Premier historian Bruce Gordon has written a highly interesting and strikingly engaging “life” of one of the great theological classics, John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. Through its Latin and French editions from 1536 to 1560, Calvin's work became “a book for the church and for many churches spread across Europe” (xii).
Over the past five-hundred years, the Institutes “never disappeared,” though “it often sat on shelves for long periods of time” (xiv). This “biography” of the Institutes traces its origin and development during Calvin's life and after his death through its appropriation in the following centuries and in as varied places as the United States, The Netherlands, and today in South Africa and China. Along the way, Gordon looks at the 1930s clash of the “Titans”—Barth and Brunner—over interpreting Calvin's views on “natural theology.” He concludes with a chapter on “Contemporary Voices,” maintaining that “in many respects, Calvin and the Institutes have never been more present”—in academia and in engagement of Calvin's thought—both pro and con, on a variety of fronts (199).
Gordon presents both Calvin's passionate defenders and his detractors. Calvin saw himself foremost as an interpreter of Holy Scripture, sharing the Reformation conviction that sola scriptura put “biblical interpretation at the heart of the movement” (16). Calvin's Institutes was his comprehensive summary of his biblical interpretation, expressed in Christian doctrine (36). His work “in style and conception” was “distinctive, both eloquent and accessible.” According to Gordon's analysis, “As a literary voice on doctrine, Calvin was alone” (14). Calvin's book was not a work of “academic theology”—a designation Gordon says “Calvin would have hated” (xiii). Instead, the book spoke of relationships: between us and God, between us and our neighbors, and within ourselves. These relationships are “inseparable in the sanctified life Calvin envisaged for women and men.” Concretely, “the Institutes is a book to be lived” (xiii).
After Calvin's death in 1564, “the intellectual world of the Protestant Reformation was changing, moving away from the humanist forms of writing that shaped the Institutes” (50). Scholasticism became the preferred academic and theological method. Calvin's inheritors did not jettison his work, but adapted it for their times. Critical apparatus structures were added to Institutes editions, and compendia and epitomes appeared to summarize Calvin's Institutes “in more manageably sized books that could be used by pressed pastors and frazzled students” (52). Gordon does not try to adjudicate the contested issue of Calvin's relationship to developed seventeenth-century Reformed Orthodoxy. Instead, he urges a contextual reading of Calvin during the Orthodox period, indicating Calvin's successors “did not treat Calvin's writings as canonical or of special authority. His words did not appear in red letters. He was venerated as a founder of the Reformed tradition and as its first great theological author, but as the decades passed after his death, others, in particular his successor Beza, led the church” (56).
Calvin's voice was most influential in England under Elizabeth I; his Institutes, “with its clarity and elegance, had no competition, certainly none from English authors” (58). For emerging Reformed Christians, including Presbyterians and Puritans, “the Institutes became the definitive statement of doctrine” (58).
In the Age of Enlightenment, “knowledge” became, not what Calvin discussed in the opening of the Institutes, but “scientia became ‘reason,’ which rendered possible religion without doctrine” (68). So churches adopted a new creed of “reasonable religion” as “an ethical, exemplary, and reasonable Christ, the supreme moral example, replaced the God as redeemer from books two and three of Calvin's Institutes” (69). Calvin's part in the “Servetus affair” became “the morality tale of all that had been wrong with Reformation religion” (71). Yet Calvin's classic continued to be influential through theologians such as Cotton Mather and, earlier, the Englishman John Cotton. When Cotton was asked why he stayed up late reading the Institutes, he replied, “because I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep” (64, 82). John Wesley even quoted Calvin on a crucial point on the doctrine of justification (83).
After the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon, “Reformed Christianity was in danger of becoming a relic, an irrelevant and unwanted reminder of intolerance and dogmatic rigidity” (89). But Schleiermacher often quoted Calvin, was a critical reader of Calvin, and argued that predestination was at the heart of the Institutes. Schleiermacher showed a new way of reading Calvin, though, as Gordon comments, he “adopted a form of universal election that had little to do with the Institutes” (94).
Gordon expertly tells the story of “America's Calvin,” especially in the Civil War context where there was “a generation of Presbyterian writers on both sides of the conflict who claimed Calvin” (118). By the time of the anniversary of Calvin's birth, in 1909, there were three leading Calvin interpreters: B.B. Warfield, Abraham Kuyper, and Herman Bavinck. While admitting Calvin's mistake in consenting to Servetus's death, Bavinck and Dutch Neo-Calvinists saw the Institutes as “the embodiment of a man who was in turn a model for what they should be” (131).
Kuyperianism was used to justify apartheid in South Africa. But for figures such as Allan Boesak and John de Gruchy, with the discovery of Calvin as “a champion of refugees, the weak, and the poor, and critical of the powerful and wealthy” (through André Bielier's The Social Humanism of Calvin, Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1964), Calvin's Institutes “inspired black and white South Africans to transform a nation” (181).
After its cultural revolution, Calvin scholarship emerged in China. Gordon shows different strands here as today the Institutes is read as “a guide for Christian living and church renewal, as a link to Western culture, as part of modernization, and as support for political dissent” (184).
Gordon's splendid study shows that the Institutes provided a theological vision for its own day, while “speaking powerfully to the present,” as it offers exquisite renderings of Christian beliefs and experiences, “by one of the faith's greatest authors” (221).
