The legitimacy of the question⤒🔗

It is easier to ask than to answer the question whether one can speak of experiential preaching with Calvin. One may also wonder whether this is, in fact, a good question. After all, wrongly phrased questions never get a good answer. With Calvin, is the matter of experientiality present as a separate and important theme, like one can speak of it a century later with the men of the Further or Second Reformation? Is it possible to find the matter of experientiality back with Calvin, in the way in which many experience it today as a separate and very important theme? Certainly not in the same way! This may well help explain why people used to turn away from Calvin’s preaching all too soon in the past, with the result that research after the own character of his preaching is only emerging in our time. Apparently, people did not find Calvin’s preaching sufficiently experiential. This is very clearly a misunderstanding. From Calvin, the father of Reformed Protestantism, the theologian of the Holy Spirit, one inevitably bumps into the question of experientiality.

What is experientiality?←⤒🔗

What is experientiality? For this contribution we take our starting point in this proposition: experientiality in the biblical and Reformational sense is the experience (one may also say, the observation) that the Word of God is true and trustworthy in the practice of life. With this, we connect to Romans 5:4, in which “experience” (KJV) is the translation of the Greek word “dokimé”, which means “being well-tried.” The ESV has “character”; other translations render it as approvedness (ASV), proven character (AMP), trial (DRA), and God’s approval (GNT). This conveys the ideathat a person can prove to be trustworthy, tried and tested in battle.

If we now try to find an answer to the question about experientiality in Calvin, we should first consider that it is not easy for us to bridge the gap of more than four centuries, and that today we live within a horizon of experience that is very different from world of believers who lived in the first half of the sixteenth century.

It is understandable that the special attention for experientiality mainly arose in a time in which doctrine and life, faith and deed, no longer formed an inseparable unit. A further separating step arrived when people emphasized doctrinal holiness, that is knowing the doctrine off by heart, but without it living in their hearts. As a result, there was the threat of the rise of two persuasions: intellectual Christianity and emotional Christianity. The accusation is understandable that people say that such faith resides too high, only in the mind, and that it should be understood more deeply, with the heart.

This, in turn, gave rise to what came to be called scriptural-experiential preaching. Of course, it is not possible that experientiality adds something to the scriptural, giving it a further qualification. In a good Reformational sense, we must state that scriptural preaching is experiential preaching, and that experiential preaching is scriptural preaching. All the experiential that goes beyond the scriptural is therefore unscriptural.

The misunderstanding of the dead letter←⤒🔗

In this way, I think we end up very close to Calvin. Experiential preaching is not an addition to the Holy Scripture proper. To the contrary, we should not first understand and interpret Scripture as a set of abstract truths, which must then be applied in an experiential manner, but rather as an immense existential truth which occupies us with our entire life, with our heart and our intellect, with our thoughts and feelings, and with our plans and actions. It is not the case that the letter is dead and that the Spirit (must) first make alive. The well-known text from 2 Corinthians 3:6 gets misquoted all too often. It does not say at all that the letter is dead. In fact, it says that the letter kills. “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The Holy Scripture is not a dead letter by itself which needs to be supplemented with the Spirit. The word of God is not cold and dead, but man is cold and dead. The Holy Scripture itself is full of spirit and life. In line with Calvin, we do not acknowledge a plural sense of the Holy Scripture, with a literal sense and a deeper spiritual sense besides. We must hold on to the simple obvious text. With the hermeneutics of the Reformation we cannot defend digging for a deeper underlying sense, a “progressus ultra verba” (progress beyond words).

Calvin and Luther←⤒🔗

One can observe interesting differences between Calvin and Luther, by, for instance concretely comparing the two great Reformers regarding their exegesis and preaching of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Calvin preached three times about Genesis 2, on June 1, 10, and 11, 1560). Apart from all parallels between them, it is immediately clear that Luther gives much more attention than Calvin to the processes that play out in Abraham’s soul, while Calvin wrestles much more than Luther with the theological problem that because of the sacrifice of Isaac the salvation of the world is at risk. In Luther’s preaching, everything that must have played out in Abraham’s soul is unpacked in detail. To Calvin, it is an existential temptation that the Lord God appears to contradict himself with the messianic promise regarding Isaac on the one hand and the command to sacrifice him on the other: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, … and offer him as a burnt offering”. Calvin also is much more a modern human in the sense that he has an eye for the offensive and horrifying idea of a human sacrifice, and the hideous notion that, by divine order, Abraham must slaughter his own son.

