I am grateful to Mark Sennett, who first asked me to evaluate Voegelin's picture of Calvin for the 2000 meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society; to my colleagues on that panel; to Charles Brown, archivist for the H. H. Meeter Center at Calvin College, for helping me think through an expanded version of the first examination; and to this Review's anonymous reviewers for their constructive and most insightful critiques.

1. Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 106–107Google Scholar (hereafter NSP).

2. Voegelin, Eric, Anamnesis, ed. and trans. Niemeyer, Gerhart (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), p. 144Google Scholar.

3. Voegelin, Eric, Order and History, 5 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956–1987), 4: 6Google Scholar (hereafter OH); Anamnesis, pp. 103–105Google Scholar.

4. Voegelin, Eric, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, ed. and trans. Emberly, Peter and Cooper, Barry (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 180Google Scholar.

5. Voegelin, Eric, “The Gospel and Culture,” in Emberly and Cooper, Faith and Political Philosophy, p. 163Google Scholar.

6. Voegelin, Eric, Autobiographical Reflections, ed. Sandoz, Ellis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 75Google Scholar (hereafter AR).

7. Webb, Eugene, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), p. 264Google Scholar.

8. See also NSP, pp. 54–59Google Scholar; and OH, 1: 21–35, 46–50Google Scholar.

9. See also Webb, , Eric Voegelin, pp. 119–20Google Scholar; and Germino, Dante, Political Philosophy and the Open Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 55Google Scholar.

10. See, e.g., NSP, pp. 107ffGoogle Scholar; OH, 4: 18–20, 27–29Google Scholar; and Voegelin, Eric, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Chicago: Gateway Press, 1968), pp. 9–12Google Scholar.

11. See, e.g., NSP, pp. 110–12, 119–20Google Scholar.

12. See, e.g., NSP, p. 159Google Scholar; Voegelin, Eric, Collected Works, ed. Sandoz, Ellis et al. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1989—), vol. 22Google Scholar, Renaissance and Reformation, eds. Morse, David L. and Thompson, William M. (1998), p. 262Google Scholar; and Collected Works, vol. 23, Religion and the Rise of Modernity, ed. Wiser, James L. (1998), p. 47Google Scholar (hereafter CW).

13. Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame etext), 3:116Google Scholar at(http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc3_116.htm).

14. See also CW, 22: 245–46, 259, 267–68Google Scholar; and CW, 23: 17Google Scholar.

15. See the entire discussion in CW, 22: 248–60Google Scholar.

16. See, in particular, Walsh, David, “Voegelin's Response to the Disorder of the Age,” Review of Politics 46 (1984): 282CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim; Walsh, David, After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), pp. 192–204Google Scholar; Douglass, Bruce, “A Diminished Gospel,” in Eric Voegelin's Search for Order in History, ed. Mcknight, Stephen A. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), pp. 145–47Google Scholar and passim; Hallowell, John H., “Existence in Tension: Man in Search of his Humanity,” in McKnight, Eric Voegelin's Search for Order in History, pp. 122–26Google Scholar; and Mitchell, Mark, “Regaining the Balance: An Augustinian Response to Voegelin,” Humanitas 15 (2002): 4–31Google Scholar.

17. One assumes Voegelin would acknowledge the Christian eschaton as a key implication of the incarnation. After all, the synoptic gospel accounts of Jesus—which Voegelin finds most palatable—appear to point to the “return of the Son of Man” even more explicitly than does John's gospel. See Matthew, 23–24Google Scholar; Mark, 13Google Scholar; and Luke, 12 and 21Google Scholar.

18. Mitchell, “Regaining the Balance,” works through this problem quite thoroughly. For an especially insightful analysis of sin as the “vandalism” of God's created order, see Plantinga, Cornelius Jr, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Koyzis, David T., Political Visions and Illusions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), pp. 29–31Google Scholar, who takes Voegelin to task for failing to see the sense in which the Christian eschaton is in fact “Creation regained.”

19. All citations to works by Augustine have been taken from Schaff, Philip, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Church, vols. 1–8 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887Google Scholar).

20. Citations to Calvin's, Commentaries are from Calvin's Commentaries, trans. Calvin, Translation Society, 22 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1993)Google Scholar. Citations to his Letters are from Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts and Letters, 7 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1983)Google Scholar, vols. 4–7, Letters, ed. Beveridge, Henry and Bonnet, Jules, trans. Beveridge, Henry et al. Google Scholar.

