Three generations separate the work of John Calvin (best represented in his Institutes of 1560) from that of the Westminster divines who composed the Westminster Confession (1646). The theological relationship between the two is a complex one that scholars are only now exploring. That there are both similarities and differences between the two is obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to read and compare them honestly. The major question is whether the supposed differences are so great that they destroy the theolog­ical lineage from the Westminster divines back to Calvin.

Some of the differences are due to a historical and cultural difference of time and place. Calvin grew up and was educated in the culture of renaissance Humanism compared with the more Scholastic culture of the British universi­ties of the 17^th century, where many of the Westminster divines received their mental training. A lot happened both in Britain and in Europe in the generations between the two parties. Calvin’s Europe was coming to terms politically with the religious divisions of the Reformation while the Westminster divines did their work in the context of a civil war between the royal house of Stuart and the rights of the common people represented by the new parliamentary reforms. The theolog­ical issues of the Reformation were not identical to those of the 17th century because the Westminster divines had more opponents than Calvin. Where his sole opposition was medieval Catholicism, the Westminster divines had to contend with Catholicism, Arminianism and Socinianism.

One striking difference between the two is the way in which they did their theology, or what we would call today their theological method. Calvin’s method is that of an exegete who works directly from the biblical text combined with that of a biblical theologian who is sensitive to the progressive and climactic nature of the biblical account of the divine plan of redemption running from Israel to Christ. As a result there is a fluency in his writing and thought that is missing from the Westminster divines. They were sys­tematisers who used rational analysis (because of a revived Aristotelian logic in the work of the Protestant educator Peter Ramus) to dissect the truth of scripture in a less biblical-historical way.

The question here is whether their the­ological method vitiates their theological findings so as to make them unrecognisable descendants of the author of the Institutes. It is the aim of this article to argue against this conclusion by showing some essential agreements between the Westminster divines and Calvin on a range of fundamental topics that are integral to their theologies.

First, biblical authority. Contrary to the claim of Barthians — who differentiate the Word of God from the Bible, that Calvin never held to a belief in the verbal inspiration of the scriptures, his writings abound in references that equate the words of the biblical text with the words of the Holy Spirit. For Calvin, Scripture is the highest authority of all because it is the God-breathed Word of the Creator and Redeemer God. For example,

God has purposed to speak to us by the apos­tles and prophets, and their lips are the mouth of the one true God. commen­tary on 1 Peter 1:25

The Westminster divines begin their Confession with a magisterial chapter on the authority of Holy Scripture which they call the Word of God written. The supreme authority by which every dispute among Christians and churches must be settled “can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures” (1:10).

Within that chapter the divines make use of one of Calvin’s own contributions to the doctrine of biblical authority, and that is the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.

The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason ... the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts.Institutes I:7.4

In agreement with Calvin, the divines teach that the believer comes to know with certainty that Scripture is God’s authoritative Word as a result of “the inner work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts” (I:5). The affinity between the divines and Calvin on the authority of scripture is complete.

Second, Calvin was a covenant theolo­gian because of his sensitivity to the flow of the biblical narrative from Abraham to Christ. The God of the Bible is One who makes covenants with people in the inter­ests of their salvation and His own glory. This accords with the way in which Paul thinks in Galatians 3 and 4, where he overviews the pattern of the history of sal­vation through a series of related covenants — the promise covenant with Abraham, followed by the law covenant with Israel, followed and capped by the faith covenant in Jesus Christ. In his Institutes (II:10-11) Calvin expounds this hermeneutical perspective as one that binds together the disparate parts of the biblical revelation as a whole.

The Westminster divines wrote a separate chapter (7) on the subject of God’s covenants, something that virtually distinguishes this confession from all other reformed confessional writings. The covenant of grace sets the theological framework for their presentation of the whole plan and work of redemption in Jesus Christ, just as with Calvin. But the Westminster divines go further, for they teach a covenant present in the original relations between God and man in cre­ation, the so-called covenant of works.

Barthian critics of the Westminster theology, with their own agenda of uni­versal grace in Christ and their rejection of any other divine revelation outside of Christ, have seized on this to argue the departure of the later reformed writers from the pure theology of Calvin.

