Beeson podcast, Episode 405
Dr. Timothy George
August 14, 2018

Announcer:	Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.
Kristen Padilla:	Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. I'm Kristen Padilla, the producer of the podcast, sitting in for Dr. George for a very special reason. Because today we are featuring a lecture Dr. Timothy George gave at Beeson Divinity School back in November 2017 for our 29th annual Reformation Heritage Lectures. 
	The lecture we are going to hear him give today is the third lecture that he gave on “Calvin: A Reformer for Our Time,” in which he talked about Calvin as a theologian on the frontier. It was excellent and I'm thrilled that you get to listen to it today. 
	I'm sitting here with my friend and colleague, Dr. Robert Smith. Dr. Smith, will you tell our listeners a little bit more about Dr. George?
Robert Smith Jr:	Timothy George has been the dean of Beeson Divinity School since its inception in 1988. As founding dean, he has been instrumental in shaping its character and mission. In addition to his administrative responsibilities, George teaches church history and doctrine.
Kristen Padilla:	Let us go now to Hodges Chapel, where we will hear from Dr. Timothy George, “Calvin: A Reformer for Our Time.”
Timothy George:	Good morning ladies and gentleman, brothers and sisters, I'm glad you've come back for the third installment in this series on the Reformation. Few figures in Christian history have been so highly esteemed, or so meanly despised as the shy French lawyer who became not only one of the greatest theological geniuses of the Reformation, second only to Luther, I'd say, but also as he has been called, the founder of a new civilization. Calvin is complicated. Some have gone so far as to depict him as the greatest teacher of Christian doctrine since the apostle Paul, and also a near infallible guide in every area of human endeavor from art and architecture to politics and economics, but his detractors have been vocal and numerous. Many of them think of him as the cruel tyrant of Geneva, a morose, bitter, and utterly inhuman figure. This didn't start in recent times. In the 16th century he was a polarizing figure too. Some people in Geneva who didn't like Calvin or his reformation decided that they would take out two letters of his name. And so instead of Calvin he becomes Cain. Taking out the two middle consonants in his name. 
	In our own time, a little closer to home, television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart has alleged that Calvin has caused untold millions of souls to be damned.  More often than not, however, Calvin has simply been ignored, especially by his cultured despisers. One of the great writers of our time, Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who tries her best to rescue Calvin a little bit from his detractors, reports that she has encountered an odd sort of social pressure. "As often as I have mentioned his name, one does not read Calvin," she said, "One does not even think about reading Calvin. Calvin seems to be neglected on principle."
	Why does Calvin still generate such contrary emotions? What has kept Calvin from fading into the shadows of church history as so many other people have done from the past? 
	What I want to do today is give you a little bit of an overview, just a brief overview of his context. I'm not going to say very much about his life and biography, though that's interesting too, but I want to talk a little bit up front about his context, when he came, when he did in the reformation story, and then I want to look at four principles I think that undergird Calvin's theology and in particular his view of ministry and what that says to us. And so I entitled this lecture, John Calvin: A Reformer for Our Time. A reformer for today.
	So we begin with an oft noted fact that Calvin was a second generation reformer. He was barely eight years old when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the Castle Church door at Wittenberg. He was born in the cathedral city of Noyon. That's about 55 miles to the northeast of Paris. His father was something of an administrative assistant to the bishop and he pulled strings in order to acquire a benefice for his obviously very bright and precocious son, young John Calvin. This benefice was kind of like a scholarship. It actually was an office in the church and Calvin was assigned to be, even when he was barely 12 years old, assigned to be in charge of a chapel on the edge of town, but he didn't do anything. That's the way these benefices work. You hire a flunky priest to go and do your duty while you take the lion's share of the money. And so Calvin entered the stream of religious life through one of the great abuses of the late medieval church. 
	This receiving of a benefice, what it allowed him to do was to go to the University of Paris. Become a student. And there he studied at the College de Montaigu, the same school Erasmus had studied at earlier and that Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, was also studying there about the same time Calvin was. I haven't been able to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I think it's fascinating to just speculate with some reason, that maybe John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola were eating the same bad cafeteria food at the same time and maybe using the same books and the same library at the same time. These two great protagonists of the second generation of the Reformation. 
