Reading Tradition As Pedagogy in Calvin and Augustine The Case of Election-Sanchez, Michelle C.

SJT 72(1): 20–45 (2019) © Cambridge University Press 2019
doi:10.1017/S0036930618000674
Reading tradition as pedagogy in Calvin and

Augustine: the case of election
Michelle C. Sanchez
Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138
msanchez@hds.harvard.edu
Abstract
In colloquial English the word ‘tradition’ tends to be understood as a noun
referring to a more-or-less static set of propositions, often used to define the
identity of the particular group that accepts them. This article seeks to challenge
this convention by defending an older, more fluid sense of traditio that is not only
found in but formative of a variety of major Christian theological sources. The
argument draws especially on Jean Calvin, his preferred theological authority
Augustine and briefly the New Testament itself, showing that each demonstrates
a fundamental interest in Christian teaching as participation in divine pedagogy.
Using the doctrine of election as a case study, I argue that this pedagogical
framework evidences a dynamic conception of traditio as tradere, or a discourse
on how human beings faithfully participate in what is properly a divine giving-
and-receiving. This conception of tradition as pedagogy is commended for both
its theological and its critical merit.
Keywords: Augustine of Hippo, Jean Calvin, election, pedagogy, tradition
The Latin cognate for the English word ‘tradition’ is traditio, which means
a teaching or instruction, the delivery of a possession or a saying handed
down from earlier times. Yet, traditio can also refer to a giving over in
treachery. In fact, traditio is the common etymological root not only for the
English ‘tradition’, but also for ‘treason’. In a way that may seem paradoxical,
traditio can signify both fidelity and betrayal. Traditio can signify both of these
contrary acts because it is a noun derived from a verb – tradere – that refers
merely to the movement of handing over. The noun, therefore, refers to a
complicated ‘thing’ that exists as a gesture or movement involving at least
three entities: a giver, a receiver and the thing given and received. To enter
the choreography of ‘tradition-ing’ at all requires making a break – reaching
out to grasp something and handing it on, a moment of vulnerability when
the object might get dropped or resignifed by the new hands it enters. This
entails risk. Yet, to treat traditio as a marker of a stable identity, as a static
object, is to forget not only the rich history of the term’s use but also the
discourse on pedagogy that grew up around it.
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Reading tradition as pedagogy in Calvin and Augustine
It is unfortunate, I think, that this is precisely how ordinary users of

English are likely to hear and use the term: as a noun referring to a more-
or-less static thing – a thing that is either accepted or rejected, a thing
used to determine the identity of particular group. For example, the Oxford
English Dictionary defines ‘tradition’ as the thing ‘handed down’, rather than
as the act of handing down. It then proceeds to give a second specifically
theological definition: ‘[Tradition is] a particular doctrine, which is not
stated in scripture but which is believed to have comparable authority, having
been transmitted orally or by other non-written means.’1 Here, tradition is
a thing that takes the form of an authoritative doctrine – a fixed teaching –
that can be distinguished from or opposed to scripture. To the right kind of
reader, this definition bears certain marks, or perhaps scars, of the sixteenth-
century struggles over ecclesial-political reform in Europe. To the extent that
these struggles involved negotiations over competing models of authority,
many Protestant reformers drew on a humanist ad fontes (‘to the sources!’)
impulse to critically elevate scriptural authority over the ‘mere traditions’
of ecclesial-scholastic authority. It is not surprising to find that the citations
for the OED’s theological definition are drawn heavily from early modern
English sources produced in the wake of reform.2
This article returns to a collection of theological sources from disparate
times and places to remember an older, more fluid sense of traditio that I
argue is not only found in but formative of a variety of major Christian
theological sources. I look in particular at the sixteenth-century Protestant
Reformer Jean Calvin, his preferred theological authority Augustine who
wrote a millennium prior, and briefly at the Greek New Testament itself,
showing that each demonstrates a fundamental interest in Christian teaching
as participation in active divine pedagogy. This, I argue, evidences the more
dynamic conception of traditio as tradere, or a discourse on how a human being
faithfully participates in what is properly a divine giving-and-receiving. This
conception of tradition as pedagogy is worth remembering both for its
theological and its critical merit.
Theologically, attending to the dynamics of Christian pedagogy in this
way accomplishes two important things. First, it recalls the extent to which
two of the most impactful Christian theological writers, whose respective
work spanned a millennium, employed a dynamic notion of Christian
teaching explicitly as a practice of reception – one that echoes the New Testament
use of tradere’s Greek equivalent, paradidomi. Second, attention to dynamic
1
‘Tradition’, Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: OUP, 2015).
2
The OED citations for the second theological definition of ‘tradition’ are primarily from
Protestant sources during and after the sixteenth century.
21
scottish journal of theology
pedagogy deeply informs, perhaps even recasts, our range of options for
interpreting doctrinal claims. If the genre of doctrinal argument is designed
to facilitate the proper posture of passing and receiving revealed divine
teaching – scripture, but also the incarnation itself – then doctrinal loci
cannot be read as stand-alone claims, nor can they be used to statically
identify either the boundaries of, or the proper members of, a ‘tradition’.
On a critical level, attention to the pedagogical dynamics underwriting
doctrinal arguments helps to recast the way in which doctrines (and
the traditions they supposedly identify) are used to fund secularisation
arguments.3 Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith are only three of
the most famous theorists who have forwarded some form of the argument
that theological doctrines have fixed structures that have become secularised
into modern institutions or social imaginaries.4 My intent here is not to
dispute the merit of these kinds of arguments. While I agree with critics
from Hans Blumenberg to Peter Gordon, who argue that causal accounts
of secularised ideas tend to suffer from oversimplifications, I do find it
plausible that statically rendered theological doctrines can and do play a role in
shaping and reinforcing broader institutional and methodological patterns
of thinking. When doctrines are understood to be fixed ideas with fixed
structures, they can be more easily extracted from a field of practice and
transferred to other social domains.5 For this reason, it is important for
those of us who work with theological sources to be able to draw out the
complexities and nuances of doctrinal arguments in order to supply critical
tools for critiquing not only the content of secularisation narratives, but also
– and more importantly – their consequences.
One of the most notorious of the ideas found in these narratives is the
doctrine of election, or predestinarian soteriology. The concept is found
in both Calvin’s and Augustine’s thinking, and it has evident support in
the New Testament itself. For centuries, the doctrine has been criticized
for fundamentally disrupting systems of ethical recognition and moral
desert, as well as for undermining the logical grounds for pursuing moral
3
See e.g. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1983); Peter E. Gordon, ‘The Idea of Secularisation in Intellectual History’, in Richard
Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Intellectual History (Malden,
MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), pp. 230–47.
4
In my view, these authors’ arguments – especially those of Weber and Löwith – are
often interpreted in an oversimplified way.
5
Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is a good example of this kind of argument. Schmitt
argues that a fairly static account of divine absolutism shares the (also fairly static)
structure of political sovereignty.
22
self-improvement.6 More recent critics are furthermore attuned to the

