While Calvinism is still a powerful source for his preaching of the Gospel, Choi is not maintaining a rigid, white-knuckle grip on dogma. Dogma is important, but it’s a means to something deeper and more essential, he said.

“I just want to see the transformation in their (his congregation’s) life,” he said. “As a theologian and pastor, I have to reinterpret the dogma for them.”

Chances are Calvin would have appreciated what Choi is doing in reinterpreting dogma and studying a Catholic thinker who, toward the end of his life, was fascinated by Buddhism.

500 years of Calvin By Catholic Register Staff This year marks the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth. In Toronto Calvin’s legacy will be explored at a conference, “Rediscovering Calvin,” at the University of Toronto June 18-20. The 16th-century reformer was right in the middle of revolutionary ferment over the meaning of the Christian message and the form and mission of the church. Here’s a few facts: Born July 10, 1509 in Noyon, France, he died May 27, 1564 in Geneva. Educated as a lawyer, he was part of the humanist movement in European culture and theology. As a young man studying law Calvin experienced a dramatic personal conversion and broke from the Catholic Church. An uprising against Protestant rule in parts of France forced Calvin to flee to Switzerland, where he wrote and published the first edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536. That same year he was invited to Geneva to aid in the reform of the church there. Throughout his years in Geneva Calvin struggled with questions of church discipline and its implications in civil society. The Presbyterian Church, the Puritans and churches that bear the names Reformed or Congregationalist are most closely associated with Calvinism. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches today represents 75 million Christians in 214 churches and 107 countries. Calvin is best known in the popular imagination for the idea of double predestination, the idea that God decided in advance who would go to heaven and who would go to hell.

“(Calvin) certainly was one of the last breathing ecumenists in the 16th century,” said United Church theologian Dr. Peter Wyatt of Toronto. “He hoped right up to the end of his life there could be a reunion of the broken church in the West.”

Neither Calvin nor Martin Luther had any problem with the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. They had issues with how that primacy was being exercised.

On the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth, the once improbable goal of reuniting the Christian church of the West may be closer than most people imagine. Catholics and Lutherans have already agreed on the meaning of justification and declared the excommunications of the 16th century no longer valid for our time. Last year the Methodists signed onto the 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification with the addition of a Reformed interpretation of some of the terminology.

Veteran ecumenist Margaret O’Gara of the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto believes we will see a more fruitful dialogue between Catholics and Calvinists in the future.

“They (Calvinists) have a lot in common with Catholics on what’s called sanctification — growth in grace. Calvinists and Catholics put emphasis on growth in grace in a way that Lutherans don’t,” she said.

Though in his own time it translated into a theocracy complete with beheadings and burning heretics at the stake, Calvin’s commitment to the concrete implications of the Gospel in society puts Calvinists on a wavelength with Catholics who believe in social justice, said O’Gara.

“Calvin really saw social implications for his theology,” she said.

Nor is there a Calvinist doctrine of the Eucharist that would impede closer ties between Catholics and Calvinists. Like Luther, Calvin believed in the real presence in the Eucharist. He was never as specific as Aquinas and his philosophical teaching about transubstantiation, but he believed in a spiritual, as opposed to material, presence in the bread and wine.

Calvin is also the surprising forerunner of some very modern trends in theology, said Wyatt.

“I think of him as the creation-intoxicated theologian,” said Wyatt.

While it would certainly be a distortion to think of Calvin as a 16th-century ecotheologian — the environmental crisis just wasn’t part of Calvin’s world — Calvin’s profound sense that revelation is present in God’s creation gives us a 16th-century way of thinking about the environment and theology.

“He speaks of creation as the dazzling theatre in which God’s glory and perfection can be seen,” Wyatt said.

While Calvinist fear and loathing of all things sexual and physical has often given a bad name to Protestantism, buried in Calvin’s thinking about the flesh is a commitment to social justice.

“He was very big on self-denial and mortification of the flesh,” said Wyatt. “But he says that God’s purpose in the call to carry the cross and to self denial isn’t focussed on making me a better spiritual person so much as it is to benefit others. It’s a summons for people of affluence to share what they have with the poor and the dispossessed.”

In the 1960s Jesuit theologian Fr. Karl Rahner essayed the idea of anonymous Christians to explain the Vatican II teaching that salvation is not limited to practising Catholics in good standing with the church. But Calvin was already there 400 years ago.

“Rather than anonymous Christian, anonymous Christ,” is how Wyatt explains it.  “Calvin has a very strong understanding of Christ as the instrumental author of creation. I’m thinking of John 1, Hebrews 1, Colossians 1, where all things come into being through the eternal Word, who then becomes flesh in Jesus Christ. This sense of Christ already, before the incarnation, intimately connected to all creatures, suggests some possibilities for understanding the work of an anonymous Christ in the world even for those who do not name the name of Jesus.”

The biggest obstacle in ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Calvinists has been the issue of predestination. For Catholics, free will is essential. If God has simply preordained who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, salvation and damnation for each and every individual, then there’s no meaning in moral choice.

But in the 1960s Protestant theologian Karl Barth reworked the Calvinist understanding of double predestination.

“With Barth re-engaging it creatively — that double predestination — I think it opens room for renewed dialogue,” said Dadosky of Regis.

Barth rejected the notion that God had issued an absolute decree on who is saved or damned. The most absolute, final and decisive thing God does in human history is give to the world Jesus Christ in the flesh and on the cross. It is a gracious decision in humanity’s favour.

Not all Calvinists buy Barth’s version of predestination, which he called “election.” But it does allow for dialogue between Calvinists and Catholics as living traditions rather than frozen, 16th-century positions.

After two years of trying, Wyatt almost snagged Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, as keynote speaker for the Rediscovering Calvin forum June 18-20 at the University of Toronto. But even without the cardinal, Wyatt hopes for plenty of Catholics to take in lectures, concerts of the hymns Calvinism produced in Geneva and a display of rare books.

When Choi discovered Merton and his profound writing about the life of prayer, Choi “felt (Merton) stretch out his hand to us.” Catholics may also find that Calvinists are stretching out their hands to them.