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October 16, 2018
Calvin employed a cluster of metaphors to describe the “spectacle” of God’s glory that he found so apparent in nature. He spoke of the world as a “mirror” or “living likeness” of God.13 It is a “painting” representing in stunning strokes the divine splendor, a “spacious and splendid house,” a “book written in large enough letters,” even a “compass” orienting people in their passage through life. “The contemplation of heaven and earth,” he wrote, “is the very school of God’s children.”14 Each of these images underscored the two principal roles played by the world as God’s “glorious theater.”
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Calvin stood in a historical tradition, stretching from Philo in the first century to Jean Bodin in the sixteenth, which perceived the natural world as a theater in which God’s providential hand is readily apparent.
Calvin began his Institutes with the importance of God as Creator. Humans discern their earliest knowledge of God, he said, in the possibilities and limits of their own created being. As a microcosm of the world, they see God’s glory mirrored in themselves, despite the tarnishing effects of sin.27 Beginning, then, with the experience of creation, Calvin went on to speak of God as Trinity, the need for redemption, and the promise of a restored world. These three themes all emerge from the initial goodness of created life.
Why is there such “unlimited abundance, variety, and beauty of all things?” So that we might “take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater,” he answers.28
The impulse to create the world arises out of a loving dance of interrelationship within God’s interior life.
Calvin’s Trinitarian theology is similar in this regard to Greek fathers like Gregory of Nazianzus who employed the Eastern Orthodox concept of perichoresis in relating the Trinity to creation. Like the dancing, interpenetrating lines of a Celtic knot, the persons of the Trinity reach for more and more dance partners in the ever-expanding celebration of God’s glory.29
“To the Father is attributed the beginning of activity and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son wisdom, counsel and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of that activity.”30 In other words, the Father, as Calvin sees it, expresses a delight in being-in-general, bringing the world into undifferentiated existence. The Son desires that this creation take specific shape and form—calling forth the elegance of trees, for example. And the Spirit hungers for the lively individuality and intricacy of bristlecone pines, Japanese red
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he attributed the world’s disordered state not only to the rebelliousness of human sin, but even more to the unresponsive “dullness” of the human family, their lack of gratitude in matching God’s own delight.34
Nature serves as a school of affliction as well as a school of desire. It disrupts the ego, redirects misplaced longings, and teaches radical trust.36 The earth’s fury, as well as its beauty, drives the church to prayer. In fact, says Calvin, the performance of praise in the church (and throughout the theater of God’s glory) is itself a contributor to God’s providential care. The longing of the faithful shares in (and supports, as it were) God’s own longing for a restored creation.
God’s redemption in Christ, then, is for Calvin a reaffirmation of creation itself, a reinvigoration of all that had been damaged by human sin.
From passages like Psalm 104:5–9, he concluded that the world remains profoundly vulnerable, constantly on the verge of chaos as a result of human sin. God’s providential hand is what holds back, at any moment, the threat of the waters of oblivion.41 A medieval cosmology underlay his thinking here, convincing him that water is an element inherently lighter than earth. The natural tendency of the world’s oceans, therefore, is to overwhelm the land. Only the continual commandment of God preserves the existence of dry earth as a virtual miracle from one moment to the next.42
Anxiety and praise were intimately connected in Calvin’s experience. Bouwsma speaks of him as “a singularly anxious man,” viewing human existence as a perpetual crisis of indecision, echoed in the contingencies of nature itself.45
Throughout his life, Calvin searched for assurances of God’s order in the fragile world around him. His mother had died when he was four years old. His father quickly remarried and shunted him off to a neighboring family where he received his earliest education. Exiled in later years from France, the country he loved most, he was never fully at home in Geneva. Moreover, he and his wife lost in infancy all three of the children born to them. His own personal world, like the entire cosmos, remained at risk.46
He spoke of the loneliness and abuse that his ministry had evoked, his desire for God honed by a sustained experience of loss. He found in the Psalter “all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.”47 As if mirroring the turmoil of the Psalms, his own inner and outer worlds remained equally fragile.
