Commentary

In the academic year 1996–97 the Meeter Center has bidden farewell to Richard Gamble, its third director, and has undertaken a search process to identify his successor. We are please to announce that Dr. Karin Maag, known to many Calvin scholars for her work at St. Andrews and her study of the Genevan Academy, will assume the directorship at the beginning of the 1997–98 academic year.

The Meeter Center also mourns the passing of Peter DeKlerk, whose work on the annual Calvin Bibliography for so long graced the pages of Calvin Theological Journal. Peter’s service to the field of Calvin studies will be long remembered. In cooperation with Calvin Theological Journal, the Meeter Center has committed itself to the continuation of the annual bibliographical project, as evidenced in the bibliography of the November 1996 issue, complied by Paul Fields, our curator.

In addition to these rather weighty matters, the regular work of the center has continued at a consistent pace: the Meeter Center Colloquium series has continued with papers by Professor William Stevenson and by tow Calvin students from the B.A. and Ph.D. programs. The Center also welcomed Dr. Richard Wevers, author of the concordances to Calvin’s 1539 and 1559 Institutes and to Calvin’s translation of the Bible, to an office at the Center where Professor Wevers continues his work presenting an “electronic Calvin” to the world.

Fellows at the Center this year included Dr. Tae Kyoung Kwon and Dr. Bonnie Pattison. We congratulate Dr. Pattison on the successful completion of her Ph.D. at Princeton on “The Theological Role of Poverty in Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church.” We look forward, moreover, to the arrival of this summer of Dr. Joy Kleinstuber of the University of Limerick, Ireland, presently the editor of Calvin’s treatise against Servetus for the Opera denuo recognita, Dr. Taedoo Chung (Korea), Peter Aggarwal (Oxford University) and David C. Noe (student research).

Richard A. Muller, president
Meeter Center Governing Board

Calvin Biographie by bernard Cottret. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1995, 455 pp. $45.95. Reviewed by Professor Dale Van Kley.

In rooting Jean Calvin’s formulation of the doctrine of election in Calvin’s own experience and conviction of having received an extraordinary calling from God, Bernard Cottret’s new biography of the French reformer contrives to take Calvin’s doctrine and experience seriously while situating them in the sixteenth century. for the extraordinary vacation that led Calvin to preach and to institute pastors without being ordained is hardly imaginable without the new and entirely lay identity of the humanist man of letters on which Calvin originally modeled himself, nor is the doctrine of predestination entirely itelligible without the assurance it provided for a community in exile of which Calvin, too, was a part. And yet neither consideration prevents Cottret from regarding Calvin’s calling as existentially authentic or the doctrine of election as exegetically honest.

Cottret helpfully situates the doctrinal differences between French proto-Calvinists and Catholics in the larger context of the siesmic rupture of spiritual sensibilities between those who, like Catholics, continued to perceive reality as a hierarchy linking the living with the departed, prugatory, and God and secular time as routinely punctuated by the miraculous and pregnant with the apocalypse; and those who—Protestants or Hugenots—allowed only Christ to mediate between the creation and a uniquely majestic God and experienced time as a linear flow divorced from either the miraculous or the apocalypse. A similar gulf, according to Cottret, divided Catholic and Protestant notions of the sacred and the sacrilegious. Calvinism’s tendency to concentrate the sacred exclusively in the divine majesty and the Word to the detriment of all else including the elements in Eucharist made it an accomplice of the disenchantment or secularization of a world that continued to embody or bespeak the sacred for Catholics.

It is thus profound shifts in conceptions of the relation between the sacred and secular in part peculiar to the sixteenth-century French cultural landscape that explain why, in Cottret’s opinion, the emphasis on the once-and-for-all character of Christ’s sacrifice in the book of Hebrews and the doctrine of Christ’s exclusively spiritual presence in the Eucharist emerged as much more decisive in Calvinism vis-เ-vis Catholicism than the interpretation of the epistle to the Romans and the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

A second defining characteristic of Calvinism for Cottret is an appreciation of the Mosaic Law and of the Old Testament in general. This made Calvinism resistant to the temptation of Christian antisemitism and showed up in the movement’s predilection for the Psalms and penchant toward Old Testament names as replacements for saints’ names. As for the place of the dreaded doctrine of predestination in Calvin’s theology, Cottret does not hesitate to address the issue, rightly insisting on predestination’s original function as a doctrine of existential assurance. But Cottret does not mince his words in criticism of the steadily expanding place of this doctrine in the work of Calvin, “carried away by polemics and his pride as an author” in the 1550s against opponents such as J้r๔me Bolsec and Pierre Caroli.

