REFLECTING ON THE DRAWING OF THEOLOGICAL LINES

Buried deep below the choir of St. Peter’s church in Geneva, John Calvin’s church, is a well-preserved burial shrine for an ancient pagan chieftain of the 1^st century BCE Allobrogian people. The site was discovered in the 1970s when St. Peter’s excavated below the cathedral to install a new heating system. What they discovered was that St. Peter’s was sacred long before it was Christian. The present cathedral, dating to the 12^th CE century, was built over the religious aspirations of other peoples stretching back at least to the 12^th century BCE. People have for a long time been reaching toward heaven on St. Peter’s hill.

I find it a delicious irony that as Calvin preached his severe gospel in St. Peter’s, lying below his pulpit were the remains of an earlier pagan faith. Perhaps the irony is not so much for Calvin the man as for Calvin the symbol: Calvin for Calvinists. Calvin, after all, had read ancient pagan writers with some sympathy. He wrote a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, and although later in The Institutes he could be scathing about the ancient pagans, he presumably had some appreciation for the authors he had read. I suspect Calvin would not have been entirely surprised that under St. Peter’s was a pagan shrine. He wrote of the “seed of religion” that lies in every human heart. Religion for Calvin is the universal human response to all that calls us in the direction of God. We are drawn by God in a Godward direction.

What might not have occurred to Calvin—or at least to his successors—is what we might learn from the buried chieftain, were he able to tell us what he believed. We were taught to draw lines. Indeed, one of the principal functions of the theology I learned as a boy was the drawing of lines. With apologies to Robert Frost, the work of theology seemed to be the making and mending of walls. We drew lines, of course, between other religions and ourselves, although this seldom came up, since we didn’t know anyone of another religion. We drew lines between Roman Catholics and ourselves, the line drawn by Protestants. We drew lines between Arminians and ourselves, the line drawn at the Synod of Dort. In my small town, we drew lines even between Reformed Church in America folk and ourselves, the Christian Reformed. For the young, it was the line between the kids who attended the local public school and those of us who attended the Christian school. Religion was about identity, and we found identity in the drawing of lines.

All that sifting and sorting, putting people and religions in boxes didn’t stop when I got to college and seminary. I recently reread the first of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures, given at Princeton in 1898, recommended reading at the college I attended. The lectures have not aged well. Kuyper’s focus is on four religious “complexes”: paganism, Catholicism (he mostly calls it “Romanism”), Islam, and Calvinism. These four, he argues, represent four fundamental principles, “life and world-views” in Kuyper’s phrasing, borrowed from the German Weltanschauung. Lurking in the background is one more complex, what he calls “Modernism,” the evolutionary antithesis of Calvinism, Kuyper’s bête noire. What he is concerned with in the first lecture is distinguishing the underlying principles that account for the way these religious “complexes” approach life and thought. For Kuyper it was a matter of distilling them down to a single ruling idea. 

But when you try to do this—to reduce paganism or Islam or Roman Catholicism to a single idea—you are no longer listening to them. You are fitting them into your scheme. Kuyper isn’t interested in the great variety of thought and practice that falls under his category of paganism—a category that for Kuyper includes ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, the huge variety of animistic faiths—he’s only interested in wedging them all together into his idea of what they must say and be, given the single principle that in his way of thinking drives them. He tells ancient pagans, Muslims, and Roman Catholics what they must believe whether they actually believe it or not.

And there is so much of which he is profoundly ignorant. He writes off Chinese thought because he believes that the likes of Confucius and Laozi have not contributed to global thought. The same for Hinduism. He writes off the entire Orthodox tradition because, he claims, it “has not been able to produce a form of life of its own from the root of its mystical orthodoxy.” He loops Buddhism in with paganism, and he does not mention Judaism at all. He says without blushing that Calvinism and Calvinism alone represents the high point of human thought. All else either leads in the direction of Calvinism or leads in the direction of error. Kuyper, it would seem, would see little point in interrogating the beliefs of the ancient chieftain who lies buried under St. Peter’s Church in Geneva. Nothing to be learned there.

