Calvinism and Chosenness

John Milbank’s opening essay in the recently-released Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition (edited by James KA Smith and James Olthuis) is a challenging critique of Calvin and the Reformed tradition, one that I hope to interact with more in the future.

One particularly striking passage had to do with how the conception of the relation of Old and New affected racial conceptions within Calvinism. Milbank contrasts Calvin’s view that the “old alliance [was] salvific in its own right” to the Catholic view that the old covenant foreshadowed and proleptically shared in the new covenant: “It is already for Calvin as if God provides a way for Gentiles to be Jews, rather than the notion that the Jews proleptically participated in a universally human salvation,” which latter conception is “the only possible nonracist theology.”

He goes on: “It is not an accident that Calvinism’s tendency to think that God made ‘new Jews’ led sometimes to racism in Calvinist thought – especially in the case of South Africa and in the United States South where the theological undergirding of racism was overwhelmingly Calvinist (and no so much Baptist). One could mention also Northern Ireland. This incidence of racism has then a tradically ironic relationship to a laudable absence of anti-Semitism, since it is grounded in a certain kind of Philo-Semitism.”

In my opinion, Calvin is closer to the “Catholic” position than Milbank lets on, but the portrait he draws of certain strands of later Calvinism rings true. And I suspect it’s not only bound up with Old-New, but also with construals of covenant of works-covenant of grace.