formation. Calvin’s aim is to cultivate biblically grounded devotion in his
readers.
The section of theInstitutesimmediately after the passage just quoted,
about God as the author of every good, opens with the following words:
‘What is God? Men who pose this question are merely toying with idle
speculations.... What help is it to know a God with whom we have nothing
to do? Rather, our knowledge of God should servefirst to teach us fear and
reverence; secondly, with it as our guide and teacher, we should learn to seek
every good from him, and having received it, to credit it to his account.’^13 This
is thefirst of dozens of passages in which Calvin rails against‘idle speculation’,
usually, though not always, idle speculation concerning God.^14
What we have to hear in these passages is the classic humanist insistence
that learning in general must be of some benefit. But as one reads along, it
becomes clear that it is not merely his Renaissance humanism that leads
Calvin to rail against‘idle speculation’concerning God. There are three
additional factors at work. Calvin is working out his own particular version
of humanism.
First, throughout theInstitutes, Calvin works with a dichotomy, some-
times spoken, sometimes unspoken, between speculation about God versus
attention to God’s revelation of Godself. Only the latter, attention to God’s
revelation of Godself, yields reliable knowledge of God. Second, Calvin
regarded all attempts to go beyond what God has revealed of Godself as
impious prying into God’s inner self, rather like prying into the inner life of
a fellow human being. This is what he says in one passage:‘The most
perfect way of seeking God...is not for us to attempt withbold curiosity
[my italics] to penetrate to the investigation of [God’s] essence, which we
ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to
contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar
to us.’^15 And third, Calvin regards speculation about God as the source of
many if not most of the controversies that plague the church. Ironically, it
would shortly become clear that biblical interpretation generated its own
spate of controversies.
A question suggested by all this was whether Calvin was opposed not just to
prying, non-edifying, thought and discourse about God but opposed, more
generally, to learning for its own sake. I know of no passage in which Calvin
(^13) Calvin,InstitutesI.ii.2, 41–2.
(^14) Here is just one more such passage. Referring to Exodus 34:6–7, Calvin says that‘here
[God’s] eternity and self-existence are announced.... Thereupon his powers are mentioned, by
which he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of
him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation’(Calvin,
InstitutesI.x.2).
(^15) Calvin,InstitutesI.v.9.
The Christian Humanism of John Calvin 83