way this theological imaginary has reinforced claims to national, cultural,
economic and/or racial chosenness, thereby funding the logic of
colonial enterprises, Manifest Destiny, free-market determinism and White
Supremacy.7
To cover this constellation of concerns over tradition, pedagogy, doctrine
and the ethical effects of secularisation, this article will proceed in two
distinct parts. In the first, I look at how Calvin frames the relationship
between traditional teaching (doctrina) and scripture. By reading key passages
of the 1559 Institutio closely, I resist the assumption that he maintains an
axiomatic distinction between scripture and doctrine, and argue instead that
his anxiety over fallen faculties and idolatry leads him to construct a complex
pedagogical relationship between the revelation of Christ through scripture
and the activity of teaching and learning such revelation enables. I then
draw out resonances between this position and that of Augustine, on whom
Calvin drew liberally, starting with a brief look at how both authors echo
the biblical use of tradere’s Greek equivalent, paradidomi, in order to construct
a pedagogy around the necessity of human receptivity.
In the second part, I turn to the doctrine of election as a case study for
how pedagogy recasts the operation of doctrinal arguments. Specifically, I
show how the doctrine of election carries out an important function within
the larger choreography of tradere. I then argue that this reading should give
us pause before conceding that the doctrine can serve as an identifier of
either ‘the Augustinian/Calvinist tradition’ or – ipso facto – as a conceptual
structure congenial to shaping secular imaginaries of innate superiority.
6
This is a common critique, but perhaps one of the most famous iterations of it is
found in Erasmus’ diatribe against Luther’s version of Augustinian soteriology. For that
exchange, see Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. and trans. E. Gordon Rupp et al.
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969).
7
Max Weber offers the most famous and influential version of this argument in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: OUP, 2011
[1904–5]). For other treatments of Weber’s argument and overall approach, see
Malcolm H. MacKinnon, ‘Part I: Calvinism and the Infallible Assurance of Grace: The
Weber Thesis Reconsidered’, British Journal of Sociology 39/2 (June 1988), pp. 143–77;
Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For some approaches to the relationship
between incarnational chosenness, predestination and racism, see J. Kameron Carter,
‘An Unlikely Convergence: W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Barth, and the Problem of the
Imperial God-Man’, New Centennial Review 11/3 (2011), pp. 167–224; Paul R. Griffin,
‘Protestantism and Racism’, in Alister E. McGrath and Darren C. Marks (eds), The
Blackwell Companion to Protestantism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 357–72.
23
The dynamic of tradition

If a novice reader were to begin the 1559 Institutio Christianae Religionis at the
beginning, uninitiated in the common assumptions over Calvin’s outsized
role as a Protestant reformer, she might not immediately peg him as an
advocate of scripture versus tradition.8 In the preface to that final edition,
Calvin first presents himself as a doctor (doctor) of the church whose task is
the pure teaching (doctrina) of piety. Scripture does not make an appearance
until the end of the preface, where it appears not as the overriding authority,
but as a divinely given tool to mediate the larger exercise of doctrina.9
This theme continues into the opening chapters of the text. From the
opening sentence, Calvin’s theological writing is directed toward a distinctly
pedagogical dilemma: namely, how one can attain ‘knowledge of God
and ourselves’ (cognitio Dei et nostri)? Calvin makes two things clear from
the outset. First, he emphasises that this relational cognitio between the
divine and human is ‘joined by many bonds’. It is not merely rational or
epistemic but also grounded in the sense and affective faculties that refer
creatures to their Creator (Inst. 1.1.1–2).10 The second thing is that human
beings are fallen, and the inherited fall into sin fundamentally distorts sense
perception, thinking and feeling. So although ‘there is no one spot in the
universe wherein you cannot discern at least some marks of [God’s] glory’,
and although those sparks still inhere in the human cognitive and bodily
faculties, the effects of sin nevertheless cause human beings to constantly
misperceive things and misunderstand the relationships that give them
meaning. This, in turn, leads to a spiralling affective cycle of pride and
8
For a helpful treatment of the relationship between scriptural interpretation and
doctrine in Calvin’s work, see R. Ward Holder, Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation
(Leiden: Brill, 2006).
9
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), pp. 3–5. With the exception of prefatory material,
all subsequent citations of the body of the Institutio will be given parenthetically
according to the convention of book/chapter/section.
10
The series of arguments Calvin gives for God’s existence attest to the full range of
faculties to which Calvin is willing to appeal for evidence. While Calvin eschews
any kind of formal proof for God’s existence, he appeals to reason via empirical and
historical evidence of human failing and the prevalence of idolatry, or the impulse
to worship (Inst. 1.1.2, 1.3.1); to human desires and perceptions (1.4.4, 1.51); to
the possibility of human advancement in learning (1.5.2); to the observation of the
human person in body and soul (1.5.3, 1.5.5); and to inexplicable experiences of
kindness and generosity (1.5.8). As the human learns to recognise the marks of God’s
glory, she is encouraged to make use of all of these faculties in relation to graciously
revealed mediations.
24
dread – one that entices humans to erect idols as false and flattering comforts
(Inst. 1.5.1; 1.15.3; 1.11).
The fallen condition thus represents a basic challenge to the enterprise
of learning, because it calls into question the human ability to progress
in genuine knowledge acquisition without spinning off into distortion and
self-deception. Only after Calvin sets up this pedagogical dilemma over five
chapters does he introduce scripture – and the way he does so is telling.
In the sixth chapter of the Institutio, scripture is presented as the privileged
accommodation through which God comes to our aid, providing us with a
tool to accommodate our fallen faculties towards genuine learning. Enabled
by the work of grace by the Spirit and through the incarnation, scripture
allows human beings to hear the pure preaching of the Word, and thus to
begin learning to perceive things rightly and to recognise their relationships
to one another, ‘once more know[ing] God as Father’ (Inst. 1.6.1, 1.6.3,
2.6.1).11
Along the way, however, Calvin does offer several arguments that
seem particularly evocative of sixteenth-century polemics over the nature
of church authority, and which, read in isolation, could reinforce the
perception that he views ‘tradition’ as uniquely vulnerable to idolatry while
‘scripture’ is not. In fact, there are two moments in these early chapters
where he appears to make this kind of argument. First, after having made
the case that the fallen misrecognition of creation generates a vicious cycle
of dread and pride that lead to sin and idolatry, Calvin argues that this
situation requires a special intervention. If fallen human beings are to advance
in learning, they can only do so with the help of a direct witness – an
authority with the capability to disrupt the problem at its root. So Calvin
asks,
[Who] could so acquiesce in decrees of his ancestors, or enactments
of the people, as to receive without hesitation a god humanly taught
him? Each person will stand upon his own judgment rather than subject
himself to another’s decision. Therefore, since either the custom of the
city or the agreement of tradition (traditio) is too weak and frail a bond
of piety to follow in worshiping God, it remains for God himself to give
witness of himself from heaven. (Inst. 1.5.13)12
11
The particular quote is taken from 2.6.1, where Calvin provides a summary of the
duplex cognitio originally laid out in Inst. 1.1–6, highlighting not only the importance of
Christ the mediator as the second part of the twofold knowledge, but the effect of the
preaching of the Word. Here, he not only presents the central importance of scripture,
but prescribes a particular choreography for its proper use.
12
The 1560 Olivétan Latin edition presents this passage as 1.5.12.
25
Here, traditio appears as a noun to present a contrast to the exceptional self-

witness of God.
One chapter later, Calvin introduces scripture by name, using the image
of ‘spectacles’ to flesh out the fuller dynamics of scripture’s function.
Scripture clarifies the senses that are otherwise distorted, thereby enabling
the recognition of the divine significance inscribed in creation and our own
selves (Inst. 1.3.1, 1.6.1, 1.6.3). He then proceeds to draw a direct line
between the ‘divine self-witness’ invoked one chapter earlier and scripture
itself, writing that scriptures ‘obtain full authority among believers only
when [they] regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living
words of God were heard’ (Inst. 1.7.1). Scriptural authority is itself conferred
through a broader exercise of signification – through the graced ability
to see scripture as if the living words of God were heard. Calvin advances
this case by privileging the force of the activity surrounding scripture’s use
and drawing a contrast between that posture and the ‘pernicious error’ that
subordinates the use of scripture to the ‘consent of the church’. He argues
that if one were to privilege the static authority of the church over the
dynamic use of scripture, this would submit the power of exceptional divine
self-witness to the ‘judgment of men’, and scripture would no longer be
received as if ‘the living words of God’ (Inst. 1.7.1).
So, on one level, Calvin clearly assumes a distinction between scripture
and tradition and privileges the former over the latter – if tradition is
understood as Calvin uses traditio in 1.5.13, as a static term to refer to
the non-scriptural doctrinal codification of teachings by human beings.
On another level, however, Calvin is not merely juxtaposing the static
object of scripture with the static object of traditio. He is arguing, instead,
that scripture be received in a certain way – as if it is of God, which,
by definition, is opposed to something received as if of men. The force
of the argument is to connect the reception of scripture to a posture
that hears the voice of God speaking now as it did to the apostles.13
For Calvin, this is not a matter of choosing among competing objects of
authority; it is rather a matter of choosing from among competing subjects
13
According to this logic, it is imperative that the scriptural witness be understood to
found the church, preceding it not only historically but also ontologically. The church
exists as it performs the activity of receiving and passing on the divine witness. As
Calvin will make clear much later in book 4, the church’s ongoing presence must be
understood as contingent on its perpetual reception of the apostolic preaching that
witnessed to Christ – a reception that takes place through the repeated practices of
preaching the Word and administering the sacrament according to Christ’s institution
(Inst. 4.1.9).
26
of authority. The 1559 Institutio is setting up an understanding of Christian

