The new Lives of Great Religious Books series from Princeton University Press aims to “recount the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts”—biographies of books, in other words, not specifically authors. The books featured thus far have been chosen “for general readers,” and the biographies are written by “leading authors and experts.” Notable offerings in the history of Christianity include biographies of Augustine’s Confessions by Garry Wills, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae by the eminent historian Bernard McGinn, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity by evangelical scholar George Marsden, and now Calvin’s Institutes from Yale Divinity School historian Bruce Gordon. Books of the Bible are also featured, such as Genesis and Job, as well as important texts from various world religions: The Book of Mormon, the Bhagavad Gita, and even the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Consisting of twelve chapters with two appendices, Gordon’s biography of the Institutes takes the reader “on a journey from the desk of the young John Calvin in Basel in 1536 to our world of social media religion” (12). Calvin is presented in lively fashion, as the biographer promises to do: “I am content to render one service, and that is to dissuade readers that the following chapters are about a dreary theological treatise by a bearded killjoy. The Institutes is an extended hymn of praise by an exiled Frenchman to a saving God he believed never abandoned the faithful” (12). Gordon’s biography can be described as part book history, part reception history, and part summary of Calvin’s theology. I’d like to consider it under those three broad headings.
Book History
Historians helpfully remind us that books don’t exist in and of themselves. There is no “Ur-text,” as one scholar has put it, that can be divorced from the material, physical existence of a book and what Robert Darnton, former Harvard Librarian, calls the “communication circuit” that runs from the author to the publisher, “the printer, the bookseller, and the reader” (see Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History [W. W. Norton & Company, 1991]). Put simply, books come from the minds and through the fingers of writers onto a manuscript, which is then edited, set to type, laid out, proofed, printed, bound, circulated, sold, and (hopefully) read. The fact that Calvin’s Institutes, as Gordon notes, “was so heavily revised, went through so many editions, and reached so many people” invites, if not demands, some consideration of it from the perspective of “book history” (20). From this perspective, Gordon’s readers learn that the Institutes circulated among “a broad clerical and lay audience,” having “made its way to those readers as a result of Calvin’s ready access to leading printers and book distributors” (16). “Single-handedly,” our biographer explains, Calvin “transformed the printing business in Geneva, turning it from a publishing backwater into a center of Protestant book production that instructed the growing evangelical communities in France” (31).
In my favorite section of the book, we learn about the publication of the Institutes in England. We meet Edmund Bunny, an editor of Calvin’s work who collaborated with a Parisian printer, Thomas Vautrollier, to produce the first English translation of the Institutes in 1574 (52, 58). We also meet two other mediators of Calvin’s theology: an unlicensed medical doctor, William Delaune, who published an Epitome (or a sort of Reader’s Digest version) of the Institutes in 1583 (53), along with Thomas “the rackmaster” Norton, a member of Parliament and son-in-law of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who in his spare time apparently enjoyed the art of torturing Roman Catholics as much as he did the art of rendering Calvin’s Latin into English (59).
The Institutes “was not one book but a project that evolved over twenty years,” and Gordon gives a fair account of Calvin’s numerous revisions and enlargement of the text (17). On balance, however, Gordon’s book yields relatively little information about Calvin’s personal involvement in the production of the physical text and its editions beyond the generation of the original theological content. I was left wanting more: for example, some further explanation of the fascinating but baldly stated claim that Calvin was a “shrewd businessman” who “understood the interplay of learning, piety, and marketing” (16). Turning to other aspects of Gordon’s biography—namely, a summary of Calvin’s theology and a history of the reception of the Institutes—I think there is much more here for Christians and scholars to discuss and debate.
Theological Summary
Gordon offers his most sustained account of Calvin’s theology in chapter 2. He summarizes the Genevan’s magnum opus in this way:
The Institutes is about God: a God who reaches out to humanity, who reveals himself in creation and in the redemption of women and men, and who through his son, Jesus Christ, restores the relationship with his people destroyed by sin. The covenant God initiated is enduring. (46)
Gordon also gives brief attention to each of what he regards as “three of the most important ideas in the Institutes: knowledge, religion, and piety” (37).
