welcome to the 502nd anniversary of John Calvin’s birthday. As it is our tradition, we have had prepared the two-minute lecture on Calvin, and who better to give it than James Vanden Bosch, the most grammatically precise professor on campus.”
Standing behind the microphone in his ministerial regalia, Vanden Bosch greeted birthday-party attendees in the character of Calvin himself.
“Good morning, and welcome to the day-late party celebrating my 502nd birthday. The heavens may be rumbling, but I’m happy to be here, at a college that bears my name and even celebrates my birthday,” he said.
In his short lecture, he said, he wanted to suggest that there were other sides to the popular image of a hard-nosed John Calvin.
Calvin is known mainly in European and North American Christianity as a stern, austere theologian who taught the tough doctrines of “election, reprobation, predestination, and total depravity.”
But this characterization makes him a church Reformer, said Vanden Bosch, “who is hard to love, hard to warm up to, hard to attend to, even, except in fear and trembling.”
Vanden Bosch said he would like people, on Calvin’s birthday, to realize that there’s more to John Calvin than some of his more difficult teachings may portray.
“Sometimes the theologians and clergy reveal more about their own fears and hopes than they do about the great good news of the gospel that I thought I was championing,” said Vanden Bosch.
Calvin was a church leader and preacher who spoke and taught on a wide range of topics, “sometimes with a much smaller but still important focus, on personal salvation,” said Vanden Bosch.
As a way to offer a different, more complimentary version of Calvin, Vanden Bosch quoted from Iowa writer/novelist Marilynne Robinson, who, he later said, is probably a bigger fan of Calvin than many others who espouse his teachings.
“[Calvin’s] humanism is expressed precisely in his understanding of the teaching of Genesis, that humankind is made in the image of God, the likeness being ‘that glory of God which peculiarly shines forth in human nature, where the mind, the will, and all the senses, represent the Divine order,’” Robinson writes of Calvin in her “Preface” to John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant; Selected Writings.
Robinson also writes that perception is at the center of Calvin’s theology, both because “it is the felt and active potential for experiencing the sacred.”
Still quoting Robinson, Vanden Bosch said: “Calvin sees the creative freedom and ingenuity of human beings in the world as yet another manifestation of the divine. This is neither the Calvin nor the Calvinism of folklore, but the language is unambiguous.”
In the guise of Calvin, Vanden Bosch ended by asking people celebrate his birthday “by being more thankful for your senses and for your mind and for your perception of all things, great and small …”
For more on the Calvin birthday bash, visit: Calvin Q&A.
