Election, Education and Effectual Calling
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
October 25, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Deuteronomy 7:7-11
Ephesians 1:1-14
“He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the
praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”
On a morning when you and I will return to the classroom to seek the common good for children through our commitment to their education--and in a year when
the ecclesial and even academic world has marked the 500th birthday of scholar, exegete, theologian and minister of the gospel John Calvin--I want to
revisit the educational revolution Calvin began in Geneva, a revolution whose legacy has all but disappeared in this nation and in the church that claims
Calvin as its founder.
From the beginning in Calvin’s Geneva, one of the most significant marks of the Reformed tradition has been its commitment to the life of the mind in the
service of God. Two hundred years after Calvin’s birth, while Methodists in this country were sending preachers out to the frontier with hearts strangely
warmed, Calvin’s heirs stayed behind to start schools so that their clergy would be the most educated “parson” in town. But equally radical was Calvin’s
insistence that every child, no matter the child’s social condition, be given a public education. By the time Calvin died in 1564, 1200 students were
enrolled in the lower grades and 300 in the seminary. Reformed churches and public education grew up hand in hand!
To trace the roots of Calvin’s commitment to education, we begin where he never would have begun: with a few details from his life. [It has been said that
Calvin’s “personal life is so featureless it seems to have been lived to make reticence redundant.”] His formal education included the study of grammar,
rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. All this he brought to his reading of Scripture, a reading that soon led him away from the Roman
church. At age nineteen he moved from Paris to Orleans and from the study of theology to the study of law. Yet it was the influence of the humanist spirit
on his own spirit that marked him and returned him to the study of theology. Calvin wrote that any who have “tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their
aid far more deeply into the secrets of the divine wisdom.”
It also was the effectual calling of God that finally turned Calvin toward the life God had given him to live. Writing toward the end of his life in a rare
autobiographical aside that appears, not by chance, in the introduction to his commentary on psalms, we read “God by sudden conversion subdued and brought
to a teachable frame my mind, which was more hardened…than might have been expected from one at my early period of life.” Still note, it was Calvin’s mind
that God converted!
When in September of 1536 Calvin quit his life of study at the urging of William Farel for the sake of the reform of Geneva and the church, Calvin found
himself in a city whose citizens, save for the rich, were illiterate. “Traditionally,” according to Marilynne Robinson, “European societies instructed their
members in approved beliefs through rituals, processions, feasts, fasts, pilgrimages and iconography. Geneva replaced all that with hour upon hour of
sermons and lectures, and a system of education that was compulsory for all children and free for the poor. [Calvin] rejected the ‘old saw that images are
the books of the uneducated’ remarking, ‘I confess, as the matter stands, that today there are not a few who are unable to do without such ‘books’…those in
authority in the church turned over to idols the office of teaching for no other reason than that they themselves were mute.’” I confess that today I think
of projectors flashing images on screens, praise bands singing love songs to Jesus, preachers prancing around the sanctuary spouting memorized pabulum
instead of proclaiming the substance of the faith. “If all these lectures and sermons seem a poor exchange for pageants and altarpieces,” Robinson continues,
“it is well to remember the Renaissance passion for books, and for the languages and literature of antiquity, first of all the Bible.”
But of equal importance to the Genevan reform were the schools established throughout the city, to the end that every person “be adequately equipped to
‘rightly divide’ [rightly interpret] God’s Word.” Parents were required to send their children with no regard to the household’s social or economic station.
In the Schola Privata, children learned the basics of Greek, Latin and dialectics (the investigation of truth through discussion). In the Schola
Publica, elective courses in Greek, Hebrew, theology, poetry, dialectics, Rhetoric, physics and mathematics were offered. When in 1559 the Geneva
Academy opened, a precursor of the American university, Theodore Beza, its first rector and Calvin’s fellow Reformer, called the event “an undertaking by
the whole city for the benefit of those ‘who were eager to learn.’” Apparently that included everyone! This was education for the common good!
Imagine the thrill not only of opening the Bible and reading stories that previously had been the purview of priests or the privileged; but also think of
what it must have been to read the stories critically as one who had been taught the original languages and the liberal arts. Moreover, how astounding it
was that Calvin had emerged from the Middle Ages as a scholar who, because he believed all truth came from God, believed also that the church need not fear
any truth no matter where it was discovered! To wit, of the sciences he wrote:
If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we
wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself. What then? Shall we
deny that the truth shone upon the ancient jurists who established civic order and discipline with such great equity? Shall we say that the philosophers
were blind in their fine observation and artful description of nature? Shall we say that those men were devoid of understanding who conceived the art of
disputation and taught us to speak reasonably? Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit? What shall we
say of all the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen?