	So when Calvin joined the Protestant cause in the 1530s, again we're not sure exactly when or how that happened because he doesn't tell us very much about it. But it was in the early 1530s, and at that point the Reformation movement seemed to be falling apart. Erasmus and Luther had famously quarreled over the bondage of the will, driving a wedge not just between those two figures, but really between the two movements they represented: Humanism on the one hand and Reformation on the other. Luther and Zwingli had quarreled bitterly over the Lord's Supper at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529. Two years later Zwingli was dead, having been killed on the battlefield of Kappel. When Luther heard about this back in Wittenberg he made a rather ungenerous remark. "It's a well merited end for such a heretic." And of course there was the Peasant's War of 1525, and by the 1530s the bloody debacle in the city of Munster, which discredited Anabaptism as a force of constructive reform. When you said Anabaptist in the 1530s and subsequently for a century or more, you didn't think about the pacifistic Anabaptists, like Michael Sadler, the Swiss Brethren, not bearing the sword, not taking the oath, living peacefully in your covenanted community. 
	You didn't think about any of that, you thought about Munster. You thought about the horrible debacle of that city as people were slaughtered and killed within the city, and then later in one of the few ecumenical adventures of the 16th century, Catholics and Protestants alike joined armed forces to conquer that city and put down the Anabaptist movement there. All of this was happening when John Calvin became identified with the Reform movement. So it's this precise moment. Zwingli is dead, Erasmus is dying. Luther is quiescent if not quiet. The Roman Church is resurgent, the radical reformation is fragmented and discredited. At this precise moment, John Calvin emerges as the leader of a new movement, and the reformulator of a new theology. That isn't quite right. Not really a new theology. But the theology of Martin Luther repackaged in a new way and given new life in a different setting, an urban city setting. 
	Well, that's about all I want to say in terms of the context of Calvin. There's much more we could say, but that's enough to show you, he comes along a little later than Luther, at a different moment in the history of the Reformation, and that is going to shape the way he will do his work to a significant extent.
	Now I want to turn to the second part of this lecture, and that is the four major points that seem to me to characterize Calvin as a reformer, Calvin as a theologian, Calvin as a reformer for our time as well. 
	The first point is to see Calvin as a theologian of the frontier. A frontier theologian. Bernard Cottret, French scholar, has written I think one of the best biographies of Calvin in recent generations, and he points out that all of the major cities in which Calvin lived during the formative years of his ministry as a teacher of the church, they were all frontier cities. Basel on the Rhine River, Strasbourg a little further to the north. Geneva itself. Now, we think of Geneva today of course as a part of Switzerland. It is a part of Switzerland, sort of, but they've never quite given up their fierce Genevan independence. When you visit Geneva today you see the building that houses the Genevan church, the Swiss Reformed Church of Geneva. It's called Eglise Nationale Geneva. The National Church of Geneva. They're very proud of their Genevan independence. That became a problem for Calvin once he moved there, because he was not Genevan. He was French speaking, French by culture, but he was French and not Genevan. That was a problem for the people in Geneva. 
	But it was a border town. It was a frontier city. And it was squeezed in between the great country of France on the one hand and the Swiss Cantons on the other, in particular, Bern, which was not very far geographically from Geneva, which had a great conflict with Geneva in the 16th century, and the Duchy of Savoy down toward Italy. Geneva is sort of squeezed into the intersection of these three polities. 
	Now what does it mean to say that Calvin was a frontier theologian? Another one of his biographers, William Bouwsma, has found in this fact Calvin's sense of displacement and homelessness. He never really had a home. Remember back to Erasmus, wandering from place to place, that was true to some extent of Calvin as well, even though he lived in a city for a number of years he never really was fully accepted there, only became a citizen of Geneva about four years before his death. And Bouwsma says, this goes all the way back to his early childhood to the fact that he was never really close to his father. Unlike Luther here. Now Luther had his problems with his father, we all know that, but in a sense, he reconciled with his father and brought both his father and his mother to Wittenberg to live out their later days. 
	Not so Calvin. There was this frostiness with his father until his death in 1535. Also the fact that his mother had died when he was only four or five years old. So he grows up kind of cared for by other people who were kind to him and shower him with many wonderful gifts, but never has that sense of really belonging. This homelessness, this sense of displacement, this longing for a country to which he could never return, France.
	Well, this also ties in to another major motif in Calvin. This is all a part of the first point I'm making about him being on the frontier, and that is, his reformation was a reformation for refugees. He himself was a refugee, fleeing France, fleeing persecution when he joins the Protestant movement to start with.
