We now come to something about Luther's doctrine of Christ. He is interesting first of all in his method, which is quite different from the method of the old Church, It is, as I would call it, a real method of correlation., namely correlation between what Christ is for us and what we say about Him. The approach is an approach from the point of view of the effects Christ has upon us. Melanchthon in his Loci, his famous dogmatik, has expressed the same idea. The object of Christology is to deal with the benefits of Christ, not with Him and His nature besides His benefits. Luther says, describing this method of correlation, "As somebody is in himself, so

is God to him, as object. If a man is righteous himself, God is righteous. If a man is pure, God is pure for him. If he is evil, God is evil for him. Therefore He will appear to the damned as the evil in eternity, but to the righteous as the righteous, according to what He is in Himself." Now this is a correlative speaking about God. Calling Christ God means, for Luther, having experienced Divine effects which comes from Him, namely forgiveness of sins. If you speak about Him besides His effects, then this is a wrong objectifying method.. You must speak of Him in terms of the effects He can have. He who has Divine effects is Divine this is the criterion.

What we say about Him has always, therefore. the character of participation suffering with Him, being glorified with Him; crucified with Him, being resurrected with Him. "Preaching the Crucified means preaching our guilt and the crucifixion of our evils." "So we go with Him ~ first servant, therefore now King, first suffering, therefore now in glory; first judged: therefore now Judge." So you must act: first humiliation, in order to get exultation!" Together condemned and blessed, living and dead, in pain and in joy." This is said of Christ and is said of us. The law of contradiction, which we have discussed, the law of God always acting paradoxically is fulfilled in Christ; He is the key to God's acting, namely by contradicting the human system of valuations. This paradox is also valid in the Church. It is, in its visible form, miserable, humble, but in this humbleness exactly as in the humbleness of Christ, we have the glory of the Church. Therefore the glory of the Church is especially visible in periods of persecution, suffering and humility. Christ therefore is God for us, our God, God as He is in relationship to us. Luther also says: He is the word of God. This is the decisive thing, and from this point of view Protestantism should think Christology in existential terms, namely in terms of never giving up the immediate correlation of human faith and what is said about Christ, and not making Him an object where you discuss chemical formulas, between Divine and human nature; or biological formulas, between Son of God and Son of Man all this has sense only if it is existentially received.

Luther emphasizes very much the presence of God in Christ. In the Incarnation the Divine Word or Logos is incarnated. Luther's doctrine of the Word has different degrees. First it is the internal Word, which he also calls the heart of God, or the eternal Son. Only this internal Word, which is God's inner Self-manifestation, is perfect. As the heart of man is hidden, so the heart of God is hidden. The internal Word of God, His inner Self-manifestation, is hidden to man. But Luther says: :We hope that in he future we shall look to this Word, when God has opened His heart, by introducing us into His heart."

The second meaning of the Word, in Luther: The Word which is Christ as the visible word. In Christ the heart of God has become flesh, i.e., historical reality. In this way we can have the hidden word of the Divine knowledge of Himself, although only for faith, and never as an object among other objects.

Thirdly, the Word of God is the spoken word, by prophets, by Jesus, by the Apostles, and so the Biblical word, in which the internal word is outspoken. But the revealing. Being of the eternal word in Christ is more than all the spoken words of the Bible. They witness to Him, but they are only in an indirect way the Word of God. Luther was never so bibliolatrous as so many Christians still are today. And when we speak today about the theology of the "word," then we can say Luther was not a theologian of the word in this sense, namely if "word" is translated by "talking." "Word" for him was Self-manifestation of God, and this was already by no means only in the words of the Bible. In it, it was in, with, and under, but not identical with it.

Luther has a fourth meaning of the word of God, namely the word of preaching, but this is only number four, and if somebody speaks of the "Church of the word," thinking of the predominance of preaching, in the services, then he is certainly not a follower of Luther in this respect.

Luther's doctrine of incarnation has a very special character. He emphasizes again and again the smallness of God, in the Incarnation. Man cannot stand the naked Absolute, God; he is driven to despair if he deals with it directly. Therefore He has given the Christ, in whom He has made Himself small. "In the other works, God is recognized according to the greatness of His power, wisdom, and justice, and His works appear too terrible. But here, in Christ, appears His sweetness, mercy, and charity." Without knowing Him we are not able to stand God's majesty and are driven to insanity and hate. This is the reason why Luther was so much interested in Christmas, and has written some of the most beautiful Christmas hymns and poems. The reason is that he emphasizes the small God in Christ, and Christ is smallest in the cradle. And so this paradox, that he who is in the cradle is He who is Almighty God at the same time, was for Luther the real understanding of Christmas. This was Christmas for him, this mystical paradox of the smallest and most helpless of all beings, having in himself the center of Divinity. And this is something which we must understand, out of his thinking in the paradoxical nature of God's Self-revelation, that the slowest and weakest is the strongest, because God acts paradoxically.

Here we ask the question, which nobody can omit asking who knows the Reformation: Is it possible that on the basis of these principles of the Reformation, which I have developed, that a Church can live? Doesn't a Church mean something else, namely a community, organized, authoritarian, with fixed rules, traditions, etc? Isn't a Church necessarily Catholic, and is not the Protestant principle that God alone is everything and man's acceptance of God is only the secondary thing, doesn't this Protestant principle contradict the possibility of having a Church?

Now there is no doubt that Luther's doctrine of the Church is his weakest point, and that the Church problem was the most unsolved problem which the Reformation left to further generations. And the reason is that the Catholic system was not replaced and could not be replaced definitively by a Protestant system of equal power, because of the anti -authoritarian and anti-hierarchical form of Protestant thinking.

The type of the Church which Luther chooses and with him Zwingli and Calvin against Evangelical Radicals, is the ecclesiastical in contrast to the sectarian type. You know all this distinction from Troeltsch, and it is a very good distinction. It is a distinction between a Church which is the mother, out of which we come, which always was there, which we have not chosen, to which we belong by birth and if we awake out of the dimness of the early stages of life, we can perhaps reaffirm that we belong to it in confirmation; but we already belong to it objectively.

Now this is quite different in the churches of the radical Enthusiasts where the individual deciding that he wants to be a member of the "church" is the creative power of the church. The church is made by a covenant by the decision of individuals to, make a church, namely an assembly of God. So here you find everything is dependent on the Independent individual who is not born from the Mother Church, but who produces active church communities. These differences are very visible if you come from the Continent, where we have the ecclesiastical, while you have, even in the old denominations here the sectarian type.

