Predestination and Logic

Rosenstock-Huessy does not especially like Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination, but at the same time he argues that the doctrine preserves necessary within Calvin’s theology. (This from an essay entitled “Generations of Faith,” in Volume 1 of his Collected Papers.)

His discussion begins with the claim that “our school children all learn the wrong logic.” Logic is concerned with human interaction with the Logos, and so “a complete logic would be the whole life of the logos, of God’s dialogue with us, about our many ways through his one creation. That which the schools call logic is a ridiculous rudiment. It is a fourth quarter of God’s fullness of speech,” and a complete logic would explore logic in each of the four quarters. “Even prayer,” he points out, “it preceded by commands given and obeyed: come, go, get up, go to bed, look in your heart and write, tolle lege, emigrate, become a doctor, taisez-vous!” In addition to the logic of textbooks, we need imperatives, the logic of silence, and the logic of piety, of “grateful remembrance.”

Calvin didn’t have the luxury of working on all these fronts. Given his historical situation “after the orgies of the ranters,” he had to “step forward into the field of teaching,” and teaching means dealing with “prehistoric” men: “The newcomers, the next generation, the laity, the people, the children by teaching are to be recruited for the army of God’s fighters. Teaching has to be logical in the diminished sense of mere logic because the laity is prehistoric, the students are this side of experienced law giving, experienced passion, experienced history, id est, of the fullness of the logos of God.”

Yet, at the same time, Calvin was well aware that “history must be safeguarded against scientific logic.” He knew that the myriad ways of God with the creation could not be encompassed in a textbook. How was he to teach a prehistoric generation, which requires some reduction to logic, without reducing history and God to logic?

Calvin’s doctrine of predestination provides the answer to his dilemma: “By predestination Calvin projects the three quarters of logic, of command, of desire, of telltale into the fourth quarter of the philosopher’s logic . . . . Predestination restored the hidden, the miraculous, the lifeblood of reality, the trust in God to the world of braintrusters. And their world Calvin dreaded. He dreaded students who would never learn to tremble as he trembled with Farel cursed him, invoking God’s presence, unless Calvin became the Reformed of the unruly Canton of Geneva.” Calvin “wanted these poor minds of the mere indicative to learn of the true God who blesses and curses, who decrees and demands. And how could he translate into a textbook the styles of God and the soul, the language of commands and the language of prayer? His way out was the double predestination. Impassionately he translated the presence of God into the abstract doctrine of his ever inscrutable sovereignty. Predestination projects prayer and obedience, desire and compulsion into the logic of facts . . . . I submit that the doctrine of predestination is a heroic effort of translating man’s temporality and so-to-speak non-existence and God’s eternal existence into the purely spatial concepts of reason.” He translated “God’s freedom” and “the soul’s faith in God’s free new action” into a teaching.

Rosenstock-Huessy ignores here, I think, a central driving force of Calvin’s doctrine, which was simply to follow Scripture wherever it led. Yet, ERH, I think, offers a caution to Calvinists who affirm this doctrine, since we are often tempted to do what Calvin warned us not to do, to fix God in a phrase. The consequence, if not the motivation, of Calvin’s doctrine is much as ERH suggests: It formulates, in doctrinal terms, the free sovereignty of God that cannot be captured in any formula. The formulation of predestination stands as a healthy reminder at the heart of Reformed theology that theology is not ultimately about formulas, but about striving for speech of praise, command, worship, awe that is appropriate to the living God.