	One of my great teachers was Heiko Oberman, and he gave our Reformation Lectures here some years ago before his death, and one of his lectures was on John Calvin. He talks about the Reformation essentially being divided between two different types. He called them trekkers and settlers. Well, the trekkers are those who are scattered, who are on the move, they're traveling, they're displaced, they're often refugees. The settlers are those who are more settled, polity, particularly in the territories of Germany and Scandinavia where Lutheranism is so very strong, but it was the followers of John Calvin in particular who became the great trekkers of the 16th century. The great trekkers of the Protestant message throughout all of Europe, and really internationally. They trekked to Holland, from Holland to Hungary, from Hungary to Poland, from the churches of London to the reformers of Lithuania. Knox was in Scotland. And in 1555 from Geneva there went out a mission for Brazil led by Admiral de Coligny. They wanted to get the gospel to the far ends of the earth and were insistent upon doing it. 
	Well, Calvinism has been compared, maybe with some justification, to Bolshevism in the early 20th century. Bolshevism which was formulated by Lenin and others, but became a kind of international coterie of folks. And that was true of Calvin and his followers as well. They were not settlers by and large, they were trekkers, and a very different understanding of ministry came out of that fact. They were trekkers, moving out from their city in Geneva and Zurich, and Strasbourg, and London unto the four corners of the world. I would not call Calvin a founder of the new civilization. That's Emile Leonard’s term. I see him more as a purveyor of a discontinuous tradition, namely the tradition of Catholic Christianity in which he was deeply committed and believed that he was called to lead the church back to that important place. And so if you can think about comparing Calvin to the middle ages, more continuity between the Mendicant friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans who broke with the tradition of Benedictine monasticism. If you visited a Benedictine monastery today, one of the places you must always go to see is the cemetery, because everybody in the monastery has a place in the cemetery. That's where you live, that's where you die, that's where you're buried, that's where you're remembered. You have a place. And they called that stabilitas. Stabilitas loci. The stability of place. 
	Well, the great motif of the reformed Calvinist tradition was not stabilitas, but mobilitas. Movement. Mobility. And so Calvin, as a theologian of the frontier I think ought to help us to see him and his historical significance as ... I'm going to use a word I like now, but apparently nobody else does ... a horizonal figure. I've used that word in so many essays, and editors scratch it out. Oh, he's making a mistake, old George, and they put horizontal. There's a difference between horizonal and horizontal. If somebody's horizontal they're dead! Horizonal is different. It means you're moving toward the horizon. You're directed to the future. And I think that's true of John Calvin and his reformation. He was a horizonal reformer. Now that's the first point I want to make. Calvin and the reformation of the refugees, Calvin as a horizonal reformer. 
	Now I want to come to my second point. Calvin's view of ministry as a calling rather than a profession, a calling rather than a profession. Of course, Calvin had a profession. He was a lawyer. We know that Luther in defiance of his father gave up the study of law to become a theologian, whereas Calvin in obedience to his father gave up the study of theology to become a lawyer. And maybe that tells us something about the nuance of difference between these two great figures and the basic life decisions they made. But Calvin was not only a reformer, as I've said, of the second generation. He was also a reformer of the second occupation. And he describes this in terms of a divine summons, a calling. We know that famous phrase he uses in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms from 1557. One of the very few autobiographical references that Calvin ever makes about himself and his experience, in which he says, "It was by a sudden conversion, a subita conversio, that God changed his heart and turned his direction and reoriented his affections so that he became, as he puts it, docile, docilitas, teachable. That's the key word in the reform tradition. Teachable.
	Now, we shouldn't get hung you on this word, sudden, as though it's a flash of lightening, a split second. Rather, the language Calvin uses in Latin is [foreign 00:22:13], beyond all hope, beyond all expectation. This is how he described his conversion. He says at one point, Guillaume Farel, burning with a wondrous zeal to advance the gospel set all of his efforts at keeping me in Geneva, although I was determined to pursue my own private studies. When he realized, Farel realized, “he would get nowhere by his pleas he came to the point of a curse, that it would please God to curse my leisure and quiet in my studies that I was seeking. If in such a grave emergency, the situation in Geneva, I should withdraw and refuse to give aid and help, this word so overwhelmed me that I desisted from the journey I had undertaken.” He stayed in Geneva, he became a reformer. Overwhelmed beyond all expectation he became a reader in Holy Scripture to the church in Geneva. And though he took on many duties over the years besides that, his primary vocation remained that of a pastor and teacher, even though, as I pointed out, he never really felt at home in that city that he had adopted, that never quite adopted him.