Luther's distinction between the visible and the invisible Church :is one of the most difficult things to understand. The one way in which you can understand it immediately is to understand when you hear those words that they are the same Church, they are not two Churches. This is the main point we mus t make. The invisible Church is the Spiritual quality of the visible Church. And the visible Church is the empirical and always distorted actualization of the Spiritual Church. So they are not two realities. They are one and the same. This Was perhaps the most important point of the Reformers against the sects. The sects wanted to identify the Church according to its visible and its invisible side. The visible Church must be purified, purged as all totalitarian groups call it today from everybody who is not Spiritually a member of the Church. This presupposes that you know who is Spiritually a member of the Church. And this presupposes judging, looking into the heart, into which God alone can look. This of course produces something which the Reformers could not accept, because they knew that there is nobody who does not belong to the "infirmary" that is the Church, as they called it, the infirmary which is the visible Church. But this "infirmary" is for everybody; nobody can get out of it definitely. And therefore everybody belongs to the Church essentially, even if he is Spiritually far away from it.

Now what is this Church? The Church is an object of faith, according to its true essence. It is, as Luther said, "hidden in spirit." It is an object of faith. When you see the actual working, the ministers, the building, the congregation, the administration, the devotions, etc., then you know that in this visible Church, with all its shortcomings, there the invisible Church is hidden. It is an object of faith, and it demands much faith, if you look at the life of the ordinary present-day congregations, and have the faith that in this life, which is by no means a life of high standing, in any respect, the Spiritual Church is present. And you can believe it only if you believe that it is not the people who make the 'Church, but it is the foundation, which is not the people but the sacramental reality, the Word, which is the Christ. Otherwise we would despair about the Church.

And don't ever forget that for Luther and for the Reformers, the Church in its true nature is a Spiritual matter Luther also called it invisible; spiritual and invisible is usually the same in him; it is an object of faith and cannot be shown. And so when you tell somebody who criticizes you because of the Church, and you say: "Yes, it is a quite good institution; there are many good people who come out of it; some people in it are much more serious than some secular people; some are very willing to sacrifice, and the moral standards are always very high, on the average higher than other groups in all this you are right, but you don't speak of the Church. And then the next day you can find that you were much too optimistic and you find out it is rather miserable, what you say. This is not the basis of faith. The basis of faith is exclusively the foundation of the Church, namely Christ, the sacrament and the Word.

This is Luther's doctrine of the Church. What about the Church offices? Every Christian is a priest, and therefore has potentially the office of preaching and administering the sacraments. They all belong to the spiritual element. But for the sake of order, some especially fit personalities shall be called by the congregation for this purpose. The ministry is a matter of order. It is a vocation like all other vocations, but it is not a state of perfection or of higher graces or of anything like this. No priest is more a priest than any layman is priest. But he is the "mouthpiece" of the others, because they cannot express themselves and he can. Therefore only one thing makes the ministers, namely the call of the congregation. Ordination has no sacramental meaning at all.

"Ordaining is not consecrating," he says. "We give in the power of the Word what we have, the authority of preaching the Word and giving the sacraments: that is ordaining." But this is not producing a higher grade in the relationship to God.

The Church government became identical very soon with the state government in the Lutheran countries, and with the society government we call it "trustees in the Calvinist countries. The reason was that the hierarchy had been removed by Luther. There is no pope, no bishops, no priests, in the technical sense. Who shall govern in the Church? Now of course first of all the ministers, but they are not sufficient; they have no power. The power comes from the princes, or from free associations with society, as we have very often in Calvinism. Therefore the princes are called by Luther the highest bishops of their realm. But they are not to interfere with the inner-religious things; they have to perform the administration the ius circa sacrum, the right around the sacred, but not into the sacred, which remains for the ministers, and every Christian.

The situation which produced this was an emergency situation. There were no bishops, no authorities, any more; but the Church needed administration and government. And so emergency bishops were created, and nobody else could be this except the electors and princes.

Out of this situation, which Luther accepted as an emergency situation, something occurred already, when it began to work, namely the state Church in Germany. The

Church became more or less and I think "more" than "less" a department of the state administration, and the princes became the arbiters of the Church in all respects. This is not intentionally so, but it shows that a Church needs a political backbone. In Catholicism it was the Pope and the hierarchy; in Protestantism it was the "outstanding members of the communion" who must take over, after the bishops have disappeared either the princes, or social groups in more democratic countries, or if the princes do not take it.

This certainly is not an easy thing, because many people believe that Luther's interpretation of the state is the real cause of Nazism. Now first of all a few hundred years means something in history, and Luther is a little bit older than the Nazis! But this is not the decisive point. The decisive point is that the doctrine of the state was a doctrine of positivism, of a Providence which was positivistical1y interpreted. Positivism means that the things are taken as they are. The positive law is decisive, and this is connected by Luther with the doctrine of Providence. Providence brought this power and that power into existence, and therefore it is impossible to revolt against this power. You have no rational criteria by which to judge the princes. You have, of course, the right to judge them from the point of view whether they are good Christians or not. But whether or not they are, they are God-given, and so you have to be obedient to them. Historical destiny has brought in the tyrant, the Neros, the Hitlers. And since this is historical destiny, we have to subject ourselves to it.

Now this means that the Stoic doctrine of natural law, which can be used as criticism of the positive law, has disappeared. There is only the positive law. The natural law does not really exist for Luther. The Stoic doctrines of equality and freedom of the citizen in the state, are not used by Luther at all. So he is non-revolutionary, theoretically as well as practically. Practically, he says that every Christian must stand every bad government because it comes from God providentially.

The state, for Luther, is not a reality, in itself, and it is always misleading to speak of the "state theory" of the Reformers. The word "state" is not older than the 17th or .l8th centuries, but instead of that they had the concept of Obrigkeit, i.e., authority, superiors. The government is the authority, the superiors, but not the structure called the "state." This means there is no democratic implication in Luther's doctrine of the state. The situation is such that the state must be accepted as it is.

But how could Luther maintain this? How could he who more than anybody else has emphasized love as the ultimate principle: of morals, accept the despotic power of the states of his time? Now he had an answer to this and this answer is very much full of spirit. He says that God does two kinds of works, the one is His own, his proper, work, as he calls it namely the work of love, which is mercy, grace, always giving. And then is "strange" work, which also is the work of love, but it is strange; it works through punishment, through threat, through the compulsory

power of the state, through all kinds of harshness, as the law demands. Now people say this is against love, and then ask the question: How can compulsory power and love be united with each other? And they derive from this a kind of anarchism, which we find so often in ideas of Christian pacifists and others. The situation formulated by Luther seems to me to be the true one. I believe that he has seen, profounder than anybody whom I know, the possibility of uniting the power element and the love element in terms of this doctrine of God's "strange work" and God's "proper work." The power of the state which makes it possible that we are sitting here, or that works of charity are done, is a work of God's love. The state has to suppress the aggression of the evil man, of those who are against love, and the strange work of love is to destroy what is against love.

Now if you call this a strange work, you are right, but it is a work of love, namely, without destroying that which is against love, love would cease to be a power on earth. Now this is the deepest form of the relationship of power and love which I know. This whole positivistic doctrine of the state makes it impossible for Lutheranism to accept revolution, from a theological point of view. Revolution is the production of chaos and even if it tries to produce order, it first produces chaos, and then the disorder is even greater. Therefore Luther was unambiguously against revolution. He accepted the positive given as a gift of destiny.

