Editor’s Note: this is the first of a four-part series. In this month leading up to Reformation Day, Kyle Dieleman will explore themes in the work of John Calvin — Putting the “Calvin” back in Calvinism.

As a church historian, one of my interests is the way theological ideas and concepts have been articulated differently across time and place.

In particular, all of us who identify with the Reformed tradition find ourselves, by definition, inheritors of a complicated, varied theological tradition. Understanding the roots of that tradition can help us understand ourselves and the place of Reformed Christianity in the world today the same way studying the history of a city or a family can help us better understand our own identities.

The Reformed tradition is certainly not to be equated solely with John Calvin. Nonetheless, his influential theology and ministry is as good a place to start as any when trying to understand the Reformed tradition. Thus, over the next four Tuesdays, I want to explore a few themes of Calvin that I think have resonance for Neo-Calvinist and Reformed communities today.

Before diving in, two caveats. First, Calvin’s theological corpus is so vast and has been studied so thoroughly, that we will have to settle for a relatively surface-level entry into his thinking. To narrow our focus, I will focus mostly on Calvin’ s renowned Institutes even though Calvin’s sermons and biblical commentaries were the bulk of his pastoral work. 

Second, outlining Calvin’s ideas and put them in conversation with later Calvinism, I will be intentionally restrained in declaring a who might be right or wrong. I’ll try to point out what I see as opportunities or dangers in Calvin’s ideas, but it is important to know I am not trying to show that Calvin is right and everyone else is wrong. To be sure, there are many things I think Calvin got wrong.

Calvin’s Anthropological Dualisms

Neo-Calvinists, especially the “transformationalist” strands often associated with Abraham Kuyper, have often been suspicious of the dualisms present in theological and philosophical systems. Debra Rienstra’s warning in this blog last week of dualism as a theological weed is just one such recent example. Older strands of scholarship have seen in Christian dualisms little but the corrupting influence of Greek philosophy. More recent trends in theology have recognized that Christian theology, building on scripture, can present dualisms in ways that go beyond a simple parroting of Greek philosophy.

The term “dualism” is almost impossible to pin down and finds its way into theology in a number of areas—creation, grace, culture, and so on. For now, we will focus on theological anthropology. That is, how should Christians think about human nature in relation to God? 

Calvin’s view of human beings is undoubtedly dualistic, at least in the sense that he conceives of human beings being created in God’s image with a body and a soul. Calvin clearly states as much in his Institutes, I.15.2: “There can be no question that man consists of a body and a soul.” In this way, Calvin is in line with many of the great ancient and medieval theologians as well as the theologians of his own day—Augustine, Abelard, Lombard, Aquinas, Luther, and so on. To be sure, each of these theologians had unique ways of formulating the precise relationship between the body and soul, some emphasizing the unity of the human person more than others.

I would argue that Calvin’s view of the body and soul was dualist but not radically so. He is clear to affirm the goodness of the body and the unity of the human person that must be understood as body and soul. 

Still, Calvin is clear that the soul is superior to the body. Most explicitly, Calvin sees the soul as the seat of the image of God since it is the soul, obviously not bodies, that is immortal, reflecting God’s own immortality. For Calvin, when the body dies the human person lives on because the soul is immortal. Calvin spends much time on the immortality of the soul, which is part of his broader focus on eternal life. For Calvin, whose own physical life was lived as a refugee with significant heartache and suffering, the promise of eternal life when the body and soul would reunite, was one of the foundational promises of the Christian faith.

Calvin’s View: Dangers and Opportunities

I would contend that Calvin’s anthropological dualism is (1) theologically defensible and the traditional position held by the majority of the orthodox Christian tradition, (2) can be dangerously distorted in theologically harmful ways, and (3) can provide helpful theological correctives and opportunities.

First, a dangerous distortion. An obvious danger in overemphasizing the soul is that the physical here-and-now becomes ignored or even worthless. One example in Calvin’s own thinking is his understanding of biblical instructions to those who are under various types of authority, even abusive authorities. In his sermon on 1 Timothy 6:1-2, Calvin advises that we are to serve God willingly “even when it is a question of obeying those who treat us badly and who are cruel to us.” The passage in question is talking about slaves, though Calvin extends the passage to be about all those who are subject to others.

One can see the small step towards forbidding slaves to escape or revolt, advising wives to stay in abusive marriages, and so on. The danger in Calvin’s dualism is obvious: if we are just passing through on our way to heaven, then what we do or endure here is of lesser consequence.

On the other hand, Calvin’s emphasis on anthropological dualism does provide theological cautions for Calvinists overly eager to establish God’s kingdom in this physical world. Here Christian nationalists offer a prime example of how dangerous ignoring the soul and over-emphasizing the physical can be. If the soul is left behind so the physical here-and-now is all that matters, then everything hinges on establishing the kingdom of God in the world we inhabit. Is it any surprise, then, that Christian nationalists might claim a Reformed tradition which empowers them to claim every square inch in this country for Christ?

Perhaps Calvin’s emphasis on the soul can remind us that our lives are more than a moment in time. Perhaps Calvin’s emphasis on the spiritual can remind us of Christ’s words in John 18 that his kingdom is not of this world. Maybe Calvin can remind us, in a chaotic and confusing, world that we were created to follow Jesus through the power of the Spirit here and now and for all eternity in the new heaven and new earth.