Reformers

Historical Perspectives on the Reformed View of the Arts in Worship

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Of all the theologians and church leaders who are cited as being opposed to the use of visual arts in worship, Protestant Reformer John Calvin is perhaps the most famous. The following article describes the cultural context in which Calvin worked and the specific nature of his views on the visual arts in worship, suggesting that Calvin was more concerned with confronting idolatry than with opposing the visual arts in worship.

Liturgy is a muscular word, an image derived in part from its intrinsic visual quality. The worshiping community gathers around the Table, pulpit, and baptismal font. Water is sprinkled; bread is broken and wine poured; hands are folded and knees are bent; collection plates are passed. Because of the visual nature of liturgy, the church from its very beginning perceived the opportunity to teach and edify itself by producing works of art that would enrich these various aspects of its liturgy. More importantly, there was little distinction, if any at all, between art for life and art for worship, as the church understood that the spiritual was discerned through the material.

But during the sixteenth century, distrust of symbols began to take root in the European church. The Protesters rejected many forms of liturgical art. Leaders of the Reformed tradition, in rethinking the role and use of symbols and iconography, forged so strong an understanding of the arts that it is reflected in almost every Reformed church building to this day. In one of the most astonishing transitions in the history of the church, the church reversed its role from artistic proponent to artistic opponent, all in a time span of less than a generation. John Calvin was one leader responsible for this fundamental shift.

Calvin in Context

In the sixteenth century, Christian belief emphasized God’s immanence. God was believed to be always close to earth working miracles and protecting Christians through venerated relics. The great domes of the basilicas were held in place by large, over-proportioned columns, not because the domes required such heavy pillars to support them, but because the dome, representing the orb of the universe, was being tied down close to the earth and the church. Europe pulsated with expectations of the miraculous. Medieval Catholicism held that the actual body and blood of Christ could be found in the consecrated host. The practice of obtaining and housing icons and relics became big business, for the power of God was thought to be in and around the pieces of bone, wood, canvas, or fabric.

This is the world into which John Calvin was born and a world he would, in turn, shape and change. In particular, Calvin redefined the understanding of God’s presence in the world. For Calvin and the other Reformers, the medieval church limited access to God’s grace to ways that were too one-sidedly “visual” in their orientation. The Reformers, instead, asserted a transcendent understanding of the presence of God. In this awareness, God ruled from Heaven, though his power permeated the world. The centerpiece of Calvin’s theology is not so much humankind grasping for concepts of God, but a gracious God revealing himself to humankind. As such, basing his reasoning in part on John 4:24 and the second commandment, Calvin asserted that true worship of God does not happen through the aid of worldly trappings, but only through the Spirit of God.

The second matter that characterized the world of the sixteenth century was the rise of humanism. The rise of biblical scholarship urged a re-emphasis on the Bible as the standard for worship instead of tradition. The printing press aided literacy and learning. Rhetoric led to the exaltation of the spoken word, encouraging a revival in preaching. For the learned Reformed leaders, these verbal, scholastic expressions came to be invested with greater authority and value in worship than its visual aspects (Philip W. Butin, “Constructive Iconoclasm: Trinitarian Concern in Reformed Worship,” Studia Liturgica 9:2 [1989]: 133-139).

At the root of this theological paradigm shift was a revived interest in Neoplatonism. This phenomenon was an expression of the Renaissance at the time of the Reformation. In the manner of Neoplatonism, Lefèvre, Calvin, and other Reformers seem to have favored the spiritual over the material as a more vital contribution to Reformed worship.

Yet, the Reformed are not primarily antimaterial or antiaesthetic. Rather, as Carlos Eire points out in his recent and thorough treatise on the subject, Reformed iconoclasm was primarily an attempt to avoid all idolatry (Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986]). Reformed aesthetics, therefore, stems from a broad, theologically motivated concern to avoid all forms of idolatry in worship. Admittedly, it was formed largely as a reactionary defense, in response to various criticisms of perceived liturgical abuses. Calvin argues for simple, direct (i.e., nonvisual) communication with the Deity.

Calvin’s Biblical Understanding of Aesthetics

As Calvin forged his aesthetic theology, he was prone to reference two key Scripture texts. First, Calvin’s theology emphasized the role of the law, as summarized in the Decalogue. In particular, the first and second commandments were persuasive in warranting the expulsion of anything considered idolatrous. A second text, John 4:24, was also prominent. In John 4:24, Jesus, as exegeted by the Reformers, was calling for true worship is worship “in spirit and in truth.” A Reformed liturgic—shaped by the writings of Zwingli, Bucer, and Calvin—is influenced by these two texts. These texts are the basis of the ongoing Reformed concern to avoid idolatry, while also contributing to an essentially positive thrust that promoted the idea of “true worship.” This may be illustrated through a discussion of John Calvin’s development of what constitutes “true worship” and a right understanding of Reformed aesthetics.

