How exactly has Calvin been accommodated? The title of Richard Muller's most recent book, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition, begs this question. Muller argues that twentieth-century Calvin scholarship suffered from a Barthian reading. Neo-Orthodox scholars routinely laid Calvin on their Procrustean beds, stretching and chopping the reformer's corpus until it fit within their dogmatic agenda. In much of the modern period, Calvin studies chiefly served as launching pads for the dogmatic-theological enterprise, rarely did they present his thought in a sixteenth-century context. According to Muller, contemporary scholarship stands at a crossroads. One path leads to a Schleiermacherian-centered hermeneutic, the other sees Calvin as a "genitive theologian," with Calvin as the theologian of experience, wisdom, christocentrism, and so forth. With The Unaccommodated Calvin, Muller seeks not to guide the traveler but to redraw the map.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part asks Calvin to define the theological task. A series of Calvin's prefaces provides the answers. Special attention is given to the reformer's method. These answers are then considered in light of Calvin's contemporaries, successors, and interpreters. Part Two addresses Calvin's theological program: the Institutes. The work is then placed in its sixteenth-century context. From this position, some modern editions of the Institutes are criticized and applications are drawn and applied to contemporary scholarship.
Muller begins his work by sketching out the lay of the land. Although Neo-Orthodox studies of Calvin dominate, alternatives exist. The 1940s found T. H. L. Parker indicting nineteenth-century work on Calvin as it searched for the elusive "center" around which Calvin's thought crystallized, centers which tended to reflect nineteenth-century points of interest. More recently, A. N. S. Lane and David Steinmetz, among others, have sought to place Calvin in his various contexts. The fruits of this labor are twofold. We now recognize Calvin's growth as a theologian throughout his career and his consciousness of the patristic and medieval tradition, making selective use of them.
In turning to the prefaces of Calvin's works, where he defines his method, Muller sees the characteristics of humanism. Calvin, like virtually every other sixteenth-century Protestant theologian, saw himself as primarily a biblical commentator, not a systematician. Scripture was to be elucidated via philological and linguistic methods, and exegesis was to be brief and clear. Extended doctrinal explanation was to be omitted from the commentary.
But Muller does not consider Calvin's humanistic context at the expense of the scholastic. Calvin had much to say about the "schoolmen," usually bad. A close examination of Calvin's thought, however, finds him making use of Aristotelian distinctions and scholastic tradition. Consciously or not, when Calvin drew from the well of exegetical tradition, he drank certain waters of the schoolmen. Muller's conclusion argues for a Calvin who blends "humanistic methods in rhetoric and piety with nominally scholastic materials."
Just as there is continuity between late medieval theology and Calvin, so too, Muller notes, there is continuity between Calvin and early reformed Orthodoxy. A detailed examination of the Institutes aparati finds Calvin's successors retaining his thought with both clarity and detail. Seventeenth-century reformers drew upon "the architectonic structure of the Institutes." Translation: Calvin's theology, his patterns of argument, and distinctive propositions helped give rise to Federalism (covenant theology). Muller here argues that one must measure continuity by more than a repetition of phraseology; awareness and adherence to content are the criteria.
Muller rounds out Part One with an analysis of William Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, which demonstrates Muller's historical method by way of critique. Bouwsma proposed an anxious, neurotic Calvin, a thesis primarily drawn from Calvin's concept of "abyss" and "labyrinth." Yet a careful study of Calvin's use of the words does not find him using them disproportionately. Why then are they to be the foci of study? Calvin doesn't use them to refer to anxiety. What then is the rationale for "abyss" or "labyrinth" as terms which he unconsciously uses to refer to his own anxiety? Bouwsma uses these terms as a psychologically interpretive grid to Calvin's thought, precisely what Muller is cautioning us to avoid. Ultimately, it appears as if these words are more apt to describe the twentieth-century historian than the sixteenth-century theologian.
In Part One, Muller argues for "Calvin the biblical commentator" who refused to do excursive theology characterized by digression in his commentaries. Muller fleshes out this thought in Part Two, directing our attention to the Institutes, the format to which Calvin turned when he desired to more fully discuss the dogmatic relationships of a passage. The Institutes may be conceived of as a series of disputations or a loci communes, that is, a series of discussions on the "common places" of Scripture. The point is that we need to look at Calvin's commentary to understand his thought. The Institutes is but a directory and commentary on passages, not a solitary system.
