Satan's Cuckoo

A few weeks ago we celebrated John Calvin's five hundredth birthday in Dunedin. When I say we, I really mean the participants at a conference held in his honour at Knox College. I wouldn't be seen dead celebrating him myself. On the occasions when I have visited my good friend the Master of Knox I have had to walk past a large picture of the birthday boy, and have always felt the same sort of outrage which I imagine I would feel if I visited the German Embassy and found a nice photograph of the late Fuehrer in a place of honour on its walls.

This is not quite as mad as it seems, when you consider that Calvin played Dr Goebbels to Our Hitler in Heaven, a deity of well-nigh infinite sadism, content to create billions of human beings whom he knew would require "irresistable grace" in order to be saved from an eternal Auschwitz - and then quite cheerfully denied it to them. And all for no better reason than his personal pleasure in exercising his sovereign will, utterly uninhibited by any such notions as compassion and mercy.

We are told that the Sage of Geneva has been traditionally misrepresented and that modern historiography has at last started to redress the balance, but still, as Alec Ryrie, the Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University says, "Calvin was an intensely arrogant and argumentative man, who could not abide to be crossed. He could be vicious, especially to his friends. Opponents, including those who rejected or disliked his vertiginous moral standards, were lambasted, driven into exile, or, on one notorious occasion, put to death."

How very Christlike. And this is the man who even today has an enthusiastic following of people who claim to be Christians, and even worse, claim that Calvin has provided the best account of the Christian religion since St Paul - or possibly his great mentor Augustine of Hippo, from who he derived much of his appalling doctrine of grace. Augustine, remember, said that the fact that God saves some people shows his mercy, while the fact that most people are lost shows his justice. And I seem to remember that a seventeeth-century Roman Archbishop of Tuam called Florence Conry wrote a whole book in defence of Augustine's belief that "the very unbaptised babes crawl about the floor of hell." (And just in case you are wondering, Florence was a boy baby himself and not a member of the Movement for the Ordination of Women.)

Eggheads all, and by eggheads I mean people for whom ideas are often more real than reality itself - to the exclusion of irrationalities like empathy and compassion. Witness the more unbending Pharisees' devotion to the Law, not to mention the works of such enthusiastic ideologues as Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot nearer our own time - all driven to murder millions for the sake of their pet theories. How Satan must have loved them (if love is quite the right term to use where the devil is concerned!). And how very pleased he must have been with John Calvin, who so cleverly turned the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ into the Heavenly Hitler, the Celestial Stalin, with eternal Bergen Belsens, Dachaus and Gulags all ready and waiting to torment the majority of his children beyond endurance just as soon as they throw off this mortal coil.

Clearly Calvin's God is actually Satan's Cuckoo.