Note on the Calvin posts

I don't know why I wrote two long posts on John Calvin. It's not like I'm a groupie. It's really just because the chain of doctrine that is the armor of God and that changes you internally is 'Federal' theology. It has the individual level and the level that is the great arc and mechanics of the plan of redemption. It's like the 'mechanics of mysticism.' Of course it is the Work in biblical doctrinal language. And Calvin is like the prophet on the mountain elucidating it, or teaching others who presented it...

Logos

Exchanging comments with an atheist I was reminded of this light that exists between us all that enables us to communicate. The irony of the atheist saying what is 'God' and blah, blah, blah. The Bible says Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, sustains this entire Creation. He is the light, the Logos, that which we recognize the presence of, and come into the presence of, to some degree or another, when we come into an "I am here" presence. When we stop chasing the creation - in identification - and come into presence of Him by whom all things were created and by whom all things consist. That Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit we accumulate and we provoke our limits and grieve that Spirit, and perhaps also extend our limits by degree as well.

My sense of Calvin

[Response to an email correspondent...]

Here's my sense of Calvin. He was separate pretty much from the revolutionary Christian world going on around him, basically he was content to be a scholar, he was very much into classical literature, his father put him on track to be in the church, then something happened with his father's relationship to the church and he put him on track to be a lawyer, then his father died, so Calvin followed his real interest to be a classical scholar. All during that time Lutheranism was an influence in his university environment. He also lived with a Waldensian, a wealthy merchant who later was burned at the stake. He wrote a book on Seneca. Then something happened. He barely alludes to it, but he was regenerated by the Word and the Spirit, strongly, quietly, then he found that people were coming to him for the 'pure teaching' despite himself. He became known. He had to leave Paris when some religious scandal broke out involving people associated with him. He wanted still to go somewhere and lead the quiet life of a scholar. At some point he wrote the first edition of the Institutes (much smaller than the final edition). It became a bible of the Protestant cause. He became famous, though he was using about six different fake names in his wanderings. Then he was accosted by a firy guy name Farel and told to come to Geneva and be a leader there or experience the wrath of God.

All through it he seemed to be passive. He seemed to be quietly resigned to not have, or own, his own life. But he was quite strange in his ability to learn the Bible and apostolic doctrine and to elucidate it so young. Jacob Arminius (the father of Arminianism, kind of the opposite of Calvinism) had this to say about Calvin:

"I recommend that the Commentaries of Calvin be read…. For I affirm that in the interpretation of the Scriptures Calvin is incomparable, and that his Commentaries are more to be valued than anything that is handed to us in the writings of the Fathers -- so much so that I concede to him a certain spirit of prophecy in which he stands distinguished above others, above most, indeed, above all."

Another thing I discern in Calvin is he intentionally didn't mix the language of the faith with anything else. This is why you don't see him saying anything positive about Homer, et al, other than something like you find in his Institutes in Book 1, chapter 10, paragraph 3. In that passage he subtly separates the Homeric pantheon from the usual false idols that were worshiped. Yet still, condemns the whole lot. Zwingli was more open about his classical learning and valuation for it, but I can tell Calvin is doing the "when I learned the truth I put childish things away" thing. Plus, he carried the gravitas of the Reformation on his shoulders and couldn't be wishy washy to any degree. This includes politically. This is also why he didn't write about himself much at all. It was all seriousness in time of war when everything was at stake, and he was the central figure others looked to for guidance.

You rightly discern in the post-Calvin Reformed theological universe (really once out of the 1500s, except maybe in the Netherlands) a less deep understanding, even though the intellectual level is extremely high. I can still get things from those guys, but we know more and can navigate it all for the wheat and not stumble upon the chaff.

