Religion: Fuse It, or Lose It

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The following excerpt is taken from Marilynne Robinson’s* preface to the Vintage Spiritual Classics volume, John Calvin, Steward of God’s Covenant, Selected Writings. Robinson’s preface serves not only to introduce Calvin to the reader, but also as a brief apologia for Protestantism and the Reformation.

As a Protestant who is wont to visit Catholic blogs, both to observe how the “other side” lives, and to defend the Christian brand under the aegis of which I was baptized and made my Confirmation, my positions have frequently been subject to the very criticism against which Robinson here defends Luther and Calvin:

To assume that objectivity can be looked for in matters of religion, as critics of the Reformers often do, when it is not naïve, is a pure statement of faith. Tradition is simply the accumulated subjectivities of individuals—Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi. That these are authoritative figures only underscores the fact that subjectivity is in itself nothing to be dismissed out of hand. If tradition sets these men apart on the grounds that God, so to speak, acted upon them directly, those who revere Luther and Calvin feel that they also were instruments of God. The Reformers’ sola Scriptura is often treated as literalism or bibliomancy, in either case as an evasion of discipline and reason. But such a view is by no means consistent with the acute critical attention both of them, but Calvin especially, brought to bear on the text.

This all seems so patently obvious that one is tempted simply to go, “Well, d’uh!” and move on to more challenging subjects. Ah, would that it were that easy. Would that Christian disunity--in an age when the Jihadists are off the rez and streaming across every Western frontier, bearing a law so harsh, yet so stark, that Father Abraham would have found little fault in it--did not render the decadent West so vulnerable in its collective hubris.

The potential site of that crucially-needed healing is an open Communion.
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*Marilynne Robinson is the author of the award-winning novels Housekeeping and Gilead, both of which I have read and recommend without reservation, and of The Death of Adam, a nonfiction book which I have also read and likewise recommend.


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