Abstract
This book by Barbara Pitkin elucidates a distinguishing feature of John Calvin’s biblical exegesis: his keen sense of history and the importance of respecting historical particularity in his interpretation of biblical texts and contexts. Pitkin deftly demonstrates how Calvin’s exegesis displays a “historicizing approach” (2) that combines “a strong sense of historical anachronism with an equally profound sense of the unity and utility of sacred history” (6) to produce distinctive interpretations associated with him. The reformer’s exegesis relates scriptural and general history to exhibit how “all history is in God’s hands and ultimately meaningful” (226).
After an initial essay introducing the background contexts and distinguishing contours of Calvin’s historicizing exegesis, seven chapters follow as case studies of his approach in action. These chapters expand upon Pitkin’s previously published research to present a roughly chronological portrait of Calvin’s exegesis, from his earliest commentaries to his final exegetical projects. Such organization conveys consistency in Calvin’s historical consciousness while revealing the striking variety of ways it surfaced to address particular circumstances, demonstrating a fixture in Calvin’s exegesis equally impossible to deny or reduce to a single method or representation.
Chapter 2 examines Calvin’s approach to Paul as both first-century church leader capable of misjudgment and teacher of timeless doctrine, whose letter to the Romans is a key to all of scripture. Chapter 3 focuses on the reformer’s 1553 commentary on John, which identifies John’s main theme as Christ’s “salvific mission in human history” (83), pressing the soteriological orientation Calvin shared with other Protestant interpreters in a decidedly historical direction that frequently locates the Gospel’s moral teaching simply in the history it relates. Chapter 4 takes up Calvin’s portrayal of David in his 1557 commentary on the Psalms, which de-emphasizes the christocentric character of David’s faith to present sixteenth-century believers with a historically embedded model for their faith because David discerns divine providence while “entangled in the web of his own history” (116). Chapter 5 considers the reformer’s historicizing exegesis of Isaiah, revealing how Calvin finds exile in the biblical past to “mirror” (128) the refugee realities he and others experienced. In chapter 6 we encounter Calvin’s extreme “praeteristic and noneschatological reading of Daniel” (145), which strongly insists that historical distance from Daniel’s prophecies—and their fulfillment—is essential for grasping their meaning as comfort to God’s people past and present. Chapter 7 argues that Calvin’s training in “legal humanism” (172) within the era’s new critical awareness of history shaped the unprecedented organization and method of his 1563 Mosaic Harmony. Chapter 8 situates Calvin’s sermons on 2 Samuel within Reformed teaching emerging during the French religious wars that comforted believers with lessons from providence in history.
This study’s impressive breadth invites reflection on its variety of sources and insights. One wonders, for instance, if sounding out echoes of a Pauline model for church reform could include less obvious “ecclesiastical” (51) texts of the early 1540s, such as Calvin’s anti-Nicodemite treatises, which expressly leverage Paul to justify reforming church structures and practices. Similarly, perhaps more could be said about how Calvin’s historicizing exegesis of John may have been deployed to bolster his pastoral authority in Geneva, or how prioritizing consolation in Daniel might make Calvin’s approach both more and less “historical” than others’. Such minor considerations detract nothing from the volume’s many strengths. Among these is the care with which it historicizes Calvin’s historicizing approach, reflected in the wry observation that Calvin’s “Isaiah commentary itself could be counted as one of those exiles driven out of England” (126). Incorporating recent studies that have illumined Calvin’s intellectual and social contexts, Pitkin situates Calvin’s exegesis at the intersection of diverse influences. These include medieval exegesis, Reformation readings of Paul, developments in historical and legal scholarship, Calvin’s sense of vocation and political fortunes in Geneva, and the outbreak of war in France. The resulting nuanced account of Calvin’s historical sensibilities clarifies how we might speak of Calvin as “Pauline theologian” or “reformer to the refugees,” for example, or explain his application of “mirror” language to exile or eschewal of christological readings. In each case, Pitkin supplies a compelling “how” and “why” from Calvin’s exegetical corpus, avouching the importance of these works for understanding his thought. Pitkin’s important work on the ubiquity and sophistication of Calvin’s historicizing approach will inform all future assessments of the reformer’s historical awareness and originality in the history of biblical interpretation.