An intense intellectual scholasticism entered the picture, but it happened for a reason. When truth - apostolic truth - is so blatantly brought into the light it gets attacked and attacked and attacked and every kind of attempt from every conceivable angle to defile it is made. Not only from without the camp, but from within the camp as well. So the intense definitions and so forth, and the confessionalism (the composing of so many confessions an catechisms and writing of the systematic theologies, by whatever name or form they took in the early decades and onward) were necessary. Because there really are 'hinges' in doctrine upon which falls to one side or the other internal states, and it is those hinges that get attacked and false teachers try to present them dishonestly and so on and so forth. Hinges such as justification by faith alone. Or sola Scriptura. All of the five solas.

And the practical matter is this: when a person is converting (they've already been quickened by the Word and the Spirit, but now when they are converting) they need to come into contact with clear, on-the-mark doctrinal teaching. So as a practical matter it is effective for the forces of darkness to engage in the endless sophistry and defiling of the truth, as well as the controlling of what is published and taught and so on, because it keeps the truth away from God's elect and it buys them time, which is really the only thing the devil's side has. A continual hold-everything-up strategy. Because they can't win. But they can delay the proceedings. At least it seems that way. But it's a real conflict with real demands and payment and so on.

Gurdjieff was right about Roman Catholicism. You really have to know the history of Christianity at a sophisticated level to see the Reformation and everything else clearly. The Church prior to the Reformation was many things, geography alone dictating alot, distance from Rome dictating alot, it's not monolithic. But the real Beast/anti-Christ stuff began to emerge (and if I knew more I could give an exact date, but) around probably when the Inquisition started to take off. 1100s? I need to read Schaff, but it's 8 volumes. The corruption had really set in by the time Luther hammered the 95 theses on that church door.

One last note: Calvin and Zwingli both were forced to be more conservative publicly and in their main writings because of the Anabaptists to their left. The radicals of the Reformation were as demonic as the Romanist side, in their own way, and as off-the-mark. For instance Zwingli was forced to officially adopt infant baptism - the Romanist practice - after initially being against ritualism and all that because he was in a battle with extremists on his left who threatened everybody because bad doctrine was an invitation for Rome and the secular powers they influenced to attack (ironically, but good doctrine is the armor of God), so the on-the-mark doctrine (which is why Calvin wrote his Institutes, to be a document presenting on-the-mark Protestant doctrine, which is how it was received as well, and was extremely effective as that) was a real weapon in that war. So mostly concessions were made by Zwingli and Calvin in this context in the realm of ecclesiology and sacramentology. The less important, really, areas of doctrine in question; and you really see the schisms and arguing among the post-Calvin Protestants in these two areas too, though that is a simplification. - C.

ps- The Puritans are always 'suspect' by the mainstream Reformed/Calvinists of our day and in the post-Reformation eras generally. It's because the Puritans are seen as 'pietists', which to Puritans just means having and doing the practical level of the faith, and to their critics it means being weird and 'mystical' and so on. Modern day Calvinism is really 'academic theology'. Those types are Man #3 types, but the reformers were Men #4 types.

Some quick thoughts to a correspondent on John Calvin, Fourth Way, Renaissance, etc.

I may be
> less set in theological
> terms than yourself. I think I'm quietly questioning
> the rationale of post
> reformers - intellectual feasts - because I feel an
> affinity with a more
> medieval mind set where there was a greater unity and less
> schism between
> the Christian and pagan - though I don't feel pagan -
> and that edges me
> perhaps to give greater consideration to both the orthodox
> and catholic than
> I might have previously and obviously I see the work spread
> through it all,
> the pagan too. Anyway, I'll circle round a while yet
> mulling on these
> things. I'm fascinated by the idea Homer and the
> classics had a significant
> influence on Calvin. I never came across it in his
> writings. Homer may be my
> next big read.

[This is long, but I've tried to throw down some distilled things on this subject. It's not just me talking...]

Yes, Calvin is accused by modern day Calvinists of being too medieval himself. Too mystical. Bernard of Clairviox (sp?) is referenced as much as Augustine in his Institutes.

What you see in the post reformers is scholasticism (categorization, ultra-fine definition, etc). It takes over after the organic school emerges. The Medieval time had its scholasticism too. (How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?)