	So when he talks about this calling, ministry is a calling, not a profession, he does it in very theological terms. The best place to read this is not his autobiographical vignette, though that's important, but go to his commentary on Galatians chapter one, where Paul is describing his own conversion, which is at one and the same time, a calling. And I think it's good to see Calvin in very much the same way. His conversion was also a calling, and there's not very much space between the two. And it consists, as he says in his commentary on Galatians, commenting on Paul's statement about himself, that he was called like Jeremiah, before he was born in his mother's womb. He relates it to three steps. One, the eternal predestination of God in which our calling is rooted. Two, that separation from the womb, again quoting Jeremiah, in which God has dealt with us in this life historically by placing us here as opposed to there. And three, this calling which comes to us from beyond ourselves and is, Calvin says, the effect and the fruit of both of these other steps. God's electing grace in Christ and his placing us in history at a certain time with a certain charge to keep.
	And so Calvin talks about this in terms of predestination, and I can't give a lecture on Calvin without saying a word about that, can I? Not much, just a little. Mark Twain has Huckleberry Finn refer to a perplexing Calvinist sermon he once heard on what he calls preforeordestination. Preforeordestination. Well, the most important thing to say about Calvin's doctrine of predestination is how totally normal and not unusual it was at all. He was in very large agreement with figures like St. Augustine, whom he quotes more than anyone else in the institutes other than the Bible. Thomas Aquinas. Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. Thomas Aquinas was also an Augustinian, especially in his later writings in the Summa. Calvin is tracking Aquinas here. 
	One of our graduates from Beeson Divinity School, Dr. Chad Raith, did a PhD comparing Aquinas and Calvin and their commentaries on Romans. Amazingly similar. Some differences, but amazingly similar. He was tracking also Luther of course. So he was not very original. He did teach that God was sovereign in salvation, no less than creation, and that divine election was entirely gratuitous, ante praevisa merita as the scholastic tag went, not based on God's foreknowledge of human achievement, not based on any merits that we have or can ever do, but surely and solely out of God's grace. And he taught this not because he was a dour despot, or he wanted to make people more miserable than they already were, but he taught it because he thought he found it clearly taught in Holy Scripture. But it's wrong to place predestination, I think, at the center of everything Calvin taught and believed. It's not an a priori metaphysical axiom from which everything else flows. If there is a center to Calvin's theology, and that's highly debated among Calvin scholars, it's probably closer to being something like union with Jesus Christ than it is the doctrine of predestination. It had a Christological focus for him. So Jesus Christ is the speculum elexionus, the mirror of election. And it also had a pastoral import. 
	In discussing predestination of book three of the institutes, Calvin follows closely the method of Paul in the letter to Romans. It's good advice for all Calvinists, if I might say so. Some Calvinists begin right there in the middle of chapter nine. Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated. Why did the thing say to the one who made it, why'd you make me that? That's not where Calvin, or Luther either for that matter, starts. They start where Paul does, in chapter one. And in Romans chapter one, what is Paul doing? Well, he's talking about what we might call general revelation. He's talking about the doctrine of creation. He's talking about the fact that God is our maker, the one to whom we are accountable. You begin with God's general revelation and creation, and in the conscience, Romans one. 
	This leads Paul on to a discussion of human sinfulness in chapters two and three. And then to God's atoning work in Christ and justification by faith, chapters four through seven. Followed by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit and the declaration of God's unfathomable love in chapter eight. Coming to a crescendo on those great verses at the end of chapter eight, "What can separate us from the love of God? Nothing in heaven, on earth, under the earth, made, unmade can ever separate us from the love of God." Only then, when you have slowly and carefully and assiduously worked yourself from the beginning of chapter one to the end of chapter eight in Romans are you ready to consider the theme of God's electing grace in the history of Israel and in our own lives. That's chapters nine to 11. 