teaching precisely as a dynamic process that takes place between human
beings and God, mediated through the divine self-witness of the incarnate
Word and the apostolic witness of scripture to that Word, and aimed at
achieving a kind of knowledge (cognitio or notitia) that is deeply intertwined
with sense perception, affective feeling and the ability to recognise and
attribute meaning. For Calvin, the reification of tradere into human traditio
is problematic precisely because it stalls the movement of responsiveness to
scripture as the ‘living words of God’ and instead renders learning as mere
agreement.
In short, what is crucial for Calvin is that learning is the kind of thing that
relies on a relationship of alterity and mediation. To advance in learning,
human beings need to receive something from beyond the ordinary domain
of immanent relationships. That is, we need to receive something handed
down, but not merely by other human beings. Many anterior echoes of
this problematic exist in the Christian archive, and not least in Augustine’s
approach to Christian teaching, to which I’ll return in a moment. But it is
worth noting that attention to the verb paradidomi, tradere’s Greek equivalent,
presents a strikingly similar pedagogical problematic cutting across the New
Testament. As with tradere, paradidomi can be rendered both as faithful handing
over and as betrayal, depending on the context. Interestingly, however, the
term’s meaning in the New Testament is almost always contingent on who
is recognised as the subject of the action. In the gospels as well as in some of
Paul’s letters, the object being handed is often the literal body of Christ or
witness’s accounts of the ministry of Christ. When ordinary human beings
assume the subject of the sentence, paradidomi connotes betrayal. Yet, when
God holds the subject-position, the action of paradidomi constitutes faithful
teaching and salvation.
For example, Luke begins his Gospel with an account of the faithful
handing over (paradosan) of the story of Jesus’ life by divinely submitted
‘ministers of the word’ (Luke 1:2), but the next iterations of the verb are
ambiguously passive, with no subject named. Jesus foretells that the Son of
Man will be delivered (paradidosthai) into the hands of men (Luke 9:44), and
that he will be ‘handed over’ (paradothesetai) to the Gentiles and mocked (Luke
18:32). Later, when the verb is once again active, it connotes betrayal. Judas
goes to the chief priests to ‘betray’ (paradoi, paradounai) Jesus to them (Luke
22:4, 6); and that on the night when Jesus and his disciples are gathered
for dinner, Judas ‘betrays’ (paradidos) Jesus with a kiss (Luke 22:48). After
Jesus is taken into custody, Pontius Pilate asks the people whether they want
Jesus or Barabbas released, and when they demand Barabbas, Pilate ‘delivers’
(paredoken) Jesus to the will of the people (Luke 23:25). Across the four
27
gospels, there are many examples of ordinary people handing Jesus over
in various ways. All signal treachery.
The same word signals something different when the subject of the action
is divine. Returning to Luke, the exceptions to the betrayal connotation
cluster around divine agency. For example, ‘All things have been delivered
(paradothe) to me by my Father’ uses the perfect tense, connoting completion,
and ending with a gesture to the structure of revelation (Luke 10:22). In
John, the verb is used to refer to Jesus’ agency over his own death: ‘[Jesus]
said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up (paradoken)
his spirit’ (John 19:30). But the clearest examples of the significance of
divine agency appear in Paul’s writings, specifically when he is establishing
a practice of ‘tradition-ing’ for his own recipients to follow. In keeping with
the gospel usage of the verb, Paul writes that God did not spare his own son,
but ‘gave him up’ for us all, and this use of paradidomi signals the condition
of the possibility of the very gospel that Paul is relaying to the church in
Rome (Rom 8:32). To Corinth, Paul repeatedly frames himself as passing
on what he first received (1 Cor 11:23, 15:3), pointing not only back to
God’s originary handing over, but also forward to an eschatological time in
which Jesus himself finally completes the act of reception by handing the
kingdom back to the Father, such that God is ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15). In that
eschatological vision, paradidomi is grammatically framed by a divine subject
and a divine object. There is, then, a New Testament precedent for thinking
of Christian teaching precisely as a tradere between God and humanity, and
moreover one in which human beings must avoid the reification that occurs
when one person claims the role of sovereign subject. For what is decisive
is not merely the content of that which handed over (namely, the body
and word of Christ). What is decisive is who is recognised as the agent of
the giving and, ultimately, the receiving – and the paradoxical problem
that the human beings who want to learn must also avoid occupying the
subject-position. For this is what fundamentally differentiates treacherous
tradere from that which is faithful.
A similar pattern recurs several centuries later in Augustine’s De doctrina
christiana, a pedagogical manual overtly aimed at teaching methods of
scriptural interpretation, or how to receive the Word of God properly.
Interestingly, like Calvin later, Augustine does not begin with scripture, but
with a set of concerns over how learning is even possible. In other words,
Augustine begins with the very dilemma inscribed in the structure of faithful
tradere, or with the question of how an ordinary person may enter a properly
divine movement of receiving and passing on. Augustine frames his text
with a version of the Eristic Paradox, a pedagogical puzzle tracing back to
Plato’s Meno that asks how a student can learn when she always already lacks
28
the thing to be learned.14 For Augustine (and Calvin, but unlike Plato), the
solution to the paradox echoes Paul’s use of paradidomi.15 Learning is possible
because Word becomes flesh and thereby creates the conditions for human
learning through the analogously incarnate medium of preaching. For the
exercise to be deemed faithful, God must be recognised as acting at every
level: as initiator, as the revelation being passed on and as receiver.
Yet, from a human perspective, this only makes the question of reception
more puzzling. After all, how can one know whether one is being faithful
or enacting a betrayal? What can it mean to ‘know oneself’ through a
process in which the role of active subject is foreclosed from the outset?
What does it mean to insert oneself passively into the activity of another?
In De doctrina, Augustine addresses these concerns in at least three ways: first,
by asking his reader to cultivate a specific kind of posture that is humble
before the inevitability of mediation; second, by developing a robust theory
of signs and things that effectively places the would-be interpreter in a chain
of significations; and third, by supplying rules to help one know oneself
through those relationships rather than as the master of them.16
First, in the preface to De doctrina, Augustine calls his reader to willingly
embrace the divine use of humble mediations:
Let us not tempt the one in whom we have placed our trust, or we
may be deceived by the enemy’s cunning and perversity and become
unwilling even to go to church to hear and learn the gospel, or to
read the Biblical text or listen to it being read and preached, preferring
to… see the Lord Jesus Christ in person and hear the gospel from him
rather than from humans. Let us beware of such arrogant and dangerous
temptations, and rather reflect that the apostle Paul, no less, though cast
to the ground and enlightened by a divine voice from heaven, was sent to
14
For more on Plato’s Meno and the Eristic Paradox, see Gail Fine, The Possibility of Inquiry:
Meno’s Paradox from Socrates to Sextus (Oxford: OUP, 2014).
15
For Plato, the paradox is solved by the theory of the recollection of the forms.
16
This reading of Augustine’s theory of signs in De doctrina is informed by the following
treatments: B. Darrell Jackson, ‘The Theory of Signs in St. Augustine’s De doctrina
christiana’, Revue des études augustiniennes 15 (1969), pp. 9–49; Mark D. Jordan, ‘Words
and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana’, Augustinian
Studies 11 (1980), pp. 177–96; Matthew R. Lootens, ‘Augustine’, in Paul L. Gavrilyuk
and Sarah Coakley (eds), The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge:
CUP, 2011); Louis Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word (Ann Arbor, MI: University of
Michigan Press, 1997); Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Mediation, Self-Knowledge, and
the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Rowan
Williams, ‘Language, Reality, and Desire in Augustine’s De Doctrina’, Journal of Literature
and Theology 3/2 (1989), pp. 138–50.
29
a human being to receive the sacrament of baptism and be joined to the

