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The Christian Humanism of John Calvin
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Many willfind my title perplexing. Lots of people, when they hear the term
‘humanism’, automatically thinksecularhumanism.The term‘secular human-
ism’is for them a redundancy, a pleonasm. It goes without saying that humanism
is secular; but it is good nonetheless to keep on saying it so that people don’tforget.
As for those who do not immediately associate humanism with secularism,
the thought of Calvin as a humanist defies their imagination. How could this
gloomy, forbidding, austere, dyspeptic, moralistic authoritarian who consent-
ed to the execution of Servetus be a humanist? What could possibly be meant
by calling him a humanist? It must be ironic.
The problem here is not just that we have to get past the negative cultural
image of Calvin tofind out what he actually thought and said; the problem is
also a problem of terminology.‘Humanism’is an extraordinarily ambiguous
term. One might be a humanist in any one of a number of different senses of
the term. What I propose doing in this essay is to show that, in three quite
different senses of the term‘humanist’, Calvin was a humanist.
One of the three forms of humanism that Calvin exhibits is naturally called
Renaissance humanism. Another has been calledsocial humanism.^1 To the best
of my knowledge the third has not been given a name. Let me call itanthropo-
logical humanism.Let me begin with Calvin’s Renaissance humanism, move on
to his anthropological humanism, and conclude with his social humanism. In
each case, my presentation will have to be extremely brief and sketchy.
CALVIN’S RENAISSANCE HUMANISMA movement that we now callhumanismoriginated in Italy in the early
Renaissance and spread rapidly from there throughout Europe. The
(^1) See, for example, André Biéler,The Social Humanism of Calvin, trans. Paul T. Fuhrmann
(Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964).