Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Matthew Myer Boulton is associate professor of ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School. An ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), he serves on the ministerial staff at Old South Church in Boston, Massachusetts. His books incl

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LIFE IN GOD

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................xINTRODUCTION: The Sacred City.................................11. The City a Desert..........................................11The Rule of Life..............................................12Christian Paideia.............................................222. Calvin's Geneva............................................29The Sacred Schoolhouse........................................29Singing the Psalter...........................................33Prayer and the Supper.........................................383. Summa Pietatis.............................................45Pietas........................................................46The Role of the Institutio....................................50Pietatis Doctrina.............................................534. Six Kinds of Knowledge.....................................61"The Knowledge of God and of Ourselves".......................63Intimacy and Speculation......................................70Creator and Redeemer..........................................765. Radiance and Oblivion......................................83Creation......................................................86Providence....................................................88Oblivion......................................................916. Seeing through Scripture...................................96Scripture and the Spirit......................................98Scripture in the Institutio...................................1057. God with Us................................................112Us without God................................................112The Mediator..................................................117In Christ's Image.............................................128Flesh and Faith...............................................1318. Doxology and Destiny.......................................138Humility and Hope.............................................139Sheep out of Wolves...........................................149A Church beyond Our Ken.......................................1569. Prayer and Communion.......................................166The Communion of Prayer.......................................167The Sacred Supper.............................................18010. Reforming Calvin..........................................191Quietism......................................................193Masochism.....................................................199Misanthropy...................................................20211. Life in God...............................................210Calvin's Ideas................................................211Calvin's Approach.............................................215Reforming Formation...........................................222Reforming Church..............................................228Bibliography..................................................233Index.........................................................239

Chapter One

On a late summer day in Geneva, 1535, a violent mob stormed the Convent of St. Clare. As one sister later described it in her polemic memoir, the intruders numbered well over one hundred men, wielding "arms and weapons and all kinds of swords and dreadful instruments." Outbreaks of iconoclastic violence were on the rise in the city, and so the nuns had already removed and hidden the most precious "objects of piety" the mob had come to destroy. But the wild-eyed throng, not to be denied, forced the doorman to lead them to the secret cache, and once there, they set about their brutal work. "Like enraged wolves," the sister wrote, "they destroyed those fine images with great axes and hammers, especially going after the blessed crucifix, which was wonderfully handsome, and the image of Our Lady." As the hammers fell, the women withdrew to the chapel, "cried out for mercy without ceasing, and a terrible cry could be heard faraway; the whole convent resonated with the violence."

Less than a week later, the Poor Clares abandoned Geneva for good, and the city council took possession of the convent, eventually converting it to a hospital. That same month, the council seized all other church property within and around the city walls, and by the spring of 1536, Geneva had formally declared itself an "evangelical" stronghold. Priests and monastics converted, or fled. The coins minted that year in Geneva bore a new motto, a slogan that would soon be come a rallying cry for sixteenth-century reformers across western Europe: post tenebras lux, "after darkness, light."

The Rule of Life

And so when the young French lawyer and theologian John Calvin first set foot in the city, just three months after the council's declaration, the tides of reform had already turned against monasteries and monastic life — and not only in Geneva. That very year, five hundred miles to the north and west, the English Parliament authorized Henry VIII to disband hundreds of monasteries across England, Ireland, and Wales, confiscating fantastic amounts of land and treasure for the royal coffers. Analogous precedents for these maneuvers, each driven by its own mixture of motives, had recently appeared in Denmark, Sweden, and the Swiss city-states. For their part, reform-minded theologians took aim at monasticism in sermons, songs, pamphlets, broadsheets, and books, including tracts by Martin Luther, the audacious Augustinian monk who denounced monastic vows as unscriptural and unchristian. 3 It comes as no surprise, then, that Calvin, too, over more than twenty years of teaching, preaching, and writing in Geneva, developed his own critique of monasticism in what would become his signature theological work, Institutio Christianae Religionis.

What may come as a surprise, however, is the basis of Calvin's critique in the first place. Put briefly, in the Institutio Calvin grounds his quarrel with monasticism — in an endorsement of monasticism. That is, his argument hinges on a contrast between contemporary and ancient forms of monastic life, and a close reading of his case illuminates not only his views on the cloister, but also his overall vision of Christian discipleship as an immersive path of practical formation. For Calvin, monastics are mistaken only insofar as they make elite, difficult, and rare what should be ordinary, accessible, and common in Christian communities: namely, whole human lives formed in and through the church's distinctive repertoire of disciplines, from singing psalms to daily prayer to communing with Christ at the sacred supper.

Thus Calvin positions himself not only against monasticism as a critic, but also alongside monasticism as a fellow heir to the church's practical treasury. He argues that this inheritance belongs as much to the common laity as to monastics, and that the time has come for the whole church to reclaim what is rightfully hers. In this sense Calvin, too, sought to storm the privileged sanctuaries of late medieval Europe, though in a way quite different from the violent invasion of the Convent of St. Clare. For while the mob meant to destroy the "objects of piety" they understood as idols, Calvin's principal aim was restorative: he set out to recover the...