church. And Cornelius the centurion, although an angel announced to
him that his prayers had been heard and his acts of charity remembered,
was nevertheless put under the tuition of Peter not only to receive the
sacrament but also to learn what should be the objects of his faith, hope,
and love.17
Here, the reader who desires to hear words ‘as having sprung from heaven,
as if there the living words of God were heard’ (to borrow Calvin’s phrase
from Inst. 1.7.1) is instructed that this must be done by assuming one’s place
in the world, ready to learn in and from those material conditions through
which a creating and incarnating God signifies divine truths.
Within this broader framework, Augustine then develops his theory of
signs. According to Augustine, creation consists of ‘things’ (isolated objects)
and ‘signs’ (things that mean only by referring to something else). All signs
are also things, but not all things are signs. Created things exist while always
also pointing beyond themselves to other things, and ultimately to their
source and end in God (who is the only completely self-referential ‘thing’).
This means that created existence entails more than static presence; rather, to
exist means to participate in networks of relationships, each of which grants
fuller significance to the others.18 And to learn therefore involves honing the
ability to interpret things in the context of those relationships, but always
mindful that God is the beginning and end of all significations.19
Third, Augustine supplies his reader with an array of devices and
accommodations designed to position her rightly in the network of signs
and things and to draw her into the proper practical context for coming
to actively participate in that network. Perhaps the most prominent are
Augustine’s two rules of interpretation – rules that, crucially, refer directly
to divine revelation and therefore act as guidelines for interpreting signs.
17
Note that the reference to ‘faith, hope, and love’ recalls the parallel structure of the
Augustinian Enchiridion’s more doctrinally oriented strategy of teaching.
18
Williams, ‘Language, Reality, and Desire’, p. 141.
19
De doctrina 1.7. This theme also suffuses the Confessiones, which were written directly after
Augustine left off writing De doctrina (to which he returned and completed later). For
example, in book 5, he contrasts mere knowledge of nature with the more dynamic
and integrated knowledge of piety: ‘When I hear of a Christian brother, ignorant of
these things, or in error concerning them, I can tolerate his uninformed opinion; and I
do not see that any lack of knowledge as to the form or nature of this material creation
can do him much harm, as long as he does not hold a belief in anything which is
unworthy of thee, O Lord, the Creator of all. But if he thinks that his secular knowledge
pertains to the essence of the doctrine of piety, or ventures to assert dogmatic opinions
in matters in which he is ignorant – there lies the injury’ (5.5).
30
Both rules are rooted in incarnational logic, or in the fundamental claim

that God teaches humanity through gestures of incarnate mediation and
therefore that learning must involve relating properly to textual and human
mediations, ‘as if there the living words of God were heard’. The first is the
rule of faith, which calls the student to embrace the claim of the incarnation
as a prerequisite to committing to its pattern of learning and teaching. The
second is the rule of love, which draws the student to relationally embrace
the human community as the embodied and affective context without which
learning is impossible.20 Mark Jordan describes this as follows:
To become redemptively manifest in human life, the Word takes flesh.
Just so, thought takes on word-sounds in order to be spoken and heard.
In the same way, again, the continuity of knowledge about God requires
a ‘fleshly’ community within which it can become active. To put the
proportion perhaps too naively: What the assumed human person is to
the Son, that the spoken word is to the inner word of thought, and that
the believing community is to the context of revelation.21
Interpretation, therefore, requires not merely reading or repeating the text,
but the more fundamentally embodied practice of receiving the text in a
concrete context such that the divine will actively constellates living signs to
the end of love.
A close reading of the 1559 Institutio suggests that Calvin views the task
of teaching (doctrina) in structurally similar terms.22 We’ve seen that he sets
up the task of the manual by first embedding himself in the larger context
of teaching. He describes himself as a teacher (doctor) of and for the church,
and moreover as one who has been taught by forebears (such as Augustine
himself).23 On the flip side, Calvin also invokes the role of ‘the pious’
(piorum) – the community – as both the initiators and the recipients of his
own text’s creation, and he frames piety itself as analogous to Augustine’s
rules. Calvin writes that piety is the ‘reverence joined with love of God
20
De doctrina 1.94.
21
Jordan, ‘Words and Word’, p. 179.
22
For other accounts of Calvin’s views on signification and its relation to Augustine’s
theory of signs, see Lee Palmer Wandel, ‘Incarnation, Image, and Sign: John Calvin’s
Institutes of the Christian Religion and Late Medieval Visual Culture’, in Walter S. Melion and
Lee Palmer Wandel (eds), Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image
(Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 187–203; and G. R. Evans, ‘Calvin on Signs: An Augustinian
Dilemma’, Renaissance Studies 3 (1989), pp. 35–45.
23
It is significant that Calvin signs the preface not only with a citation of Augustine, but
one with significant content: ‘I count myself one of the number of those who write
as they learn and learn as they write’ (Inst., preface, 5).
31
which the knowledge of his benefits induces’, and that God is not known
where there is no piety (Inst. 1.2.1). This suggests that piety, like Augustine’s
rules, is not a teaching but both the prerequisite for and fruit of teaching
properly enacted. Piety is a kind of active-and-passive posture that positions
one rightly in relation to God-as-subject.24
As the text proceeds, Calvin embraces an increasingly robust account of
how divinely given mediations facilitate exercises of resignification. The
knowledge of God the Creator culminates in the doctrine of providence,
teaching the reader to learn to see worldly events as if signs of divine glory
and care.25 The knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ, the second
part of Calvin’s ‘twofold knowledge’ (duplex cognitio), teaches human beings
to recognise God’s redeeming work in the world through the signifying
humanity of Christ. In book 3, which I will examine in greater depth, the
duplex cognitio resignifies the status and activity of the ordinary human through
the adopting work of the Spirit. Then, in book 4, this same semiotic impulse
anchors Calvin’s distinct theory of sacramental signification, which asks
believers, for example, to perceive not only the ordinary elements of bread
but to recognise them as if they were the body of Christ given for spiritual
nourishment (Inst. 4.17.10).26 In the very structure of the Institutio, the reader
receives teachings concerning God as Creator and Redeemer, is adopted into
those teachings by the Spirit, and is then asked to pass those teachings on
through exercises of prayer, participation, worship and sacrament.
Attention to this way of thinking about Christian pedagogy, with resonant
themes evident across many important sources beyond the ones I have
named, should give contemporary interpreters pause before assuming
an overly static rendering of ‘tradition’ that can simply be opposed to
‘scripture’ – and especially before assuming such a view to be an essential
component of Protestant thinking. The pattern that I have begun tracing
here is one in which scripture mediates as the apostles did: by witnessing
24
This accords with Richard Muller on piety: ‘Calvin continually exhorts his readers
to piety and consistently criticizes authorities and teachings that stand in the way
of piety or of the teaching of piety (doctrina, exercitia, or stadium pietatis), but he never
describes what he is doing as a form of piety. Piety was to be conjoined with ‘teaching’
or ‘doctrine’ (doctrina): Calvin did not understand it as an exercise separable from
his teaching, preaching, and debating.’ See his Unaccommodated Calvin (New York: OUP,
2001), p. 107.
25
In an especially vivid passage, Calvin writes that the scriptural writers teach us to see
clouds not only as water vapour but also as divine chariots, and lightning bolts not
only as electricity but also as divine messengers (Inst. 1.5.1).
26
I discuss Calvin’s sacramental signification in greater depth in my article, ‘Calvin and
the Two Bodies of Christ: Fiction and Power in Dogmatic Theology’, Political Theology
19/5 (2018), pp. 439–56.
32
to the proper object of Christian teaching – the body of Christ, the Word of
God – and by praying to faithfully pass that on without asserting a sovereign
subject-position over it. According to this logic, ‘tradition-ing’ has little to
do with finding a particular set of teachings to delimit or identify a group.
It has much more to do with the posture of receptivity and love that one
cultivates toward both a set of teachings and the wider world of signs in
which they are received.
A case study: election

