I am not sure who is more ignorant of John Calvin: Robert H. Nelson, who wrote The New Holy Wars, or Tobias Lanz, who reviewed it (“Calvinism Without God,” August).  Since I haven’t read Mr. Nelson’s book, I will address Mr. Lanz’s review.

I was more than a little taken aback to read that “Calvin had a negative view of people—most are so sinful, they are beyond redemption.”  Clearly, whoever wrote such a patently false description of Calvin has neither read much that he wrote, nor knows much of his personal life and warm love for those far and near whom he continually aided.

Next, I was wholly astonished to read, “He also believed there should be no intermediaries between God and man except for Scripture.”  That’s odd, since Calvin agreed with Saints Augustine and Cyprian that, if you would have God for your Father, you must have the Church for your mother.  The same Calvin insisted so strongly on the authority of the Church that he was driven out of Geneva for objecting to the government’s interference in her rule.

But Mr. Lanz rises to the surreal when he says, “What fewer people know is that Calvin also believed that nature—God’s creation—was another reliable intermediary.”  In fact, Calvin would have strongly condemned any such belief, although he did, along with Saint Paul in Romans 1, the Psalms, the Church Fathers, and Roman Catholic teaching on the natural law (which infers by reason the moral requirements of God), teach that God offers mankind two revelations of Himself: general revelation in Creation and special revelation in Scripture.  That’s a long road and wide world from nature as intermediary between God and man.

Finally, Mr. Lanz enters orbit around Pluto when he asserts that Calvin “rejected not only the formal Church Sacraments but the idea that God could be experienced in the mundane—especially mundane human beings.”  Now it is embarrassingly clear that Mr. Lanz knows absolutely nothing of Calvin, for he is writing about a man who insisted on the Real Presence, never mind the necessity of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper for every Christian.  Indeed one of Calvin’s marks of the true Church is a right administration of the Sacraments, and until the end of his life he sought to have weekly communion instituted in Geneva, against the wishes of the government.

It is not necessary that Chronicles or Mr. Lanz like Calvin, but I don’t expect to open Chronicles and find historical ignorance and misrepresentation worthy of the New York Times or Newsweek.  Clearly, he knows no more about Calvin than many modern Calvinists do.  Surely you can do better.

—Franklin Sanders

Westpoint, TN

Dr. Lanz Replies:

I have read enough Calvin to know he was a radical whose ideas directly influenced the modern heresies of economic and environmental religion that Robert Nelson describes in the book I reviewed.  Now let me respond to Mr. Sanders’ criticisms of that review.

He was taken aback by my statement “Calvin had a negative view of people—most are so sinful, they are beyond redemption.”  Well, Calvin placed great emphasis on Original Sin and in his Institutes described human nature as “wicked and deformed.”  Moreover, he defined predestination literally, which meant only the elect were saved.  Sanders goes on to explain Calvin’s “warm love” for his fellow man.  Yet, after Calvin’s “articles” were instituted in Geneva in 1537, dozens were killed and exiled shortly thereafter.  Calvin famously presided over two of these death trials.  Warm indeed!

Sanders’ biggest problem is my assertion that Calvin believed in only two intermediaries (means of God’s revelation to man)—Scripture and Creation.  He claims Calvin would have condemned any belief in Creation as an intermediary.  But in his Institutes Calvin states “that man can grow in knowledge of God through observation of creation.”  Sanders then asserts that Calvin strongly believed in the Church and Sacraments as intermediaries.  But Calvin, ever the radical, redefined the role of the Church and the nature of the Sacraments.  He reduced the Sacraments and, more importantly, stripped both Church and Sacraments of their material significance, thus reducing them to the purely spiritual.  By separating the spiritual and material dimensions of life, Calvin divided them into two sovereign domains.  And that is Calvin’s legacy.

The purpose of the Sacraments (and the sacramental life) is to keep the spiritual and material connected.  This allowed people access to God and his grace in mundane things, including mundane humans.  And it is our actions in everyday life that lead to salvation.  Once the sacramental life is lost, people seek ever more ambitious and abstract means of finding God and salvation.  This errant pursuit is the hallmark of all modern heresies, and only when the legacy of Calvin is put to rest can this existential problem be solved.