21. Citations to the Summa Theologiae are to Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, ed. McDermott, Timothy (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1989)Google Scholar.

22. Citations to Calvin's Institutes are to Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. McNeil, John, trans. Battles, Ford L., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

23. Tinder, Glenn, The Fabric of Hope (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), p. 34Google Scholar.

24. Contrast Heilke's, Thomas defense of Voegelin in Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), pp. 96–97, 156Google Scholar, and passim.

25. See also Hallowell, , “Existence in Tension,” p. 123Google Scholar. I thus take issue with Heilke's (Eric Voegelin, pp. 159ffGoogle Scholar) defense of Mennonite John Howard Yoder as one of the few examples of “Christian eschatological consciousness … that neither derails into millenarian activism nor relinquishes its first principles in the Augustinian manner of Niebuhrian realism.”

26. Tinder, , Fabric of Hope, pp. 9, 128Google Scholar.

27. See Wendel, François, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Mairet, Philip (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1963), p. 285Google Scholar. As Norman Cohn (whom Voegelin often quoted favorably [e.g., AR, p. 67]Google Scholar) noted, Calvin repeatedly denounced the millenarian sects of his day. See Cohn, , Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 170–74, 183–86Google Scholar. Interesting as well is that Calvin's most extensive, and clearly most personal, commentary was on the Psalms—hardly an exercise in “apocalyptic” thinking—a book which Calvin describes in his Preface as “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.” See also Calvin's, Commentary on John, 16:16–20Google Scholar.

28. Stevenson, William R. Jr., Sovereign Grace: The Place and Significance of Christian Freedom in John Calvin's Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, is an attempt to examine fully Calvin's view of “Christian freedom.” For Calvin's take on the “third use” of the law, see Institutes, 2.7.12Google Scholar. Here Calvin stated that with the third and “principal” use of God's law (beyond “convicting” believers and “restraining” all), “Here is the best instrument for [believers] to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord's will to which they aspire, and to confirm them in their understanding of it.”

29. Calvin was pointing implicitly here to Summa Theologiae I–II, Qu. 113, A. 1Google Scholar; and Qu. 114, A. 3, where in the first of these passages Aquinas described the content of justification as “being rightly disposed within ourselves with our lower powers subject to the higher power of reason, and that higher part subject to God.” On the overall point of Calvin's place in the Christian tradition, note the insight of Richard Muller: “the Reformation altered comparatively few of the major loci of theology: the doctrines of justification, the sacraments, and the church received the greatest emphasis, while the doctrines of God, the trinity, creation, providence, predestination, and the last things were taken over by the magisterial Reformation virtually without alteration.” Interestingly, in regard to Calvin's “attacks” on scholasticism generally, Muller makes a strong case that “Calvin is clearly attacking not scholasticism in general but a specific excess of late medieval nominalist speculation concerning the limits of divine transcendence and the potentia absoluta” (see Muller, , The Unaccommodated Calvin [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], pp. 39, 47–49, and passim)Google Scholar.

30. See also Institutes, 4.15.12.Google Scholar Such an interpretation is particularly relevant here because, as Calvin, noted in Institutes, 2.2.27Google Scholar, for Origen, “certain other ancient writers,” and the “Schoolmen” the argument in Romans appeared to signal a key transition for Paul from the “death” he described in Chapter 7 to the new life in Christ he wanted to describe in Chapter 8. Calvin desired explicitly to refute this interpretation.

31. Muller, Richard, Christ and the Decree (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986), pp. 22ff and passimGoogle Scholar, shows Calvin's continuity with the tradition more fully.

32. It should be emphasized here that the editors of volume 22 of Voegelin's Collected Works, in their introduction (pp. 15–20)Google Scholar and in a note (on pp. 276–77n30), state that Voegelin's “harsh picture of Calvin should be balanced by an alternative perspective that is emerging in current Reformation research.”

33. During the years of Israel's exile, for example, the occasional prophetic voice was about the only available sign of their “chosenness.”