This pattern of pedagogy as tradere does not merely establish a structure
around which doctrinal claims are made, it also informs the meaning and
practical effect of doctrines themselves. To examine what this might look like
in a particular case, I will look at the doctrine of election, or predestinarian
soteriology.27 The main features of this position are shared by Augustine
and Calvin, who cites Augustine exhaustively on the topic. Both insist that
God elects to save human beings, that God remains the sole subject of saving
action and that divine grace alone enables the responsive embrace of faith
by the human person. Both also maintain that God chooses how to dispense
saving grace according to a hidden purpose, one that cannot be identified
with worldly economies of moral desert or regimes of recognition. I have
already noted that many find this account of salvation troubling for a number
of compelling reasons. Not only does it seem to unravel motivation for
moral self-cultivation, it may also fund a troubling social imaginary prone
to interpret the world in terms of elected and rejected groups.
In this final section, I will examine Calvin’s doctrine of election as it
appears in the 1559 Institutio, reading it in its context and in view of the
larger pattern of Augustinian signification. The vulnerability of the knowing-
and-desiring human subject, straddling active and passive postures before
God, is absolutely crucial to the late Augustine’s account of salvation. Such
27
I noted at the beginning that this doctrine, perhaps more than any other, has been
used to mark and identify the ‘Calvinist tradition’. This is problematic for a number
of reasons, two of which I address in this article: namely, because it is doubtful
from a close reading of the text that Calvin subscribes to such an understanding of
tradition (much less under his own name) or that he construes election as the kind of
static mark that can serve as an external identifier. There are other reasons, however,
that this is problematic, and the most important that I do not explore here have
to do with the historical hybridity of Reformation-era doctrines and the hybridity
of Reformed thinking itself. Richard Muller has done more than any other scholar
to make this case, and for an articulation that covers both criticisms of the ‘Calvin
vs. the Calvinists’ tendency and problematic readings of Calvin’s (and more broadly
Reformed) soteriology, see Richard A. Muller, Calvin and the Reformed Tradition: On the Work
of Christ and the Order of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012).
33
a soteriology follows neatly from the larger claim that Christian teaching
succeeds as the divine will works actively through mediating signs to turn
the orientation of the knower, place him among others and render him
receptive to divine tradere.28 Within this framework, salvation can be read
as the proper name for that crucial moment of this subjective turning, or
the instant when the believer recognises himself differently in relation to
God. Salvation indicates a believer who knows God as the proper subject
and knows the self as recipient – a receiver who, by virtue of occupying her
proper place, becomes an active, yet mediate, giver of signification through
the rule of love. In what follows, I will show that a similar pattern structures
the itinerary of Calvin’s 1559 Institutio, with the instant of turning narrated
through the doctrine of election. First, however, let me briefly examine some
other instances of post-Augustinian pedagogy in order to establish some
common features.
Mark Jordan has argued that the influence of Augustine’s theory of signs
can be traced across a number of major works of medieval Latin theology,
with its tell-tale signature being the impulse to think signification-in-general
through the analogical lens of the Word become flesh.29 In texts that
demonstrate this influence, it is possible to locate a critical moment (or
a series of such moments) when the argumentative structure of the text
describes or even performs the reorientation of the subject-position of the
protagonist/reader. In other words, there is a key point at which the human
being in pursuit of divine learning comes to know himself differently, as
if from a different vantage, as if addressed by an excessive and reorienting
divine reality to which all signs, including the self, point.30 This reality may
be figured in different ways and through different strategies – one might
think, for example, of the effect of Thomas’ five ways or of the shattering
coincidence of the seraph with the crucified framing Bonaventure’s Itinerarium
28
Augustine’s later soteriological writings are devoted to the problem of reception,
with his motivation for forwarding a predestinarian account defended by his frequent
citation of 1 Corinthians 4:7: ‘What do you have that you did not receive?’ In Grace
and Free Choice, for example, Augustine will argue that knowledge is bound up with
desire, and the question has to do with the end to which desire is directed. Is the
desire to master the terms of salvation, or to receive a good will from the only one
who is qualified to bestow such a will? (77). Along these lines, it is also noteworthy
that Augustine’s arguments for receptive desire constantly foreground the activity of
prayer. See Grace and Free Choice in Answer to the Pelagians, IV: To the Monks of Hadrumetum and
Provence, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999).
29
Jordan, ‘Words and Word’, especially pp. 177–9 and 196.
30
A compelling account of Augustine’s pedagogy and its influence across the Latin
tradition is found in Mackey, Peregrinations of the Word.
34
mentis in Deum.31 Both of these textual moments effectively place the reader
epistemically and ontologically in a mediate relation to God as the source
and origin of signification, forbidding the occupation of the sovereign
subject-position.
Yet, perhaps the most elegant narration of such a critical moment of
turning appears in Anselm’s Proslogion, the entirety of which is structured
as a prayer – specifically, a prayer that Anselm be able to learn. Harking back
to the Eristic Paradox, Anselm beseeches God,
When will you show yourself to us again? … For I cannot seek you unless
you teach me how, and I cannot find you unless you show yourself to me.
Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you. Let me
find you in loving you; let me love you in finding you. I acknowledge,
Lord, and I thank you, that you have created in me this image of you so
that I may remember you, think of you, and love you. Yet this image is so
eroded by my vices, so clouded by the smoke of my sins, that it cannot
do what it was created to do unless you renew and refashion it.32
In clear Augustinian fashion, Anselm anticipates that his ability to learn
depends on a divine creative and redemptive prerogative. Yet he finds
himself in the paradoxical position of actively reaching for it, asking for it
and doing what he can to place himself in the way of the gift by embracing
the rules of faith and love. He prays,
I am not trying to scale your heights, Lord; my understanding is in no way
equal to that. But I do long to understand your truth in some way, your
truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand
in order to believe; I believe in order to understand.33
At this point, Anselm’s prayer positions him as the kind of subject who
can hope to understand in the only way a created thing can understand: by
entering into a receptive relationship to that which it does not understand,
and praying for grace and illumination.
31
The five ways (Summa Theologica, 1.2.3) work not to disclose the essence of God (which
is impossible) but to orient the reader intellectually in relation to a God whose
existence is prior and whose essence is inaccessible. Bonaventure’s itinerary both
begins and ends with the shattering imposition of the seraph over the crucifix – an
ending that is especially significant for how it turns, and even shatters, the reader who
has spent the bulk of the itinerary learning to refine perceptions and conceptions in
order to elevate the soul to God, returning the pilgrim to the site of the body as if
from another vantage point.
32
Anselm, Proslogion 1.
33
Ibid.
35
Anselm’s journey thus begins with a prayer to move from faith that God
exists toward an actual understanding (intellectus) of God as ‘that than which
a greater cannot be conceived’.34 Not incidentally, this is a divine name
borrowed from De doctrina christiana.35 Like the claim that Christ is ‘Word made
flesh’, the name for God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’
has a semantic character that does not merely describe God abstractly; it also
addresses the human person’s living context with particular force. That is, it
refers to God not only as a conceptual being but also as a being who exists
in relation to created things – the things alongside which human beings are
embedded, and through which human beings themselves exist. The claim
that God is ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ is also a claim
about God’s relation to the knower’s context, or God’s relation to all other
words and flesh that the knower perceives, addresses and, in turn, conceives.
The claim is that God surpasses all of them while also relating to all of them,
because the name for God exceeds all other conceivable things while also
referring to all other conceivable things.36
In the brief arc of the Proslogion, Anselm’s prayer is quickly answered. In
chapter 3, he receives an illumination, one that teaches him that God as
‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ must also exist in reality
by subjectively transforming his own understanding of his position in the
world. It is unfortunate that this illumination has become deracinated under
the shorthand of the ‘ontological proof’, because it is more accurately a
narration of Anselm’s own reorientation, and the nomenclature of ‘proof’
tends to obscure what is most striking about the quality of the learning that
Anselm experiences. When Anselm receives the illumination, nothing has
actually been added to the sheer linguistic content of that which he had
already embraced in faith. There is no new information. Rather, Anselm has
experienced a different ontic relation to the content – content that he had
already desired to believe. He has become able to hear it in a new way, such
that it transforms his entire sense of his own being-in-reality.
When he realises that ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’
must also exist in reality, the realisation is that those words refer to a reality
that exceeds the grasp of the subject who utters them. This places him in
a new relation to the utterance. The words refer to a being that exceeds
the grasp of his cognition, one greater than his cognition can characterise
or control. Yet, it is also a being that has assumed a relation to him. The
illumination is that Anselm’s understanding (intellectus) is enabled as he
34
Anselm, Proslogion 2.
35
De doctrina 1.7.7; see also Jordan, ‘Words and Word’, p. 196.
36
This reading is informed by ch. 3 of Mackey’s Peregrinations.
36
assumes a posture of receiving, rather than a posture of epistemic mastery