One more point. One often has said that Luther has something to do with Nazism. I think this is completely wrong. Nazism was possible in Germany, because of this positivistic authoritarianism, because of Luther's affirmation that the given prince is given forever and cannot be removed. This was, of course, a tremendous inhibition against any German revolution, if it had been possible at all which I don't believe in modern totalitarian systems. But an additional spiritual cause was the negation of any revolution, and therefore the acknowledgment of the given authority as authority by everybody. When we say that Luther, is responsible for the Nazis, then we say a lot of nonsense. When we, for instance, think of the ideology of the Nazis, then it is quite clear that this ideology is almost the opposite of Luther's. He had no nationalistic ideology; he had no tribal ideology, no racial ideology. He praised the Turkish state for its good state administration. From this point of view, no Nazism is in Luther.

There is perhaps another point of view: the conservatism of his political thinking. That's true, but it also is nothing except a consequence of the basic presuppositions. So don't make this mistake, even if you hear it very often from seemingly expert people. It's only true in one thing: namely, Luther has broken the back of the revolutionary will, in the Germans. There is no such thing as a revolutionary will in the Germans, but that is all we can say, and nothing beyond it.

And let me add here: some say often that it was first Luther and then Hegel who produced Nazism. This is equally nonsense, because Hegel, even if he said that the state is God on earth, didn't mean the power state: he meant the cultural unity of religion and social life, organized in a state. And if this is done, he indeed would say that there is a unity of state and Church. But ""state" is for him not the party movement of the Nazis, the relapse to tribal systems; state is. for him organized society, repressing sin.

Now I go away from Luther. What I was able to give you was rather short. Even a whole semester's seminar on him is not enough. But l hope I gave you some kind of survey helping you to overcome at least some interpretations of this great prophetic personality. In him the Reformation broke through. -- Now I come to people who took over his breakthrough and carried it through in different ways.

Zwingli is not as original a theologian as Luther was, in whom the breakthrough occurred.

He is partly dependent on and partly independent of Luther, but he is never the first beginning, as it was in Luther.

What is the character of Zwinglian Christianity? This is not so easy. Zwingli was very much influenced by the humanists. He remained his whole life a friend of Erasmus, in spite of all the roughness with which Luther separated himself from Erasmus. Zwingli did not, as later on Melanchthon also never did. These people were humanists besides being Christians. They were Christian humanists. And this is especially clear in a man like Zwingli. The authority of the Scriptures in Zwingli is based on the call of the Renaissance: Back to the sources! The Bible is the revelation of God. "God Himself wants to he the schoolmaster.". (Luther could never have written such a sentence; He is certainly something more powerful than a schoolmaster!) But the decisive difference is that Zwingli had a fully developed doctrine of the Spirit, something which was lacking in Luther and the other Reformers. "God can give truth, through the Spirit, in non-Christians also," he said. The truth is given to every individual always through the Holy Spirit, and this Spirit is present even it the word of the Bible is not present. In this way he liberated somehow from the Biblical burden which Luther put upon people.

Luther had a dynamic form of Christian life. Zwingli and, as we shall see, Calvin also had a static one: faith is psychological health. If you are psychologically healthy, then you can have faith, and vice versa. They are identical, actually. Faith for Luther is a dynamic thing, going up and down, reaching heights and depths. This is always possible for Luther. For Zwingli it is much more static, much more humanistically balanced. It is much more something which is similar to the bourgeois ideal of health. Faith is psychological health. "Christian faith is a thing which is

felt in the soul of the faithful like health in the body." The continuous breaking down and re-arising of the community with the personal, wrathful and loving God, is Luther's type. The corresponding undynamic union with God is Zwingli's type. Zwingli is progressive; Luther is paradoxical. And therefore it is so difficult to speak about the paradox, on Zwinglian soil. Either the paradox is dissolved or, if not, then it is accepted. The paradox of the Christian life against the rational progressivism of the Christian life this is the basic difference. But there is another difference to which we shall go tomorrow.

We started discussing Zwingli, but my state of tiredness prevented me from giving a full account of him. I don't want to go back to it, but I want to say that the interesting thing, in the first half of the Swiss Reformation, in Zurich where Zwingli was carrying it through, is that one could call it a synthesis of Reformation and humanism. When I say this, you remember that I spoke about Luther's relationship to Erasmus and the final break, but the continuation of humanistic elements in the further Reformation on Lutheran soil, represented especially by Melanchthon. These two men, Zwingli and Melanchthon ("Melanchthon" from the Greek, meaning "black earth,") Luther worked together with Melanchthon almost from the beginning of the Reformation, in Wittenberg (the theological wing which was dependent on him was often called Philippism) i.e. dependent on Philip Melanchthon, or "Blackearth," if you want to retranslate him out of the nobly sounding Greek into less nobly sounding language! This man was deeply influenced by Erasmus, and never broke with him. Similarly with Zwingli. Both were Reformers insofar as they followed Luther. They were at the same time humanists insofar as they accepted elements coming from the master and leader of all humanism, Erasmus.

This was the difference between Luther and the Swiss reformers. When we come to Calvin, keep in mind that he is largely dependent on Zwingli, as well as on Luther, that he turns back to a certain extent from Zwingli to Luther, but in spite of all this he also was humanistically educated and in his writings shows the classical erudition in style and content.

This is the general character of the Swiss Reformation, in contrast to the Lutheran. I believe that whenever liberal theology arises, as it did from the 17th to the 19th centuries, that since that time theologians develop in all denominations who are nearer to Zwingli than to Calvin. One of the main points I made is that Zwingli believes that the Spirit is directly working in the human soul and that therefore God's ordinary working goes through the Word, the Biblical message, but that God, extraordinarily, can also work on people who never had contact with the Christian message with people whom we speak of as living in foreign religions, or the humanists. The examples given by Zwingli are mostly from Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, and others.

I just read yesterday a hymn which, besides Christ and Luther, l think Socrates was in the content to be sung by a congregation of southern Negroes or Middle Western peasants. And I don't think whether it is very wise to bring theology in this way into a hymn. And if people like Zwingli, Calvin, and others, speak of revelation and salvation in men like Socrates, and Seneca, and many others, whom they mention, then there is a mistake in this, the mistake that they know pagan piety only in these representatives; but pagan piety has exactly the same character as Christian piety in this respect, that it is at least equally intensive in the common people who are really pious with respect to what they know of God, and these are the men they should have mentioned. But since they were good humanists, they mentioned only their own sociological class, namely the people who were not only great men but who also belonged to the intelligentsia. And if you ever decide as ministers to take such things into a hymn, please decide against it. Although I gave you in these classes as much Socrates and Plato as I could, nevertheless I don't sing to them

Now I come to another point, the immediacy of the Spirit, the possibility of having the Spirit without the Word. I didn't discuss last time the special doctrine of God in Zwingli, which is a very important doctrine, namely the doctrine that God is the universal dynamic power of being in everything that is. In this sense you can recognize some of my own theological thinking in Zwingli and Calvin, but you can recognize it also in Luther only that the Zwinglian humanistic form in which this was conceived has much more rational deterministic character God works through the natural law. And therefore the idea of predestination which Zwingli strongly accepted has a color of rational determinism. We shall see that the same is true of Calvin, while in Luther it has much more the character of Occamism and Scotusism, namely the irrational acting of God in every moment, which cannot be subjected to any law.

