 | Calvin Courier is published twice yearly by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, |
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In this edition: As fall semester progresses, I am happy to let you know of our activities over the past few months and our forthcoming events. Six of our seven visiting scholars who received fellowships to come to the Meeter Center have already spent their weeks of research here. All have been very impressed with the Meeter Center’s facilities and collection. We are shortly going to introduce more people to the Center-and its rare books in particular-as nine college classes from four different departments come for class sessions on early modern printing. The church history students from Calvin Seminary will also come for a graduate-level session on primary sources and historical research. Our scholarly work in the Center continues with such projects as a symposium on Liturgy and Worship and Its Medieval Inheritance, cosponsored with the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship and planned for May 1999, a volume of contributions on the German reformer Philip Melanchthon, and a proposed volume on the history of the Genevan Psalter across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our main event for the fall was, however, our Festival of Psalms, which took place in the college chapel on Saturday, October 3. This event was attended by around 600 people and was a wonderful occasion complete with singing by church and student choirs and by the audience as well. The audience also heard dramatic readings taken from sixteenth-century writings on the Genevan Psalter. We welcome your feedback, comments, and questions by e-mail, letter, telephone, or personal visit. We would be delighted to see you. Karin Y. Maag The Festival of Psalms, held in the Calvin College Chapel on October 3, featured singing and performance of more than a dozen psalms as well as readings and thespian sketches of scenes out of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of the singing included the assembly. The first half of the festival was played in historical context, including a capella renditions, lined-out singing (assembly repeats after leader), antiphonal choral arrangements, and even a stanza of congregational song in Dutch. The festival’s second half was mainly performance of the psalms, featuring choral, ensemble, organ, and solo arrangements. The program’s opening half leaned largely toward Geneva-and not, say, Wittenberg-but this is Calvin College, after all. A more varied selection was featured, however, in the performance pieces. Befitting the evening’s festivity the organizers chose primarily psalms of praise. Perhaps the planned CD project, Music from the Genevan Psalter, will feature genres suited to individual listening, such as penitential psalms. As introit to each half of the festival, Psalms 98 was an apt motif for the evening: “Sing, Sing a New Song.” The festival was a splendid reminder that the age-old liturgical core of Judeo-Christian worship endures with profundity today. Herman J. De Vries Jr., Ph.D. Books Chung, Sung-Kuh. Korean Church and Reformed Faith: Focusing on the Historical Study of Preaching in the Korean Church. Seattle: Time Printing, 1996. de Kroon, Marijn. De eer van God en het heil van de mens: Bijdrage tot het verstaan van de theologie van Johannes Calvijn naar zijn Institutie. Leiden: J.J. Groen en Zoon, 1996. Lülsdorff, Raimund. Die Zukunft Jesu Christi: Calvins Eschatologie und ihre katholische Sicht. Paderborn: Bonifatius, 1996. Dissertations Fong, Chun-ming Abel. “Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin: The Dynamic Balance between the Freedom of God’s Grace and the Freedom of Human Responsibility in Salvation.” Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 1997. Pattison, Bonnie Lynn Goding. “The Concept of Poverty in Calvin’s Christology and Its Influence on His Doctrine of the Christian Life and the Church.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 1997 Articles Berg, M.A. van den. “Calvijn en Melanchthon, een beproefde vriendschap.” Theologia Reformata 41, no. 2, 1998: 78–102. Douglas, Crerar. “Tragedy and Comedy in the Luther-Calvin Dialectic.” In Positive Negatives: A Motif in Christian Tradition, 95–116. American University Studies series VII. Theology and Religion 103. NewYork: Peter Lang, 1991. Kuhr, Olaf. “Calvin and Basel: The Significance of Oecolampadius and the Basel Discipline Ordinance for the Institution of Ecclesiastical Discipline in Geneva.” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 16, no. 1, 1998: 19–33. Larson, Mark. “John Calvin and Genevan Presbyterianism.” The Westminster Theological Journal 60, no. 1, 1998: 43–69. Lienhard, Marc. “Les réformateurs protestants du XVIe siècle et la papauté.” Positions Lutheriennes 46, no. 2, 1998: 157–73. Oort, Johannes van. “Calvinus patristicus: Calvijns kennis, gebruik en misbruik van de patres.” In De kerkvaders in Reformatie en Nadere Reformatie, 67–81. Edited by Johannes van Oort. Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1997. Roussel, Bernard. “Bible et dévotion mariale. J. Calvin et J. Maldonat interprètes de Luc 1, 26–38.” In Homo Religiosus: autor de Jean Delumeau, 378–85. Paris: Fayard, 1997. Tinker, Melvin. “Language, Symbols and Sacraments Was Calvin’s View of the Lord’s Supper Right?” Churchman 112, no. 2, 1998: 131–49. Zachman, Randall C. “Calvin as Analogical Theologian.” Scottish Journal of Theology 51, no. 2, 1998: 162–87. Meeter Center Acquires Medal Collection In April 1998 the Meeter Center acquired eighteen commemorative medals of John Calvin minted to mark specific anniversaries of Calvin’s life and the Genevan Reformation. This collection of silver and bronze Calvin medals is one of the most extensive in the world. The oldest piece is dated 1555 (while Calvin was still alive), and the most recent from 1932. These commemorative medals were collected over a period of years by the Reverend Ray Teeuwissen primarily during his time as director of the John Knox House in Geneva. The Meeter Center is proud to house this exciting collection known as the Ray W. Teeuwissen Collection of Calvin Effigies. After Christmas we plan to organize an evening talk about the medals. Why does a German Reformation historian travel to the States to do research? I encountered this question quite often before I left my native Germany at the end of September for my fellowship at the Meeter Center. As a Ph.D. student of the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal I am writing a dissertation on Philip Melanchthon’s understanding and application of rhetoric. During my time in Grand Rapids I compared Melanchthon with the Reformed theologians Bullinger, Bucer, and Calvin, focusing on their interpretation of Romans 9–11 and their attitude toward the Jews. The primary and secondary sources gathered at the Center allowed for a comprehensive study of this complex topic and offered valuable insights into the intense network and interrelations of these theologians. My weeks in Grand Rapids have not only involved diving into a huge number of sources but also taking another step in crossing the transatlantic gap: In the Meeter Center I met many friendly and helpful people. We learned about each other’s culture and exchanged scholarship. Traveling home I will not only take back the results of my research but also the knowledge that those who doubted the value of researching at the Meeter Center are proved wrong by my challenging experience! Nicole Kuropka, Ph.D. candidate Calvin’s Institutes: New Search Program Did you ever wish you had more facility in reading the Latin of John Calvin? Did you ever wish that you could more easily combine your research into Calvin’s Institutes in the Latin text with the English text? In researching John Calvin would you like to find passages that use a certain Latin word in the Latin text of the Institutes and be able immediately to see an English translation of that sentence? Or perhaps you instead want to find passages with a certain English word in the English text of the Institutes and be able immediately to see how the Latin of that English sentence reads or what Latin word lies behind that English word? Or perhaps you wonder how consistently one Latin word gets translated into the same English word? If you can see yourself in the above description, the Meeter Center has just the computer program for you. Richard F. Wevers (retired from the Classics Department of Calvin College and who now spends a good deal of his time at the Meeter Center) has developed a computer search program that may well interest you very much. The program uses the Latin text of the Barth/Niesel edition of the Institutes (the same text he used in his Concordance to Calvin’s Institutio 1559 and the computer search routines previously developed for the Latin text) and combines it with the Beveridge translation. In this new program the user can ask the computer to look up a Latin word (or combination of two Latin words in one sentence). The computer will show on the screen each sentence (one at a time) that contains that word or combination of words and on that same computer screen show the English translation of that sentence. Or you can have the computer look up an English word (or combination, as above). And similarly the computer will bring to the screen each English sentence that contains that English word or combination of words and on that same computer screen show the Latin sentence that is the source of that English. As each occurrence is brought to the screen, the user has the option of seeing more preceding and succeeding context, sentence by sentence, always with the sentences appearing in both their Latin and English form. Packaged with these programs is a browser. This program allows the user to read, one screen at a time, the English or Latin text of the Institutes, beginning at the book, chapter, and section the user designates. Or the user can ask that the browser bring to the screen the text of the Institutes in both languages, sentence by sentence, beginning at the book, chapter, and section the user chooses. The programs and their data files are available in zipped or compressed form on seven disks. In their uncompressed form they require about 42 megabytes of disk space. Plans are being made to make them available on CD ROM disks. The price will be $50. If interested, contact either: Richard Wevers (weve@calvin.edu) Paul Fields (pfields@calvin.edu) Richard F. Wevers, Ph.D. Hugh and Eve Meeter Calvinism Awards for High School SeniorsThe topic for 1999 is “The Care of the Poor according to John Calvin and Its Twentieth-Century Implications.” Contact the Meeter Center for an informative brochure about the awards. Papers must be received by January 15, 1999. Meeter Center Colloquium Series
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