over the object. And, as with Augustine’s rule of love, this understanding
places him in in a new relation not only to God but (through God) to other
things. He assumes a place in the middle, as it were, of a chain of signs,
becoming a conduit for the divine activity of handing over. Crucially, the
structure enabling this moment of turning is also the precise condition of
possibility for treachery. This is precisely what Gaunilo’s ‘Reply on Behalf of
the Fool’ demonstrates. For, in that critical moment, the subject may insist
on maintaining epistemic control and doing with the object what she wills –
handing it over to be betrayed.37
A similar sort of pedagogical itinerary is legible across Calvin’s 1559
Institutio, with the doctrine of election representing the pivotal point of
subjective turning.38 Contrary to popular reputation, predestination doesn’t
headline Calvin’s theological project. While he certainly gestures to divine
priority in earlier loci, especially when discussing providence (Inst. 1.16–
18) and sin (Inst. 2.2–5), he does not flesh out the doctrine of election
until the end of book 3 (Inst. 3.21–4). By the time he has arrived at
book 3, Calvin has already moved his reader through the duplex cognitio
Dei, the order of teaching fit for placing the student in relation to God
37
Anselm directed the ‘Reply on Behalf of the Fool’ to be included perpetually with
the Proslogion, alongside Anselm’s own reply. With the inclusion of Gaunilo’s reply, the
text is accompanied by the condition of its own failure, or by the possibility that the
divine name will not necessarily enact the turning of the subject. For Gaunilo, Anselm’s
argument fails when the language of ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’
is approached as a concept unrelated to the subject, or objectively external to the
subject’s own constitution. From such a standpoint, the concept is a mere thing among
other abstract things that does not refer without a contextual act of force. As mere
language, it has only a conventional claim on being, and as long as the being-of-God-
in-particular cannot be objectively disclosed and related to the language, the argument
fails. The argument’s very success thus turns on the perpetuity of the gap between
sign and signified. This is a gap that Anselm thinks can only be closed performatively:
when the subject is turned in her relationship to words and things more generally,
coming to know herself fundamentally as related to everything else by virtue of a
language invested in being. According to Mackey, the argument is not designed to
add anything new, such as disclosing a stable and transcendent signifier. Rather, it
facilitates ‘a perpetual pilgrimage through the differences of language that sunder
sign from being and delay until eternity the advent of presence’, while also gesturing
toward the worthiness of the pilgrimage itself (Mackey, Peregrinations, p. 107).
38
Muller writes that Calvin’s election ‘is preeminently a demonstration of God’s gracious
will in Christ shown forth in calling, justification, and sanctification’. Richard A.
Muller, Christ and the Decree (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1986), p. 25. I see
my argument as fundamentally in line with this characterisation, albeit recasting
structural-pedagogical terms derived from Augustine.
37
the Creator (book 1); and then coming to know the Creator through
the redeeming activity of Christ (book 2).39 These teachings effectively
situate the reader in the world as a domain created, governed and cared
for by God; and then teach the student how Christ’s redeeming work
mediates the knowledge of God to us as human beings.40 In book 3,
Calvin finally moves to the place where Anselm began: the reader is
equipped with the content of faith, and desires to be transformed by
actually receiving, and coming to fully participate in, these teachings.
Book 3, ‘The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ: What Benefits
Come to Us From It, and What Effects Follow’, is expressly devoted to the
human reception of divine pedagogy, and therefore with the dynamics of
how the Eristic Paradox is actually addressed: how humans enter the activity
of tradere even as they acknowledge God as proper subject and object.41
The locus on election represents the climax to this question by drawing
attention to that critical moment when the reader, who has already received
a sufficient treatment of the articles of Christian faith, will either become a
betrayer or a faithful recipient of that teaching. For Calvin, this hinges on
a dramatic encounter between two different kinds of ‘knowing’. First (and
positively), there is the Anselmian desire to be able to understand oneself as
elect – to hear the divine teachings and have confidence that they pertain to
you personally, that the knowledge of God is indeed joined to the knowledge
of ourselves (cognitio Dei et nostril). Then (negatively) there is second urge to
know, which Calvin frames as a pathological urge to get inside the mind of
God and occupy the position of sovereign knower, abstractly understanding
39
For some classic treatments of Calvin’s duplex cognitio, see Edward A. Dowey Jr, The
Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); T. H.
L. Parker, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God: A Study in the Theology of John Calvin (London:
Lutterworth, 1962); and, more recently, Richard A. Muller, ‘“Duplex cognitio dei” in the
Theology of Early Reformed Orthodoxy’, Sixteenth Century Journal 10/2 (1979), pp. 51–
62.
40
To read both how and why Calvin emphasises Christ’s incarnate humanity as crucial
to what makes Christ the sole and central mediator, see especially Inst. 2.12. Calvin
places Christ in relation to other signifying forms of God-given mediation in 2.7–11.
41
Because the chapters on election come at the end of the book (followed only by a
short treatment on the life everlasting), they assume a structural resonance to the loci
that close the previous two books: namely, providence and atonement. In book 1,
providence moves Calvin’s argument from the claim that God is Creator to an account
of how God’s power shines ‘as much in the continuing state of the universe as in its
inception’ (Inst. 1.16.1). In book 2, atonement moves Calvin’s argument from the
claim that Christ is the redeemer and fulfilment of divine mediations to an account
of how Christ redeems (Inst. 2.16). Then, in book 3, Calvin focuses on the work of
the Spirit, which literally doubles as the discourse on how human beings receive the
grace given by God as Creator and Redeemer.
38
why God wills what God wills. It is this pathological urge to know that
functions as the primary target of Calvin’s polemics across the four chapters
on election. Calvin begins his discourse by writing that God would have
us ‘revere’ what we do not understand (Inst. 3.21.1), a call back to the
opening definition of piety as ‘that reverence joined with love of God which
the knowledge of his benefits induces’ (Inst. 1.2.1).42 Later in the election
locus, he writes that, more than any other doctrine, election demands that
humanity accept its cognitive and intellective limitations: ‘Let us not be
ashamed to submit our understanding to God’s boundless wisdom so far
as to yield before its many secrets. For, of those things which it is neither
given nor lawful to know, ignorance is learned; the craving to know, a kind
of madness’ (Inst. 3.23.8). If election is designed to perform the relation
between knowledge of God and self-knowledge, it involves cultivating
epistemic humility.
This may, to a degree, help to contextualise why Calvin is willing to make
so many difficult and even dubious claims about predestination across these
chapters. For instance, he writes, ‘All are not created in equal condition;
rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others’;
and a bit later, ‘By his just and irreprehensible judgment [God] has barred
the door of life to those whom he has given over to damnation’ (Inst. 3.21.5,
7). As many have noted, such claims run counter to conventional notions
of divine benevolence and equity. They may also lead a careful reader to
wonder precisely how Calvin has the authority to assert them with such
confidence. Isn’t he overstepping his own cognitive limitations? Yet Calvin
forwards these claims, even while admitting that the teaching is ‘dreadful’
(horribile), and that it has the potential to lead many to ruin (Inst. 3.23.7;
3.21.2).43
Why does he spend so much time discussing election in such
argumentative detail and with such confidence? On my reading, he offers
no less than four (and perhaps five) reasons. The first is simple empirical
realism: we observe that some reject the call while others embrace it (Inst.
3.21.1). The second points to the relatively clear scriptural grounding of
the teaching (Inst. 3.21.3). The third is logical: if salvific grace is to be
conceived as specially given grace addressed to the concrete individual, and
42
This language recurs in book 4, when Calvin uses it to quell excessive metaphysical
speculation over the sacraments, writing that it is better to ‘experience than
understand’ how Christ is joined to us through material elements. See Inst. 4.17.32. It
may also be a legible call back to Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum.
43
To be clear, my best judgement is that Calvin does at times overstep the epistemic
boundaries he also places around the discourse – perhaps an unfortunate consequence
of polemic.
39
not a categorical feature of humanity as such, then it stands to reason that

