MARKS OF A PIOUS MIND
Piety is a word we don’t often use today. It sounds terribly old fashioned and has connotations of insincerity and hypocrisy. We tend to think of “pious” persons as those who make a show of being religious but who inwardly lack the heart of a true Christian. One author comments that church leaders today don’t want to be known for their “piety” but for their “spiritual authenticity.” Piety, they say, is associated with that which is fake, insincere, and unreal.
Calvin, however, had no scruples about using the term. It was widely accepted in his day as referring to the kind of life produced by genuine reverence and love toward God. True piety, Calvin claimed, grows out of an understanding that we owe our life to God as our Creator, and that he is the Source of all good in the universe. Where these things are believed, they produce an attitude of reverence, devotion and trust – a desire to devote ourselves to God’s service, to “cleave to him”, and to trust him for all that we need. Today we might call that “godliness”; in Calvin’s time, they referred to it as “piety.”
Beyond the general heart attitudes noted above, piety, Calvin argued, can be can be recognized by specific attitudes of the mind. For one thing, a “pious mind” doesn’t “dream up for itself any God that it pleases, but contemplates the one and only true God” (Institutes I.ii.2). That is to say, “it does not attach to him whatever it pleases, but is content to hold him to be as he manifests himself” (ibid). Calvin was aware that we all have a tendency to make God into the kind of being that we want him to be – one that suits our preconceptions and tastes. A truly pious (or devout) person, however, shrinks from this, and from undue speculation about God. They are content to receive what God reveals of himself in his Word, and submit their preferences and preconceptions to that.
Second, a pious mind is one that looks to God for protection and the provision of every need. Knowing him to be the source and governor of all things, “it gives itself over completely to trust in him... if anything oppresses, if anything is lacking, immediately it betakes itself to his protection, waiting for help from him. Because it is persuaded that he is good and merciful, it reposes in him with perfect trust, and doubts not that in his loving kindness a remedy will be provided for its ills.” (ibid).
Thirdly, a pious mind acknowledges God as Lord and Father, and because of that, “it respects his authority, reverences his majesty, seeks his glory, and obeys his commands” (ibid.). Wherever God is truly owned to be sovereign Lord, and loved and embraced as Father, his authority will be respected. People will honour him for who he is and be quick to learn and keep his commands. More than that, they will be ready to devote all that they are and have to him, and make it the goal of their lives to seek his glory. This, Calvin says, lies at the very heart of true piety.
Fourthly, a pious mind is marked by a sense of fear. Knowing that God is perfectly righteous and the just Judge of all, and that he is “armed with severity to punish wickedness, it ever holds his judgment seat before his gaze, and through fear of him, restrains itself from provoking his anger” (ibid). Nevertheless, Calvin goes on to say, this fear is not such as to make a pious person want to withdraw from God were a way of escape open, but leads him to embrace God “no less as punisher of the wicked than as benefactor of the pious” (ibid). Both the goodness and justice of God are worthy of our adoration and appropriate practical response.
Furthermore, a pious mind refrains from sinning against God because it loves and seeks to please him. The thought of God’s justice and threatened wrath and punishment is enough to make anyone shrink from sin. It is a mark of true godliness, however, to refrain from sin out of love to God. A truly devout mind and heart “loves and reveres God as Father and it worships and adores him as Lord. Even if there were no hell, it would still shudder from offending him alone” (ibid).
Such heart attitudes as those listed above belong to what Calvin calls “the essence of pure and real religion.” Where they exist, they prove that a person knows God. Their absence, conversely, betrays that a person’s professed faith is little more than a “vague general veneration for God.” Calvin lamented that there were very few in his day that “really reverence him.” He would surely do the same if he lived today.
Associate Principal GTC (