| Calvin was much more hostile to
religious images than his fellow
reformer Martin Luther. This hostility may well be a more
defining
feature of Reformed Protestantism than the doctrine of predestination
or an emphasis upon the independence of the church from even Protestant
secular governments, as Phil Benedict’s recent study has suggested. Yet many students of Calvin’s views have assumed that hostility to images is simply a corollary of his rejection of any role for saints, a rejection he of course shared with Luther; indeed it is sometimes argued that Luther simply failed to go far enough. This paper considers such interpretations, but the emphasis is on an examination of Calvin’s own views. It compares his views to those of Luther at appropriate points. It argues that there is no necessary connection between, on the one hand, a rejection of any role for prayers to or the intervention of saints, and on the other, a rejection of all religious images. It suggests that neither a role for images as inspiring piety (suggested by Erasmus) or as providing memorials of key historical events in the history of Christianity (suggested by Luther), is incompatible with a rejection of traditionally Catholic attitudes toward other roles for saints. It suggests that the peculiarities of Calvin’s view are especially evident when considering his rejection of images of Christ and the crucifixion, for, while rejecting the images, he obviously did not reject the reality and supreme importance of the events such images signified. Finally, this paper links his thoroughgoing rejection of images to his attitude to the Bible and to the activities involving it, above all interpretation and preaching. It suggests that personal, yet socially conditioned conflicts over the moral legitimacy of writing played a central role in his own conversion to religious reform, and that the influence of this issue inclined Calvin to deny that the sacred was present apart from the reading, writing or preaching of the Word of God. This led him, argues, to hold that emotional-inspirational experiences associated with images that others experienced as an outpouring of the sacred, were in reality sinful emotions expressing the depraved human desire to worship even the true God as an idol. |
||