Yet the details of Calvin’s education and the history of the Genevan reform beg our own encounter this morning with the theological substance of the gospel
that led Calvin to serve God through the life of the mind and that led Presbyterians from then until the 20th century to build school houses next to church
houses throughout this land.
In the first place, I think Calvin’s doctrine of election caused him to see every child in Geneva as a child claimed by God’s grace, even if that child
should not grow up to respond in faith to God’s love. “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world…and destined us for adoption as his
children through Jesus Christ” says our text. The scandal of election for which Presbyterians are known is the belief that some are chosen and others
rejected. Yet for Calvin this missed the truth that each human life has been endowed by God with dignity and stamped with God’s image; he called this
“common grace.” As John Leith explains the doctrine’s meaning for everyday life, “The preciousness of human life is not determined by our personal work, or
by the group to which we belong, but by the fact that God thought of us before we were, called us into being, gave to us our individuality, our name, a
dignity that no one dare abuse.”
Precisely because Calvin saw, in each child, a life called into being by God and chosen in love, the common life of the people of Geneva was to be a life
ordered without distinction of class or race or station in life. Each child of God was to be equipped through catechetical instruction and the liberal arts
to respond critically and substantively to the address of God in Scripture. What this same doctrine means for Calvin’s heirs today is that our piety and our
politics must demand a child born into the poverty and drugs of West Philadelphia be afforded the same dignity and education that the precious children of
Chestnut Hill are given by the good fortune of their birth into privilege. We must become advocates of God’s children born within the city limits who must
be equipped, for the sake of the common good, to read voraciously and write creatively, to think critically and analyze carefully, to delight in the arts
and so to discover their destiny. As a congregation of the Reformed tradition, we must become champions of the life of every child’s mind in the service of
God.
In the second place, Calvin believed that human beings have been given life for a purpose that is not our own to choose but God’s to command. We are chosen,
between birth and death, to embody “at least in a broken and fragmentary way, the purposes of the eternal God in the ordinary events of our ordinary
lives….God has called us not only to be but also to do, to work in his creation,” says Leith. Or as Calvin wrote in his Institutes, “each individual has his
own kind of living assigned to him by the Lord as a sort of sentry post so that he may not heedlessly wander about throughout life….From this will arise…a
singular consolation: that no task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned as very precious
in God’s sight.”
No doubt Calvin saw the public education of Geneva’s children as the means by which each child may be equipped for the work God has purposed. This had
neither to do with a child’s skill or the acquisition of a body of knowledge [our definition of vocation today]; it had to do with the inner disposition and
openness of a child to her destiny, to living the life he has been given by God to live. To seek the common good of children in the second place is to
protest anything in the social order that keeps a child from living her destiny, from fulfilling his vocation.
Though finally on Reformation Sunday, when we are celebrating a new chapter in our children’s Christian education with the call of Diane Fitch and as we
consider how we might become advocates for the public education of children in this land-no matter their social and economic circumstances, we must
acknowledge that education is not to be equated with salvation. At most I think Calvin would say that education puts a child in the way of grace. For at the
end of the day and at the end of a lifetime, God’s gracious claim upon the lives of our children is wholly the action of God’s love. God has come to them
not as a body of knowledge or as a set of beliefs to comprehend through a course of study but as a person. God has come to them in the One who, from the
foundation of the world, has chosen them in love and destined them to be God’s own.
Over the course of their lifetime, God will be known in the ordinary events of their sometimes ordinary lives. The stories Jesus told, the parables he
taught, the sick he healed, the lost he found, the cross he bore opens a child’s imagination and, as it was with Calvin, brings to a teachable frame the
human mind, which was more hardened…than might have been expected at such an early age. Or as the Westminster Divines put it and we soon will confess, God
effectively and irresistibly calls our children, savingly enlightening their minds, renewing and powerfully determining their will that they may be made
willing and able to answer God’s call and accept and embrace the grace that has, from the foundation of the world, made them God’s own. Thanks be to God!
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