This has something to do and here is another point of difference between the Lutheran and the Zwinglian Reformation, namely that the law plays a different role in both of them. In Zwingli it is not the law which makes us sinful, but the law shows us that we are sinful; while Luther had the profound psychology which we have rediscovered in modern psychological terms, that the law produces resistance and therefore, as Paul has called it, makes sin more sinful. This was lacking very much in Zwinglian and also in Calvinistic thinking. The concept of law has a very positive connotation. Now this refers to natural law generally. And natural law, as you probably have not forgotten, means in ancient literature, first of all law of reason the logical, ethical, and juristic law. And secondly, also the physical law. So don't think of physics when you read of "natural law," in books of the past. Usually it means the ethical law which is in us, which belongs to our being, which is re-stated by the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount, but which in itself is by nature, I. e., by created nature, by that which we are essentially. And this kind of law is much more in the mind of Zwingli and Calvin than it is in the mind of Luther. Luther detested the idea that God has established a law between Himself and His world, between Him and the finite actions and things and decisions. He wanted everything as non-rational, non-legal, as possible, not only in the process of salvation but also in the interpretation of history and nature; while Zwingli and Calvin accepted nature in terms of law. When therefore Immanuel Kant defined nature as a realm in which physical law is valid, this was much more Calvinistic or Zwinglian; in any case, it was not Lutheran. For Luther nature is the mask of God through which He in an irrational way very similar to the Book of Job acts when He acts with mankind.

Therefore the attitude toward nature in Calvinism and in Zwinglianism is much more according to the demands of bourgeois industrial society, namely to analyze and transform nature for human purposes; while Luther's relationship to nature is much more in the sense of the presence of the Divine, irrationally, mystically, in everything that is. And if I hadn't known this before, very theoretically, and not very safely, .I would have learned it when I came to this country.

For Zwingli the law of the Gospel is law not only, of course: he accepts Luther's doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, as did every Reformer, naturally. But he at the same time spoke about a new evangelic law, as nominalists and humanists did. This law should be the basis of the law of the state. Don't forget that Wyclif and Occam had exactly the same idea, and that in this point a more Catholic element is in the Reformed thinking, namely the thought that the Gospel can be interpreted as the new law. This term, the "new law," is a very old one, appearing very early in Church history. For Luther, this would have been an abominable term; the Gospel for him is grace and nothing other than grace, and never can be the new law. But for Zwingli it can be. And this law is valid not only for the moral situation but also for the state, the political sphere. Politically, the law of the Gospel decides the laws of the city. If, therefore, cities do not subject themselves to the law, they may be attacked by those cities which' subject themselves to the law; and the law is against Catholicism; so Zwingli started the war against the cantons in Switzerland, and died in the battle against them, and was conquered. But the principle remained, the principle that the law of the Gospel should be the basis of the state law, and this had tremendous influence in world history: it saved Protestantism from being overwhelmed politically by the Roman Church, by the Counter-Reformation.

But there is still one deeper element of difference between Luther and Zwingli. It is the doctrine of the sacraments. The fight between Luther and Zwingli in 1529 in Marburg was a fight between two types of religious experience one, of a mystical interpretation of the sacrament; the other, of an intellectual interpretation Zwingli said: The sacrament is a sure sign or seal reminding us as symbols, and expressing our will to belong to the Church. This: Divine Spirit sets beside them, not through them. Baptism is a kind of an obliging sign, like a. badge. It is a commanded symbol, but it has nothing to do with subjective faith and salvation, which are dependent on predestination.

In the doctrine of the Eucharist, the decisive point was seemingly a matter of translation, but, in reality a matter of a different Spirit. The open discussion went around the statement: "This is my body," about the meaning of the word "is. " The humanists usually interpreted it by "signified." m means." Luther emphasized that it cannot mean this but must be taken literally: the body of Christ is literally present. For Zwingli it is present for the contemplation of faith, but not per essentiam et realiter (by essence and in reality) "The body of Christ is eaten when we believe that He is killed for us." You see that everything is centered on the subjective side. It is the representation of a past event. The present event is merely in the subject, in the mind of the believer. He is certainly with His Spirit present in the mind, but He is not present in nature. Mind can be fed only by mind, or spirit by spirit, and not by nature.

Against Luther he says that the body of Christ is circumscripte (by circumscription) in Heaven, i.e., on a special definite place. Therefore it is a special individual thing; it does not participate in the Divine infinity. As man with a body Christ is finite, and the two natures are sharply separated. Therefore the Lord's Supper is a memory and a confession but not a personal communion with somebody who is really present. Luther emphasizes the reality of the Presence, and in order to do this he Invented the doctrine of the omnipresence of the body of the elevated Christ.

The presence of Christ is repeated in every act of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Historical person and sacramental person are identical. In order to do this, Luther said against this: "Where you put God, there you must put humanity: they cannot be severed or separated; it has become one person." To say that the Divine character of the bodily Christ is only said in symbolic or metaphoric terms is from the Devil. So Luther completely rejected the idea that the Divinity of Christ is separated from His humanity in Heaven, Even in Heaven, the Divinity and humanity of Christ belong together. He expresses this in the profound and fantastic doctrine of the ubiquity of the body of Christ the omnipresence of the body of the ascended Christ. "Christ is present in everything, in stone and fire and tree, but for us He is present only when he speaks to us through everything. Now this is the idea that God drives toward embodiment, towards corporeity. and that the omnipresence of the body of Christ m the world is the form in which God's eternal power is present in the world. Now if you want to carry this through in scholastic terms, namely taking it literally or superstitiously, then it is an absurd doctrine because it belongs to a body to be circumscribed. But if you take it symbolically, then it is a profound doctrine because it says that if God is present in anything on earth He is always also present with His concrete historical manifestation, namely with Christ.

Now Luther meant that much more primitively, but his meaning is that in every natural object you can have the presence of the Christ. And in a Lutheran service during the Sundays in Spring, you always find a tremendous amount of flowers and nature brought into the church, because of this symbol of participation of the body of Christ in the world.

Now what kind of principles are involved in this discussion?

