“Beyond the Sphere of Our Judgment”:
Calvin and the Confirmation of Scripture
[This article is dedicated to my friend and colleague, Robert D. Knudsen, in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the cause of Reformed apologetics in the tradition of John Calvin and Cornelius Van Til.]
John Calvin was preeminently a pastor and teacher of the Word of God. He was devoted to studying the Scriptures and applying them faithfully to the people of God. He manifested this devotion in his preaching and lecturing, his commentaries and treatises, and also in his greatest work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. He stated that the key purpose of the Institutes was “to prepare and instruct candidates in sacred theology for the reading of the divine Word.”1 He believed that a clear theological system would aid the student in the study of the Bible. He was convinced that in the final edition of the Institutes in 1559 he had accomplished this goal to the best of his abilities: “I was never satisfied until the work had been arranged in the order now set forth.”2
This final edition began with an inquiry into the question of knowledge. As William Bouwsma has put it, “The first nine chapters of Book I constitute a kind of epistemological introduction to the work as a whole, as they consider the possibility and the processes of the knowledge of God before proceeding to its content.”3 Calvin was not interested in a formal, philosophical epistemology. Calvin was not interested in developing a philosophical system. He was interested in the fundamental religious questions: how can I know myself, and how can I know God? He believed that these questions were interconnected. One can know neither oneself nor God except by knowing both in relation to one another.
Calvin began his analysis of these questions by asking, how can I know God. He argued that God could be known in nature, but that sinful man could only know God clearly through the Scriptures. The Bible is essential for the sinner to know God.
What is Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture? One might assume that Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture would be easy to summarize and evaluate in light of Calvin’s well-deserved reputation as a clear and incisive thinker. But
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surprisingly, that is not the case. T. H. L. Parker has written, “Calvin’s concept of Scripture as the Word of God presents probably the most difficult problem in all his theology, one on which much has been written and about which there is considerable disagreement.”4 H. Jackson Forstman is even stronger: Calvin’s view of Scripture “must strike one as arbitrary, provincial, and incoherent—in short, as superstitious.”5
These concerns about Calvin’s doctrine of Scripture carry over into efforts to understand his ideas about the confirmation of Scripture as God’s Word. Kenneth Kantzer, for example, disagreed fundamentally with B. B. Warfield on how to read Calvin on this point.6 Despite disagreements and difficulties in past attempts to understand Calvin, the following analysis will show that Calvin is really quite clear in the presentation of his position. His position becomes clear on an examination of his teaching, of the sources of his teaching, and of the significance of his teaching.
How does one know that the Scriptures are the revelation of God? Calvin addressed this question in the Institutes, Book I, chapters 7 and 8. In these chapters he recognized two possible answers different from his own. The first possible answer was that one knows the authority of the Bible from the teaching authority of the church. Calvin, however, rejected this answer, insisting that the church rested on the Bible, not the Bible on the church.
The second possibility for knowing the Scriptures as the revelation of God was that the Bible’s authority might rest on evidence available to rational reflection. Calvin, especially in chapter 8, developed the appropriate ways in which various kinds of evidence could be used to substantiate the truthfulness and authority of the Bible.7 He made clear, however, that
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the use of evidence was a secondary and supportive element for knowing the Scriptures’ authority. The primary way to know the authority of Scripture was to be found elsewhere.