All that keeps the universe from falling apart in any instant, said Calvin, is the immediate act of God’s continual creation.
As Calvin put it, “The stability of the world depends on the rejoicing of God in his works.”49 God sustains what he creates by the very act of taking delight in it.
The latter makes possible the former. The world is a theater of desire, where the display of God’s own continual hunger for relationship is met by the thunderous applause (and yearning) of creation itself. The role of human beings is to lead the rest of creation in praising the one for whom they all yearn, yet know they cannot possess.
He could even say, “If on earth such praise of God does not come to pass . . . then the whole order of nature will be thrown into confusion and creation will be annihilated.”52
This notion of the generative nature of praise, recognizing the power of desire to realize what it seeks, is rich in ecological significance—even if Calvin only slightly began to explore this himself. It suggests that celebration is as important to the well-being of the world as the physical and biological systems that contribute to its integrity. Contemporary naturalist and poet Pattiann Rogers asks in one of her poems, “Suppose praise had physical properties/and actually endured? . . . Suppose benevolent praise/ . . . had a separate existence, its purple or azure light/gathering in the upper
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Calvin’s metaphor of the world as theater involved all of creation in the act of performance. Oceans and mountains provide commanding sets that astound the theatergoers. Trees, birds, and animals serve as a Greek chorus, echoing the theme of God’s glory. The audience ranges from humans in general, viewing the production with varying degrees of understanding, to the church down in the orchestra, singing along with the cast. All the while, God is the principal actor on stage, variously arrayed in garments of star-studded fabric, wearing masks that flash with the wild beauty of a storm at sea or
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God’s purpose in putting on the costumes of nature’s beauty is to awaken desire in those God loves, luring them back in ravishing delight. The language of longing recurs repeatedly in Calvin’s references to the splendor of the natural world.
As soon as we acknowledge God to be the supreme architect, who has erected the beauteous fabric of the universe, our minds must necessarily be ravished [rapi necesse est] with wonder at his infinite goodness, wisdom, and power.62
The world as a theatrical performance follows a “script,” instructing performers in their practice of praise. But it is also a garden of the senses, awakening yearning within them. As Calvin says: We see, indeed, the world with our eyes, we tread the earth with our feet, we touch innumerable kinds of God’s works with our hands, we inhale a sweet and pleasant fragrance from herbs and flowers, we enjoy boundless benefits; but in those very things of which we attain some knowledge, there dwells such an immensity of divine power, goodness, and wisdom, as absorbs all our senses.65
Drinking a glass of good wine with friends, wearing tasteful clothes, living in a beautiful house, and taking delight in the playfulness of language are all commendable pleasures, like enjoying the beauty of a tree or the smell of flowers or the joy of fine music.67
[I]f we ponder to what end God created food, we shall find that he meant not only to provide for necessity but also for delight and good cheer. Thus the purpose of clothing, apart from necessity, was comeliness and decency. In grasses, trees, and fruits, apart from their various uses, there is beauty of appearance and pleasantness of odor. . . . Has the Lord clothed the flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils, and yet will it be unlawful for our eyes to be affected by that beauty, or our sense of smell by the sweetness of that
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In one of his sermons, he spoke of the lack of “joyfulness and gladness of heart” as a sin, almost recalling Hildegard of Bingen’s observation that Adam and Eve’s original error was a failure to take delight in all the trees of the garden, focusing instead on only one. Calvin said: God of his own nature is inclined to allure us to himself by gentle and loving means, as a father goes about to win his children, by laughing with them and giving them all they desire. If a father could always laugh with his children and fulfill their desires, all his delight would surely be in them. Such a one does
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Calvin argued that the image of God is still discernible in fallen humanity. “Should any one object, that the divine image has been obliterated, the solution is easy; first, there yet exists some remnant of it, so that man is possessed of no small dignity; and secondly, the Celestial Creator himself, however corrupted man may be, still keeps in view the end of his original creation.”