Although Calvin never explicitly writes about aesthetic theory per se, his approach can be discerned from his writing on liturgical art and icons, particularly from his various warnings about worshiping relics (John Calvin, An Admonition, Showing the Advantages Which Christendom Might Derive From an Inventory of Relics, in Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, vol. 1, ed. Henry Beveridge and Jules Bonnet [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983]). In addition, some of his commentaries and sermons provide us with his thought about beauty and the arts.

To understand Calvin’s view of aesthetics, it is necessary to pull together his reflections upon the nature of art and the nature of worship; it is these two areas that Calvin does explicitly address, often in tandem. Understanding Calvin’s view of aesthetics grows out of studying Calvin’s theological reflection upon nature, human nature, and the function of art.

Art is dependent upon beauty, says Calvin, and beauty comes only from God. In fact, Calvin often interchanges the words art and beauty. Beauty, as expressed through the arts, is related to God and his existence as Creator. Calvin believes that God’s beauty is transcendent but that it can be perceived in the created physical world and in the moral order. In describing God as the author of physical and moral creation, Calvin clarifies how God is able to be known as the Trinity. God, the Father, created the heavens and earth; he is the consummate artist since he formed the world and everything in it. These creative acts of God, the paradigm artist, are exhaustive and complete (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1:5 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959], 59). Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, came to earth and exhibited a perfect spiritual beauty. His spiritual presence, self-sacrifice, and love exemplify the lovely. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, exhibits moral beauty, placing in the hearts of people such virtues as love, justice, goodness, wisdom, and compassion.

In addition to seeing God’s beauty as revealed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Calvin also believes that humankind, in both the physical and spiritual sense, is beautiful. We are the chief creatures of God’s creation. We are made in God’s image: awesome, mysterious, complex, and beautiful. These attributes are vestiges of the imago dei (the image of God) and testify to heavenly grace, even though they are sullied by sin.

True Worship and Aesthetics

Calvin’s understanding of art had implications for the use of art in worship. His view of liturgical art involves an understanding of the worshipers and the effect of beauty upon them. Visual imagery was thought to be too powerful a force, especially in the relic-packed Catholic churches of Calvin’s time, to be used successfully in worship. As beholders of art are sinful and have a natural inclination toward idolatry, the majesty of God was to be guarded against any idolatrous confusion with images used to worship or represent him, the very issue addressed so directly in the second commandment. Thus, in order to resist the temptation to idolize and worship the works of creatures rather than the creator, Calvin railed against the use of many art forms in worship (Calvin, Inventory, 290).

Calvin was more interested in worshiping in “spirit and in truth” (John 4:24); that is, worshiping the Creator directly without relying on the works of his creatures. To this end, Calvin’s worship environments were purged. Altars were removed and plain tables were brought in. The pulpit—representing the preaching of the Word—took central place; the centrality of the Word was represented architecturally by placing the pulpit in the middle of the chancel. Baptismal fonts were brought to the front of the sanctuary, forming a triangle with a pulpit and table. Organ cases were closed (at least during the worship service proper) and relics and icons were removed. All these actions brought the central acts of worship before the congregation in a clear, simplified way (James White, Protestant Worship: Traditions in Transition [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 65-66). The result was a re-formed Reformed worship service that simplified the visual and accentuated the verbal.

Later Calvinist Manifestations

Later expressions of Calvinism continued to glean the implications of its original concern to avoid idolatry in worship. The Puritans, for one example, were heavily influenced by the Calvinistic aesthetic. More recently, Dutch Calvinist thinkers such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Dooyeweerd sought to refocus the problem of idolatry by warning against the idolatrous potential of misdirected worldviews. Another Dutchman, Gerardus van der Leeuw, though he takes Calvinism down a different path, nevertheless expresses again the role of Christ as the unique expression of God, who alone is worthy of ultimate loyalty. Karl Barth focused the problem of idolatry on idols of culture, race, and state. Reformed churches, in short, following the model cast by John Calvin, have always intentionally attempted to counteract anything that would replace Christ as the central focus of the church or worship. This can especially be seen in recent attempts to counteract nationalism, militarism, racism, and sexism.