For Calvin, if the authority of Scripture rested on the church or on proofs, then it rested on a human authority. But he believed such a position was disastrous for true religion. “…what will happen to miserable consciences seeking firm assurance of eternal life if all promises of it consist in and depend solely upon the judgment of men?”8 For Calvin man must have a certain and undoubted foundation for religious knowledge. The Bible was that foundation, and its truth must be known by some other manner than human judgment. As Calvin said in his famous “Reply to Sadoleto,” “We hold that the Word of God alone lies beyond the sphere of our judgment.”9
But how could man know without exercising his judgment? Calvin’s answer was that the Holy Spirit convinced God’s people of the truth of his Word:
…the testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also 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 to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded…. Some good folk are annoyed that a clear proof is not ready at hand when the impious, unpunished, murmur against God’s Word. As if the Spirit were not called both \’seal’ and \’guarantee’ [II Cor. 1:22 ] for confirming the faith of the godly; because until he illumines their minds, they ever waver among many doubts.10
This work of the Spirit transcended the human reasoning process and established Scripture above every human authority. The real self-authenticating character of the Bible was found in the work of the Spirit, who first inspired it and then applied it to the believer. Again Calvin stated:
For even if it [the Scripture] wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, it seriously affects us only when it is sealed upon our hearts through the Spirit. Therefore, illumined by his power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but 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.11
How did the Spirit work that certainty in the believer? Calvin described that work in rather metaphorical language. His description was brief and
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far from any full philosophical analysis. His primary metaphor was that of illumination: a light that enlightens the blind. “Indeed, the Word of God is like the sun, shining upon all those to whom it is proclaimed, but with no effect among the blind. Now, all of us are blind by nature in this respect. Accordingly, it cannot penetrate into our minds unless the Spirit, as the inner teacher, through his illumination makes entry for it.”12 But he could also speak of it as a feeling: “a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation.”13 He could speak of it as a taste: “Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.”14 This light, or feeling, or taste was a profound experience worked in the believer by the Spirit.15
Calvin argued that by the power of the Spirit one could gain a higher understanding and a deeper insight into truth. Again Calvin’s language was more rhetorical than technically philosophical. “For faith is so far above sense that man’s mind has to go beyond and rise above itself in order to attain it. Even where the mind has attained, it does not comprehend what it feels. But while it is persuaded of what it does not grasp, by the very certainty of its persuasion it understands more than if it perceived anything human by its own capacity.”16 And in another place Calvin wrote,
Therefore, as we cannot come to Christ unless we be drawn by the Spirit of God, so when we are drawn we are lifted up in mind and heart above our understanding. For the soul, illumined by him, takes on a new keenness, as it were, to contemplate the heavenly mysteries, whose splendor had previously blinded it. And man’s understanding, thus beamed by the light of the Holy Spirit, then at last truly begins to taste those things which belong to the Kingdom of God, having formerly been quite foolish and dull in tasting them.17
In summary, the key elements in Calvin’s view of the primary confirmation of Scripture are these: (1) Christians know the Scriptures to be the Word of God by an immediate recognition of that truth. (It is important to bear in mind here that Calvin is speaking of the theological foundation of Christian confidence in the Bible as the Word of God, not the process by
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which a Christian in his own experience may come to that confidence.) (2) This knowledge is a unique response to the Word of God. (3) This knowledge is worked by the Holy Spirit. (4) The Holy Spirit works this knowledge in the renewed minds and hearts of Christians. And (5) this knowledge is foundational to religious certainty and confidence.
If Calvin’s position on the confirmation of Scripture is clear, it is certainly not persuasive to all. Kantzer labeled it “a sort of pseudo-mysticism”18 and stated, “We in turn ask Calvin why he is more willing to trust a human insight than a human reasoning process…. Calvin will reply that this sight is to be trusted absolutely because it is really God’s sight. We again ask Calvin how he knows that this is God’s sight, and he can only appeal once more to his human insight.”19 To understand how Calvin might have responded to such a criticism, a fuller examination is needed of the intellectual sources of his position and of the significance he attached to his position on the confirmation of Scripture.
The importance of the confirmation of Scripture in Calvin’s religious and polemic work raises the question of the sources for Calvin’s thought in this area. Generally his ideas were not novel or without precedent in Christian thought. The first source, certainly as Calvin would see it, was the Bible itself. He believed that the Bible taught its self-authenticating character and that God’s self-revelations—for example, to Abraham about the sacrifice of Isaac or to Moses at the burning bush—never created epistemological crises. The Bible is the source of our understanding and illumination: Ps 119:105, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” Jesus speaks of the immediacy of recognition, for example, in John 10:27, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” Calvin also believed that the role he ascribed to the Spirit was taught clearly in the Bible: John 16:14, “He will bring glory to me by taking what is mine and making it known to you.”
