Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
denying any jurisdiction to the Church; but nor could he simply assert the authority of secular government over the Church. He was obliged to explain the division of labour between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, both of which had an essential role in sustaining the reformed faith and both of which played a central role in governing the earthly city.
Political life in a city like Basle or Geneva thus placed a special burden on Protestant theology. For Luther, in a different context, it was enough to confine the functions of the Church to preaching the Word and administering certain sacraments, while asserting the exclusive jurisdictional claims of secular government against ecclesiastical pretensions, yet asking little more of earthly government than that it rein in a sinful humanity. His theology achieves this effect by stressing the simultaneous duality of sin and justification: God’s loving grace ‘justifies’ humanity as a free and unearned gift, even while the sinfulness of human beings, their implication in the devil’s ‘kingdom’, requires submission to secular government, which is divinely ordained.
Calvin may have been more reluctant to give secular governments a dominant authority over the Church; but within its own domain he demanded more of secular power than did Luther, and his views on civil government therefore required a different theology. He certainly shares the principal tenet of Lutheranism, the doctrine of justification by faith; but his emphasis is less on God’s loving grace than on his total sovereignty.8 While justification remains an unearned gift, which is not a reward for virtue, good works, or freedom from sin, the godly life of the Christian community is not just a matter of service and good works freely undertaken by the Christian faithful in answer to God’s loving grace. It follows from God’s unconditional will that Christians must in this world live a life of godly discipline.
Calvin’s theology underwrites a partnership between secular and spiritual authorities, in which both, equally under the sovereignty of God, exercise temporal jurisdiction. This not only restores to the Church its own temporal authority but also elevates the role of civil government. Its function is not simply to maintain civil peace and good order among sinful human beings but, in a joint project with the Church, to impose a godly discipline on the Christian community in recognition of God’s total sovereignty. Civil government, in other words, is not just a divinely ordained institution to cope with the ‘kingdom’ of the devil as it manifests itself in human sinfulness. Civic authorities act together with the Church in the fulfillment of God’s sovereign will. This means that, even while the Church ministers to the soul as civil government takes care of more mundane concerns (which include defending the true faith), there can be no clear distinction between the godly standards upheld by the Church and some kind of lesser, more modest, less divine criteria applied to civic life.
Calvin’s doctrine of predestination may seem to complicate the issue. After all, if human beings are damned or saved through no fault or virtue of their own, what can it mean to demand of them that they live according to the dictates of a godly discipline? Yet if we start not with predestination but with God’s sovereign will, the logic of Calvin’s argument may be easier to trace: the doctrine of predestination – the idea that our fate depends entirely, without condition, on God’s determination – follows directly from the notion of God’s total and unconditional sovereignty, as does the idea of godly discipline and the role of both jurisdictional spheres in maintaining it.
It is almost as if Calvin arrives at his doctrine of predestination less because it expresses his deepest convictions than because it seems an unavoidable consequence of God’s total sovereignty, which is central to his views on the role of the Church and civil government. In the Institutes, the argument for predestination – the predestination of the damned no less than of the elect – comes down to this: we must believe in it, because to do otherwise is to detract from the glory of a totally sovereign God. But, in Calvin’s view, there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. Precisely because it represents God’s unconditional sovereign will, which cannot be understood or judged by any human standards, it must remain a mystery; and we should not attempt to penetrate God’s judgment on our own fate in the afterlife. The best that Christians can do, in their humility and unconditional obedience to God, is to act in this world with confidence in the goodness and generosity of God’s justification, proceeding in their earthly callings as if they and their fellows belonged to the elect, with faith that not only their souls but their works are justified by divine grace.
Christians, then, must serve their community in accordance with the principles of godly discipline. This certainly elevates earthly callings to a new respectability and even grants an element of godliness to the most humble human labours. But, while Calvin’s idea of the calling, more than Luther’s, invites the faithful to take an active part in shaping the social and political conditions of their lives on this earth, it also means that civil governments must be regarded as representatives of God; and this carries with it a strong obligation to obedience: ‘When those who bear the office of magistrate are called gods, let no one suppose that there is little weight in that appellation. It is thereby intimated that they have a commission from God, that they are invested with divine authority and, in fact, represent the person of God, as whose substitutes they in a manner act’ (IV.20.4). It follows that Christians owe obedience to civil government, and even tyrants must be treated as the delegates of God: ‘even an individual of the worst character, one most unworthy of all honour, if invested with public authority, receives that illustrious divine power which the Lord has by his word devolved on the ministers of his justice and judgment, and that, accordingly, in so far as public obedience is concerned, he is to be held in the same honour and reverence as the best of kings’ (IV.20.25). Christians should obey secular government not simply out of fear ‘but because the obedience which they yield is rendered to God himself, inasmuch as their power is from God’ (IV.20.22).
Nevertheless, if Calvin’s doctrine of obedience to civil authority seems hardly less, or even more, stringent than Luther’s, his roots in the free Protestant city do make a difference. When considering the various forms of government, he expresses a preference for collective governments instead of kings, if only on the grounds that human imperfections make it useful to have magistrates who can keep an eye on one another. The ideal might be a city like Geneva, governed by civic elites through the medium of magistrates and city councillors, who have an official duty to preserve the city’s liberty. This means that, on the whole, aristocracy is best, or perhaps a mixed constitution in which aristocracy is leavened by an element of popular government. There is nonetheless, Calvin tells us, no point in discussing which government is best, since that depends on circumstances; and, in any case, we must assume that, whatever the prevailing type of government in any given circumstance, it was decreed by God. While the Lord may take vengeance against ‘unbridled domination’, ‘let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer’ (IV.20 31).
There seems to be no ambiguity in Calvin’s views on strict obedience, but here he introduces a qualification that would have major consequences for political theory. ‘I speak’, he says, ‘only of private men’; because there have existed public offices – presumably decreed by God – whose duty it has been ‘to curb the tyranny of kings’, such as the Ephori in Sparta, the tribunate in Rome, the Demarchs in Athens, and perhaps even the assembled three estates in a kingdom like France (IV.20.31). It has been the public duty of these ‘lesser magistrates’ to defend the people against the tyranny of rulers. Although Calvin himself would never go beyond the observation that there have existed public offices whose official duty is to represent the interests of the people as a check on princely power, the doctrine of the ‘lesser magistrate’ would become the basis of more wide-ranging and militant resistance theories.
That doctrines supporting the power of temporal authorities, and even the need for obedience to them, could be mobilized in support of resistance to power and even popular rebellion is a peculiarity of Western culture. Other societies have certainly created doctrines of rebellion, but they took a very special form in Western Europe. The fragmentation of political power in feudal Europe, and the constant jurisdictional battles that followed from it for centuries thereafter, produced quite distinctive effects. The assertion of one jurisdiction against another could be formulated as a right to resist illegitimate power or tyranny. While this meant that ideas of resistance could be adopted and disseminated by ruling classes,