As a biography of the reformer, Cottret’s is bound to be more satisfying than William Bouwsma’s influential John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Reformer, if only because, in sharp contrast to Bouwsma’s, Cottret’s Calvin is a whole and reasonably unified person who like most people suffered and changed a great deal over time, from the brash young French humanist scholar in competition with Erasmus in 1532 to the embodiment of faith and resignation on his deathbed in 1564. Very much in the spirit of Bouwsma’s biography, however, Cottret’s also restores Calvin to the sixteenth century, France, and the exiled French community in Geneva, and therein lies the chief merit of both. For it is paradoxically only restoring Calvin to his own time and place that his message can best be repristenated for ours.

Books

Battles, Ford Lewis. Interpreting John Calvin. Edited by Robert Benedetto. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996.

Calvin, John. The Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defence of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice against Pighius. Vol. 2. Edited by A.N.S. Lane. Translated by G. I. Davies. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996.

Chung, S.K. A Study on Calvinism. Seoul: Chongshin Publishing Company, 1995.

Grell, Ole Peter. Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England. Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1996; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996.

Lane, Anthony N.S. Calvin and Bernard of Clairvaux. Vol. 1 of Studies in Reformed Theology and History. Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1996.

Articles

Babel, Henry. “Le rayonnement theologique de Geneve depuis Calvin.” In Informationes theologiae Europae: Internationales okumenisches Jahrbuch fur Theologie, Vol. 3, 251–60. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

Berg, M.A. van den. “Op Weg naar het Vaderland: De eschatologie bij Calvijn.” Theologia Reformata, Vol. 39, No. 4, 1996: 265–87.

Engammare, Max. “Calvin incognito in London: The rediscovery in London of sermons on Isaiah.” Huguenot Society Proceedings, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1996: 453–62.

Gonin, Marc-Francois. “Le Couple et la Vie de Famille des Luther et des Calvin.” La Revue Reformee, Vol. 47, No. 191, 1996: 35–42.

Horton, Michael Scott. “Calvin and the Law-Gospel Hermeneutic.” Pro Ecclesia, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1996: 27–42.

Kingdon, Robert M. “Editing Genevan Ecclesiastical Registers.” In Editing Texts from the Age of Erasmus, 25–37. Edited by Erika Rummel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

Kok, Joel E. “Heinrich Bullinger’s Exegetical Method: The Model for Calvin?” In Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, 241–54. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996.

Maddox, Graham. “Calvinism and Democracy: The Growth of Oppositional Politics.” In Religion and the Rise of Democracy, 121–43, 252–59. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Oort, Johannes van. “John Calvin and the Church Fathers.” In The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, Vol. 2, 661–700. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997.

Schreiner, Susan Elizabeth. “The Spiritual Man Judges All Things: Calvin and the Exegetical Debates about Certainty in the Reformation.” In Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, 189–215. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996.

Sproxton, Judy. “From Calvin to Cromwell through Beard.” Journal of European Studies, Vol. 25, 1995: 17–33.

VanderWilt, Jeffrey T. “John Calvin’s Theology of Liturgical Song.” Christian Scholar’s Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1996: 63–82.

Dissertations

Cheng, Yang-En. “The Theology of the Calvinist Resistance Movement: A Theological Study of the French Calvinist Resistance Literature.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994.

Elwood, Christopher Lee. “The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in France, 1530–1570.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard Divinity School, 1995.

Greene-McCreight, Kathryn. “Ad Litteram: Understandings of the Plain Sense of Scripture in the Exegesis of Augustine, Calvin and Barth of Genesis 1–3.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994.

Kang, Kyong Lim. “The Identity of Nicodemism and Calvin’s Anti-Nicodemite Controversy.” Ph.D. diss., Korean text. Chongshin University, 1997.

Moroney, Stephen Kearney. “The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Exposition of Calvin’s View and a Constructive Theological Proposal.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1995.