Calvin’s position and the language in which that position was expressed shows that other sources also influenced him. While he clearly did not speak the dialectical language of medieval Aristotelianism, some argue that late medieval scholasticism was an important influence on Calvin. Alister McGrath, for example, has written of the strong presence both of the via moderna and of the schola Augustiniana moderna in the University of Paris in the early sixteenth century.20 While one cannot be sure what exactly Calvin
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studied at Paris or even when and with whom, nevertheless McGrath argues that there is evidence in Calvin’s writing that shows his familiarity with such types of late-medieval nominalism.21 Karl Reuter in his earlier study argued in particular for the influence of John Major on Calvin, claiming that Major mediated the theology of Duns Scotus and Gregory of Rimini to Calvin.22 T. F. Torrance further developed this line of reasoning in his studies on aspects of epistemology from Duns Scotus to John Calvin.23
On the other hand, Alexandre Ganoczy24 and A. N. S. Lane25 have argued vigorously that the claim of significant influence from late medieval theology on Calvin during his student days in Paris is extremely unlikely. Calvin most probably did not study theology formally in Paris and there is no evidence of any particular interest on Calvin’s part then in medieval theology.
For the purposes of this study the question of the theology that Calvin studied in Paris is not of prime importance. But other aspects of his studies in Paris may well be significant. Some of the epistemological questions that are reflected in Calvin’s thought on Scripture might have been raised during his arts’ studies in philosophy. Lane granted, “A reasonable case may be made for Major’s philosophical influence upon Calvin.”26
How can these philosophical studies provide background to understanding Calvin’s view of the confirmation of Scripture? Torrance has shown how Duns Scotus rejected both Augustine’s concept of innate ideas and Aquinas’ stress on the priority of abstractive knowledge. Duns Scotus asserted instead that intuitive knowledge was primary.27 He distinguished a perfect intuitive knowledge (unattainable in this fallen world) from an imperfect intuitive knowledge which in the case of God is still compelling for the one who has such knowledge.28 As Torrance summarized: “…when within this relationship the mind of man encounters the reality of God in His self-manifestation it cannot withhold its assent to the truths which it apprehends.”29 In Duns Scotus and John Major, Calvin could
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have found encouragement for his ideas of the compelling, intuitive recognition of God’s truth in Scripture. Still a key difference seems to be that for Scotus this intuitive knowledge is a general approach to knowledge and for Calvin the Spirit’s confirmation of the Scripture is unique.
In form of argument and general interest Calvin is certainly more a son of the Renaissance than of medieval philosophy. How might Renaissance humanism have influenced Calvin’s approach to Scripture? The difference between the medieval world and that of the Renaissance has sometimes been described as the decline of Aristotelian thought and the recovery of a more Platonic way of thinking. But Renaissance humanism was a much more complex phenomenon than a simple shift from Aristotle to Plato. William Bouwsma has suggested that the rhetorical culture of the Renaissance really moves between the poles of Stoicism and Augustinianism.30 While Stoic elements can be found in Calvin, the influence of Augustine was much greater. Bouwsma summarizes the Renaissance Augustinian approach to truth in these terms: “Ultimate truth, then, is mysterious, beyond rational comprehension, and therefore first planted in the heart by grace, not discovered by the mind.”31 This brief summary aptly captures the direction of Calvin’s thought on the confirmation of Scripture.
Bouwsma recognizes that the problem of knowledge was a fundamental one in the Renaissance and that the pessimism of the Renaissance about possibilities of knowing were serious also for Calvin.32 He writes, “The recognition that we are dependent for religious knowing on Scripture was in fact an expression of this sense of limits.”33 Yet that sense of limits made the reliability of Scripture all the more crucial for Calvin and his theological enterprise.
Calvin’s theology has often been more specifically linked to that of Augustine. Renaissance rediscovery of the church fathers made Augustine available and vital to scholars such as Calvin. Augustine was the church father most often and most favorably cited by Calvin.
Now significant differences certainly do exist between Augustine and Calvin. Love was at the center of Christian experience for Augustine while
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faith was at the center for Calvin. Augustine was much more philosophical, while Calvin’s interest remained more specifically religious.34 Calvin is more concrete in his appraisal of fallen man and more focused on the religious relation of man to God than Augustine.
