Calvinism and psychoanalysis: A comparative study

Summary Although the title of this essay suggests a comparison of psychoanalysis and Calvinism, I have chosen to compare primarily the two leaders of these movements. On many points they shared similar beliefs. Certain of these areas have been highlighted and discussed briefly: ascetic tendencies, work, religion, concepts of God and of man, actions as symptoms, and predestination and determinism.     

Temporal Creation and Cosmological Arguments in Early-Modern Calvinism

This study examines the varieties of cosmological arguments deployed in the natural theologies of early-modern Calvinism. Some of the first Reformed forays into theistic proofs make use of Thomist arguments which allow for the logical possibility of creation from eternity. In the seventeenth century, many Reformed theologians prefer to use arguments against the possibility of an eternal world – arguments which had been defended by medieval theologians such as Bonaventure. But these arguments in turn faced criticism in the seventeenth century, and many of the Reformed supplemented them or replaced them with others. The argument from the mutability of the world to its temporal beginning became increasingly popular among Reformed thinkers. Historical arguments from the recent rise of arts and sciences or biological species supplemented the philosophical arguments for the world's beginning. Their theological commitment to the impossibility of eternal creation may explain why the Reformed did not typically use the Clarke and Leibniz argument from contingency.     

Dynamics of Peer Victimization in Early Adolescence

ABSTRACT

This study addressed the stability of victimization across four consecutive years from Grades 4 to 7, and the concurrent correlates, short-term consequences, and predictors of victimization in early adolescence. Participants were 600 students (49% girls) enrolled in 10 elementary schools in Grades 4-5 and 2 middle schools in Grades 6-7 in an ethnically diverse school system. Data collection included peer nominations, self-reports, and teacher reports in each year. Victimization was highly stable across all years, including the transition from elementary to middle school. Both concurrent and short-term consequences showed that victimized 6th graders, especially girls, experienced significantly greater maladaptive outcomes than their nonvictim counterparts. For both genders, risk factors for adolescent victimization included externalizing and internalizing behaviors, while protective factors included academic and peer sociability elements. Implications for prevention and intervention are discussed.     

The Motherhood of the Church in Henri de Lubac and John Calvin

Both Henri de Lubac and John Calvin described the Church as ‘mother’. From the patristic tradition, the motherhood of the Church had two dimensions: (i) the Mother Church as an institution delimited by the episcopacy of which inclusion was a necessity for salvation; and (ii) the Church as the mother of believers through whose ‘motherly’ care of bringing to life, nourishing and teaching through the sacraments God makes provision for his children. Both de Lubac and Calvin stress the maternal functions of the Church, but differ over how the Church’s motherhood relates to its visible identity and why inclusion in the Church is necessary for salvation. This article argues that this connection represents a rich theme for ecumenical ecclesiology. Despite divergent ecclesiological grammars and themes, Catholic and Reformed traditions are drawing from a shared patristic inheritance which gives good ground for dialogue for respective ecclesial self-understandings.     

Calvin, Osiander and Participation in God

Abstract: This article investigates the ways in which Calvin's controversy with Osiander has made the Reformed tradition skittish when confronted with categories of participation. An examination of the similarities between Calvin and Osiander are probed, with an eye to seeing how the debate functioned in refining Calvin's doctrine of participation whose strict trinitarian boundaries kept creature and Creator distinct.     

Legitimation and Strategic Maneuvering in the Political Field

This article combines a pragma-dialectical conception of argumentation, a sociological conception of legitimacy and a sociological theory of the political field. In particular, it draws on the theorization of the political field developed by Pierre Bourdieu and tries to determine what new insights into the concept of strategic maneuvering might be offered by a sociological analysis of the political field. I analyze a speech made by the President of Romania, Traian Băsescu, following his suspension by Parliament in April 2007. I suggest that the argument developed in this speech can be regarded as an example of adjudication and I discuss its specificity as an adjudication in the political field in an electoral campaign. I also try to relate legitimation as political strategy to strategic maneuvering oriented to meeting the contradictory demands of the political field, which I see—following Bourdieu—as involving a double political game, a game of democratic representation and a game of power.

