Edition: Fall 2003, Number 32 Calvin Courier is published twice yearly by the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary 3201 Burton Street S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 Ph: 616-526-7081

From the Director

Once again the campus is bustling with students, while in the Meeter Center we are looking back over a busy and successful summer. Our third biennial paleography course on sixteenth-century Genevan documents was a great success. Once again, Dr. Thomas Lambert provided expert guidance, and this year’s students were very motivated to take full advantage both of his instruction and of the Meeter Center resources. We are grateful to the Friends of the Meeter Center, whose gifts helped us offer stipends to each participant, and to the Sixteenth Century Studies Society for underwriting the course thanks to a $1,000 grant.

Six visiting scholars also spent time at the Center working on topics ranging from the theology of the Reformer Wolfgang Musculus to Calvinist sabbath observance. In July the college marked John Calvin’s birthday, and I gave the two-minute lecture as Idelette de Bure, Calvin’s wife (see below).

The Center is involved in planning a range of events over the coming months, including our faculty colloquium in the fall and spring. We are also cosponsoring a panel on Jonathan Edwards in late October as part of the tricentennial celebrations of his birth. We will also look forward to hosting the biennial meeting of the Calvin Studies Society in Grand Rapids in the spring of 2005.

Our major project this year, however, is the result of our successful application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a five-week summer seminar in 2004. We were delighted that our project was selected by the NEH as one of the summer seminars for university teachers, and we are grateful to our referees and the college grant officers who helped us make our application successful. For more details on the award and information for potential participants, see below.

We look forward to these and other undertakings and welcome your feedback and comments. As always, thanks for your interest and ongoing support of our work.

Karin Y. Maag

Meeter Center Wins NEH Grant

The big news of the summer was that the application submitted by the director to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant for a five-week summer seminar was approved. We were granted $82,654 to run a seminar for U.S. college and university faculty on “John Calvin and the Transformation of Religious Culture in Geneva, France, and Beyond.” The seminar will be co-taught by Raymond Mentzer, (University of Iowa) and Karen Maag. It will run from June 28 to July 30, 2004. Please pass the word around, and consider applying if you currently hold a faculty position in a U.S. college or university. It promises to be a wonderful opportunity for in-depth study of key themes of the Reformation.

We will meet three mornings a week, with the rest of the time for research. The seminar’s main topics are liturgy and worship, education and training, and discipline. We will read both what Calvin himself had to say about these subjects and primary and secondary sources on how his ideas and those of other Reformation leaders were implemented, adapted, or at times even downplayed depending on specific confessional circumstances.

Application materials are available from the Meeter Center. The deadline for completed applications is March 1, 2004. Further information is available by contacting the director at kmaag@calvin.edu.

New Acquisitions

Articles

Couenhoven, Jesse. “Law and Gospel, or the Law of the Gospel?” Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 2, 2002: 181–205.

Higman, Francis. “Without Great Effort, and with Pleasure: Sixteenth-Century Genevan Bibles and Reading Practices.” In The Bible as Book: The Reformation, 115–22. London: The British Library, 2000.

Kuropka, Nicole. “Calvins Römerbriefwidmung und der Consensus Piorum.” In Calvin im Kontext der Schweizer Reformation, edited by Peter Opitz, 147–67. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2003.

Pellerin, Daniel. “Calvin: Militant or Man of Peace?” The Review of Politics, 65, no. 1, 2003: 35–59.

Streete, Adrian. “Chrysostom, Calvin, and Conscience: More on King Richard III.” Notes and Queries, 248/50, no. 1, 2003: 21–22.

Woodruff, Jennifer Lynn. “John Calvin, the Wesleys, and John Williamson Nevin on the Lord’s Supper.” Methodist History, 41, no. 4, 2003: 159–78.

Dissertations

Christina, Craig Collier. “Calvin’s Theology of Preaching: The Activity of the Holy Spirit in the Preaching Event.” Ph.D. diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001.

Garstka, Daniel. “A Politics of Piety: The Latent Modernity of Calvin’s Christian Philosophy.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2002.

Reid, Jonathan Andrew. “King’s Sister, Queen of Dissent: Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549) and Her Evangelical Network.” Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 2001.

Wiley, Charles Aden. “Responding to God: The Church as Visible and Invisible in Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2002.

Books

Backus, Irena. Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003.

Becht, Michael. Pium consensum tueri: Studien zum Begriff consensus im Werk von Erasmus von Rotterdam, Philipp Melanchthon und Johannes Calvin. Münster: Aschendorff, 2000.

Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

Chung, Sung Wook. Admiration & Challenge: Karl Barth’s Theological Relationship with John Calvin. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

Kennedy, Kevin Dixon. Union with Christ and the Extent of the Atonement in Calvin. New York: P. Lang, 2002.

Mathison, Keith A. Given for You: Reclaiming Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Pub., 2002.