Still there is a remarkable affinity between the theologies of Augustine and Calvin. But the exact lines of influence are elusive. As A. N. S. Lane has well said, “There are striking parallels in thought between Calvin and Augustine, with whom he was undoubtedly intimately acquainted, but it is hard to prove that Calvin reached his Augustinian positions through the direct influence of Augustine rather than through the Augustinianism of others.”35
The general lines of influence can be seen in the obvious parallels between Calvin and Augustine in the summary of Augustine’s epistemology offered by Frederick Copleston:
St. Augustine asks himself the question, How is it that we attain knowledge of truths which are necessary, immutable and eternal? That we do attain such knowledge is clear to him from experience. We cannot gain such knowledge simply from sense-experience, since corporeal objects are contingent, changeable and temporal. Nor can we produce the truths from our minds, which are also contingent and changeable. Moreover, such truths rule and dominate our minds, impose themselves upon our minds, and they would not do this if they depended on us. It follows that we are enabled to perceive such truth under the action of the Being who alone is necessary, changeless and eternal, God. God is like a sun which illumines our minds or a master who teaches us.36
Here is not only the unique initiative of God in causing knowledge of himself, but also the idea of illumination. “We cannot, says Augustine, perceive the immutable truth of things unless they are illuminated as by a sun. This divine light, which illumines the mind, comes from God, who is the ‘intelligible light’, in whom and by whom and through whom all those things which are luminous to the intellect become luminous.”37
While many problems remain in understanding the fullness of Augustine’s approach to knowledge, Copleston makes one other interesting observation that ties Augustine’s concerns to those of Calvin, the concern for
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certainty in knowledge: “…it must be remembered that Augustine’s problem is one concerning certitude, not one concerning the content of our concepts or ideas.”38
These ideas which Copleston has summarized can be found in Augustine’s own words. Augustine’s Confessions spoke of the importance of the certainty of religious truth and how that certainty was derived from God alone:
If he [Moses] spoke in Latin, I should know what he said. But how should I know whether what he said was true? If I knew this too, it could not be from him that I got such knowledge. But deep inside me, in my most intimate thought, Truth, which is neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin nor any foreign speech, would speak to me, though not in syllables formed by lips and tongue. It would whisper, ‘He speaks the truth.’ And at once I should be assured. In confidence I would say to this man, your servant, ‘What you tell me is true.’39
Augustine could also speak of higher and inner ways to knowledge for the soul: “For we have another and far superior sense [to bodily senses], belonging to the inner man, by which we perceive what things are just, and what unjust.”40
These ideas about knowledge were not unique to Augustine, but in many ways were part of the common tradition of the ancient fathers who had been influenced by Plato and Neo-Platonism—fathers known to Calvin. For example, Hilary of Poitiers (315–367), who had been educated in Neo-Platonism, wrote: “The new faculties of the regenerate intellect are needed; each must have his understanding enlightened by the heavenly gift imparted to the soul.”41
The language of light that shines in Christian Platonism down to the time of Calvin, while primarily mediated by Augustine, has its roots in Plato’s famous discussion of the cave.42 To know the truth man must leave the cave of shadows to be enlightened by the sun. Plato’s allegory is greatly reworked by Christian thinkers away from the notions of eternal forms and reminiscence. But the idea that true knowledge is gained only by being delivered from the native darkness of this world into the brightness of the light of truth remains a powerful image in Christian thought.
Calvin stressed the significance of his position on the confirmation of Scripture so passionately for a variety of reasons. The first was religious. At
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the heart of Calvin’s understanding of the gospel was the conviction that the promises of God must be certain and apprehended by a confident faith. Faith was a deep trust in God’s fatherly goodness:
For, as faith is not content with a doubtful and changeable opinion, so is it not content with an obscure and confused conception; but requires full and fixed certainty, such as men are wont to have from things experienced and proved. For unbelief is so deeply rooted in our hearts, and we are so inclined to it, that not without hard struggle is each one able to persuade himself of what all confess with the mouth: namely, that God is faithful. Especially when it comes to reality itself, every man’s wavering uncovers hidden weakness. And not without cause the Holy Spirit with such notable titles ascribes authority to the Word of God. He wishes to cure the disease I have mentioned so that among us God may obtain full faith in his promises.43
At the heart of the gospel was the truth and certainty of Christ as Savior, taught to man by the Spirit through the Word.