John Calvin and Virtue Ethics

Many scholars have argued that the Protestant Reformation generally departed from virtue ethics, and this claim is often accepted by Protestant ethicists. This essay argues against such discontinuity by demonstrating John Calvin’s reception of ethical concepts from Augustine and Aristotle. Calvin drew on Augustine’s concept of eudaimonia and many aspects of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, including concepts of choice, habit, virtue as a mean, and the specific virtues of justice and prudence. Calvin also evaluated the problem of pagan virtue in light of traditional Augustinian texts discussed in the medieval period. He interpreted the Decalogue as teaching virtue, including the cardinal virtues of justice and temperance. Calvin was not the harbinger of an entirely new ethical paradigm, but rather a participant in the mainstream of Christian thinkers who maintained a dual interest in Aristotelian and Augustinian eudaimonist virtue ethics.     

Theology and Interpretation: The Case of Aquinas and Calvin on Romans

This article explores how Aquinas's and Calvin's theology of justification, the law and the nature of human works integrate with their interpretations of Romans by analyzing their commentaries on 1:16b–17, focusing on the iustitia Dei, and 2:13, which addresses the relationship between works and justification. Aquinas's interpretation unfolds by emphasizing the work of Christ in and through sinners, while Calvin's interpretation emphasizes the work of Christ for and to sinners. I also demonstrate how the theological judgements embedded in these sections inform their reading of Romans as a whole.     

The Virtue of Heaven: From Calvin to Cyber-Talk and Back

Protestant theology at the beginning of the twentieth century, as represented by such influential figures as Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, Franz Over‐beck, and later Rudolf Bultmann, asked what was no longer believable in the Gospel talk of heaven given the modern frame of reference. A century later the opposite question invites at least equal attention: what is no longer believable in the modern frame of reference given the Gospel talk of heaven? Calvin’s references to the real (or true) presence of Christ's heavenly life as "virtus" invite a conversation with computer talk of virtuality that illumines by contrast the current task of dogmatic theology in addressing what is heard today in the Gospel message as "the real world".     

Calvin and the Ecclesiastical Power of Jurisdiction

Abstract

This study offers a hypothesis that the two marks of the Church in the Calvinist Reformed tradition, together with its disciplinary power, restate the twin classical powers granted to the Church in Catholic tradition, namely the powers of order and jurisdiction. Unlike Luther, for whom the chief ecclesiastical power was the authority to preach and teach, Calvin not only acknowledges the teaching and sacramental functions of the Church, but also stressed a jurisdictional power (jurisdictio fori) with autonomous legislative and judicial competence. This jurisdictional dimension is the key to explaining the role played by Geneva-inspired Reformed churches vis-à-vis the State and differences from other other Protestant traditions.     

Calvin O. Schrag,The Self After Postmodernity

Continental Philosophy Review -     

SELF-ABANDONMENT AND SELF-DENIAL Quietism, Calvinism, and the Prospect of Hell

Self‐abandonment and self‐denial are, respectively, Catholic and hyper‐Calvinist analogues of each other. Roughly, each requires the surrendering of a person to God's will and providence through faith, hope, and love. Should the self‐abandoning/self‐denying individual accept his or her own damnation if that be God's will? This article, which is virtually alone in discussing the Catholic and Reformed Protestant traditions together, answers “No.” The unqualified self‐abandonment present in quietism and the radical self‐denial of Samuel Hopkins are perverse and irrational responses to the prospect of hell because they run counter to the Christian's deepest need to spend eternity with God. However, a qualified self‐abandonment is intellectually defensible and offers a viable Christian piety.     

The Arguments of the Tombs of the Unknown: Relationality and National Legitimation

In the wake of the First World War, a new form of commemoration emerged internationally, but in each case focused upon a new kind of national “hero”—the unknown soldier or warrior. The first instances appeared in France and Britain in 1920, followed by the United States in 1921, and Belgium in 1922. Other nations followed suit over the years, with the most recent WWI Unknown Soldier monument dedicated in 2004, in New Zealand. The motivational calculus of these national tombs was, of course, the massive number of combatant dead whose remains could not be identified. This paper takes up the two very different arguments composed by these commemorative sites. The first argument was directed to surviving family members and was articulated most explicitly by the French as a hypothetical enthymeme “this could be your husband, your father, your brother,” etc. The second argument has been directed to national and international collectives as a constitutive proclamation of legitimated nation-state or Empire Although this argument is particularly explicit in postcolonial gestures of independence on the part of former dominions of old empires, it was evident in even the earliest cases of the tombs of the unknown.