When it came to an end, all the Reformers agreed that they denied the; transubstantiation doctrine and agreed about a lot of points about the Lord's Supper, but they did not agree about the ubiquity, i.e., the presence of Christ everywhere. This means there is a fundamental difference, which Luther stated when he left the castle of Wittenberg: "They have not the same spirit with us." What did this mean? First of all, it is the relationship between the spiritual and the bodily existence. In Zwingli you have the humanist intellectualism separating the spirit from the body, and ultimately the Neoplatonic background of this. Therefore in Calvinism there is a lack of interest in the problem of expression. But for Luther, spirit is only present in its expressions; it is directly present in consciousness which finally led to the amalgamation with Cartesian ideas.

The interest is incorporation. The (mystic) Oetinger said: "Corporality is the end of the ways of God." Therefore the great interest in the bodily reality of Christ, in history and in sacrament.

The second spiritual difference is the religious meaning of nature, the control of nature in Zwinglian thinking which demands regularly calculable natural laws the dynamic naturalism of Luther which often goes into demonic depths and is not interested in any law of nature.

And then the final and most important form which was expressed in two Latin formulas. Finitum capax infiniti the finite is capable of the infinite. For Zwingli this is not possible. They said directly: finitum non capax infiniti -- the finite is not able to have the infinite within itself. And this of course is a very fundamental difference, which first occurs in Christology and then is extended to the whole sacramental life and the whole relationship to nature.

It is perhaps wise to say that in the Swiss Reformation, from which, with Zwingli, we now turn to Calvin, .the sociological background was co-determining for the special form in which the whole thing happened. In Luther we have the form of surviving aristocracy. In Switzerland we have the large cities which, like Zurich and Geneva, were mostly trade and small factory cities. That means that sociologically the background of the Swiss Reformation drives in the direction of industrial society. In the German Reformation especially the North German, the Lutheran Reformation it sticks to the pre-bourgeois situation as much as possible If you read Luther's little catechism, you have there a paternalistic culture of small farmers and some craftsmen in villages and small cities. If you read, in contrast to this, some letters and other expressions in Zwingli and Calvin, then you have the men of the world. who have a world-wide horizon, through the trading relationships in the centers in which they lived. This produces a quite different attitude towards nature, the state, and everything.

This leads us now to Calvin himself The first point I want to make in my discussion of Calvinism is his doctrine of God and man. Here we have the turning point of everything in him. One has said that the doctrine of predestination is the main point. Now this is easily refuted by the fact that in the first edition of his "Institutes" it was not even developed; only in the later editions did it acquire great space. But it is to be refuted also from more important points of view.

In every theology. the decisive thing is always the doctrine of God I told you this with regard to Luther, to Augustine. etc. For Calvin the central doctrine of Christianity is the doctrine of the majesty of God. The attitude in which God is known as an existential attitude, more than in any other of the Reformers -- at least in formula, even more than in Luther. For Calvin human misery and Divine majesty are correlated. Only out of the human misery can we understand the divine majesty and only in the light of the Divine majesty can we understand the human misery. Calvin applies to God a word which has been rediscovered by Rudolf Otto numen, the numinous. God is a numen for him, He is unapproachable, horrifying. and at the same time fascinating. He speaks of "this sacred numinous nature," when he speaks of God. This is distinguished from all idols, from every polytheistic God. It is transcended in a radical way. so radically that you cannot speak directly of God. And here he has a very interesting theory of Christian symbolism. The symbols are significations of His incomprehensible essence. Symbols have to be momentary, disappearing, self-negating, He says they are not the matter itself. I think this self-negating is the decisive characteristic of every symbol with respect to God, because if they are taken literally, if they are not self-negating, then they produce idols. This is Calvin and not a mystical theology such as in Pseudo-Dionysius, who says this. So when you speak of symbolism when referring to God, you can refer to a man who is certainly beyond suspicion of being less than orthodox. namely, to Calvin.

The truth of a symbol drives it beyond itself. "The best contemplation of the Divine Being is when the mind is transported beyond itself with admiration." The doctrine of God can never be theoretical-contemplative; it must always be existential, by participation. The famous phrase by Karl Barth, which is taken from a Biblical text "God is in Heaven, and you are on earth" -- is often said and explained by Calvin. The Heavenly "above" is not a place to which God is bound, but it is an expression of His religious transcendence, not an expression of a physical transcendence.

All this leads to a central attitude and doctrine of Calvinism, namely the fear of idolatry. This is tremendously strong in him. Calvin fights the idols wherever he believes he sees them. He is not interested in the history of religion, which is practically condemned as a whole as being idolatrous. Religion cannot help having an idolatrous element. Religion is a factory of idols all the time. Therefore the Christian and the theologian must be on his guard and prevent idolatrous trends from overwhelming his relationship to God.

He fights against the pictures in the churches, all kinds of things which can divert the mind from the merely transcendent God. This is the reason for the sacred emptiness of the Calvinist church buildings. There is always a fear of idolatry in the depths of men who have overcome idolatry. So it was with the prophets, so it was with the Arabians (Islam), so it was now with the Reformers. Calvinism is an iconoclastic movement crushing icons, idols, pictures of all kinds, because they deviate from God Himself.

Now this idea that the human mind is a perpetual manufacturer of idols is one of the deepest things which can be said about our thinking of God. Even orthodox theology very often is nothing other than idolatry.

Now we have on the other side the human situation, which is described in much more negative terms than it is by Luther. "From our natural proneness to hypocrisy, any vain appearance of righteousness abundantly contents us, instead of the reality, which is our sin. Man cannot stand his reality; he is unrealistic about himself or as we say in modern times, he is ideological about himself; he produces unreal imaginations about his being. -- This of course is a very radical attack on the human situation, but this corresponds to God as the God of glory. When Calvin speaks of the God of love, it is usually in context with those who are elected. There He reveals His love. But the others are from the very beginning excluded from love. Now you can say this is always true; but is it not then also true that in Calvin God is also the creator of evil?

I turn now to this question in connection with his doctrine of providence and predestination

Calvin was very well aware that his kind of thinking would easily lead to a half-deistic type of putting God at the side of the world. Hundreds of years before the deistic movement appeared in England, Calvin warned against deism, namely putting God beside the world. Instead of that, of course, 'he conceives of a general operation of God; in preserving and governing the world, so that all movement depends on Him. Deism is a carnal sense which wants to keep God at a distance from us. If He is sitting on His throne and does not care what is going on in the world, the world is left to us. And this is exactly what the Enlightenment and industrial society needed. They couldn't stand A God who is continuously in interrelation with the world, who continuously interferes. They had to have a God who has given to the world the first movement. but then sits beside it and doesn't disturb the activities of the business man and the industrial creators. So. this anticipation of deism is a very important thing.. Against this he says: "Faith ought to penetrate further." God is the world's perpetual preserver, "not by a certain universal action actuating the whole machine of the world and all its respective parts, but by a particular providence sustaining, nourishing, and providing for everything which He has made." All this implies a dynamic process of God within the law she has given. But he knew that the doctrine of natural law easily would make God into something beside reality. All things, therefore, have, according to Calvin, instrumental character; they are instruments through which God works in every moment. If you want to call this pantheism, then it could be right, which means everything is "in God." The things are used as instruments of God's acting according to His pleasure. (Here we are very near to Luther.) And he also gives a concept of omnipotence which is against the absurdity of imagining highest God sitting somewhere and deliberating with Himself what He should do, and knowing that He could do many other things or everything He wanted, by saying: No, I don't want to do this. I want to do that. This is exactly like a woman in the household who decides to do-this or to do that. This is an undignified view of God, and this the Reformers knew. "Not vain, idle or almost asleep, but vigilant, efficacious, operative, and engaged in continual action; not a mere general principle of confused motion, as if He should command a river to flow through the channels once made for it, but a power constantly exerted on every distinct and particular movement "For He is accounted omnipotent, not because He is able to act but does not, and sits down in idleness.