some must be excluded (Inst. 3.21.7, 10). Yet the fourth is the one Calvin
cites more than any other and the one most consonant with Augustine’s
late position: namely, that election renders humanity utterly humble –
and grateful – before God.44 In some ways, Calvin’s radical and troubling
assertiveness on double predestination seems aimed to defend the fact that
God could justly elect some and damn others if God so chose. If we have
the urge to say otherwise, that evidences something problematic about the
affective-epistemic position we are assuming (Inst. 3.21.1, 3.23.11).45
There is a way of reading the unflinching quality of Calvin’s arguments
as conferring rhetorical depth and strategic complexity to a larger exercise
in pedagogy. For by challenging and even offending the reader’s affective-
epistemic sensibilities, these arguments generate a new range of questions:
questions that, if received in the right posture, can reveal something of the
reader’s preconceptions and emotions to the reader herself. And by revealing
what may previously have been unconscious or hidden in the self, these
arguments allow the reader to observe and confront his own desires – his
desire, perhaps, to know things that are simply beyond the proper bounds of
human cognition. Alternatively, the reader may observe in herself evidence
of a different desire that sincerely wants to know as God gives knowledge,
surrendering cosmic curiosity to know himself in relation to God as a
recipient of grace. This is what I see as the possible fifth reason that Calvin
treats election in the place and manner that he does. It is diagnostically
effective.
Along these lines, it is also significant that election appears immediately
after Calvin’s chapter on prayer, the longest chapter of the entire Institutio.
44
E.g. in Predestination of the Saints, Augustine writes, ‘If God produces our faith, working in
a marvelous manner in our hearts in order that we believe, need we fear that he cannot
do the entire work? And does a human being, for this reason, claim for himself its first
parts in order that he might merit to receive the last parts from God? See whether one
achieves anything else in this way but that the grace of God is somehow or other given
in accord with our merits and that in that way grace is no longer grace (Rom. 11:6). For in
this way it is paid back as something owed, not given gratuitously. It is, after all, owed
to one who believes that his very faith be increased by the Lord and that the increase
in faith should be the reward of the faith already begun.’ See Augustine, Predestination of
the Saints in Answer to the Pelagians IV, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press,
1997), p. 152. Augustine’s concern here is for the disposition of the human person –
what position is most advantageous to quell pride and encourage faith and gratitude.
45
This also accords with the epistemology Augustine adopts in his later writings, where
desire functions clearly as a prerequisite for knowledge, both in the cases of right
knowledge and error. See The Spirit and the Letter in Answer to the Pelagians I, ed. John E.
Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), esp. pp. 183–5.
40
In a structural echo of the Proslogion, Calvin prepares his reader for the most
critical moment of the itinerary by assuming the tensive posture of active
petition. The reader knows that she needs to receive understanding, but she is
also actively doing everything she can do to put herself in the proper posture
of a recipient. Calvin is clear that the crucial components of a prayer involve
actively grasping at the teachings of the duplex cognitio and then earnestly
asking that they take on significance in the concrete context of one’s own
life.46 He writes,
After we have been instructed by faith to recognize that whatever we need
and whatever we lack is in God, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom
the Father willed all the fullness of his bounty to abide so that we may all
draw from it as from an overflowing spring, it remains for us to seek in
him, and in prayers to ask of him, what we have learned to be in him.
Otherwise, to know God as the master and bestower of all good things,
who invites us to request them of him, and still not go to him and not
ask of him – this would be of as little profit as for a man to neglect a
treasure, buried and hidden in the earth, after it had been pointed out to
him. (Inst. 3.20.1)
Calvin’s prayer desires not merely conceptual knowledge, but a visceral
understanding of providential and incarnational faith.
Once again, this is a recognisable iteration of the Augustinian-Anselmian
posture that believes in order to understand. The aim of prayer is not only to
assent to faith that God is bestower, but to actually experience God as bestower.47
46
Calvin repeatedly indexes proper knowledge to its use and benefit to the life of the
believer. For a selection of references, see Inst. 1.1.1, 1.2.1, 1.5.9, 1.16.3, 3.20.1–
3, 4.1.1, 4.16.9, 4.17.10. Brian Gerrish highlights this element of Calvin’s thinking
in the following way: ‘To be sure, it would be a setback for our understanding of
[Calvin] if we then imagined an opposition in his mind between truth and usefulness,
or between theological understanding and practical piety. While he was not interested
in useless truth, it would never have occurred to him that a doctrine could be useful
if it was not first of all true.’ See B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology
of John Calvin (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), pp. 17–18.
47
One can note the thread of references, not least in Calvin’s discussion of providence,
to the light emanating from the divine Word that exists temporally and ontologically
prior to created light. See e.g. Inst. 1.6.1 and 1.13.13. It is worth noting also that
this represents an important distinction between Calvin and more Platonically and
Neoplatonically influenced writers before him. As my colleague Dr Michael Motia puts
it, for those following Plato and Plotinus, participation suggests that one is ‘held in
being by that which created and sustains you’. For Calvin, who maintains ontological
distinction between God and the world and a robust use for both human faculties and
practices of signification, participation suggests something like being a part of what’s
41
Calvin puts it vividly in the following section: ‘By [praying] we invoke

the presence both of [God’s] providence, through which he watches over
and guards our affairs, and of his power, through which he sustains us,
weak as we are and well-nigh overcome, and of his goodness, through
which he receives us, miserably burdened with sins, unto grace; and, in
short, it is by prayer that we call him to reveal himself as wholly present to us’ (Inst.
3.20.2).48 Here, the structure of the prayer also mimics the Pauline structure
of faithful paradidomi: God’s presence assumes a dynamic structure that gives
a revelation and receives it back through the work of Christ, who makes
humans participants in it. The person praying thus knows herself as if in
medias res: as having grasped the claims of faith while desiring to be the kind
of person who can participate in the movement of that faith in time and
place.
If the duplex cognitio furnishes the content of faith, and if prayer is seeking,
then election signals the modicum of understanding that is granted when
an individual is turned by grace to become a recipient. Calvin gestures
to this when he arrives at the crux of the election locus: the question of
how a reader attains certainty concerning his or her own election.49 He
approaches the matter by giving several injunctions that fence the doctrine
in keeping with the way he has been navigating between beneficial and
pernicious forms of knowledge. For example, at the close to 3.23, he cites
Augustine to argue that a reader’s concern over the knowledge of election
must be triangulated around the reader’s singular life. With regard to all
others, ‘We know not who belongs to the number of the predestined or
who does not belong, so we ought to be so minded as to wish that all men
be saved’ (Inst. 3.23.14).50 Yet as concerns our own selves, Calvin opens
3.24 by arguing similarly that we ought not to look for evidence of our own
election in any external effort. This merely flatters the pathological desire to
know the signs of divine favor in the abstract (Inst. 3.24.1). The sole sign
of election Calvin will admit is the sheer content of the call itself, in as
much as it subjectively reveals the content of the individual’s inner response
going on – participating in a game or a performance. I’m indebted to Dr Motia for