Oberman, Heiko. The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Hugh and Eve Meeter Calvinism Awards to High School Seniors

On September 26 the Meeter Center hosted a tea for Eve Meeter and five recent Meeter Award recipients currently attending Calvin College. It was an enjoyable time for all as the students expressed their appreciation to Eve for their awards and shared short summaries of their papers. The essay topic for 2004 is “John Calvin and Marriage.” Contact the Meeter Center for an informative brochure about the awards. Papers must be received by January 15, 2004.

Meeter Center Colloquium Series

October 29, 2003: The Meeter Center will participate in a tricentennial celebration of Jonathan Edwards’ birthday by cosponsoring a colloquium entitled “Today’s Church in Reformation and Politics” with Calvin Seminary. Panel participants will include: Dr. John Bolt, professor of systematic theology, Calvin Seminary, “The Glory of Spiders and Politics”; Dr. James Bratt, professor of history, Calvin College, “Jonathan Edwards, Past and Present”; and Rev. Jack Van Ens, PCUSA minister, “What Has Jerusalem to Do with Athens or Jonathan Edwards with Thomas Jefferson?”

November 6, 2003: Dr. Lyle Bierma, professor of systematic theology at Calvin Seminary, will speak at our fall colloquium on “The Sources and Theological Orientation of the Heidelberg Catechism.”

March 31, 2004: Dr. Laura Smit, assistant professor of religion at Calvin College, will be the Meeter Center’s spring lecturer. Her topic will be “A Calvinist Sacramental Understanding.”

John Calvin’s Birthday Celebration

On July 10, 2003, students, faculty, staff, and visitors celebrated John Calvin’s birthday on campus and were treated to a two-minute lecture, given this year (for a change) by Idelette de Bure, John Calvin’s wife. Mrs. Calvin recounted her husband’s efforts to find a suitable spouse and told the gathered audience some stories about life with her husband.For a full text of her speech see www.calvin.edu/alumni/traditions/jc_birthday. Guests enjoyed cake, punch, and a free John Calvin mug in honor of the special day.

My Time at the Meeter Center

My time at the Meeter Center was immensely profitable. In particular, patient instruction in the best use of the Center’s resources and timely, helpful responses to the myriad of questions I asked regarding everything from sixteenth-century French paleography to where to find the Grand Rapids bookstores made my time here significantly more productive than it might have been.

I divided my time at the Center evenly between establishing a warm friendship with the tireless photocopy machine, reading materials at the Center that I did not know existed, and writing up my research. It is especially this last activity that was most important for my present stage of research. Apart from the obvious advantages of having so vast a collection within easy reach, the Meeter Center is particularly invaluable for one in the writing-up stages of a project. The near-exhaustive collection—always in progress—of articles, essays, and books on Calvin and Calvinism, all in one place and all equally accessible, greatly alleviated the familiar burden of searching for those evasive studies on my subject that no one seemed to have. Because of the scope of the collection, which is by design as exhaustive as possible, the need to access such texts quickly was met here in a way not possible elsewhere. Indeed, having taken advantage of only a small fraction of what is on offer at the Center, I find it hard to resist the temptation of claiming that advanced research students of Calvin’s life and work, if their work is to be done right, must make at least one trip to the Center to take advantage of its resources.

In my case this simply would not have been possible—and my work would have been significantly impoverished as a result—had the Center not afforded me a generous student research fellowship. For the Center’s generosity, therefore, and for the multitude of kindnesses shown me during my all-too-brief time here, I am sincerely thankful.

Mark Garcia, Ph.D. candidate
University of Edinburgh

Genevan Paleography Course

The Meeter Center hosted its third biennial Genevan paleography course from June 2-June 13. The course participants appreciated the opportunity to delve into handwritten sixteenth-century documents and to practice deciphering the texts under the guidance of expert paleographer Dr. Tom Lambert.

Reformation and Renaissance Review

The publishers of Reformation and Renaissance Review are pleased to offer a discount for individual subscriptions to readers of the Calvin Courier newsletter and Friends of the Meeter Center as well as to participants in the Center’s conferences and symposia.

Reformation and Renaissance Review is published three times a year. The journal provides a platform for work on the theology and spirituality, both Protestant and Catholic, of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Contributions in related disciplines including history, literature, bibliography, theatre, music, art, and philology that bear on the theological and spiritual developments of this period are also included. Each issue contains papers that illustrate new trends, new developments or new evidence, as well as those attempting a reappraisal of current consensus on a topic of interest. Trends in the modern historiography of the period are identified, and important books reviewed. The first issue appeared in 1999 and the editor is Paul Ayris, director of library services, University College London. Additional information may be found at www.equinoxpub.com.

Fellowship Applications for 2004 may be obtained from the Meeter Center upon request and should by returned by January 1, 2004. Application forms are also available on our Web site.