Per Caritatem

By Michael Vendsel

Explaining just what Calvin means when he talks about this internal or secret testimony of the Spirit, however, proves to be challenging.  Is Calvin talking about an ineffably mystical experience in which the mind is bypassed or transcended? B.B. Warfield states this question nicely in his Calvin and Calvinism:

It still remains…to inquire precisely how Calvin conceived the Spirit to operate in bringing the soul to a hearty faith in the Word…. Are we to understand him as teaching that the Holy Spirit…creates…an entirely ungrounded faith in the divinity of the Scriptures…so that the soul embraces them… with firm confidence…wholly apart from and in the absence of all indicia of their divinity…?[1]

The interpretation Warfield describes seems to have been the one Edward A. Dowey favored decades later in his The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology:

The mind itself is caught up in a higher, transcendent kind of knowing. It is rationally convinced, yet the conviction rises far above what can be rationally grasped…. The believer’s certainty… is the certainty of a mind that concurs understandingly in that of which it is convinced and at the same time rises beyond what it can explicitly comprehend to participate in the mystery of revelation.[2]

Warfield, however, takes exception to this interpretation. “When a soul is renewed by the Holy Spirit to a sense for the divinity of Scripture,” he writes, “it is through the indicia of that divinity that it is brought into its proper confidence in the divinity of Scripture.”[3] He admits that Calvin does not say this in so many words, but he goes through a number of arguments in support of this claim. In his mind, the surest of these arguments is that Calvin is quite insistent that Scripture’s authority cannot be augmented by anything outside itself. That principle would be compromised by the internal testimony if the Spirit gave fresh information about the divine source and consequent truthfulness of Scripture, information that was not inherent in Scripture itself. The Spirit enables us to see the authority of Scripture as it already presents itself in Scripture. He seals those presentations to our hearts, as Calvin puts it, or, as Warfield puts it, He gives us a sense for divinity, an ability to pick up on the exhibition of divinity when it occurs.   So whose reading is to be preferred – Dowey’s or Warfield’s?

I would argue that a close reading of Calvin reveals two tendencies related to this question. First, Calvin does seem to consistently distinguish the internal testimony from ordinary sorts of evidence. At that point, Dowey seems to be correct. But at the same time, Calvin clearly talks about the ground or basis off of which the internal testimony operates – what we might call evidence, or what Warfield calls indicia. Perhaps the clearest example of these two tendencies is in section 5 of chapter 7, where Calvin writes “Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments….” In one breath he claims that there is an evidence of divinity inherent in Scripture, but in the very next he denies that Scripture can be submitted to proofs or arguments.

But what sort of evidence or indicia is this, which simultaneously grounds belief without making belief a matter of proof or argument? My argument is that as one moves on in section 5 of chapter 7, Calvin speaks of this evidence in terms that one could call aesthetic. He speaks, specifically, in terms of the majesty or glory of God, and he seems to regard this as the most powerful sort of truth-indicator.  A few sample texts will bring this out. For example, at the beginning of the section Calvin writes:

above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God Himself) that it has flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men. We seek no proofs, no marks of genuineness upon which our judgment may lean; but we subject our judgment and wit to it as to a thing far beyond any guesswork! [4]

Here he says that Scripture is assured to us in a way that is above human judgment, and he compares being assured that way to looking on the majesty of God Himself. He immediately goes on to distinguish the sort of confidence he is describing from blind superstition, and the two tendencies come out even more prominently:

Nor do we do this as those miserable men who habitually bind over their minds to the thralldom of superstition, but we feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there. By this power we are drawn and inflamed, knowingly and willingly, to obey him, yet also more vitally and more effectively than by mere human willing or knowing![5]

The divine majesty present in Scripture is said here to ground our belief in such a way that we are not being superstitious, but also in such a way that our confidence cannot be classified as an instance of mere human knowing. There is evidence within the Scriptures, but not of an ordinary kind. The next statement is equally illustrative:

Such, then, is a conviction which asks not for reasons; such, a knowledge which accords with the highest reason, namely knowledge in which the mind rests more firmly and securely than in any reasons.

The divine majesty described earlier is said here to bring about a conviction which does not ask for reasons, but which simultaneously accords with the highest reason. It brings about a knowledge which rests in something, and yet what it rests in is distinguished from reasons.

It should be emphasized at this point that Calvin is not claiming that there are no arguments of a more commonplace variety to be had. At the very beginning of chapter 8, he writes:

when, recognizing its exemption from the common rule, we receive it reverently, and according to its dignity, those proofs which were not so strong as to produce and rivet a full conviction in our minds, become most appropriate helps.

In places, he even suggests that these arguments are abundant. His concern, however, seems to be that these arguments not be made the foundation of Christian belief, since they never rise to the level of indubitability and cannot permanently dispel doubt.

Notes

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[1] B.B. Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 84[2] Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 110-11.[3] Warfield, 87 [4] Idem

[5] Idem