creation and scripture leads us to acknowledge God as majestic, such acknow-
ledgement taking the form of honour and adoration.
But as we saw, Calvin insists that what draws us to God is not our
recognition of God’s majesty but our recognition of God’s goodness towards
us. Such acknowledgement Calvin callspietas; I have suggested that a better
word than‘piety’for what he has in mind is‘devotion’. Calvin does not mean
to exclude from devotion our acknowledgement of God’s majesty, but at the
core of his understanding of Christian devotion is acknowledgement of God’s
goodness.
What we have seen is that Calvinistpietasor devotion is extraordinarily
expansive. Devotion includes the study of Scripture, of course, and the study of
the church fathers. But for some of us it also includes the study of the pagan
classics, not only because such study proves useful in some way but also for the
sheer delight of reading the ancient orators, poets, dramatists, historians,
philosophers, and lawyers. And for some of us it goes beyond the study of
texts to the study of mathematics, of astronomy, and of the other natural
sciences, again not only because such study proves useful but also just for the
sake of arriving at understanding. In approving not just the study of the
humanities but also the study of the natural sciences, Calvin proved himself
to be a very idiosyncratic member of the Renaissance humanist movement.
What Calvin asks of all our studies is not that they prove useful in the usual
sense, but that theyfit, in one way or another, into the life of Christian
devotion. When studying astronomy we stand in awe before the unfathomable
divine wisdom and power displayed in the heavenly bodies. When studying
what human beings have produced—philosophy, poetry, law—we stand in
awe of the extraordinary talents that God has bestowed on God’s human
creatures. And of course the life of Christian devotion goes beyond study. It
includes delight in food, in wine, in art. It includes grief over the death of those
we love. It includes the struggle for a just social order in which our funda-
mental solidarity as image bearers of God comes to expression in our families,
in the economy, in our politics.
I suggest that a Calvinistic understanding of education sees the ultimate aim
of education as cultivating in students Christian devotion, in Calvin’s extra-
ordinarily expansive understanding of Christian devotion. It will cultivate
in students awe, gratitude, delight, grief, the recognition of solidarity, and
commitment to social justice. In some of my own writings on Christian
education, I have said that Christian education is education forshalom.
What I callshalom, and what Calvin callsdevotion—in Latin,pietas—are the
same thing, seen from slightly different angles.
94 Nicholas Wolterstorff