Zwingli and Calvin were the two primary guys (Luther was a force - same age as Zwingli - but a different animal, which is why Lutheranism is what it is, and Calvinism founded empires.)

Calvin wrote a book on Seneca, was a humanist scholar, etc., etc., then experienced regeneration by the Word and Spirit and converted and set foot out of Paris not knowing where he was going. Zwingli died young in battle (Zwingli is associated with reform in Zurich as Calvin is associated with Geneva.)

You have to read all these guys adeptly. They all operated in the midst of a furious and intensely violent war. Calvin was forced to be a political leader including in his writings. For instance, in the Institutes you'll read him giving very Romanist-like eXoteric explanations of the sacrament of baptism. Then in his less public Sermons on Ephesians he - like Zwingli - said baptism is a ritual for stupid people. People who need the visual. Also, when Calvin came into direct contact with a Romanist like Cardinal Sadoleto he sounds like an anabaptist. For example Calvin says to Sadoleto that one doesn't need a church building and physical trappings and all that. That is the true Calvin. But as a political leader and leader in the war of the times he had a responsibility to be more accommodating to the theology of the day because he could get an entire population killed. (This is why Servetus was put to death as well. If Geneva hadn't it would have put the entire city at risk of invasion and death. You have to see everything regarding the Reformation and the reformers in the context of the times.)

But the chain of TULIP is the mystical chain the Bible teaches. When seen and accepted it effects the internal reorientation from being man-centered to being God-centered. It goes against Old Man logic and demands. It is not only new thinking but it is accepting that there is something higher than you. Five solas as well.

You don't have to think in terms of going 'Catholic' or 'Orthodox' just 'apostolic.' The school is there in all those periods of history. The reformers went 'back to the source' as did the Renaissance. What you will see in Orthodox writings that you like you'll find was actually written by a Celtic Christian from the 4th century, for instance. Arminian Baptists accuse Calvin of being Romanist because the true school can be found in medieval sources here and there which Calvin learned from and cites.

The document that is two letters, one by Cardinal Sadoleto and one by John Calvin, is must reading to know Calvin. Calvin had just been kicked out of Geneva by the political leaders and Sadoleto saw an opportunity to turn the populace of Geneva back to Rome, so he wrote a public letter to Geneva. Calvin, in exile, but feeling a responsibility to defend Geneva, wrote a public letter that answered Sadoleto point-by-point, but it is unique in that it is Calvin the warriour going up against anti-Christ. It's published with titles like 'A Reformation Debate, Calvin vs. Sadoleto' and similar titles.

Main thing is find the true school of it all. Calvin has power because he represented the true school in the most foundational and literary and on-the-mark way. (This is why his writings immediately were translated by the dynamic, poetic, action-oriented Elizabethan culture that knew real school.) He brought his Renaissance background to elucidating it. You just have to see where people go off-the-mark and not let that paint everything. It's usually in ecclesiology and sacramentology where humanity gets 'inside' and brings the usual 'group' crap and brings things down to a worldly - and worse - level. But there is a true ecclesiology (cosmos of school, C Influence, teachers, the Word of God) and a true sacramentology (the two conscious shocks, for instance, or prayer and fasting, etc.).

I've said it before but the three main branches of the faith - Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant, correlate to the three basic centers of Man #1,2,3. But it is the intellectual part, the Protestant, that keeps you honest and gives you understanding. The emotional part, the Roman Catholic, is where the devil sets up camp. That is not to say it - the emotional part - is all bad, but just that the devil plants himself 'there' because that is where - intellectual division of the emotional center - magnetic center is developed, i.e. the gateway to real understanding. The Orthodox is best summed up by practice, and the Work is mostly seen in the Orthodox division. But you can't avoid the Protestant - true Protestant - intellectual part. Once you have it you are a different animal.

Pilgrimage

I sound weird. It's because most of what I discuss I'm now above. But I can't find new territory. It's kind of strange when you are at a place where there are no books to give you anything new.