Calvin is reserved in speaking about the inner life←⤒🔗

In addition, Calvin has a certain reservation when he speaks of the inner life. Luther wears his heart on his sleeve and knows how to address us directly. Calvin does not describe personal experiences and feelings, as Luther does with his tremendous hunger for the merciful God. Calvin is much more reserved and does not as easily allow for a look at his inner self. In his famous answer to Sadoleto, Calvin says, “De me non libenter loquor”: “I am unwilling to speak of myself, but since you do not permit me to be altogether silent, I will say what I can say with modesty”. In that way Calvin only lets himself be tempted a few times, such as in the introduction to his commentary on the Psalms, in which he provides some autobiographical details. Also in the already mentioned answer to Sadoleto we see Calvin himself come forward.

Sadoleto had essentially accused the Reformed before God’s seat of justice. To this, Calvin answers, “…For such is the assurance in our consciousness of the truth of our doctrine, that it has no dread of the heavenly Judge, from whom, we doubt not, that it proceeded.” After this follows Calvin’s personal witness of faith, (preceded however by his acknowledgement that “I speak not of our persons…, but as far as our ministry and office is concerned, there is not one of us who will not be able to speak thus for himself”):

I desired nothing, Lord, but to stand up for the honor and glory of your Christ… As to the charge of forsaking the Church (causing a schism) which they were wont to bring against me, there is nothing of which my conscience accuses me… but when I raised your banner, I was opposed with violence. With whom the blame rests it is for thee, O Lord, to decide… I myself was turned from the darkness to the light of your Word… And now, O Lord, what remains to a wretch like me, but instead of defense, earnestly to supplicate thee not to judge me according to my earlier abandonment of thy Word, from which, in thy wondrous goodness, thou hast delivered me.

Calvin and Abraham←⤒🔗

It is very clear that more places in Calvin’s works betray his personal experience. For instance, there is some identification of Calvin with David. Calvin himself says about this that his experiences in the struggle and oppressions, into which God’s providence led him, greatly helped him to become familiar with the psalms of David when he wrote his commentary. Likewise, it is very clear from the way Calvin writes about Abraham and his struggle of faith, that a significant element of his personal experience plays a role. Here, too, there is an unmistakable identification: Abraham as the stranger in a foreign land; and Calvin as the refugee, a stranger in an often-hostile city of Geneva. In his sermons about Abraham, Calvin proclaims the great comfort of God’s predestination and providence, and he says, “Nous n’avons autre refuge qu’á sa providence”: “We have no other refuge than his providence.”

In this, Abraham is an example for the church of all times. Calvin literally says, “In the person of Abraham, God wanted to give us a mirror of sorts, in order that when we must do battle, it will not hurt us to follow in his footsteps, and that we will not find it strange or new to become like him who is the father of the whole church. But it is also certain that, when everyone pays close attention to all trials he must suffer, this is not even one hundredth of what we see in Abraham. Throughout his life, Abraham was tested in body and spirit. But in the end God wanted to test him much more severely than ever before, so he would have to despair 100,000 times if he had not been wonderfully strengthened by the Holy Spirit.”

Abraham’s temptation←⤒🔗

It is touching to read how Calvin describes Abraham’s temptation. In Isaac Abraham had received the son of the promise in whom he had seen the day of Christ from afar. “Now he must die. Then... hell is opened, and the devil must reign in a way that throws everything into perdition. There is nothing left of all the promises of salvation, because he who must deliver the life of all creatures enters death. And what does that entry consist of? This is not a matter of saddening Abraham’s heart by oppression and sorrow in a human sense, but of the death of his faith and all hope concerning his salvation. It appears as if God wants him to trample on all he had given him regarding the expectation of his mercy and goodness. In short, it appears that he mocks Abraham, as if he said, ‘Sure, but you were stupid when you waited for me and followed me, when you took so much trouble to obey me. I promised you offspring from whom all salvation would spring. I fulfilled my promise by giving you your son Isaac, but you must now cut his throat, so you will understand that it only was simplicity and foolishness on your part to trust what I promised you, and that you hoped to have offspring and that this offspring would be more noble than the world and hundreds of thousands of worlds are worth. After all, it is about the salvation of your soul and the souls of all people, and you are going to wipe out all of it.’” One who can interpret Abraham’s temptation in this way must have gone through such depths of despair himself. However, at the same time, Calvin points out that it is impossible “that we could understand these things well, and that it would hit us in a sufficiently live manner” (“assez touchés au vif”). It is a unique struggle of faith of Abraham.

