A Crooked Stick

I can’t remember who first impressed upon me the fact that God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick, but I have often drawn encouragement from it. I am a decidedly crooked stick who harbors hopes that God would draw something straight from his labors.

It is, though, as well important to recall that history is full of straight lines drawn by crooked sticks. Our tendency to want our heroes all straight runs counter to our comprehension of human nature. Every year in mid-January, for example, well-deserved praise pours forth in honor of the courage, passion, and vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a backlash emerges from bitter pens wanting us to see his moral faults. He was a crooked stick God used to draw some long needed straight lines.

Of course, all God has to work with are crooked sticks. We should expect nothing else from fallen humanity.

Knowing all of this, then, I find that completing Bruce Gordon’s biography of John Calvin Calvin, has made me sad. Calvin, it appears, was a crooked stick.

Calvin’s own Institutes of the Christian Religion has had a huge impact on my life and thinking. So instructed have I been by its logic and restraint, and so moved by its warm, pastoral approach, that I find it easy in reading it to overlook the polemical tone that settles upon many pages.

That combination of pastoral warmth and polemic aggression reveals the two sides of Calvin’s personality that make it difficult to offer a simplistic picture of him.

This was Calvin’s divided self: the confidence in this calling as a prophet and apostle set against his ever present sense of unworthiness and dissatisfaction….These were two sides of the same personality. It was his acute sensitivity to the gap between what was and what should be that distressed him. (page 334)

A complex person is easy to attack but harder to understand. And when that complex person is a spiritual person, and especially a prophetic person, he becomes an easy target for those wanting to attack him as one who did not well represent the principles he preached. Gordon’s portrayal is sympathetic, insisting that we need to understand Calvin from within his own cultural context (a good rule of thumb for any historical character), and at the same time his portrayal feels honest.

At the end of the day, I judge that I would not have liked him very much. The Calvin that emerges from these pages is one whom I wished were different. He comes across as being hyper-sensitive to criticism, not very politically astute, at times harsh in his expression, and one whose work-ethic was so intense as to be idolatrous.

And yet I need to understand that Calvin existed in a time of great contention. Christian truth was not only disputed academically, but blood would flow when persons would differ. The church was in a position of needing to be re-formed, and that was a messy business.

I leave the biography respecting Calvin’s work and being drawn to aspects of his person. That he determined to live by the truth’s reflected in his Institutes is perhaps illustrated by his desire to not become the center of any cult of idolatry. He shuddered to think that a theological system would emerge bearing his name. When he died, per his instructions, he was immediately put in a box and buried in an unmarked grave, to prevent idolatrous adulation of his body.

It didn’t work, of course. Idolatrous adulation still occurs. Honest biographies are necessary to remind us that we are to idolize no person. All are crooked sticks, and crooked sticks are harder to idolize.

But the straight lines they are used to draw reveal that they are useful instruments in the hand of an Artist worthy of our honor. We thank God therefore for the work of great men, and we pray to God that he will draw something straight with us as well.