Calvin also stressed the work of the Spirit for polemic and apologetic reasons. The greatest opponent that Calvin faced was the Roman Catholic Church of his day. Rome insisted that the authority of the Bible rested on the authority of an infallible church. This disagreement over the ultimate authority for Christians was one issue at the heart of the Reformation. Rome argued that the canon, text, authority, and interpretation of the Bible all rested on the recognition and interpretation given them by the teaching authority of the church. The Reformers, in response, argued for the authority of the Bible as establishing the church and standing over the church to reform it. For Calvin the work of the Spirit replaced the role that Rome gave to the church as the ultimate authority confirming the Scriptures as God’s Word.
Equally Calvin rejected any human claim to inspiration by the Spirit in his day apart from the Word. Calvin utterly rejected the claims of fanatics to direct inspiration by the Spirit which rendered the Word irrelevant. Individual judgment—even in the name of the Holy Spirit—could no more stand over the Word than could the corporate judgment of the church.
Calvin’s thought on the confirmation of the Scripture was a powerful presentation and defense of basic Christian truth. The sources of his thought in the Bible itself, late medieval theology, and the Renaissance recovery of Augustine and the fathers shows something of both the eclectic and synthetic character of Calvin’s thought, typical of Renaissance humanists. In his own day the religious significance of his position was clearly
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seen and greatly admired. It encouraged Christians in their confidence in the Scripture, whether they were scholars, martyrs, or common believers.
Soon, however, many Calvinists turned to other ways of confirming the authority of the Bible. Calvinism after Calvin, even as early as Calvin’s successor in Geneva, Theodore Beza, moved toward Aristotelian, or more precisely Thomistic, approaches to studying theology and conducting polemics. That Aristotelian approach dominated the seventeenth century, for example, in the work of Francis Turretin, and continued in the apologetics of Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. John Gerstner and R. C. Sproul have maintained that tradition in our day.
In the nineteenth century, however, Abraham Kuyper revived the more Platonic-Augustinian approach to theology and apologetics that had characterized the work of John Calvin.44 Kuyper powerfully engaged the modern world of thought—in both its rationalist and irrationalist forms—with this approach. He stressed the radical antithesis between Christian and non-Christian thought and the importance of regeneration for proper thinking. This Kuyperian approach was developed further in the apologetical work of Cornelius Van Til, the one-hundredth anniversary of whose birth was remembered last year. This tradition has continued at the Westminster Theological Seminaries in the work of Robert Knudsen among others.
The consistency and importance of this approach to apologetics and biblical authority is as vital to good theology today as it was in Calvin’s day. It seeks as Calvin did to promote that religious certainty which is at the heart of the gospel and to prize and preserve the Scriptures as the divine Word. This approach is not novel, but solidly grounded in the Scriptures themselves and in the writings of the fathers. Calvin’s teaching properly exalts the Scriptures as the authority which is beyond human judgment and should continue to guide and encourage the church in its reverence for the Word and its defense of the faith.
Westminster Theological Seminary in California
Escondido, California
1 John Calvin, “To the Reader, 1559,” in Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. J. T. McNeill; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) 4.
2 Ibid., 3.
3 William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 153.
4 T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971) 56.
5 H. Jackson Forstman, Word and Spirit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962) 60.
6 Kenneth S. Kantzer, “John Calvin’s Theory of the Knowledge of God and the Word of God” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard, 1950) 427: “The crucial question, however, is rather, does the witness of the Spirit produce only the conviction which is grounded upon these evidences, or does the witness produce another more immediate conviction, not grounded on these indicia, which represents par excellence the divine judgment rendering man certain of the authority of Scripture. Calvin indicates that the latter is his own interpretation.” Thus Kantzer summarizes the issue between himself and Warfield. Kantzer reads Calvin as meaning the latter position, while Warfield reads Calvin as holding to the former. The argument of this article supports the interpretation of Kantzer.