The personal and the communal←⤒🔗

Calvin is not only much more reserved about his inner life than Luther. There is a second important difference between the two of them. Calvin thinks from a church-perspective. To him, that means that the personal is always embedded in the communal. In the matter of experientiality, we, however, have come to think much too individualistically and also legalistically. As a result, there is a heavy and pressing burden for the individual who has to first experience all these things himself before being accepted in the community of believers. That is why so much experientiality always gets stuck in the lobby, in the fear of uncertainty regarding admission across the threshold. Calvin’s conversion is the discovery of the true catholicity of the church. The church is not constituted of individual believers, who have already arrived and crossed the threshold, but the church finds her firm ground in Christ who gathers and assembles her and keeps her together by his word and sacraments. The insignificant life of the individual with his struggles and strife is thus kept safe in that mighty communion of the church of which Christ is the Head. We do not need to redo the entire journey of salvation by ourselves to become an experienced believer, who so becomes a worthy and constituent member of the church. That would make the church  individualized in an anabaptist manner as a circle of authentic believers, all of whom could well remain on their own.

We are born and nourished within the church←⤒🔗

It is quite the opposite: in that communion of the church, “at her bosom,” Calvin says, “we are born and nourished.” Christ does that by his Word and Spirit. We also cannot do without that, for we cannot uphold ourselves, not a day and not an hour. At the bosom of the church, we are taught in the knowledge of faith. Through the ministry of Word and sacrament, our weak confidence is strengthened. We are fully dependent on the communion of the church. There we become each other’s members and are a hand and a foot to each other. All these different members become one body, because Christ rules us, and in that communion of his death and resurrection he makes us like him in distress and struggle. In that distress and struggle we are trained to trust God and his Word alone.

Trust in God←⤒🔗

That is why Calvin’s preaching is fully experiential: how he speaks about Abraham and his struggle in the faith. To Abraham it was certain that God could not contradict himself. Abraham therefore faces a life-sized contradiction he cannot handle, but which, deep down, is not a contradiction to God. In that, Abraham holds on to God’s faithfulness, since he guarantees his promise. In total confidence, Abraham must leave it to God to supply in this great struggle, in this tremendously demanding situation between the truth of God’s promise and the absolute validity of his command. Abraham must leave it to the divine providence to create a way out of this terrifying labyrinth. It is typical for Calvin to respectfully halt before God’s mysteries. After all, there is always a life-sized danger that people want to penetrate God’s hidden counsel and even dare to claim an unabashed judgment about God’s comings and goings. That is typical for Calvin’s experientiality: he stops respectfully before the hidden character of God’s mysteries, and in the confusing maze of questions and temptations he holds on to God’s faithfulness and falls back on God’s predestination and providence.

In one of his incomparable etchings, Rembrandt touchingly hit on precisely this moment when he draws Abraham, pressing Issac to his heart with his right hand while covering Issac’s eyes with this hand, and lifting the knife with his left hand. At the same time, both of Abraham’s hands are held in check by the angel standing behind him, and almost growing into one figure or form. The angel also spreads his two wings over both Abraham and Isaac. By those wings, Rembrandt expresses the fact that both Abraham and Isaac are safe in the secret of divine providence.

No reflections←⤒🔗

In this way, Calvin operates very differently in his preaching than Luther and does not get into all sorts of reflections on what might or might not have played in Abraham’s soul. In his extreme temptation, Abraham takes his refuge in God’s providence. One who studies these Abraham-sermons of Calvin with care will discover that the doctrine of God’s providence is not a chilly abstracted doctrine to him, about which people could argue endlessly and with which one could resolve many riddles of life. Abraham also did not reason according to human intellect. Indeed, the truth of the providence of God cannot be grasped with the mind, but only by faith.