Omnipotence is omni-activity. Providence consists in continuous Divine action. These elements of the idea of God in all: the Reformers are very important.

Now it comes to the problem with which Calvin was still wrestling on his death-bed: If this is so, isn't God the cause of evil? Now Calvin was not afraid to say that natural evil is a natural consequence of the distortion of nature. Secondly, he said: It is a way to bring the elect to God, and in such a way it is, justified. But then he said a third thing: It is a way to show the holiness of God, in the punishment of those whom He has elected and in the selection of those who are selected. Now this third point is that God has produced evil men in order to punish them and in order to save others who are evil by nature, from their evil nature. If you have this exclusively theocentric point of view, everything centered around the glory of God, then it is understandable that you also have the attack on Calvin (to which he was very sensitive), namely, he made God the cause of evil. But whatever this may mean, we will discuss it the first hour of next week, and then in the last two hours we will have a survey on the Protestant development.

We finished Friday with, the general ideas of Calvin on providence, the tremendously powerful way in which he looks at the Divine activity in everything in every moment, and directing it. If this is the presupposition; if we almost have the feeling that Calvin approaches a kind of Divine determinism, then we must ask the question, "How is all this related to the actuality of evil?" We can distinguish different answers.

The suffering of the world is not a real problem for Calvin. Since his first principle is the honor of God, he can show that human suffering is 1) a natural consequence of the distorted, sinful world; 2) a way of bringing the elect to God; 3) a way to show His holiness in the punishment of a distorted world.

Physical evil is taken partly as a natural consequence, partly as educational means, partly as punishment for sin. But this does not solve the problem of moral evil. Here Calvin must accept, and tries to show that the evil acts of Satan and of evil men are determined by God's counsel. Even Pilate and Nebuchadnezzar are servants of God. God blinds the minds and hardens the hearts of men; He puts an evil spirit into their heart. "For God, as Augustine says, fulfills His righteous will by the wicked wills of wicked men. Augustine declares that He creates light and darkness, that He forms good and evil, and that no evil occurs which He has not performed." Such statements which seem to make God the cause of evil, are understandable only if we understand what Calvin says, that the world is "the theater of .the Divine glory." In the scene which we call "the world," God shows His glory. In order to do this, He causes evil, even moral evil. Calvin says: to think that God admits evil because of freedom, is frivolous. Because God acts in everything that goes on; the evil man follows the will of God although he does not follow His command. By following His will they defy His command, and that makes them guilty.

Now this means that Calvin's idea of providence is strictly God – causes – I don't say "determined," but "God-caused." And if, as he realizes, some people feel that this is not what we can say about God, and that this kind of providence is a horrible thing, then he answers, "Ignorance of providence is the greatest of miseries; the knowledge of it is attended with the highest felicity.: The belief in providence liberates us from anxiety, dread, and care. This period, at the end of the Middle Ages, was one of catastrophes and transformations, externally, and of profound anxiety internally. The doctrine of providence in Calvin is not an abstract one but is a doctrine which is supposed to heal anxiety, to be able to give courage, and for this reason he praises it.

But of course there is something more involved in this doctrine, namely his famous doctrine of predestination. Predestination is providence with respect to the ultimate aim of man. It is providence which leads man through his life to his final aim. And so predestination is nothing more than the logical implication and the final fulfillment of the doctrine of providence.

Now what does "predestination" mean? How does this problem arise? Why is it that most of the great names in religion, from Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, to Luther, are adherents of "predestination," while those who do not adhere ,always are nearer to a moral interpretation of Christianity than to a strictly religious interpretation? This is a problem which we must ask ourselves. If we deny predestination, we deny the high line of religious personalities and their theology.

Now the question behind this doctrine is: Why does not everybody receive the same possibility to reject or to accept the truth of the Gospel? Why doesn't he get it historically? - -he never knew Jesus. Why does he never get it psychologically? – his preconditions are such that he could not even understand the meaning of what is said to him. This is a question we must ask today, every day.

The answer is: By Divine providence, but, as we have heard, providence with respect to our eternal destiny is predestination. In the moment in which Christianity emphasizes the uniqueness of Christ, it must ask why most people have never heard about Him, while those who have externally heard about Him were preconditioned in a way that this hearing didn't mean anything. In other words, all these men observed something empirically, namely that there is a selective and not an equalitarian principle effective in life. Life cannot be understood in terms of an equalitarian principle; it can be understood only in terms of a selective principle.

Everybody asks these questions. Calvin says: You shouldn't suppress such questions in terms of a wrong modesty; one must ask them. "We shall never be clearly convinced. . . that our salvation flows from the fountain of God's free mercy till we are acquainted with His eternal election, which illustrates the grace of God by this comparison, that He adopts not all promiscuously to the hope of salvation but gives to some what He refuses to others."

But this is only the one side. The other is that which gives to those who ask this question a certainty of salvation because it makes salvation completely independent of the oscillations of our own being. This was the second reason for this doctrine, in Paul, Augustine, and Luther. They wanted certainty of salvation. If they looked at themselves, they couldn't find it because their faith was always weak and changing. If they looked beyond themselves, they could find it in the action of God.

The concrete character of Divine grace is visible in an election which elects me especially, by not electing others. All this leads to the concept of predestination. "We call predestination the eternal decree of God by which He has determined in Himself what He would have every individual of mankind to become, for they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some and eternal damnation for others." That's his definition. What is the cause for this election? Only God's will, and nothing else. "If, therefore, we can assign no reason why He grants mercy to His people but because such is His pleasure, neither shall we find any other cause but His will for the reprobation of others." i.e., the irrational will of God is the cause of predestination.

Now here we come into an absolute mystery, as he calls it. We cannot call God to any account. We must accept it and we must drop our criteria of the good and the true. If someone says that is unjust, he answers: We cannot go beyond the Divine will to a nature which determines God because God's will cannot be dependent on anything else. even in Him. Here you have the full weight of the Scotistic-Occamistic thinking: the will of God is the only cause for what God does; nothing else.