many conversations on this topic.
48
Emphasis added.
49
I am confident in calling this the crux of the locus not just because it is climactically
positioned at the beginning of the fourth and final chapter; and not just because
of the (putative) force of the pedagogical argument I am advancing here; but more
fundamentally because it is the part of the argument that visibly ties to the theme
of book 3 as a whole, concerned with ‘The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of
Christ: What Benefits Come to Us From It, and What Effects Follow’.
50
This is a citation from Augustine’s De correptione et gratia, ch. 46.
42
of desire. For Calvin, this call consists both in the ‘preaching of the Word’
and, crucially, the ‘illumination of the Spirit’ (Inst. 3.23.2; see also 1.9.3).
This means two things: first, that knowledge of one’s own election is not
the kind of knowledge that can be had through static, socially visible modes
of recognition; and second, that this knowledge itself hinges on the active
work of Word and Spirit in dynamic relation to the concrete self.51 Calvin
concludes that ‘the inner call, then, is the pledge of salvation that cannot
deceive us’ (Inst. 3.23.2).52
Here is the passage where Calvin unpacks the logic in full:
Rare indeed is the mind that is not repeatedly struck with this thought:
whence comes your salvation but from God’s election? Now, what
revelation do you have of your election? This thought, if it has impressed
itself upon him, either continually strikes him in his misery with
harsh torments or utterly overwhelms him. Truly, I should desire no
surer argument to confirm how basely persons of this sort imagine
predestination than that very experience, because the mind could not
be infected with a more pestilential error than that which overwhelms
and unsettles the conscience from its peace and tranquility toward God.
Consequently, if we fear shipwreck, we must carefully avoid this rock,
against which no one is ever dashed without destruction. Even though
discussion about predestination is likened to a dangerous sea, still, in
traversing it, one finds safe and calm – I also add pleasant sailing unless he
willfully desire to endanger himself. For just as those engulf themselves in
a deadly abyss who, to make their election more certain, investigate God’s
eternal plan apart from his Word, so those who rightly and duly examine
it as it is contained in his Word reap the inestimable fruit of comfort. Let
this, therefore, be the way of our inquiry: to begin with God’s call, and to end
with it. (Inst. 3.24.4)53
The implication, here, is remarkable, for the call itself is nothing more than
the reception of the content of faith, and the decisive evidence is the way in
which it is received. In other words, the question is whether it indeed reorients
the self and renders the self receptive, as with Anselm’s illumination; or
whether it remains a stumbling block, as with Gaunilo’s ‘Reply on Behalf
of the Fool’. Like the name for God as ‘that than which a greater cannot
be conceived’, the illumination to which Calvin refers does not generate
51
Calvin, in fact, repeatedly distinguishes the saving call from social-recognisable marks
of favour. See e.g. Inst. 3.23.10 as well as his discussion of suffering in 3.8.1.
52
Emphasis added.
53
Emphasis added.
43
new information. It is rather the performance of a new posture in relation

to information already given, and that posture is its own evidence.54 For
Calvin, assurance is given by the simple proof that one who hears the call
yearns to live it out with faithful tradere rather than to assume treacherous
sovereignty over it.
Conclusion
Election is Calvin’s most notorious doctrine, the one often used to define the
so-called ‘tradition’ bearing his name.55 Yet, I have argued that the doctrine
itself, read in its broader pedagogical context, eschews the very logic that
supports this effort – a logic that would establish static identity through
a stable, socially recognisable, external signifier. In other words, if there
is a pattern of Christian-scriptural thinking that approaches tradition as a
verb, and from there thinks of Christian teaching as the dynamic exercise
of learning to participate as a human being in what is properly a divine
activity, then this cuts to the very heart of how we read and understand
the function of both scriptural and doctrinal arguments. I’ve argued that
for Calvin, as for Augustine and others, neither election in particular nor
Christian teaching in general proceeds as a static set of claims that can be
opposed to, or even neatly derived from scripture. Instead, teachings are
mediations that are useful to tactically position the knowing self in relation
to divine signification, guiding the self to assume the proper posture of
humility and receptivity before a divine will that engages and occupies all
created things as signs of divine love. This suggests a fundamental rebuke
against the common urge to conceive knowledge as sovereign-subjective
mastery over either theological ideas or created things.
I take this to be an important consideration for those invested in Christian
teaching – in reading and interpreting scripture, doctrinal arguments and
especially the act of preaching so crucial to the exercise of tradere. But it is also
54
There is a longstanding debate over whether Calvin rejects the ‘practical syllogism’,
an anachronistic name for the idea that assurance of salvation is provided by the
presence of a perceptible mark in an individual life. I’ve argued here that the ground
of assurance is found in the orientation to the call and the actions that follow from it,
which I take to be more or less in line with the position that Calvin does allow the
syllogism, not as a syllogism per se, but as a set of movements that connect christology
to call, justification and sanctification. For a recent discussion, see Muller, Calvin and the
Reformed Tradition, ch. 8. For more on Calvin’s approach to certainty in the context of
other early modern intellectuals and his emphasis on the affective dimensions of faith,
see Susan Schreiner, Are you Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New
York: OUP, 2011), particularly pp. 66–77.
55
As I noted in the introduction, I see this impulse as misdirected on multiple levels.
44
important because Christian doctrines continue to inform our broader social

imaginations. Election has been used to shape and defend the supposedly de
facto justice of free-market capitalism, Manifest Destiny, colonial domination
and White Supremacy – any logic that identifies certain modes of human
life as central, exceptional and superior to that of others. Yet, these linkages
presume, from the outset, that traditional doctrines are the kinds of things
that possess the kind of static content that can be deracinated and transferred
into a different social context.
The reading I’ve offered of Calvin’s election – and of the dynamic con-
nection between Augustinian pedagogy and soteriology more generally –
offers critical tools to resist such deracination. Most pointedly, it undercuts
the fundamental epistemic position that allows for such modes of
secularisation to occur: one in which the doctrine is reified, abstracted from
the concrete inner experience of the individual, and allowed to control a
different set of data. Attention to the conditions of fidelity and betrayal that
haunt tradere enables a responsible critic to recognise such uses of doctrinal
arguments, within and beyond ecclesial contexts, and to name them as
betrayals. They are betrayals inasmuch as they reflect an effort to control
and delimit the will of God, eschewing the vulnerability, receptivity and
relationality that supply the very conditions for the possibility of doctrinal
fidelity.56
56
An earlier version of this article was given at the American Academy of Religion,
Christian Systematic Theology Unit panel on the concept of tradition in November
2017. I am grateful to Junius Johnson and Holly Taylor Coolman for articulating the
prompt and organising the panel, and for the helpful feedback I received from other
participants.
45

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SJT 72(1): 20–45 (2019) © Cambridge University Press 2019

Reading tradition as pedagogy in Calvin and

Keywords: Augustine of Hippo, Jean Calvin, election, pedagogy, tradition

It is unfortunate, I think, that this is precisely how ordinary users of

self-improvement.6 More recent critics are furthermore attuned to the

The dynamic of tradition

Here, traditio appears as a noun to present a contrast to the exceptional self-

of authority. The 1559 Institutio is setting up an understanding of Christian

a human being to receive the sacrament of baptism and be joined to the

Both rules are rooted in incarnational logic, or in the fundamental claim

A case study: election

assumes a posture of receiving, rather than a posture of epistemic mastery

not a categorical feature of humanity as such, then it stands to reason that

Calvin puts it vividly in the following section: ‘By [praying] we invoke

going on – participating in a game or a performance. I’m indebted to Dr Motia for

new information. It is rather the performance of a new posture in relation

important because Christian doctrines continue to inform our broader social

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