In regulating external conduct, the general aim of the state, in Calvin’s view, is to insure justice or equity in society at large. The concern of the church is the spiritual realm, the life of the inner man the concern of the state is the temporal realm, the regulation of external conduct. He believed that human beings were creatures of fellowship and that Church and State satisfied a human need for this type of grouping. Sin, for Calvin, is the opposite of knowing God and a corrupt reason and will can prevent this knowledge.Calvin’s social thought was also influential. Instead, individuals must cultivate this awareness of deity through examination of the seeds of divinity within each person as well as through contemplation of and reflection on the world. (II: 7)Ĭalvin believed that simply knowing truths about God did not, as the Scholastics would have it, mean the same thing as knowing God. Without a standard by which to measure ourselves, we invariably yield to pride, overestimating the worth of our natural gifts and overlooking the corruption that has resulted from the exercise of those gifts. On the other hand, there is also no knowledge of self without a knowledge of God. He taught that when we accurately reflect on ourselves, we realize the excellence of our natural gifts but we also realize that our exercise of these gifts yields ‘miserable ruin’ and unhappiness, and that ‘our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God.’ Without this realization of our misery and dependence-especially of our misery-none of us comes, or even tries to come, to a knowledge of God. Calvin broke decisively with this approach in claiming that knowledge of God is so interrelated with knowledge of ourselves that the one cannot be had without the other. Thomas Aquinas had taught that the theologian should start with God and then consider creatures insofar as they relate to God as their beginning and end. The works of John Calvin (1509-1564), especially his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), were central to Puritan beliefs because they asked central questions: how do we acquire knowledge of God and of ourselves? According to Nicholas Wolterstorff in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Calvinism, Sermon Structure, and the Arminian Controversy Calvinism Definitions
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