Ligon Duncan on Calvin and Piety

Ligon Duncan just finished lecturing on Calvin’s doctrine of Christian living, or piety. Here is a summary of the lecture:

Many are familiar with Calvin’s Institutes as a handbook, a manual, to compliment his commentaries and sermons. Calvin understood the need to be both biblical and theological. You can be theological without being biblical but you cannot be biblical without being theological. There is almost no where better to go than to Calvin’s commentaries to see rich biblical expositions. Calvin did not understand the Institutes to be a comprehensive sum of theology in the way that Thomas understood his Summa Theologica . His Institutes are more a comprehensive treatment of piety, or the Christian life. His work was theological, Christological and rooted in the Gospel. The beginning of the Institutes shows that Calvin rooted the Christian life in what you think about God. If you were to ask Calvin to summarize his teaching on Christian living in one word, he would tell you it is in “piety.”

There are many in the Reformed community who believe the idea of piety to come from the movement known as pietism. Another word he would use was “religion.” For Calvin “religion” is an experiential love of God as Father and fear of Him as Lord. When Calvin uses the term religion he means faith joined with fear and reverence of God. It was, for Calvin, the knowledge of God that is the beginning of everything in piety or Christian living. It is piety that begets love. The Lutherans tended not to take the first question of the Shorter Catechism as a summary of biblical truth. They had seen the medieval monks living the first table of the law while abandoning love their neighbors. Calvin argues that love for God (i.e. true love for God) leads to love to neighbor.
The origin of Calvin’s focus on “piety” came not only from his knowledge of God’s word, but also from his study of the Classics. He saw the way that the Romans, who considered Christians to be impious because of their lack of commitment to the Roman cause, and understood that it carried a far reaching idea. The word 15 times, or so, in the epistles. Calvin expounds all of these passages in his teaching on piety. In his introduction to his work The Origins of Piety in John Calvin, Ford Lewis Battles explains Calvin’s deep commitment to this idea from the pages of the epistles. Battles does conclude, “We have no such definite information on the specific Scripture that caused Calvin’s change of heart…A close study of the evidence leads me to conclude…that it was…Romans 1:21.” You will find the themes of Christian life and piety in his expositions on the Psalms. They also come out in Calvin’s account of the Reformed Christian’s confession before God’s judgment seat in his reply to Cardinal ? The particular section on the Christian life were, interestingly, not present in the 1536 edition of the Institutes, but there were small dots at the end of the section where they are now found indicating that he would have written more at that time if possible.
The Christian life is especially summarized in the sections on Romans 6 in Book 3. Chapter 7 deals with the summary of the Christian life. The summary was outlined as follows: First, self-denial; second, cross-bearing; third, meditation on the future life; and, fourth, the use of this present life. He then goes on to say that if we are not our then we know where we need to seek our purpose. Since we belong to God, all our desires must be for God. Man’s first step is away from himself and must be toward God. Self-denial is at the heart of the Christian life. Calvin’s own life illustrates this. When he was asked to return to Geneva, he said that there is nothing less agreeable to him. However, because Calvin knew that he was not his own, he went.

Calvin understood that the Christian life meant a life of cross-bearing. He understood that we are to grow in it. There were in Calvin’s day, as there are in our own, those who said that it is unhealthy to focus n the afterlife. For Calvin, meditation on the future life, not only comforts us in the present life, but it gives us the hope and motivation to serve in this life.