Gordon captures enough of Calvin’s theology, in my view, to serve as an acceptable introduction for a very general reader. Still, there are a few short-comings worth noting. The most significant reservation I have about the treatment of Calvin’s theology is Gordon’s attempt to remain neutral as our guide. Calvin’s thought has produced different reactions over the centuries, as Gordon acknowledges. And in promising a history of how readers have read the Institutes, the book delivers with a full range of diverse and contradictory interpretations. But I think the reader would have been better served by Gordon, himself an expert, by the insertion of his own perspective at certain points as to the fairness or accuracy of some of the readings of Calvin that he presents. In the end, he attempts what I think is impossible—namely, a kind of impartial account that doesn’t finally help the new or prospective reader discern what Calvin actually taught and believed.
Looking at the doctrine of predestination, for example, Gordon rightly notes that Calvin had a well-developed doctrine of predestination but that it was not the singularly important doctrine (or central dogma) of his theology (42). He notes, accurately again, that “Calvin never believed that he was saying anything new; the doctrine of election, he insisted, was taught by Christ, Paul, and Augustine” (87). And yet, we are also told that Calvin’s doctrine was “received with widespread repugnance, even among his friends” (43), and that “among his fellow Reformed Christians, many hated his uncompromising doctrine of double predestination” (33). With friends like that, I found myself thinking, who needs enemies? And was this really the response of his “friends”?
There are a number of other oddities and ambiguities of description, such as when Gordon suggests that Calvin was a “prophet of doom” who “never saw a tulip in his life,” which would seem to be a reference to what Gordon must think is a tension between Calvin’s doctrine of predestination and the teachings of the Canons of Dort (87, 8). Gordon also reports along the way that Calvin’s doctrine of predestination has been understood to make “God the author of sin” (43)—a charge he admits that Calvin “angrily refuted”—and was even a major disincentive for evangelism and missions. In the end, while it is true that these things (and worse) have been claimed of Calvin’s theology, readers aren’t given any clear answer on the question of whether these readings of Calvin are fair or accurate interpretations. I am of opinion that this does a disservice to a general reader. At the very least, one hopes that the neutrality of the biographer will serve as an invitation to “take and read” the Institutes and discover for oneself what the truth might be.
Reception History
In terms of reception history (i.e., the question of how Calvin’s Institutes and its theology has been received by later generations), an early passage in the book raised my eyebrows. Gordon explains that Calvin has “often been abducted by individuals and groups seeking to use his name for positions he could never have held.” This point may well be true, but then Gordon gives us an example—namely, “modern ideas of biblical inerrancy” (7). He explains that a “literary and doctrinal kidnapping took place while Calvin lived and continued unabated after his death, forcing us to ask, who was this man and what was his relationship between him and his successors” (7).
Now, I do believe it would be anachronistic to claim that Calvin believed in the doctrine of inerrancy, word for word, as set forth for example in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. But nor do I believe that had such a statement been presented to Calvin in the consistory room in Geneva, he would have rejected it out of hand. The concern that this example raises, however, is not about inerrancy but about a double standard that Gordon seems to apply throughout the book as he presents and evaluates Calvin’s “heirs.”
What can it mean that those successors who claimed continuity with Calvin in their development of his understanding of biblical authority or predestination are accused of serious crimes worthy of federal prosecution (i.e., kidnapping and abduction)? Meanwhile, those who openly rejected Calvin’s teaching on a vast number of points—Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, who is also discussed by Gordon at some length—escape criticism almost entirely. One is left with the impression that Calvin’s immediate successors, the consolidators of the Reformation and his co-laborers for the reform of the church, potentially abused their father in the faith by developing his theology and giving it further nuance and substance. But the Protestant liberals, who came later in the nineteenth century and openly acknowledged that they understood Calvin merely as a “heritage” figure or a “symbol of a common Protestant inheritance,” are given a free pass (80). It is difficult to know what a novice reader will make of this analysis, but more experienced readers will want to raise questions about why those who claim loyalty are denied, but those who themselves reject continuity escape criticism.
In conclusion, the book does raise an important question in this year of Reformation celebrations: What does it mean to be an heir of Calvin’s theology? Far more important than a laying on of hands (as in some misguided notion of apostolic succession), or a simple assertion to possess the mantle of Calvin’s authority, faithful Christians will want to consider their adherence to the confession of faith made by Calvin and the Reformers, and the question of its faithfulness as a summary of biblical teaching.
Ryan Glomsrud has taught historical theology at Westminster Seminary California since 2011 and serves as book review editor of Modern Reformation magazine.