Yet we now know that full covenant theology, consisting of a covenant of works and a covenant of grace together, was already prevailing across Europe and Britain within a generation after Calvin. The men of the late 16^th century stood in direct dependency on Calvin as their acknowledged theological father. We believe they developed their fuller covenant theology as a natural outgrowth of Calvin’s ground-breaking work. The Dutch theologian Herman Witsius, writ­ing in the 17^th century in the heyday of covenant theology, displays the same awareness of biblical patterns of divine revelation in history as Calvin himself. Both Calvin and the later Protestant writ­ers could see that covenant is central in all divine-human relations.

Third, adoption. Calvin’s favourite way of describing the high privilege of grace and salvation is that of adoption, the fact that through Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, He makes those who believe in Him His sons and daughters and heirs of His eternal glory and kingdom. The whole of salvation is summed up in this honour and status of believers:

all the promises of God ought to rest on this foundation, that God has adopted us in Christ and He has promised that He will be our Father and our God.commentary on Acts 7:32

Even more than justification, on which the battle of the Reformation was fought, Calvin chooses adoption for his preferred description of our highest saving privi­lege. In this he follows Paul whose teach­ing on salvation excels on this topic (Rom. 8:15-17, Gal. 4:4-7, Eph. 1:5).

Alone among all the reformed confes­sions, the Westminster Confession has a separate chapter on Adoption (12) in which it repeats most of the teaching of Calvin just as he reproduces the teaching of Paul. The chapter consists of a single paragraph but this fact argues the impor­tance the divines attached to the subject as a separate colour in the spectrum of redemptive blessings that Christ has won for His people.

Fourth, assurance of salvation. Calvin includes assurance as an essential element in saving faith when he states:

Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevo­lence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.Institutes III:2.7

There is a noticeably subjective element in Calvin’s definition where he refers to the inner working of the Holy Spirit to bring about this degree of assurance of the truth of the Gospel and our share in it. Elsewhere Calvin is not averse to pointing to the personal signs of God’s gracious work in the lives and experience of the saints themselves:

the election of God, which by itself is hidden, is made known by its marks, when God gathers to Himself the lost sheep, and joins them to His flock, and stretches out His hand to those who are wandering and estranged from Him. The knowledge of our elec­tion, therefore, must be sought from this source. (commentary on 1 Thessalonians 1:4).

All this is said in view of the fact that some writers claim that Calvin was wholly objective about the subject of assurance, by concentrating everything on Christ in the Gospel, so that the later Westminster divines departed from him when they connected Christian assurance with the believer rather than what he believed in.

The Westminster divines, because they were interested in the typology of Christian experience, break down the source of assurance into three, in a sepa­rate chapter of their Confession (18). These are (i) the promises of salvation in Christ that we have in scripture, (ii) the visible and felt evidences of God’s gra­cious work within us in the form of Christlike virtues, and (iii) the direct witness of the Holy Spirit with our spirits to our heavenly membership in God’s family. Clearly the divines agree with Calvin on the first and main ground of assurance which is Christ in the Gospel promise of forgiveness and life, but then add the two further grounds of Christian character and spiritual experience that follow on from that.

On the subject of assurance Calvin and the Westminster divines have taught what was most relevant to their respective con­texts. For Calvin this meant highlighting the trustworthiness of God’s Gospel word centering in Christ, for people who were confused by the Church’s teaching on the need for works coming to God and continuing with God. The Westminster divines were speaking for people who were claiming the Christian name without due regard to personal knowledge of God and the development of Christian virtues. We could say that Calvin’s approach was more Pauline (Galatians), that of the divines more Johannine (1 John).

We may conclude therefore that the theological differences between Calvin and the authors of the Westminster Confession are relative in nature and limited in number in spite of different theological methods which show that they were men of their own cultural setting. These differences do not affect the fundamental agreements in their respective theologies. Both belong to the Augustinian-Reformational tradi­tion going back to Paul, Jesus and the Old Testament prophets. They are members of the same theological family showing their own individual traits.