	And then when you very closely and carefully and assiduously worked yourself through those deep waters, you come to the end of chapter 11. And how does chapter 11 of Romans end? "Oh, the mystery. Oh, the depth. Who can understand it? Were you there when God made the stars?" That great pion of doxology that you get at the end of chapter 11. Who can fathom it? Who can understand it? Which is just a more refined, sophisticated way of saying, we'll understand it better by and by. Or as Charles Wesley put it in one of the great hymns of the Christian faith, Amazing love, how can it be that thou, My God, shouldst die for me? That's a better way to do predestination. That's Calvin's way of doing predestination, particularly in his commentary on Romans as well as in book three of the institutes. The elect are not the elite, and we have to be really careful not to act sometimes as though we were.
	So Calvin walks onto the stage of history as a person under compulsion. Reluctant to take center stage. Many times he will speak about Geneva being an abyss. I'd rather take up 10,000 crosses, he says, then go back there. And you never really understand, I think, Calvin, without fully hearing that reticence, that hesitance, that shyness, that bashfulness, whatever you want to call it, not wanting to be center stage but compelled to do the duty he believed God had given him. Not in his profession, but in his calling. But it was not a calling without a sense of self doubt. I say that even though the evidence for it is rather slender because Calvin so disliked any form of self disclosure. We don't find in Calvin the sort of robust hand to hand combat with the devil, the [foreign 00:32:55] that we see in Luther. 
	But sometime, read a letter that Calvin wrote. The correspondence between Calvin and Louis du Tillet. Louis du Tillet in 1538. At that point Calvin had been expelled from Geneva, he had conflict with the city counsel, they kick him and Farel both out of the city. He's on the road. He's not yet settled in Strausberg. That's where he'll spend the next three years of his life, the happiest years of his life where he gets married, he's a pastor of a church, Strausberg. But he's not in Strausberg yet, he's on the road, no doubt experiencing great personal distress. And he gets this letter from Louis du Tillet. Who was Louis du Tillet? Well, he was, I would say he was Calvin's closest friend at that point. They had known one another in France before Calvin ever came to Geneva. He and his family had welcomed Calvin into their home as a shelter, as a refuge when he was fleeing persecution in France. They had read the scriptures together, they had prayed together. That was his best chum, Louis du Tillet. 
	But now du Tillet is thinking, should really I have embraced the reformation or not? You gotta think about this. There were a lot of people that said yes to the reformation and then had second thoughts about it. And they went a different way. And Louis du Tillet was one of those. It was right at that moment in his life when he was reconsidering, do I want to stay with Calvin and these reformers, or go back to the Catholic church, which he did eventually. And so he writes this letter to Calvin and he casts aspersions, questions about the authenticity of Calvin's own calling. I mean, you read Calvin's response to what his best friend was saying, putting a question mark on his life and calling. It stung him briefly, and that question haunted him for a long time. For Luther, the question was are you alone wise? Who are you to go against 1500 years of the tradition of the church? Are you alone wise? For Calvin the question was, was I really called? Was it God who led me to that abyss of Geneva, or was it something else? So he doesn't have this calling in a robust way that does not also include some doubts. 
	And later on in the institutes when he's talking about faith he will say there's no such thing as genuine faith that is untinged by doubt. That comes from John Calvin, not Kierkegaard. Not somebody else that you might think of, sort of an existentialist, it comes from John Calvin because he understood that a real faith is a faith that has been through the fire. That's been tested. Burnished in the oven of experience and comes through on the other side, firm in its confidence in Jesus Christ. 
	Well, let me go on to point number three. I want to leave a little time for questions today. The church is a community of grace sustained by word and sacrament. The reformation was an ecclesial event. It wasn't just a matter of individual faith and belief in Jesus. That was part of it, of course, but it was more and deeper than that. It was what Bonhoeffer would characterize as life together, life in community, life in covenant. Those are important things and important words for John Calvin. A community of grace sustained by word and sacrament. I'm not going to say any more about Calvin's preaching. I've alluded to that in the first lecture when we were talking primarily about Luther but also Calvin, preaching as a means of grace it was, but I want to particularly for moment put the spotlight on Calvin's desire for the Lord's supper to be central in the life and worship of the church. Celebrated he thought, every week. Now, I've heard pastors complain about that. Every week? Well, it'll just become old hat. But they never say that about the offering. We do that every week. It never gets old, we just keep on doing it.