7 T. H. L. Parker (Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God [Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969] 74), from a neo-orthodox perspective, seems to like the way in which Calvin approaches the confirmation of Scripture in Institutes 1.7, but is very disparaging about his use of evidences in chap. 8: “Some are certainly more weighty than others; but strong or weak they collectively constitute a blemish on Calvin’s doctrine of the Word of God which has had for its progeny the busyness of fundamentalists to prove the truth of the Bible to the neglect of discovering and preaching the Truth of the Bible.”
8 Institutes 1.7.1.
9 A Reformation Debate (ed. John C. Olin; New York: Harper, 1966) 92.
10 Institutes 1.7.4.
11 Ibid. 1.7.5.
12 Ibid. 3.2.34.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid. 1.7.2.
15 For a discussion of the role of experience in the theology of Calvin, see Charles Partee, “Calvin and Experience,” SJT 26 (1973) 169-81, and W. Balke, “The Word of God and Experientia according to Calvin,” in Calvinus Ecclesiae Doctor (ed. W. Neuser; Kampen: Kok, 1978) 19-31. Calvin wrote in similar language about the experience of faith: “But there is a far different feeling of full assurance that in the Scriptures is always attributed to faith. It is this which puts beyond doubt God’s goodness clearly manifested for us…. But that cannot happen without our truly feeling its sweetness and experiencing it ourselves” (Institutes 3.2.15).
16 Institutes 3.2.14.
17 Ibid., 3.2.34.
18 Kantzer, “John Calvin’s Theory,” 525.
19 Ibid., 526.
20 Alister E. McGrath, “John Calvin and Late Medieval Thought,” Archive for Reformation History 77 (1986) 63.
21 Ibid., 73ff. This evidence, however, does come from the 1540s, not early in Calvin’s writings.
22 Karl Reuter, Das Grundverständnis der Theologie Calvins (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1963). Reuter further developed this thesis in Vom Scholaren bis zum jungen Reformator (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981).
23 T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965) 76-98, and “Intuitive and Abstractive Knowledge from Duns Scotus to Calvin,” in De Doctrina Ioannis Duns Scoti (ed. C. Balic; Rome: Congressus Scotisticus Internationalis, 1968) 4.291–305.
24 Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987; orig. 1966) 57-63.
25 A. N. S. Lane, “Calvin’s Use of the Fathers and the Medievals,” Calvin Theological Journal 16 (1981) 153ff.
26 Ibid., 155. This same point is made by McGrath, “John Calvin,” 65.
27 Torrance, Theology, 292.
28 Ibid., 296f.
29 Ibid., 297.
30 William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism, Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990) 21f.
31 Ibid., 50.
32 William J. Bouwsma, “Calvin and the Renaissance Crisis of Knowing,” Calvin Theological Journal 17 (1982) 208, “The various tendencies that I have tried to identify in Calvin’s conception of knowing—his deep reservations about the possibility of human knowledge in the traditional sense, his emphasis on listening, his interest in knowledge as an experience involving the whole personality, his historicism, in short his rhetorical view of knowledge—compelled him also, if not consistently, to adopt a remarkably human view of the theological enterprise: Calvin understood, at least sometimes, that theology does not state truths in an absolute sense, from God’s standpoint.”
33 Ibid., 200.
34 Frederick Copleston (A History of Philosophy [Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1962] 2/1.64f.) contrasts Thomas and Augustine in these terms: “If Thomism, without of course neglecting the fact that man in the concrete has but a supernatural end, places emphasis on the distinction between the supernatural and the natural, between faith and reason, Augustinianism, without in the least neglecting the gratuitous character of supernatural faith and grace, always envisages man in the concrete and is primarily interested in his actual relation to God.”
35 Lane, “Calvin’s Use,” 150.
36 Copleston, History, 81f.
37 Ibid., 77.
38 Ibid., 80.
39 Augustine, Confessions (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1973) 11.3.
40 Augustine, The City of God 11.27, in NPNF vol. 2.
41 Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity 1.18, in NPNF, 2d Series, vol. 9.
42 Plato, The Republic, Book 7.
43 Institutes 3.2.15.
44 No doubt more modern philosophical and theological developments also influenced Kuyper in addition to the influence of Calvin and those who came before him.