Our coach from the accommodation to the conference venue left at 8.10am for opening worship at 8.30, leading directly into a first session. We had a coffee break of half an hour at 10.30, lunch at 1.00 (for an hour… but in my case involving a meeting ), and another coffee break of half an hour at 3.30… but we’ve only just got back to the Lodge now (admittedly after a formal dinner at a prestigous local restaurant) at 10.00pm oui time. We certainly know that the Congress has begun.
The first main session was an overview of what was an important year last year in the world of Calvin scholarship. 2009 was the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth, and all kinds of events (conferences, exhibitions etc) and publications (about twenty new biographies alone!) were arranged to mark the occasion. The speaker gave us a summary of what had happened, laced with humour and salted with some wise reflections on what it all might or might not amount to. It was good to hear her emphasise that, just like all the prominent figures in the Bible, Calvin should always be remembered warts and all – he was, after all, the most vigorous preacher of the grace of God, and was fully aware of his own weaknesses and shortcomings. Among anniversary conference venues in 2009, many were predictable: Geneva, Belfast, Pretoria, Dordrecht. But others were less so: St Petersburg, Seville – and Beirut, even! We laughed at the news that a piece of public sculpture (a bust, in fact) has even been erected to mark Calvin’s cutlural contribution in… Havana, Cuba; and at the news that the American Postal Service issued commemorative stamps last year, to acknowledge the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, Gary Cooper and Bob Hope… but not John Calvin.
There was a substantial paper on Calvin’s understanding of reconciliation (a loaded subject in this part of the world). The paper was given in German, and I’m afraid that in common with some others I was unduly distracted by the poverty of the English translation which had been prepared for those who did not wish to rely on their German. It was comical – some splendid typos like ‘tree positions’ instead of ‘three’ and ‘dump symbols’ instead of dumb; as well as some very clumsy, clunky English sentences: ‘Like this were to clarify, how itself that the holiness of the Christian Church in the life of reflecting their mutuality and were to do’. Even given the tortuous nature of theological German, it’s gobbledegook!
Not wishing to gloss over a very competent introduction to Calvin’s early formulations of a doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, a highlight of the day for me was a paper looking at Calvin’s whole work as standing in continuity with the medieval and patristic monastic tradition. It’s a counter intuitive idea, because Calvin had some trenchant criticisms to make of the monastic orders of his own day. But the speaker made a good case that Calvin was attempting to take the monastic life out of the monastery (or at least to plunder the monastic treasury) and make it accessible to ordinary Christian believers – he coined the nice phrase ‘the Monkhood of All Believers’. He pointed out Calvin’s commitment to Psalm singing by lectionary calendar (we had done some of that, lustily, in our opening worship, in the Genevan style), and to a daily pattern of prayer at set times (or at least set occasions, rather like the monastic office). He emphasised Calvin’s view that all Christians have a high vocation and, given the degree of accountability of citizens in Geneva to the authorities for their behaviour, posed the idea that Calvin functioned as a bit of a secular abbot. I found it thought provoking, I must say.
This evening we’ve enjoyed an official conference dinner, hosted by the Rector of the University (the Vice Chancellor). He is a remarkable man… Prof Jonathan Jansen. (He told us his father is Abraham, and his mother is Sarah and that all his brothers and sisters, like himself, have biblical forenames… except one, ‘and he’s the only decent one among us’.) He told us how he had abandoned a Christian faith as a teenager to join the struggle to end apartheid (because the church, classically, kept telling him not to engage in politics but to remember his ‘citizenship is in heaven’), only to find that the anger he developed became a liability to him in later years. ‘I’m ashamed to tell you this today’, he said, ‘but I came to hate white people’. But he subsequently came (through a journey that introduced him to Liberation Theology and Black Theology) to realise that he himself stood in need of forgiveness and of the presence of God in his life, that it was only in being forgiven that he found a capacity to forgive. It was an inspiring speech from a man with a touch of Mandela about him.
The only drawback was that the venue was c-c-c-c-cold. It’s the end of winter here. The climate is very predictable and all three days we’ve had clear blue skies, lots of sunshine and temperatures in the middle of the day in the early 20s. But in the early mornings and in the evenings and overnight, it is cold. It dips to freezing point in fact. And most of us had dressed for the conference day, not for the dinner – or had assumed that the dinner would be in a well-heated venue. But we were in an usual place out in the countryside outside Bloemfontein, in a wooden structure with thin walls. It was pretty, but not warm… and even the large open fire in the downstairs courtyard only thawed out our feet before we got on the coach to return to our lodging. My heating is on full blast tonight and I can gradually feel the blood in my feet unfreezing!
Oh, and the crocodile was a disappointment. He looks very sorry for himself, like any wild animal in captivity. He lies in his pool, which is heavily fenced in, and barely moves. Why should he? His food is tossed to him daily, and in any case, there’s nowhere to go. Must be a parable of something.
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