Yet it cannot be denied that the Reformed concern to avoid all forms of idolatry has come with a cost: a cost many perceive to be the loss of imaginative and artistic expressions in worship. In a grand irony, many see the perceived lack of creativity to be unrepresentative of the Creator God—the God so many Calvinists are attempting to worship in a non-idolatrous way. And, though confessionally Trinitarian, many see Reformed worship as predominantly the worship of God the Father, with little emphasis on God as revealed in Jesus Christ or as revealed in the mysterious nature of the Spirit.

Fortunately, this understanding of Calvinism and the practice of it are changing. The ecumenically oriented liturgical movement has facilitated an openness to new expressions from the broader streams of Christian worship, albeit sometimes slavishly uncritical and eclectic in its borrowing.

Calvin’s concerns remain valid for today. Reformed worshipers agree that they must not, in the rampant liturgical renewal, confuse an image with its reality, or a symbol with the reality symbolized. A distinction must be maintained, the Reformed insist, between symbol and adornment. Symbol is necessary; adornment should be used judiciously, if at all. We must not develop an autonomous taste for the sensuous or romantic. Nor can we delight only in the forms we have produced, unable or unwilling to discern the enabling grace of God in and through the forms. Likewise, the iconoclastic urge must continually be tempered so that the connection between the mystery of God and the beauty in creation and in our creativity is maintained.

Thus, the chief contribution of the Reformed tradition is to insist that all imagination and art is a servant to the word of God. The Reformed liturgist is one who asks, “How can every action, color, banner, anthem, sermon point away from itself to God?” And the Reformed Christian is one who sings with the English hymn writer William Cowper, “ … the dearest idol I have known, whatever that idol be, help me to tear it from thy throne and worship only thee.”

The Preaching of the Reformers: Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564)

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Martin Luther, like John Wycliffe, John Huss, and Girolamo Savonarola before him, may be classified as a preacher of “prophetic personality.” For these preachers, preaching was an act of spiritual warfare. Luther’s sermons are polemics against the abuses within the Roman church and the hard-heartedness of many of its priests. Luther also began the tradition of preaching an additional pedagogical sermon. In these catechistic sermons he taught the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and doctrines of the Reformation. The tradition of featuring both catechetical and homiletical sermons in services became common in some Lutheran (and Reformed) churches, and this practice still continues in some churches today.

John Calvin did not preach in the popular style that Luther did. However, he influenced Reformed preaching more than Luther’s style influenced Lutheran preaching. Calvin regarded the sermon as the central point of the liturgy; in fact, the liturgy itself was but the framework for the sermon. Dropping the readings of the liturgical calendar, he often chose to preach a series of sermons through a book of the Bible. To Calvin, a sermon was an exposition. Following the historical, theological, and grammatical approach, he eschewed all allegorizing and mystical interpretations in favor of a traditional exegesis that sought to reveal the actual meaning of Scripture.

Calvin and Luther

It would be difficult to find so marked a contrast between any two celebrated contemporaries in all the history of preaching as that between Luther and Calvin. Luther (1483-1546) was a broad-shouldered, broad-faced, burly German, overflowing with physical strength; Calvin (1509-1564) a feeble-looking little Frenchman, with shrunken cheeks and slender frame, and bowed with study and weakness. Luther had a powerful intellect but was also rich in sensibility, imagination, and swelling passion—a man juicy with humor, delighting in music, in children, in animals, in poetic sympathy with nature. In the disputation at Leipzig he stood up to speak with a bouquet in his hand. Every constituent of his character was rich to overflowing. With all this accords his prodigious and seemingly reckless extravagance, and even an occasional coarseness of language when excited.

Calvin, on the other hand, was practically destitute of imagination and humor, seeming in his public life and works to have been all intellect and will, though his letters show that he was not only a good hater but also a warm friend. And yet, while so widely different, both of these men were great preachers. What had they in common to make them great preachers? Along with intellect, they had the force of character, an energetic nature, and will. A great preacher is not a mere artist and not a feeble suppliant; he is a conquering soul, a monarch, a born ruler of humankind. Calvin was far less winning than Luther, but he was even more than Luther an autocrat. Each of them had unbounded self-reliance, too, and yet at the same time, each was full of humble reliance on God. This combination, self-confidence, such that if it existed alone, would vitiate character, yet checked and upborne by simple, humble, childlike faith in God, this makes a Christian hero, for word or for work. The statement could be easily misunderstood, but as meant it is true and important, that one must both believe in oneself and believe in God if one is to make a powerful impression on others.