I say that and I wonder: physics? Higher mathematical languages? Sanskrit? I don't think so.

I've written about it recently. When you have exhausted the realm of B Influence there is only C Influence left. But engaging that requires being in the third state of consciousness, at least. Then after that one wonders what one does.

I'm starting to sense it requires a pilgrimage. Or some kind of moving journey. Maybe that is seeing it too eXoterically. A pilgrimage or journey, yes, but how to effect that. It could be an activity. A subject matter. The arc of mastering something new.

ps- In case I didn't make it clear, the impressions coming from the new subject or activity you are mastering, while in the third state, become the communication from C Influence. Putting it too simply.

Schedule self-remembering

This is important.

I'm close to seven complete readings of the Word of God.

For the seventh I'm just going to take notes as I go along. Not mechanical, what is necessary at the moment to put things in memory. For such a big influence like the Bible (I mean BIG in terms of pages and words) you have to stay light and lithe with the side projects to help you get it more in memory. - C.

ps- Another important thing I see is schedule self-remembering. I havn't done enough of that, and it develops and cultivates real will in a practical and real way.

pps- There is schedule self-remembering where you use the clock (pick a time to be awake) and then there is the type where you use unpredictable things that you know will happen, like loud noises when out and about, or a police or ambulance or fire truck siren, or somebody calling your name. Many possibilities. Seeing a dog or a squirrel...

ppps- Death tests are in this category too.

RE: Unique idiot (this email contains a big subject)

> I read the book idiots in Paris.. it was quite interesting
> because it was a combination of the diaries of Elizibeth
> Bennet and John Bennet. John Bennet was kind of like a
> lunatic yogi, who would do things like sit with his arms
> outstretched for 3 hours trying to "break through"
> whilst Elizibeth was a hopeless devotional type who'd
> write things like "today Mr Gurdjieff drank tea!"
> etc etc...
>
> But between the lines you got a decent impression of what
> was going on there.

So notice it didn't occur to him to attempt to be in a real state of self-remembering, non-identification for three full hours? Is this why Ouspensky left Gurdjieff's environment? (Maybe he was doing that and I'm reading too much into it with not enough info.)

It's common to wonder where it leads. Because at first it leads to higher experiencing and higher understanding of things we already know (influences, for instance), but we have to consider that when we exhaust all that and then wonder 'where does it all lead?' that it leads to us being in higher realms, able to be used by God, in battle, for instance, or even just in a garden of the higher Kingdom of God, but it manifests in events down here too.

Like, once I remember going to an apartment complex to pick up my young nephew to take him to a park, and unique events occurred, a family was moving, my nephew had played with their little girl, so I said let them play on the grass awhile and say goodbye, and I sat in my car, then the little girl threw some toys at me, angry, didn't know why, but I waited, then finally my nephew got in the car, then I started to drive away, and just then the toddler - not the little girl but a younger child - of the family bolted in between parked cars and into the path of my car with the mother frantically running after (and the mother was intensely frantic, more than what the event seemed to call for, but in recurrence it may have been the event of the death of bad injury of her child...but I had seen it all as if in slow motion (I was in a higher state), and had already stopped (a common sleeping state would not have seen the event unfolding and just hit the
accelerator and who knows), and I've thought that that is a good example of how you can be used to change things. That child wasn't hit by a car that day because I was able to be used by higher forces, I was delayed (me being strange, not in a hurry, like normal humans) which altered the timing of the events then in the event itself which I was now taking a part in I was awake, and so on.

Remember I've mentioned that I always used my time with my little nephew to practice being in the third state. It was a reason to go to unique places, parks and so on. Pulling him in a wagon around the neighborhood. Things like that.

So that is a big thought: knowing that that effort to be in the third state not only puts you in contact with C Influence, but it makes you available to be used down here in ways you can't predict, and it also gives you things, puts you in environments you can't necessarily see, that effect you. - C.

POSTSCRIPT: This subject is big because it gets at the wall that one hits with this Work. It gets at what is beyond that wall.