Calvin himself feels the horrible character of this doctrine. "I inquire again how it came to pass that the fall of Adam, independent of any remedy, should involve so many nations with their infant children in eternal death, but because such was the will of God – it is an awful decree, I confess." Nevertheless, when he was attacked, and especially in his last years, in face of his death, then he answered in a little different way: Everything is dependent on Divine predestination. "Their perdition depends on the Divine predestination, in such a manner that the cause and matter of it are found in themselves"; the immediate cause is man's free will. i. e., Calvin thinks, as did Luther, in two levels. The Divine cause is not real cause, but decree, something which is mystery and for which the category of causality is only symbolically and not properly applied. Besides this he knew, as did every Reformer and predestinarian, that it is man's finite freedom through which God acts when He makes His decree of predestination.

If we criticize it, we should not say it is a simple contradiction between God's causality and human freedom – that's too easy – because the levels are different, and there is no possible contradiction on different levels. If you want a contradiction, you can have it only on the same level. If you therefore have two levels, namely the Divine action which is mysterious because it doesn't fit our categories; and the human action in which freedom and destiny are mixed – then you have the real picture. Don't think of the Reformers, or of all great theologians, in a one-leveled thinking. Then you come to all these impossible statements which not only contradict each other – and, with a heroic attempt of your mind to destroy itself you say that this is a contra diction which we must accept; but think in terms of two levels, whereby enough mystery is still left, but not a simple logical contradiction, which simply means you use words without meaning. And this should not be done even if you emphasize the paradox: don't make it into a speaking of words without meaning. You can think in terms of two levels; for example, you can say, "I cannot escape the category of causality when I speak of God's action, and when I do so I derive everything from God, including my eternal destiny." This sounds like a mechanical determinism. But this is not what they mean. The two levels, of which the one uses the term "causality" properly, and then posits against it finite freedom – the human level; then the Divine level, where causality is used symbolically, and where everything which brings us to God is derived from God. These two statements must be made. And if you divide them up into two levels, they are not logical contradictions, i.e., meaningless sentences. But never demand of anybody to destroy his own logos, i.e., the Image of God, and to make meaningless statements. That is not the relationship between God and man.

This gives a problem, of course, for the individual Calvinist, I. e., the question: Is he elected? What gives us the assurance of election? And so the looking for the criteria, the marks, of election starts. And Calvin finds some of them: the first and decisive of course is the inner relationship of God in the act of faith. But there is also the blessing of God, the moral high standing of someone – which are all symptoms. Now psychologically this brought a situation in which the individual was not able to get certainty except in producing the marks of certainty, namely a moral life and an economic blessing. And this means he tried to become a good bourgeois industrial citizen, and believed that if he were this, then had marks of his predestination. Of course, theology knew that predestination never can be caused by such actions. But if they are there, then you can have certainty. And this was the danger of this theology of the marks of predestination.

It is remarkable how little Calvin has to say about the Divine love. The Divine glory replaces the Divine love. And if he speaks of the Divine love, it is love towards those who are elected. But the universality of the Divine love is denied, and the demonic negation, the split of the world, has in Calvin a kind of eternity, through his doctrine of double predestination. Therefore this is a doctrine which contradicts the doctrine of the Divine love as sustaining everything that is, a doctrine which Dante still knew when he wrote, at the entrance of Hell, in his Divina Comedia. "I also have been created by Divine love." But if something is created by Divine love, then it is not eternal condemnation.

Now there are many discussions in Calvin about the doctrine of the Christian life. I only want to make a few statements about it. "When they explain vivification of that joy which the mind experiences after its perturbations and fears are allayed, I cannot coincide with them (I. e. , with Luther) since it should rather signify an ardent desire and endeavor to live a holy and pious life, as though it were said that a man dies to himself that he may begin to live to God." For Luther the new life is a joyful reunion with God; for Calvin it is the attempt to fulfill the law of God in terms of a Christian life. And the summary of the Christian life is self-denial and not love. It is departing from ourselves. "0h, how great a proficiency has that man made who, having been taught that he is not his own, has taken the sovereignty and government of himself from his own reason, to surrender it to God." Luther's fragmentary up and down, ecstasy and despair, is not what describes the Christian life in Calvin. The Christian life is a line upwards. exercised in methodical stages. And this gives to the whole type a quite different form.

There are two other elements in it: the world is a place of exile. The body is a valueless prison of the soul. -- Here you hear words more of Plato than the Old or New Testament. But this was in him. Nevertheless he denied any hatred of life. And his asceticism was not the Roman asceticism, to deny life itself, to deny the body in special activities of an ascetic character. But it was what Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch have called inner-worldly asceticism, an asceticism which has two characteristics: cleanliness, in terms of sobriety. chastity, temperance -- subordinated to the concept "clean." -- This has tremendous consequences in the whole life of the nations which were Calvinistic: an extreme external cleanliness, an identification of the erotic element with the unclean – against the principles of the Reformation, but in consequence of this Calvinistic ethics.

And the other was that our activities in this world are activities of producing tools and, through tools, profit. It was what one has called the "spirit of capitalism." Now this word has been so much misunderstood that I would like to say a few words about it. There are some primitive people who think that a tremendous scholar like Max Weber and Troeltsch have said that Calvinism has produced capitalism. And then, of course, these people are much cleverer than Max Weber – probably the greatest scholar in the whole 19th century in the realm of the humanities and sociology – and they tell him that there was capitalism before Calvin lived, especially in the Lombardian plane in north Italy, in the south and north German cities, in London, etc. So we have capitalism before Calvin, and Weber is wrong and I, the clever boy, am right! -- This is probably

wrong. Weber said that there is something in the spirit of Calvinistic ethics and some related sectarian ethics which is useful for serving the purposes of investment in the capitalistic economy. In pre-capitalistic economy the rich man showed his riches in glorious living: he built castles or mansions, or patrician houses - -and we still enjoy building houses today. But that is not the way in which Calvinism tried to show the people how to use their wealth. It should be partly used for endowments; as it is in this country, in which practically all culture is rooted (i.e., through endowment) and partly for new investments. And this indeed is one of the best ways of supporting the capitalistic form of economy, namely to make the profits into investments, I. e., means for new production, etc., instead of wasting them, as the Calvinists would say, in glorious living.

Now that is what he wanted to say. If you don't believe he was right, I can tell you that in eastern Germany, before the 20th century catastrophes broke in, those cities in which the Protestants were living were the rich ones, and the ones in which the Catholics lived were the poor ones. But perhaps the poor were happier than the rich ones! – you cannot say that in these terms; .but you can say that these Calvinistically influenced towns and cities produced German capitalism – and not the Catholics, or Lutherans in the east, etc.

So these men were right, if you don't make a childish nonsense out of what they said – and that one should not do with such a great scholar.

Calvin's doctrine of Church & State:

Calvin's doctrine of the Church is, like Luther's, the place where preaching is carried on and the sacraments correctly administered, ritually, Calvin, however, makes a much more radical distinction between the empirical Church ;and the invisible Church. While for ;Luther the invisible Church is only the Spiritual quality of the visible Church, for Calvin the invisible Church is the body of those who are predestined in all periods of history, not dependent always on the preaching of the Word. This is connected with what we have learned about Zwingli and Calvin: the doctrine of the Holy Spirit working also apart from the Christian message, and therefore universally active.