Park, Sang Il. “The Implications of John Calvin’s Doctrine of Education for Religious Education in the Korean-American Church.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1994.

Thysell, Carol Lynne. “The Pleasure of Discernment: Marguerite de Navarre’s ‘Heptameron’ as a Literary/Theological Response to John Calvin’s Treatise.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 1995.

The above students received the 1997 Hugh and Eve Meeter Calvinism Awards for the papers they submitted on the topic “John Calvin’s Views on God’s Law and the Magistrate in Creating the Good Society.” Leanne Triezenberg from Big Rapids, Michigan, won the first-place award at $2,500, and second place winner Aren Roukema from Langley, British Columbia, won $1,250. Contact the Meeter Center to receive an informative brochure about next year’s contest. Papers should be received by January 15, 1998.

On February 20, Professor William Stevenson, Jr. of the Political Science Department of Calvin College gave a lecture entitled, “The Political Implications of Calvin’s ‘Third Part’ of Christian Freedom.” Stevenson observed that Calvin’s three parts of Christian freedom appear to foreshadow modern political thought. Calvin’s discussion of individual freedom corresponds with modern liberal views, his emphasis on social freedom reflects modern communitarian perspectives, and his remarks on historical freedom antedates notions of revolutionary development.

Stevenson focused on this third part, demonstrating how Calvin’s belief in divine providence enabled him to present a more bal-anced view of freedom than is found in modernity. On the one hand, providence informed believers that social and political structures are adiaphora, readily changed as God continues to reform the world. On the other hand, providence also reminds believers that the present stage of social-political development belongs to God’s plan. Consequently, Christians possess grounds both to lead revolutions and to resist them.

However, rather than posit a schizophrenic “two Calvins” (cf. William Bouwsma), Stevenson concluded that these two elements provide a compatible, healthy balance for believers. Knowledge of divine providence forces them to wait humbly as they seek the Lord’s will, for they can never be sure what his sovereign will desires in any social-political situation.

Michael Wittmer, Ph.D. student
Calvin Theological Seminary

Kingdon, Robert M. Registres du Consistoire de Geneve au temps de Calvin, vol. 2. Edited by Thomas A. Lambert and Isabella M. Watt. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996.

Leith, John H. Crises in the Church: The Plight of Theological Education. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997.

Muller, Richard A. The Unaccommodated Calvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Richard A. Muller has been asked to serve as the new vice president of the Calvin Studies Society. Professor Muller will be traveling to the Netherlands and Geneva in May to deliver lectures on Calvin and Reformed scholasticism at the Universities of Utrecht and Geneva and at the Free University of Amsterdam.

Meeter Center Colloquium Series

February 20, 1997: Dr. William Stevenson, a professor of political science at Calvin College, delivered the February lecture on the political implications of Calvin’s idea of freedom. (See article above.)

April 16, 1997: The third annual student colloquium featured Kathy Ponstein, a Calvin College junior religion and theology major, who read a paper entitled “Theology and Humanism in the Calvin Sadoleto Exchange.” Mark Larson, a Ph.D. student at Calvin Theological Seminary, presented a paper entitled “John Calvin and Genevan ´Presbyterianism.’”

October 11, 1997: In honor of Melanchthon’s 500th birthday, the Fall 1997 colloquium will focus on his theology. Participants and their topics are as follows:

• Dr. Lyle Bierma – “What Hath Wittenberg to Do with Heidelberg? Philip Melanchthon and the Heidelberg Catechism”
• Dr. Richard Muller – “Ordo docendi: Melanchthon and the Organization of Calvin’s Institutes, 1536-1543”
• Dr. John Schneider – “Melanchthon Rhetoric as a Context for Assessing His Theology”
• Dr. Timothy Wengert – “We Will Feast Together in Heaven Forever: The Epistolary Friendship of John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon”

Conference Papers Presented

Kingdon, Robert M. “The Use of Print by Royal Governments to Manipulate Public Opinion in France during the Sixteenth-Century Wars of Religion.” Paper presented at a Franco-Israeli symposium, May 1996.

Sixteenth Century Studies Conference

The 1997 conference will be held October 23–26 in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information contact: Dr. Raymond Mentzer, History Department, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717

Medieval Association of the Midwest

On September 19–20, 1997, the Medieval Association of the Midwest will hold its 13th annual conference on the campus of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.