It's the same old foundational Work teaching though: make efforts without expectation of results. That is not because it's a 'wrong motivation' to work for results, but it's because you can't discern what the results are except perhaps, and at first, in hind sight.

You throw your hands up, exasperated, "There's nothing to do!" meanwhile things are happening all around you *and through you* that you're not discerning. Things are happening, that is, as long as you *are* making efforts.

You're a soldier on the battlefield in the higher world, active, and then you just stop making efforts and the higher forces say: "Well, we lost that one. Didn't think anything 'was happening.' No, you were just in the midst of battle being a rare soldier for us, usable. And now you've gone away because you think nothing was happening. OK, we'll wait on you. You'll wake up again in time..."

POSTSCRIPT II: Starting to move and act in the higher world consciously. This is the #5 Man stage of Work.

New word: frame

Look how Thomas Boston uses this word 'frame' in this section of his Human Nature in its Fourfold State:

*******
The heart, that was made according to God's own heart, is now the reverse of it, a forge of evil imaginations, a sink of inordinate affections, and a storehouse of all impiety, Mark 7:21, 22. Behold the heart of the natural man, as it is opened in our text. The mind is defiled; the thoughts of the heart are evil; the will and affections are defiled—the imagination of the thoughts of the heart, that is, whatever the heart frames within itself by thinking, such as judgment, choice, purposes, devices, desires, every inward motion, or rather the frame of the thoughts of the heart, namely, the frame, make, or mold of these, 1 Chron. 29:18, is evil.

Yes, and every imagination, every frame of his thoughts, is evil. The heart is ever framing something; but never one right thing—the frame of thoughts, in the heart of man, is exceedingly various; yet are they never cast into a right frame.
*******

It's a useful word as he uses it because it gives understanding, or a 'view' of what the heart is doing which is behind our actions and words and thoughts and deeds and so on. But if the heart frames things differently (which is what the Work gets at with active reasoning and attitudes and thinking from the Work rather than from life and so on) then... It kind of is a word to connect one more with the inner 'reins' of real will.

Boston, in this book, discusses Work ideas in Christian language. Rebellious will, disordered affections, darkened mind, as the result of the fall. You have to read it. Here's an online version.

Might be of interest

I came across this in a volume of writings of Christian mysticism:

The three books attributed to King Solomon - Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon - are written for three progressive degrees of awakening (or, you know). Proverbs = exoteric; Ecclesiastes = mesoteric; Song of Solomon = esoteric.

Ouspensky said the same of the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Gospel of John, and Revelation.

I've finally sorted out my reading

I've finally sorted out my reading. I was looking for something with more power (more higher centers material) than 19th century novels. They can be interesting and fun, but... So I thought epic poems. But that didn't fly. I've read them all. I decided I can't find anything more powerful than the Bible and sound doctrine. So: 1. the Bible (AV1611), 2. Thomas Boston's unique and powerful work Human Nature in its Fourfold State, 3. Pilgrim's Progress, 4. The Fourth Way, and, 5. for now, Don Quixote.

A critic, in passing, mentioned off-hand that Don Quixote had the 'cosmic' in it. It's also one of the seven or so great novels I have listed to read. I read an abridged version many years ago, but don't remember it. I wasn't awake when I read it. Interestingly when I read War and Peace many years ago I was awake, because I remember that work and the reading experience.

The books listed above are in the history, imaginative literature, philosophy, and sacred writings template. The Boston work is history (the ultimate history, the history of redemption). Bunyan is imaginative literature, and the Work fills in for philosophy. The Bible for sacred writings. They all have the advantage of being Christian works, so no mixed language like if I included a pagan work or something.

The Boston and Bunyan books were folk classics in their day.

I've already written all this before, but...

I think a very sound 10 book list of great novels is this:

Don Quixote
Tom Jones*
Moby Dick
War and Peace*
Anna Karenina
Brothers Karamazov
Vanity Fair*
Middlemarch
Ulysses
Magic Mountain

I've only read, complete, three of them!