>From this point of view the visible Church is an emergency creation, an adaptation of God to human weakness. Therefore it is not a matter of believing in the Church, but believing that there is a Church. The main function of the Church is educational. The Church always has to bring people, through those means, into the invisible Church, the body of the predestined.. On the other hand, the emphasis on this educational work of the Church is much stronger than in Lutheranism. Although ultimately the Church is an emergency creation of God, actually it is the only way for most Christians to come to God at all Therefore he has developed a doctrine of the Church which is quite different from the doctrine which had been developed by Luther. Instead of two marks of the Church, namely doctrine and sacraments he has three marks: doctrine, sacraments, and discipline. And this element of discipline is very decisive. "As some have such a hatred of discipline, as to abhor the very name, they should attend to the following consideration. As the saving doctrine of Christ is the soul of the Church, so discipline forms the ligaments which connect the members together and keep each in its proper place." The discipline starts with private admonition – and this admonition was very serious, mostly; it goes through public challenge (this was ruinous, socially) and finally to excommunication. But even excommunication is not able to remove one from the saving power of God. While in Rome someone who is excommunicated can in this state not be saved, somebody who is in Protestantism can be, or possibly has been, predestined, and if so he will be saved in spite of the excommunication, namely, then the excommunication will not be effective.

These three marks are by Divine law. But there are other things by Divine law. There are four offices: pastors, or ministers (both words are used), doctors or teachers, presbyters, deacons.

The most important of these four are the pastors and presbyters. These four are by Divine order, and they have to be always there. They are derived from the Bible.

The Church has in itself, in its own mixed status, a community of active sanctification. This community is created by the Church and becomes manifest in the Lord's Supper. Therefore discipline precedes the giving of the Lord's Supper. Now I don't want to go much into the doctrine of the sacraments in Calvin. The main thing is that he tries to find a mediation between Luther and Zwingli. He does not want, with Zwingli, that the Lord's Supper is only a meal of commemoration; he wants the presence of God, but not a presence which he finds superstitious and magical, as he sees it in Luther, where even those who are not belief-ful eat the body of Christ

The doctrine of the State:

Calvin was a humanist and therefore gave to the state much more functions than Luther. Luther gave it practically only one function: to repress evil and preserve society from chaos. Calvin uses also the ideas of humanism, of good government, of helping the people, and many other things of a more positive way. I can give you this very drastically: the function of a policeman in Germany is to repress; the function of a policeman in this country may also be this function, but beyond this it is the function to help. For us, when we came 20 years ago, it was really an experience when you wanted something you could go to a policeman! Nobody could do that in Germany! Now I hope this has changed, but I don't believe too much. The state represses, but it never helps.

But Calvin never went so far as to say, with the sectarian movements, that the state can be the kingdom of God itself. He calls this a Jewish folly. But what he says was, with Zwingli, that a theocracy has to be established, i.e., a government which not priestly government, but the rule of God through the application of the evangelical laws, through the political situation. And for this he indeed works hard. And he demands that the magistrates of Geneva care not only for legal problems, the problems of order in the general sense, but also for the most important content of the daily life, namely for the Church; not that they shall teach in the Church or give decisions (as to what things) shall be taught. But they must supervise the Church to punish those who are blasphemers and heretics – and so he did, with the help of the magistrates of Geneva – and to create in all respects a kind of community in which the law of God governs the whole life. No priests and ministers are necessarily involved in it. Theocratic rulers usually are not priests4hen the theocracy becomes hierocracy – they are usually laymen, and that is usually what he wanted. The state must punish the impious, he says. They become criminals because they are against the state law, which is based on the Divine law.

Calvinism has saved Protestantism from being overwhelmed by the Counter-Reformation. And it has done so on a world-wide scale by the possibility of alliances of Protestants all over the world – Cromwell especially did this – the world alliances

which we still have in this country, as an idea of allying the good people against the evil people; of course the evil people are the political enemies, but this is done in the name of the good people, which is something the Lutherans would not do; when they tried it they fell down. This gave Calvinism a tremendous international power.

There is another element in Calvinism, namely the possibility of revolution. If you read Calvin you think this is even worse than Luther. He certainly said that all revolution is against. the law of God, as Luther did. Then he makes an exception which has become decisive for West European history, He said that although no individual citizen should be allowed to make a revolution, the lower magistrates should be able and willing to make a revolution if the natural law, to which every ruler is subjected, should be contradicted by this ruler. Then the lower magistrates have the duty to revolt against him

Now this of course is a possibility that in a democracy such as ours, where all of us are lower magistrates – by voting, we establish the government – under these

circumstances revolution is, universally permissible. And this was the situation in Western Europe, where the kings and queens were mostly on the side of Catholicism, and Protestantism could be saved only by people who were convinced that in the name of God they can fight against their kings and queens, if kings and queens suppress the true Gospel, namely the purified Gospel of the Reformation.

Let me say a few words about his doctrine of the authority of scripture.. This is a very important point insofar as it was the way in which, finally, biblicism developed in all groups of Protestant faith. The Bible for Calvin is a law of truth, and of course also a law of word. At length, that the truth might remain in the world in a continual course of instruction to all ages, he determined that the same oracles which he had deposited with the patriarchs should be committed to public records. With this design the Law was promulgated, to which the prophets were afterwards annexed as its first interpreters. The Bible, therefore, must above all be obeyed. It contains a "heavenly doctrine." This was necessary – although again an adaptation – because of the mutability of the human mind. This was the necessary way to preserve the doctrines of Christianity by writing them down, and making, as Calvin says, God's instructions speaks of "the peculiar school of the children of God."

Now all this can be harmless, or can be the opposite, and there is much discussion going on as to how to interpret his doctrine of the Scripture. In any case the answer is that this doctrine is absolute, but it is absolute only for those to whom the Divine Spirit gives the testimony that this book contains the absolute truth. But if this is done, then we can witness to the whole Bible as an authoritarian book of a radically authoritarian character.

The form of the Biblical authority is derived from the fact that the Bible is composed under the dictation of the Holy Spirit. This term, "dictation of the Holy Spirit," is something which produced the doctrine of verbal inspiration, in a way which surpasses anything which existed in Calvinism, and in contradicting the Protestant principle as such: t he disciples were "pens" of Christ; all elements which come from them were superseded by the Divine Spirit which testifies that in this book the oracles of God are contained. "Between the apostles and their successors, however, there is this difference – that the apostles were the certain and authentic amanuenses of the Holy Spirit, and therefore their writings are to be received as the oracles of God." Out of the mouth of God" the Bible is written, i.e., the whole Bible; the distinction between the Old and New Testaments largely disappears. And you can find this still today in every Calvinistic country.