Good and right are defined in terms of what God commands...

Good and right are defined in terms of what God commands; and the tautologous character of “It is right to obey God” and “God is good” is not thought to be a defect, but rather to redound to God’s glory. “God is all-powerful” remains, of course, a synthetic proposition; what God can do is all that the most powerful man can do and far more. So God is not only an omnipotence, but an arbitrary omnipotence.

Aquinas had almost civilized Jahweh into an Aristotelian; Luther turns him into Nobodaddy for good. And at this point the resemblances between Luther and Calvin are more important than the differences.

For, firstly, Calvin too presents a God of whose goodness we cannot judge and whose commandments we cannot interpret as designed to bring us to the τέλος to which our own desires point; as with Luther, so with Calvin, we have to hope for grace that we may be justified and forgiven for our inability to obey the arbitrary fiats of a cosmic despot. Secondly, even where Calvin appears most at odds with Luther, in his treatment of the realm of the secular, there is an inner identity. Luther took St.

Paul’s attitude to the bureaucrats of the Roman empire as the model for his own attitude to the Elector of Saxony; Calvin took the attitude of the prophets to the kings of Israel and Judah as his model in dealing with the magistrates of Geneva. But although Calvin’s theocracy makes clergy sovereign over princes, it sanctions the autonomy of secular activity at every level where morals and religious practice do not directly conflict with such activity.

Provided that sex is restrained within the bounds of marriage and that churchgoing is enforced on Sundays, political and economic activity can proceed effectively unchecked by any sanctions whatsoever. Only the most obviously outrageous are ever condemned, and the history of Calvinism is the history of the progressive realization of the autonomy of the economic.

Luther, like Calvin, bifurcated morality; there are on the one hand the absolutely unquestionable commandments, which are, so far as human reason and desires are concerned, arbitrary and contextless, and on the other hand, there are the self-justifying rules of the political and economic order. “The individual” is the subject of both realms; individual precisely because he is defined as against the God who creates him and as against the political and economic order to which he is subordinated.

“For the first time,” wrote J. N.