Reflections on The Institutes: Out of the Labyrinth
Written by Michael Worrall
In chapter 5 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin is pointing out that God makes himself known to mankind through both fashioning and governing the universe. After ten paragraphs detailing how God’s wisdom, creativity, sovereignty, and judgment are revealed in his sustained creation, Calvin pivots to show how despite all of this mankind still wanders away into confusion and fails to worship God. He says, “For each man’s mind is like a labyrinth, so that it is no wonder that individual nations were drawn aside into various falsehoods; and not only this - but individual men, almost, had their own gods.”
The problem, Calvin says, is not that God has failed to reveal himself, but that our minds are labyrinths filled with twists and turns and dead-ends. Our thoughts, which ought to be stayed on God, can’t escape our own heads. He concludes that this trapped, rattling mental life doesn’t just lead individual men and women into falsehood and confusion, but entire nations. Calvin isn’t surprised that individual confusion and falsehood has corporate consequences, he assumes it!
This is fascinating to me in our cultural moment where systemic sin is being debated. Why is it so hard for us to believe that our nation is still staggering from the drunkenness of slavery and segregation? Why is it so hard for us to believe that our businesses, communities, courts, and churches have been “drawn aside into various falsehoods” like arrogance, greed and injustice? It seems corporate and systemic sin (at least idolatry) aren’t up for debate in Calvin’s mind. If individual men are confused in their own minds “it is no wonder” that the nations, communities, and organizations they make up will be led into similar confusion and falsehood.
Fortunately, God doesn’t leave us lost in the maze of our minds, wandering forever into confusion. “We must come,” Calvin says, “to the Word, where God is truly and vividly described to us from his works...If we turn aside from the Word, as I have just now said, though we may strive with strenuous haste, yet, since we have got off track, we shall never reach the goal. For...the divine countenance... is for us like an inexplicable labyrinth unless we are conducted into it by the thread of the Word; so that it is better to limp along this path than to dash with all speed outside it.”
The way out of our falsehood and into intimate knowledge of God is to be “conducted into [God’s presence] by the thread of the Word.” There we see God “truly and vividly described to us from his works.” Perhaps we have been “[striving] with strenuous haste” on the tracks of progress, status, and self-righteousness when what is needed is to stop, backtrack, and “limp along” the way of Jesus in confession, repentance, and neighborly love.