This force of character in both Luther and Calvin gave great force to their utterances. Everybody repeats the saying about Luther that “his words were half battles.” But of Calvin too it was said, and said by Beza who knew him so well, Tot verba, tot pondera, “Every word weighed a pound”—a phrase also used of Daniel Webster. It should be noticed too that both Luther and Calvin were drawn into much connection with practical affairs, and this tended to give them greater firmness and positiveness of character, to render their preaching more vigorous, as well as better suited to the common mind. Here is another valuable combination of what are commonly reckoned incongruous qualities—to be a thinker and student, and at the same time a person of practical sense and practical experience. Such were the great Reformers, and such a man was the apostle Paul.

Calvin: Theologian and Church-Builder, Expositor and Preacher

The vast reputation of Calvin as theologian and church-builder has overshadowed his great merits as an expositor and preacher. With the possible exception of Chrysostom, I think there is no commentator before our century whose exegesis is so generally satisfactory and so uniformly profitable as that of Calvin. His Latin, so clear and smooth and agreeable, is probably unsurpassed in literary excellence since the early centuries. All his extemporized sermons taken down in shorthand, as well as his writings, show not so much great copiousness as true command of the language, his expression being, as a rule, singularly direct, simple, and forcible.

The extent of his preaching looks to us wonderful. While lecturing at Geneva to many hundreds of students (sometimes eight hundred), while practically a ruler of Geneva, and constant adviser of the Reformed in all Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands, England, and Scotland, and while composing his extensive and elaborate works, he would often preach every day. For example, the two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy, which are dated, were all delivered on weekdays in the course of little more than a year, and sometimes on four or five days in succession. It was so with the other great Reformers. In fact, Luther accuses one preacher of leading an “idle life; for he preaches but twice a week, and has a salary of two hundred dollars a year.” Luther himself, with all his lecturing, immense correspondence, and voluminous authorship, often preached every day for a week, and on fast days two or three times.

Luther’s Preaching

Luther had less sustained intensity than Calvin, but he had at times an overwhelming force, and his preaching possessed the rhetorical advantage of being everywhere pervaded by one idea, that of justification by faith, round which he reorganized all existing Christian thought and which gave a certain unity to all the overflowing variety of his illustration, sentiment, and expression.

Luther showed great realness, both in his personal grasp of Christian truth and in his modes of presenting it. The conventional decorums he smashes, and with strong, rude, and sometimes even coarse expressions, with illustrations from almost every conceivable source, and with familiar address to the individual hearer he brings the truth very close to home. He gloried in being a preacher to the people. Thus, he says: “A true, pious and faithful preacher shall look to the children and servants, and to the poor, simple masses, who need instruction.” “If one preaches to the coarse, hard populace, he must paint it for them, pound it, chew it, try all sorts of ways to soften them ever so little.” He blamed Zwingli for interlarding his sermons with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and praised those who preached so that the average person could understand.

Luther’s Personality

Luther is a notable example of intense personality in preaching. His was indeed an imperial personality, of rich endowments (in talent), varied sympathies, and manifold experiences. Those who heard him were not only listening to truth, but they experienced the man. Those who merely read his writings, in other lands and languages, experienced the man, were drawn to him, and thus drawn to the gospel.

With all his boldness, Luther often trembled at the responsibility of preaching. He says in one of his sermons, As soon as I learned from the Holy Scriptures how terror-filled and perilous a matter it was to preach publicly in the church of God … there was nothing I so much desired as silence.… Nor am I now kept in the ministry of the Word, but by an overruled obedience to a will above my own, that is the divine will; for as to my own will, it always shrank from it, nor is it fully reconciled unto it to this hour.

What Luther says of preaching must end with a paragraph from the Table Talk, which makes some good hits, though very oddly arranged.

A good preacher should have these properties and virtues: first, to teach systematically; secondly, he should have a ready wit; thirdly, he should be elegant; fourthly, he should have a good voice; fifthly, a good memory; sixthly, he should know when to make an end; seventhly, he should be sure of his doctrine; eighthly, he should venture and engage body and blood, wealth and honor, in the Word; ninthly, he should suffer himself to be mocked and jeered of every one.

The expression, “he should know when to make an end,” recalls a statement I have sometimes made to students, that public speaking may be summed up in these three things: First, have something to say; secondly, say it; third and lastly, quit.