 Calvin says, “Because the promises of God do not display before our eyes what they entail, it is necessary that we rise above the world when it is about faith. What is that? It means that we do not measure the power of God, who is infinitely great, by the means that come to light and that we understand. But in situations when thoughts arise in our minds or imagination that the relevant matter cannot exist, or that there is some contradiction, that we then nevertheless hold on to believe that it is certain that God will fulfill what he has said. How? O, that is not for us to judge. Here we must take all our senses captive [Ici il nous faut captive tous nos sens], and our entire intellect, and give this honor to God that he is faithful, but that we do not know which exits he will provide when it seems to us that everything is closed off and plugged. We cannot believe in God if we do not give a place to his providence, which runs its course even beyond all that we can evaluate or understand.”

In the struggle of life←⤒🔗

In Calvin’s works, this doctrine about providence and predestination is born and formulated in a heroic struggle of faith, in which believers must wrestle through great darkness even as they cling to God’s promises and obey his commandments. That is the Sitz im Leben (life setting) of this doctrine. One who cannot place himself within the horizon of this experience blocks his access to proper understanding of this doctrine. In this gigantic struggle, Abraham must go through a deep and dark valley of contradictions and temptations, through which he can only pass in hope against hope as seeing the Invisible (Romans 4:18, Hebrews 11:27). That is an experiential matter par excellence. This is not an uncertain matter, for God is faithful. If it is about this struggle of faith, which must submit to God’s providential leading through height and depth, along with the deep awareness that we live (coram Deo) before God’s face, and paired with an existential shiver in the knowledge that we must one day give account of all our thoughts, words, and actions, and we understand that this is the essence of experientiality, then Calvin is fully experiential.

Legalism spells death to true experientiality←⤒🔗

We do well to pay attention to the unique content of this experientiality, for one cannot legalistically press it into states, schemas, and patterns, and force others to submit to that yoke. With Calvin we do not find such legalization of experientiality. It arises much later. When it does, we find ourselves in a time with a different horizon of experience, the horizon of uncertainty. This legalism arises in the time in which Descartes’ philosophy with its doubt as a matter of principle undermined the firmness and certainty of salvation. The certainty of the preaching gets replaced with the (un)certainty of experience. In the cultus of inner experiences, the full riches of the only comfort are under threat of becoming obscured.

Experientiality and creation←⤒🔗

After all, the believer lives his entire life before the face of God in the entire breadth of earthly life, exactly while being aware that he does not have a lasting city here. That does not make him withdraw himself to the inwardness of the introverted life, because everything in this life will vanish anyway, but it steels and strengthens him by the hidden communion with God to go out with more eagerness to burn like a candle in the service of the heavenly master, until, in his time, he says,

“Good and faithful servant, you have been faithful over little; I will set you over much. You are promoted to higher service. Enter into the joy of your master.” Matthew 25:21, 23

 That means that, in a Reformational understanding, we see preaching and experientiality function in a very broad context, and therefore may speak of experientiality and liturgy, experientiality and politics, and even of experientiality and culture, experientiality and creation. Regarding this cultural dimension, only think of what Rembrandt expressed in his etchings with his rare artistic talent and at the same time deeply spiritual understanding of Abraham’s struggle of faith. Concerning creation, the care for the environment is burned on the hearts of the Christian. After all, it is God’s creation. Calvin says, “We are in this world primarily not for ourselves, but for God.” In the footsteps of Calvin, we cannot play off time and eternity against each other. To the believer, it is one calling that connects heaven and earth. When we separate the things God joined together, there will always be calamity.

Experientiality and prayer←⤒🔗

We close with a prayer of Calvin, with which he finished his second sermon on Genesis 22, and in which it is clearly evident to which extent Calvin, like Abraham, seeks his refuge in divine providence and entrusts himself to God’s faithful care:

But let us cast ourselves down before the majesty of our good God, acknowledging our faults, praying to him that we may thereby feel that this occurs: to hate them, to dispose ourselves of them and to discard them. And that He may now so support us in our weaknesses that He will not cease to take our service as pleasing to him, even if it is imperfect, and even though there are many things which could be justly rejected by him. And finally, that we learn to so submit ourselves to his direction, that we do not too much open our eyes to see what has not been permitted to us, but that we expect that he will always lead our ways to a good end, as we seek nothing but to follow him where he leads us, and that we always stretch out towards the goal he set before us. And that he would not only show this mercy to us, but also to all peoples. Amen.