34. See the discussion in Stevenson, , Sovereign Grace, chaps. 1–2Google Scholar.

35. On the role of intellect in Calvin's thinking, see Muller, , Unaccommodated Calvin, pp. 161–67Google Scholar.

36. See the recounting of a number of examples in Stevenson, , Sovereign Grace, pp. 131–48Google Scholar.

37. Voegelin proceeded in this passage to describe Calvin's “terroristic” practices in Geneva, a description now belied by a number of recent studies of the Geneva of Calvin's day. See in particular the work of Robert Kingdon and his team of researchers. See also the caveat by the editors of CW, 22: 276–77n30Google Scholar.

38. Contra Voegelin, the essay “On Civil Government” in the final (1559) edition of the Institutes seems to me perfectly consonant with Calvin's injunctions in his Commentary on Daniel. See Stevenson, , Sovereign Grace, pp. 32–36; 138–47Google Scholar; and passim.

39. Calvin did, of course, write sharply worded attacks on the idea of “kingship.” Moreover, he insisted that if constitutionally authorized the so-called inferior or “popular” magistrates did have important responsibilities to “withstand” (intercedere) tyrannical action by higher government officials (Institutes, 4.20.31).Google Scholar For fuller discussion, see, inter alia, Stevenson, , Sovereign Grace, pp. 29–36, 94–100, 124–30, and 141–47Google Scholar.

40. Here Calvin speaks of “the error” of thinking that believers should never “continue in submission to another power.” Even those “attempting to take away the kingdom from Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth,” are nonetheless “legitimate princes and rulers” (Commentary on Romans, 13:1Google Scholar). Of course, as note 39 just above acknowledges, Calvin was neither passivist nor pacifist in his politics. In the present argument, however, I seek first to refute Voegelin's picture of Calvin's “will to power” and so to show Calvin's appreciation for established government.

41. See Institutes, 4:20.2Google Scholar; as well as Stevenson, , Sovereign Grace, pp. 94–100Google Scholar.

42. It is interesting to note on this score that Calvin's usual word for “government” was the Latin moderatio. See Hopfl, Harro, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an important argument aiming to demonstrate the basis for religious liberty in Calvin's thinking, see Witte, John Jr, “Moderate Religious Liberty in the Thought of John Calvin,” Calvin Theological Journanl 31 (1996): 359–403Google Scholar.

43. Voegelin was fond of generalizing about Calvin on the basis of the traditional accounts of life in “Calvin's” Geneva. As noted above, however, these traditional accounts have been rather seriously called into question in recent years.

44. See, e.g., Voegelin's remarkable statement that Calvin's praise of rulers tolerant of the Protestant cause “is extended… not primarily to make the people submissive to civil authority…, but in order to make the rulers submissive to Calvin” (CW, 23: 48)Google Scholar. Contra this view, see, e.g., Calvin's letter (DCXXXIX of 5 April 1563) to M. de Soubise, governor of Lyon, a Reformed believer who found himself ousted from power by the terms of the Treaty of Amboise. Had Soubise been present at the proceedings that concluded the treaty, it would clearly have been his “duty… to resist with all due liberty the evil they wished to accomplish.” However, he was now confronted with a matter—hastily and imprudently put together though it was—nevertheless “concluded and done.” Calvin's advice under these circumstances was unambiguous: “You have then to practice the doctrine of the holy Scriptures, which is, that if God takes away the sword from those he had girt with it, this change should make us give way and regulate our conduct accordingly.” See also, e.g., Letters DXXXVIII of May, 1559, and DLXXXVI of 26 February 1561.

45. Hopfl, , Christian Polity, p. 194Google Scholar.

46. For connections to Owen and others, see Baker, Wayne J., “Church, State and Toleration: John Locke and Calvin's Heirs in England, 1644–1689,” in Later Calvinism (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994), pp. 525–43Google Scholar.For the political implications of Edwards's theology, see, e.g., Guelzo, Allen C., “From Calvinist Metaphysics to Republican Theory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 399–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McDermott, Gerald R., “Jonathan Edwards and the Culture Wars: A New Resource for Public Theology and Philosophy,” Pro Ecclesia 4 (Summer, 1995): 268–80Google Scholar. See also Sheldon, Garrett W., The Political Philosophy of James Madison (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

47. Ironically, Voegelin paid tribute to British and American resistance to the ideological currents of the day at the end of his lecture series published as NSP (p. 189)Google Scholar.

48. See, e.g., OH, 1: xivGoogle Scholar; and Heilke, , Eric Voegelin, 13Google Scholar.