But what if religion is not like this? What if religion is complicated, quirky, and various. What if paganism is not really a category except in the mind of those who reject it. What if the ancient chieftain buried under the altar in St. Peter’s knew things that we have lost, things about the world around us, about human life, about, yes, God?

For a recent post I read a book long on my shelf, one of those books that I had always meant to read but never gotten around to, C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. The charm of this novel, Lewis’s last, is its deep sympathy for pre-Christian paganism. Not just pre-Christian but pre-Hellenic. There are many things the Fox, the tutor of the royal children in the novel, does not understand because his rationalistic worldview will not allow them. The religion of the kingdom of Glome is of meatier stuff. Or, perhaps, bloodier stuff. The image of Ungit, the god of Glome, is a black misshapen stone, smeared with blood. 

In Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, Land (2026), Tomas, an Irish surveyor working for the English army, comes upon an ancient spring. When he drinks of the water of the spring, he begins to see that his mapmaking, his naming of the features of the land, his drawing of boundaries, obscures what lies below the surface, the lives of those who have gone before. The land itself has, as it were, a divine presence. He tries, and ultimately fails, to draw a map that faithfully represents what the land has to tell. He wants to see the land, not for what the English want to make of it, but for what is and has been, and for the traces of the people who have walked its paths.

Theology is a kind of mapmaking. Often it attempts to impose its own truth on the experiences of people. It becomes a form of religious imperialism. We force the experiences of others into our theological grid. We fail to see what others see because our maps don’t allow for it.

We Reformed do this in the name of the Bible. Here, perhaps, Abraham Kuyper can help us. He addresses the Bible in the second of his Stone Lectures. His remarks are overladen with too much of the Reformed theological map he inherited, but at its heart his view of scripture is experiential. It’s what happens to us in the reading of scripture. We come to see things, experience things, that we otherwise would not have seen or experienced. He says of the Bible:

. . . The magnetic power with which the Scripture influences the soul, and draws it to itself, just as the magnet draws the steel, is not derived, but immediate.

The problem with much of theology is that it is the opposite of this: not immediate but derived. As in Kuyper’s first lecture, it is derived from an idea, in Kuyper’s thinking, it’s derived from a single principle, and everything else is made to conform with that principle. But, as Kuyper seems to realize, the Bible is not like this. Faith is not like this.  To read the Bible is to be cast into a world of immediate experience. Even Paul, the most theological of biblical writers, begins with the experience of encountering Christ. 

Of course we need to sort out these experiences—to map them. But too often the order gets reversed. The map becomes primary, and the call of God on our lives becomes secondary. And when that happens, we stop listening to others who are not on our map. 

I recently read the Dao De Jing. I picked it up because a Christian theologian I have often read, David Bentley Hart, a month or so ago published a translation of the Dao. I wanted to see what Hart had done with it. I read it while I was also reading Homer, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. Each of these, the Dao and the Odyssey, have been read for thousands of years because they reach, each in its own way, for divine truth. And in doing so in the way they do it, they disturb the map that I have drawn for myself of the spiritual world. There are places I have not visited, experiences I have not had.

What I am pleading for in this essay is not that we stop drawing theological maps. It’s that we realize that what we are mapping describes only part of the landscape. Our maps are provisional, guides to some experiences but failing to point to others. If we are not to miss important features of the landscape, like the ancient spring discovered by Tomas in Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, it’s important to look at other maps.

Perhaps the pagan burial that lies under St. Peter’s Church in Geneva is a divine sign for the religion that now dominates the hill. Perhaps it tells us that faith is not primarily about drawing lines but about drawing together, across our separate experiences of God and our different maps, toward the larger landscape of which we each grasp only a partial truth.

Or so I think.

Clay