BOOK REVIEW:
What Pure Eyes Could See: Calvin's Doctrine of Faith in Its Exegetical Context. By Barbara Pitkin. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ix + 260 pp. ISBN 0195128281.

The temptation to some form of Gnosticism is endemic in Christian belief; it is in some sense the archetypalheresy. There are those who, finding the word “knowledge” in the pages of the Fourth Gospel accuse its writer of the heresy, though Irenaeus’ encounter with his opponents reveals the flaw in such a charge. What Irenaeus shows is that at issue is not the word but the way in which it is understood, and especially whether it is rooted incarnationally or not: on whether it is the intellectus fidei, the knowledge which consists in, and never moves beyond the sphere of, faith. But what kind of knowledge is the knowledge of faith, and how is it mediated? They are the questions on the answers to which a right systematic account of the concept of faith is to be predicated. If the earth is to be filled with the knowledge of God, everything hangs on what that is and how it is to be obtained. 

Among the many merits of this study of Calvin’s doctrine of faith is that it shows one of the great minds of the Christian tradition engaging with the many sides of this complex question. Luther, in his opposition to the intellectualism of the mediaeval tradition, rightly opposed faith to the distortions of the tradition, and Calvin shares his sharp opposition to leading scholastic categories. And yet the later Reformer has to deal with the greater complexity that had eventuated from years of controversy, and this means in his case an intellectual pilgrimage in which the scripture’s manifold presentation of the relation between the believer and God is rigorously and progressively explored. 

Barbara Pitkin’s book is a similarly rigorous exploration of the pilgrimage. It does not make light reading, for its scholarship is wide-ranging, painstaking and detailed, but the journey is rewarding. It shows us things from the whole of the Calvin corpus which most of us are likely never to have the opportunity to explore in such detail for ourselves. Building on Calvin’s conception of the two-fold knowledge of God, the author shows that for Calvin faith is a kind of perception which has a truly noetic character. 

Even in the earlier works, Calvin’s desire to teach gives to his concept of faith not only a soteriological orientation but one revealing his concern to teach doctrine. As time advances, his concern for knowledge becomes more marked. Faith for him is a kind of perception, which, although it is contrasted with physical perception, is not understood entirely platonically, for: “faith ‘sees’ the image of God in the word, the sacraments, the ministrations of the church, and perhaps even in the structure of the world” (p. 61). Calvin's soteriological concerns maintain the breadth of his conception, and figure among the features of his theology which save him from intellectualism. Nor is his a narrowly biblicist vision. In conversation with Dowey, Dr. Pitkin insists that it is faith rather than scripture which serves for Calvin as the gateway to the knowledge of God (p. 131). 

How important is all this for our modern age, with its tendency to anti-intellectualism and its playing of experience against the need for a firm hold on the doctrinal content of the faith? Here, as in almost everything else, Calvin has so much to teach us. Without a personal indwelling of the content of the Christian gospel, we shall not be truly trained in the faith; yet that content is mediated to us not by our intellectual efforts, but by the Lord who is the Spirit. 

Colin Gunton
King’s College, London

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING/SUMMER 2001, VOL. 2, #2.