Calvin: Our Crazy Ass Grandpappy
When I said on BeautyTipsforMinisters recently that jeans are NOT appropriate for ministers on Sundays (or to wear when leading worship any other day of the week -- and I stick to that, Jamie Goodwin!!), I wrote "Calvin is fine for church. Calvins are not."
Donald O'Bloggin wrote something very frowny about Calvin NOT "belonging" in Unitarian Universalist congregations.
Donald, dear heart, Calvin practically INVENTED the Reformation. Without the Reformation there wouldn't be either Unitarians or Universalists, hence no Unitarian Universalism.
I'm not a fan of the man who burned out martyr Servetus at the stake, either, but we ought to know more about him than the old pre-destination thing that everyone knows and rejects.
Calvin made some genius contributions to religious life as you and I know it, including to the ministry as you and I know it and have benefitted from it.
He may be a crazy-ass grandaddy in some very serious ways, but he's still our crazy-ass grandaddy. See, when you come from a dissenting tradition, you have to know WHO and WHAT you dissented from to get any juice from it. Trust me, as a kid who spends an awful lot of time with Mr. Calvin -- your understanding of, and appreciation of contemporary Unitarian Universalism can be so much more thrilling when you don't approach it as a tradition that sprang from Dana McLean Greeley's helmet, fully formed and in full armor, in 1961.
And since when is ANY legitimate topic of conversation or historic personage forbidden from our congregations? That's part of what we call the Free Church, and like it or not, Calvin helped make the Free Church possible.
Now all you brainiac historian types can weigh in.
Donald O'Bloggin wrote something very frowny about Calvin NOT "belonging" in Unitarian Universalist congregations.
Donald, dear heart, Calvin practically INVENTED the Reformation. Without the Reformation there wouldn't be either Unitarians or Universalists, hence no Unitarian Universalism.
I'm not a fan of the man who burned out martyr Servetus at the stake, either, but we ought to know more about him than the old pre-destination thing that everyone knows and rejects.
Calvin made some genius contributions to religious life as you and I know it, including to the ministry as you and I know it and have benefitted from it.
He may be a crazy-ass grandaddy in some very serious ways, but he's still our crazy-ass grandaddy. See, when you come from a dissenting tradition, you have to know WHO and WHAT you dissented from to get any juice from it. Trust me, as a kid who spends an awful lot of time with Mr. Calvin -- your understanding of, and appreciation of contemporary Unitarian Universalism can be so much more thrilling when you don't approach it as a tradition that sprang from Dana McLean Greeley's helmet, fully formed and in full armor, in 1961.
And since when is ANY legitimate topic of conversation or historic personage forbidden from our congregations? That's part of what we call the Free Church, and like it or not, Calvin helped make the Free Church possible.
Now all you brainiac historian types can weigh in.
posted by PeaceBang at 4:00 PM
5 Comments:
I often wonder about this question: How many of the people we claim as ancestors would claim us as descendents?
Doug points out a practice I really despise among us, which I call Dredging the Cemeteries. i am of the mind that VERY FEW of our so-called "descendants" would claim the typical UU as spiritual kin -- especially those who have no use for the Bible or for the Christian faith within which so many of our ancestors were firmly and exclusively grounded.
I hope I don't seem to be claiming Calvin as an ancestor. I am saying we should not ban him from our churches, since he pretty much founded the Reformation and we really should be at least somewhat acquainted with the theologies of the Reformation. Calvin would like nothing so much as to see people like me burned at the stake. Even given that fact, I don't like to hear UUs ever say, "This or that person's ideas should NEVER be studied or discussed in our congregations!"
When you're a rebel, you should know what you're rebelling from. If one of the great Unitarian legacies was to refute Calvinism, we should know what Calvinism IS, beyond the one-sentence Calvin For Dummies description.
As most of my readers know, I have delved deeply into Calvinistic Puritan theology in the past year and find there much to redeem what I think are harmful liberal excesses among us.
{{ducking as the Bierkenstocks and copies of Eckhart Tolle's "Be Here Now" come flying at her}}
Oh, also: I had soft shell crabs for dinner last night.
Now the vegetarians can throw things, too.
Peacebang I have had this argument (Jeans that is not Calvin) many a time.
Infact a minster up and Cleveland recently chastised me for the same thing during small little revival we did on Holy Saturday..
I just say, one of the nice things about not being a minister and therefore a volunteer is that I get to get away with a more relaxed style!
I do try and wear the cute jeans for services though!!
As for Calvin.. he is up there with St. Paul for me.. infuriating, but to important to ignore, if only for apologetics sake.
Lito, you do that last one and I will sell that for you at GA!
Other comments, very wonderful. Thank you all.
PB says:
If one of the great Unitarian legacies was to refute Calvinism, we should know what Calvinism IS, beyond the one-sentence Calvin For Dummies description.
Let me share with you a dirty little secret, one we don't often admit even to ourselves. My own observation is that there's a huge core of residual Puritanism, if not exactly Five Points Calvinism, still alive and thriving somewhere near the heart UU culture today. (Calvin himself was never a Five Points Calvinist; that was Theodore Beza's doing.) The popular "origin myth" that we were born out of a wholesale refutation of our Calvinist past is polemical spin and bad scholarship, at least in part. The 19th century Unitarians saw themselves as the rightful heirs to carry the best of the Puritan tradition into a new age of scientific revelation, not as rebels against the shameful legacy of foolish, errant ancestors.
For example, the Puritanism of yesteryear still survives almost unchallenged in our tendencies today toward personal moral discernment, congregational covenantalism, presuming the right to pronounce valid moral norms for the rest of society, and conflating political enforcement of those norms with religious observance, among other things. It's where we get our sense of being morally elect and set apart from the masses wandering in darkness, and our sense that a worthy character is demonstrated in worthy works. In turn, much of this inheritance from the Puritans can be traced backward to Calvin and his Reformed theology -- if not as their ideas were originally formulated, then at least as they were often observed in practice. (If she were here, Anne Hutchinson would probably agree.)
It's also closely related, but not entirely identical, to what is known in Red Sox Nation as "the Harvard attitude", a big residual slug of which is IMO also alive and thriving in UU culture today.
I wonder if we would cherish some of these traits so deeply as defining elements of our UU identity if we were also asked to recognize them honestly as the vestigial Puritanism that they in fact are.
As for Confederate U's, my vote goes to John C. Calhoun, even though he died before the outbreak of hostilities.
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