Muller then turns his attention to the structure of the Institutes, specifically addressing Calvin's conception of the "right order for teaching." The questions revolve around the various structural changes Calvin implemented between the first edition of the Institutes, in 1539, and the definitive edition of 1559. From the outset, one must recognize the changing nature of the Institutes. What began as a small catechetical device grew into a series of "disputations," a textbook for the theological student. The catechetical work, typical of the era, followed the order of the Apostles' Creed; the collection of disputationes, influenced by Melanchthon, followed the Pauline ordo salutis (order of salvation).
After establishing Calvin's framework for his Institutes, Muller compares and contrasts modern editions. On the whole, the various modern editions, replete with extended discussions, interpretive "helps," and headings and subheadings myriad, leave the reader viewing the Institutes through the spectacles of Neo-Orthodoxy. By ignoring the sixteenth-century context of such theological methods as loci communes, common places or topics, and Calvin's own identification of the Institutes as such, the twentieth-century editor is apt to force the Institutes into a systematical grid. To read the Institutes in this fashion is to do Calvin an injustice. So, too, is reading the Institutes apart from his commentaries; the exposition of the "common places" of Scripture inform and are informed by the exposition of the Canon.
Muller proceeds with another case study. R. T. Kendell's Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 serves as the object of the lesson. Kendell sees Calvin viewing faith, solely, as intellectual proposition, while the later Calvinists, he observes, incorporate some use of the will, thus a proported discontinuity. Muller notes that Calvin did not intend to participate in the intellectualist-versus-voluntarist debate. While Calvin does use some of the terminology of the intellectualists, such as faith as cognitio or scientia (knowledge,) he also describes faith as illuminatio (illuminating.) Calvin argues for the Augustinian concept of faith as a gift of God, through which God regenerates both the intellect and the will. Kendell's errors are, as Muller argues, both basic and obvious in nature and can best be explained as the product of a dogmatic agenda.
Muller concludes with a summary and an agenda. Calvin is to be viewed within his contexts. To do anything less will yield a Calvin who appears remarkably like what the researcher had thought all along. The Institutes is not a textbook/manual of systematic theology and ought be read in the context of his commentaries. Calvin used humanistic tools to mediate, to some degree, scholastic tenets.
Muller's book is an extremely valuable contribution to the work about sixteenth-century historical theology. For as much value as this book has concerning Calvin, perhaps it should be viewed as a textbook of historical methodology. Muller's survey of the literature is masterful. His work is characterized by a careful and detailed examination of the primary sources, reflected with elaborate documentation. Muller has attempted to control his biases, raising them to the conscious state and employing deliberate methodology to his argument.
That is the text; now to the subtext. The MR reader will experience something analogous to walking in halfway through a movie. This book is the latest exchange in an ongoing argument concerning Calvin and his successors. It may be a work by which Muller places his adversaries in check. Until rather recently, the seventeenth-century Calvinists were portrayed as the colloquial bad guys. Pious, humble Calvin was a good soul, but with the ascendance of Theodore Beza, things took a turn for the ill. Soon Calvin's Bible-friendly exegesis would be replaced with the cold, hard rigors of Protestant scholasticism, the very scholasticism that Calvin so often repudiated! Here, it was thought, was the paragon of discontinuity between master and successors.
Enter Richard Muller. In what is now sometimes referred to as the "Muller thesis," scholasticism is viewed as method. The seventeenth-century reformed thinkers retained, and expanded upon, Calvin's doctrines, utilizing the methods of the schools which were now forming, that is, scholasticism. There is a certain organic maturation between Calvin and Casper Olevianus, or Francis Turretin; thus their phraseology is often disjointed from Calvin's. Yet there is a continuation of content, of internal structure of argument, and of "architectonic structure." Muller now raises the stakes by arguing that not only is there continuity between Calvin and his successors, but between Calvin and his predecessors. Borrowing a page from the book of Heiko Oberman, who has convincingly argued for similarities between late medieval theology and the Reformation, Muller now finds himself cataloging data for "Calvin the humanist" and "Calvin the scholastic." Undoubtedly there are those who will argue with this presentation, and yet they must now reinterpret the data that Richard Muller has marshaled. A daunting task, "as if Calvin can be saved from the scholastic past and detached from the increasingly scholastic future of Reformed theology in the sixteenth century."
This book is a technical volume, written for the professional or graduate student. Nevertheless, many lessons may be drawn for the lay reader. First, be wary of any book whose title resembles "Calvin, Theologian of (fill in the blank)." Second, buy the Beveridge edition of the Institutes, at least until the Muller edition comes out. Third, when reading the Institutes, if you come across a Scripture reference, do not assume that it is the modern equivalent of a proof text. Rather, it tells you, "please see my commentary on this verse."