	Calvin wanted the Lord's supper to be every Sunday. Now, that's different from Zwingli. Zwingli was happy for the Lord's supper to be celebrated as infrequently as possible. They eventually came up with a scheme in Zurich of four times a year. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and the feast of the two patron saints of Zurich, Felix and Regula. Those four times the Eucharist was celebrated in reformed reformational Zurich. Calvin thought, that's not good enough. So he pleaded, he lobbied, he argued that in Geneva the Lord's supper should be celebrated every week. As a matter of fact, he did not get his way with that request. The city counsel refused to do it, and set up the same patter they had in Zurich four times a year. And in the baptist, the good Southern Baptist Church I grew up in, that's how often we did it. Four times a year. Why? Where in the Bible does it say that? Well, it doesn't say that in the Bible. We get that pattern from the city counsel mandate of Geneva and Zurich, a very umbilical standard. Calvin says we need to be celebrate the Lord's supper because it's not just a ritual, it is a manifestation of the real presence of Christ in our midst. 
	Zwingli had a saying about the Lord's Supper, [inaudible 00:40:01]. To eat is to believe. And so we remember what Jesus did for us on the cross, we're grateful for that, and we celebrate that. So eating is believing.  [inaudible 00:40:15]. Well, Calvin agreed with that of course, but he said there's more than that too. There's something else going on there. Eating is not merely believing. It's something that includes believing but it's also an experience, an encounter with Jesus Christ in a way that we don't find just walking along the sidewalk or going to the shopping mall, or having fellowship with somebody over coffee. We lift up our hearts unto the Lord. The name for this in the traditional liturgy is [inaudible 00:40:54]. And here there's a little different take between Calvin and Luther. He does not expect Luther's doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's body. 
	He says, in the Lord's supper we don't bring Christ down from heaven and encase him in the corporeal elements of bread and wine. Rather, when we come to the table of the Lord, by the power of the holy spirit our hearts are lifted up. [inaudible 00:41:25]. We lift up our hearts. Let us lift up our hearts. We lift them up to the Lord. And that's why communion really takes place, in the heavenlies. Isn't that what Paul is talking about in Ephesians chapter one? For God has made us to sit together with Jesus Christ in the heavenly places? He's not saying this is at the end of time and the great kingdom of heaven that is prepared for us for all ... It's happening right now. And one instance of that is when we come to the table of the Lord, which is one of the means of grace, along with preaching. So Luther again gives the word that Calvin follows here, the true marks of the church are the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. 
	One more point. [inaudible 00:42:28]. Lift up your hearts. Leads me to this point to think about Calvin as the reformer of the long view. What do I mean by that? This upward view. Lift up your hearts. This meditation on the future life. If you want to read something in the institutes that's really just edifying, you don't want to wade through all 2000 pages, go to that section where Calvin is talking about [inaudible 00:42:55], meditation on the future life. So rich, so deep, because he was a reformer with a long view. He knew that history did not terminate on itself. That God was up to something in this world that none of us may every see the conclusion of. Now, most of you who are here today are younger than I am. A few of you, a very few, may have a few years and miles on me, but there will come a time when none of us will be in this chapel, in this school, in this city, in this world. We need to take that on and understand it, that we are not meant to live here in this world forever and ever and ever and ever, but that God has prepared a place for us in the heavenlies, where Jesus Christ waits. I've gone away to prepare a place for you. And if I go away I will come again and receive you unto myself. 
	Calvin had this sense of eschatological magnetism of the gospel. It pulls us forward to that time when bd shall wipe away all tears. There'll be no more sorrow, no more crying, no more death, no more pain, and we will need no lights, for Christ himself will be the light, the sun in that place.
	Well, to those who ask what will happen to the world, we answer well, his kingdom is coming. To those who ask, what is before us, we answer the king stands before us. To those who ask, what may we expect, we answer, we are not standing before a pathless wilderness of unfulfilled time with a goal which no one would dare to predict. We are gazing, rather, upon our living Lord. Our judge, our savior, who was dead but now lives for evermore. We are gazing upon the one who has come and is coming, and will come to rain forever. It may be that we shall suffer affliction in this world. Yes, that we must if we want to participate in him, that we know that his work and his royal word will not fail whatever the affliction. So be comforted saints. Jesus says, "I have overcome the worlds." Because this is true, because this is rooted in the gospel, we can take the long view. This is the ministry and the theology of Calvin and it's worth thinking about and taking on board in this world of ours.
	Thank you very much.
Announcer:	You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host, Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational evangelical divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work and we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of the Beeson podcast.