 

By the Bootstraps

Yes, as Chilton Williamson, Jr., tells us (“Contradiction and Collapse,” What’s Wrong With the World, September), there is “a vast, actually unbridgeable gulf between” democracy and the modern welfare state, since, in a welfare state, “a substantial proportion of its citizens are incapable of managing their lives without the state giving them money and moral support, and telling them what to think and do.”  In the welfare state you have people, the “welfare class,” who are “dependent clients of the state” and are only interested in the “exploitation of the public purse.”

Compare these people with, say, Richard Cheney.  Mr. Cheney does not need the government to support him.  He has shown the initiative and ability to provide for his own welfare.

In 1992, when Richard Cheney was secretary of defense, his Pentagon paid Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root nine million dollars to produce a classified report detailing how private companies (like Halliburton) could provide logistical support for U.S. troops in potential war zones around the world.  Mr. Cheney was seeking to make the government more efficient.  When shortly after this report the Pentagon awarded Brown & Root a five-year contract to provide logistics for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, no one was more surprised at this than Richard Cheney, I would guess.  The GAO estimates that through this contract, Brown & Root made overall $2.2 billion in revenue in the Balkans.

In 1995, when Richard Cheney left the Department of Defense, he did not simply sit around and draw unemployment checks.  No, Richard Cheney, despite having no previous business experience nor expertise in the oil or the construction business, overcame these obstacles to gain the position of CEO of Halliburton Co., one of the biggest oil-service companies in the world.  In this capacity he was able to move Halliburton up from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors.  It shows you what hard work can accomplish without recourse to exploiting the public purse.  Now Mr. Cheney is worth several hundred million dollars.

Then consider the people who run the investment banks.  When they faced bankruptcy, they didn’t give up and go on the dole; no, they saved the economy by shrewdly applying the money that the government and the Federal Reserve invested with them, so that in no time they were able to restore their seven-figure salaries and their bonuses.  Again, it just took individual initiative and hard work to do what they did.  They did not depend on the government to tell them what to do; instead, they displayed their independence of government welfare, and they went out and provided for themselves.

As far as the unfortunate effect on the concept of democracy (whatever democracy actually is) of universal suffrage, which extends the vote to more of the American booboisie, remedies are at hand.  By giving corporations the right as “persons” to spend as much money as they want to back their candidates, corporations will have even more to say as to who runs for office, and who gets elected, as it takes an enormous amount of money to run for office these days.  This will ensure that the uninformed voters inhabiting the welfare class will only be able to select from the candidates of either party who, for the most part, have been vetted by big corporate money interests.  This, along with the corporations’ demonstrated ability to get their way with members of the government through extensive lobbying efforts, will pretty well keep the lower classes from indulging in the unfair practice of redistributing the wealth the upper classes have extracted from the economy when they get together in their boardrooms and decide what their share of the corporate earnings will be.

So, in regard to Chilton Williamson’s claim that liberal democratic capitalism doesn’t work, I would argue that it has worked pretty well these past 40 years for the one percent of the richest Americans.  Anyway, at best democracy is a liberal mirage, and unregulated free-market capitalism is a liberal illusion.

Now here’s a thought: Is it possible that democracy erodes the life of both the upper and lower classes?

—Robert Charron

Raleigh, NC

 

Roeser Remembered

Thank you for the Tom Roeser obit (by Fr. Anthony Brankin, Cultural Revolutions, August).  Back in the day I worked closely with Tom in front-line pro-life political action.

It was during the heady times of single-issue campaigns: electing stalwarts like Bob Dornan and relishing such “upset” defeats (upsetting you-know-who) as Sen. John Culver in 1980.  Tom was a delight to talk to—not only because he could spin funny and poignant tales from the campaign trail, but because he served as a treasure trove of insightful political strategy and tactics.  I’ll miss his hearty laughs: They were particularly infectious because he enjoyed his own jokes.

—Peter Gemma

Sarasota, FL