John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety (review)

Elsie Anne McKee has done the theological world a great service by bringing together a collection of writings from the work of John Calvin as pastor and teacher which go a long way towards showing that Calvin has wrongly been neglected as a spiritual guide, and that he has much to say on the subject of piety, his term (as McKee rightly notes) for what we mean by "spirituality." In particular, McKee focuses on Calvin's calling to be a pastor, and his attempt to carry out that office faithfully and comprehensively, as the key to gain the best understanding of what Calvin means by "piety." By placing Calvin in his pastoral context, McKee hopes to overcome two misunderstandings of Calvin which have kept him from being seen as a guide to the pious or spiritual life: his alleged intellectualism and alleged individualism. McKee rightly notes that Calvin made the heart more central to our relationship with God than the intellect, and that he rooted the piety of individuals in the corporate life of the Church, which was for him the body of Christ and the mother of the pious. By focusing on his work as a pastor, both in Strasbourg and in Geneva, McKee hopes to bring the affective and communal piety of Calvin to the fore to counter the mistaken stereotypes of Calvin that endure to this day.

McKee not only roots Calvin's understanding of piety in a pastoral context, but more specifically locates Calvin's piety itself in his experience of the call to be a pastor (received rather graphically at three distinct times in his life). According to McKee, "The piety of Calvin was that of a pastor passionately and wholly committed to living out God's claim on him, and calling others to hear and heed, to rejoice in and witness to God's claim on them as the purpose and joy of their lives" (2). McKee makes this case on the basis of two rather vivid statements in Calvin's writings. The first is a letter written to Farel in light of Calvin's anguished decision to leave Strasbourg to return to Geneva. "But when I remember that I am not my own, I offer up my heart, presented as a sacrifice to the Lord" (51). The second is from the description of the life of the Christian in the Institutes, which McKee takes to be a description of the experience of piety. "We are not our own: insofar as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for Him and die for Him" (273). According to McKee, piety is the experience of being claimed by God, of belonging entirely to God and to God's service, and for Calvin this experience of piety was essentially related to his call to be a pastor.

Having rooted Calvin's own piety, and hence his understanding of piety itself, in his experience of being called by God to the pastorate, McKee goes on to describe the whole of Calvin's pastoral work as the expression of that claim to others. In other words, the piety that lay deeply within Calvin's heart came to expression in the whole range of his ministry, so that others might hear that claim for themselves and respond by surrendering their lives to God. "Therefore there is a strong pastoral element in the expression of Calvin's piety. Readers . . . will hear the pastor drawing on his own experience of his relationship with God, shaped by scripture, to address God's people" (6). The language that the pastor will use will come from Scripture, but the experience of piety that comes to expression in that language is prior to Scripture, lying in the heart of the pious. "The biblical faith must be put...