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Blake's first concrete task is to persuade his own Presbyterians to start negotiating union, and it is this job that he tackles this week in Buffalo. Going for him is the fact that he is the church's most influential officer. The Moderator, top spot on the Presbyterian table of organization, is a chiefly honorary post, whose occupant spends much of his one-year term on an inspirational tour of member churches. Dr. Blake is no Pope or Metropolitan; as the humble title suggests, the Presbyterians' Stated Clerklike the U.N.'s Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold—is given some authority and left to make of it what he can by using prestige, persuasion and his working control of the organization. Blake gets $18,500 a year, is midway through his third term, which ends in 1963.
In turning his influence and skills to the task of church unity. Blake can emphasize the great body of common beliefs of the reformed churches, which he shares with some 50 million Christians around the world. The keystone tenet of the reformed faith is the absolute sovereignty of God, who stands at the head of bis church without the mediation of any hierarchy and makes himself known through interpretation of his written word—the Bible. Combined with the doctrine of sin ful man's redemption by Jesus Christ and the need to do God's will, this stress on God's majesty produced the Calvinistic corollary that all men are equal before their Creator and that the necessary ministers and governors of the church are called and elected by the body of believers, rather than appointed from above.
A "Horrible Decree." The man who bequeathed this great tradition to Christianity was born a Frenchman (in 1509) and trained as a lawyer. But as a young man at the University of Paris, John Calvin caught the fervor and excitement of Luther's break with Rome and became one of the keenest theological thinkers Christianity has produced. Most of his body of thought, set forth in his book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, first written when he was only 26, has survived the passage of time. One major Calvinist tenet now generally discredited is the doctrine of predestination—which he himself called "the horrible decree."
Calvin founded this belief on the inexorable deterministic logic of Augustine in that saint's 5th century controversy with Pelagius, the British heretic. Pelagius' heresy—too widespread in the modern world to raise an eyebrow—was that Adam's disobedience had affected no one but himself; all men are not born sinners, but free to opt for good or evil, salvation or hell. Standing firmly on Scripture, both Augustine and Calvin after him held that Adam's fall was man's; all men are born in sin and deserve damnation. God in his love sent men the means of salvation in Jesus Christ, but obviously all do not repent and mend their ways and receive Christ; most go to the hell they merit.
Calvin postulated that since God as Creator of all things is omniscient, knowing the future and the past as one, he knows in advance who will be saved. And since God is omnipotent—able to save all men if he wills—the damned are damned by God's consent, damned eons before they were born, and there is nothing they can do about it.