Calvinists and disenchantment

I haven’t had a chance yet to read Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, but there’s a fascinating review by Finbarr Curtis up at the Immanent Frame. Curtis focuses on Keane’s interpretation of Calvinist approaches to human agency, pointing out several (Weberian) assumptions that may have led the analysis astray at points. While Keane emphasizes Calvinism’s critique of mediating structures (the hierarchical church, viz. Roman Catholicism), Curtis argues that he does not give enough import to Calvinism’s alternative stress on divine agency. In other words, Calvinism’s critique of pre-modern society is not identical to secular modernity’s parallel critique.

For example, one could note that despite their critiques of institutional mediation, Calvinists in practice constructed coercive civic and ecclesiastical institutions designed to further their vision of a Godly society—just ask the residents of Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritans’ Massachusetts. But Keane decides to accept Calvinist critiques of institutions and chooses to doubt Calvinist critiques of human agency. To this end, he draws on the classical sociological theories of Weber and Troeltsch, but these theorists were working with their own background assumptions, which presumed that Protestants (as opposed to, say, Catholics) would have to have been the ones who shaped the process of historical development that bridged the gap between Christendom and secular modernity. Thus, what mattered was where Protestant agency ended up, and this made the sovereignty of God, the saving work of the Holy Spirit, and the critique of free will into vestigial ideas that were destined to disappear. But it is important to consider that the jury is still out about whether these classical sociological theories were necessarily right about the telos of secular modernity.

Curtis suggests that modernist Protestantism, which is more explicitly a secular project, adopts a certain semiotic neutrality, i.e. that all human symbols are common and therefore ultimately pluralistic. This is not something that any classical Calvinist would confess:

What characterized Protestant modernists was their willingness to see Christianity as one religion among other religions. Thus, a semiotic ideology used to condemn other people’s false religions became transformed into a supposedly neutral hermeneutics of symbols, metaphors, and meanings. The insistence that everyone’s religions were alike and comparable could then be the basis for a tolerance that could serve as one of the markers of secular citizenship in a pluralistic society. I am just not convinced that most Protestants around the globe shared this semiotic ideology, especially those who persisted in calling themselves Calvinists.

Curtis stresses the role of the Spirit in Calvinism’s critique of modernity (true vs. false spirits). In my own studies of Reformed sacramentality, I think this is precisely the feature that many critics of the Reformation tend to overlook. Calvinism cannot be reduced to a synonym for disenchantment, per se. The real issue for Calvinists was a re-location of spiritual power, not its naturalization.

Read the entire article here: Giving up the Holy Ghost.