John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor, and Theologian: The Shape of His Writings and Thought.
Kelsay, John
John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor, and Theologian: The Shape of His
Writings and Thought. By Randall C. Zachman. Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker-Academic, 2006. 283 pp. $24.99 cloth.
In this volume, Zachman collects essays written over a number of
years. While most are previously published, the collection allows a
sustained and forceful reading of major portions of Calvin's ouvre.
As Zachman presents it, this reading grows out of "two insights ...
discovered in the course of teaching [Calvin's] theology for the
past two decades. First, I learned that Calvin had as his ultimate
objective teaching every single man, woman, and child how to read
Scripture for themselves, so that they might apply its genuine meaning
to every aspect of their lives.... Second, I discovered that for all his
interest in teaching and reading Scripture, Calvin was a deeply
contemplative theologian, who claimed that the invisible God becomes
somewhat visible to us in what he called 'living images of
God,' which form the self-manifestation of God" (7-8). Zachman
develops the first insight in terms of Calvin's presentation of his
life's work as teacher and pastor; this is the topic of the essays
in part 1 of the volume. The second insight is the focus of part 2.
Thus in part 1, we learn how Calvin worked with various
"audiences" in the service of his overarching aim: the renewal
of the Church. In order to achieve this renewal, Calvin worked to make
the Word of God available to "the unlearned." As teacher or
doctor of the faith, Calvin's direct audience consisted of pastors.
These would in turn take responsibility for the faith of ordinary
Christians. For that task, they would need instruction in sound
doctrine, and also in the proper means of interpreting Scripture. As
Zachman has it, the later editions of the Institutes address the former
need, presenting pastors not only with the substance of right doctrine,
but with its proper order. Calvin's "students" thus learn
that God works to renew fallen humanity by proceeding from the most
universal and general affirmations to the more particular (and, in some
sense, controversial) aspects of the creed. Calvin's commentaries
on Holy Scripture address the latter need, so that pastors learn the
method of interpreting texts "by the order of context," so
that particular verses find their meaning in the context of larger
portions of text, primarily that of the book in which they occur, though
in the end, the whole of the Bible reveals the work of God, which is the
ultimate context of interpretation.
If Calvin's work as teacher addresses an audience of pastors,
his own work as pastor involves direct attempts to shape the piety of
ordinary believers. In this respect, Zachman focuses on sermons and on
Calvin's various attempts to write a catechism. The latter, being
particularly aimed at children, seems to have presented considerable
difficulties, not least in that Calvin seems uncertain whether the
instruction of children is most directly a responsibility of pastors or
of parents. In either case, both sermons and catechisms serve to
demonstrate Calvin's conception of the way faith works:
affirmations about God are internalized with respect to the intellect
and emotions, and these in turn create dispositions by which one's
mode of relating to the world is affected. The focus on words creates an
initial aura of a highly intellectual religiosity. Ideas are training
for affections, however; and in this way, the renewal of the mind is
connected with the transformation of the self.
This last provides a nice segue into part 2 of Zachman's
collection, in which the goal is to present readings of Calvin's
work that tie a focus on the Word to the contemplation of the living
images of God present in creation and in Christ. Commenting on Romans
1:19, Calvin writes that the human being was created "to be a
spectator of the fabric of the world, and ... was endowed with eyes for
the purpose of being led to God ... by contemplating so magnificent an
image" (192-93 and elsewhere). With respect to creation, and also
in the instance of the Christ, the removal of graven images serves to
focus believers on living representations provided by God. Zachman
attaches considerable importance to this point, so much so that he makes
the notion of Jesus Christ as the image of the Father the governing
theme of Calvin's theological work. Once this emphasis is in place,
Zachman argues, a number of historic controversies over Calvin's
Christology, the relations between creation and redemption, and the
place of the Holy Spirit in Christian faith are resolved.
Zachman's work is a major contribution to Calvin studies, not
least in the way it provides a corrective for several recent and widely
influential presentations. Part 1, for example, provides a strong
critique of works that focus on Calvin as rhetorician, and which
subsequently downplay the dialectical and contemplative aspects of his
work. And the argument of part 2 is clearly intended to provide balance
to studies that see the campaign to remove images as correlative with an
intellectualism devoid of emotion and (in a certain way) sensuality.
Along the way, it should be said that Zachman's wide knowledge of
the corpus of other sixteenth-century writers allows him to employ the
method of comparison to great effect. Discussions of Calvin's
relations with Luther and Melanchthon are especially illuminating. The
one major gap in this presentation of Calvin's work is the omission
of any extended discussion of the role of discipline in the program of
the Church. On this point, one hopes that Zachman may turn in future
work to an elaboration of the remarks made on page 140 of this study,
and thus to indicate the ways that Calvin as teacher, pastor, and
theologian relate to the institution of faith in the visible Church.
John Kelsay
Florida State University
