Oldal 253 [253]
A CALVINIST APOLOGETIC FROM THE FICTION AND
ESSAYS OF OUR TIME
——o—
PÉTER PÁSZTOR
“The requiring of an implicit faith, and an abso¬
lute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of
conscience, and reason also.”
Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter XX. 2
Calvinism has not fared well in the Zeitgeist even though a number of tower¬
ing figures, the likes of Karl Barth (1886-1968) and Paul Ricoeur (1903-2005),
have left ineluctable oeuvres for many generations to ponder. Indeed, in spite of
being the most coherent and consistent formulation of the Reformation concept
that there is no authority over conscience other than the Word of God, it has
come to be regarded as just another form of totalitarianism, alongside Nazism
and Communism, as the historian of ideas Richard Webster claimed.’ Perhaps
the reason has not so much to do with modernist individualism and scepticism
being able to marshal stronger forces, but with Calvinism’s becoming reserved,
self-effacing and inward-turning in the clatter.
Whatever the case, it has recently found a major defence in the slowly, un¬
pretentiously and thoughtfully unfolding work of the American novelist and
essayist Marilynne Robinson. It might sound rather benumbing, a misnomer, to
dub an imaginative, belletristic enterprise as Calvinist apologetics, but justify¬
ing religion has a pivotal role in both the fiction and essay writing of Robinson.
Without a doubt, in her understated manner, her essays attempt no less thana
re-furnishing of Protestantism, Calvinism in particular, with the intellectual
poignancy it used to bear in Western thought and imagination. Several of
her essays are polemics for religion and against atheism. This is the very stuff
of apologetics, Calvinist apologetics in her case. However, we are justified in
1 WEBSTER, Richard, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and ‘The Satanic Verses’,
Southwold, Orwell Press, 1990, 32-34.