Scotch College

Texting Calvin

Scotch College owes its foundations to Calvinism, which, in the midst of a new revolution, remains as relevant today as ever.

Just as there was Homer before there was Homer Simpson, so there was Calvin before there was Calvin Klein. In fact July marked the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. Do I hear someone ask, ‘Who was John Calvin?’

If you have heard of him it may well have been disparaging and negative. John Calvin was French; a brilliant lawyer and humanities scholar, he spent his working life in Geneva as a Christian minister. But he has had a bad press. There have been several reasons for his many detractors: his commitment to God as sovereign, his perception of the brokenness of humanity, and a complex legal incident involving the execution in Geneva of a Spaniard named Servetus.

In an era when every schoolboy must learn to question the veracity of information on any given web page, yet not every politician exercises the same discretion about emails, it is time to suggest that we should sift through the misinformation about Calvin and revisit our Protestant heritage. After all, when Time magazine listed ‘Ten Ideas Changing the World Right Now’, number three on the list was the new Calvinism.

Professor Steven Ozment, in his book Protestants, observes that the Protestant reformation is the period of history most relevant to us, caught up as we are in our digital IT revolution. This is because the Reformation was about the meaning and authority of texts; not SMS texts, of course, but printed texts, especially the Bible. Five hundred years ago print was the ‘new media’ in an IT revolution.

In the BBC production The Story of God, as the camera pans around St Peter’s Cathedral in Geneva − Calvin’s church − the voice of Professor Lord Robert Winston narrates ‘a great revolution took place here’. Says James Eglinton, Calvin ‘wrote extensively, preached over 2,000 sermons, founded a school which transformed education in Europe, taught theology, sheltered refugees and was at the centre of a worldwide Christian movement’.

Calvin’s best known written work is his Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published at the age of 25. He consulted widely, including with Jewish scholars on the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures and revised the Institutes throughout his life. On the basis of his scholarly explanation of the biblical texts, read in their original languages, Calvin challenged the teaching and hierarchical authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

John Knox − a student and contemporary of Calvin’s − took his ideal of education and ecclesiology to Scotland where universal education and government by ‘elders’ became integral to the Reformation of the Scottish Church. Regarding his approach to school discipline, Eva Morrison comments ‘Calvin forbade excessive force and required the principal of the school to have a “gracious personality free from harshness and rudeness” [un esprit débonnaire].’

Speaking of John Calvin, Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson says ‘There are things for which we in this culture clearly are indebted to him, including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in the humanities. How easily we forget’.

We should remember. Detractors need not intimidate us; our Christian heritage is unashamedly Calvinist. James Forbes, like Calvin, had an early encounter with Jesus that changed his priorities and motivation. To Jesus, Calvin said, ‘My heart I offer, promptly and sincerely’. It could have easily been Forbes’ motto too.

Close to the end of his short life, James Forbes reaffirmed his commitment to Calvinist ecclesiology by siding, in the Disruption of 1843, with the Church of Scotland, Free. Always interested in education, he shortly thereafter, in true Calvinist fashion, planned the Melbourne Academy – ‘the Scotch College’ – to provide a new level of leadership in education and Christian ministry in Victoria.

Calvin promoted education and literacy to expose misinformation, especially traditional accretions and superstition in religion. He wanted Jesus to be clearly seen through the lenses of scripture. In our own IT revolution there are lessons to relearn about exposing misinformation, an urgent need of biblical literacy, and clarity about Jesus. GS