BOOK REVIEW:
The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundations of a Theological Tradition. By Richard A. Muller. New York, NY and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. 308 pp. ISBN: 019511681X. 

This is an insightful and rigorous study of John Calvin as a sixteenth century theologian, and it is without a doubt one of the best written in recent years. The single-minded goal of the study is to examine Calvin’s ideas in their original context and thereby to correct a number of twentieth century readings—or, as the author would have it, misreadings—that—“accommodate” Calvin to causes and ideas that the reformer himself never remotely entertained. To that end, it pursues a thoroughgoing reexamination of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, including the place of that text within the reformer’s overall theological corpus, and interprets it—quite rightly in my view—not so much as a systematic treatise but as a prelude and accompaniment to that which Calvin himself considered to be a theologian’s primary work, namely, interpretation and exposition of the scriptures.

The corrections proffered against unwarranted accommodations run in many different directions. Historians are taken to task for being too a-theological in their assessment of Calvin, while theologians are chastised for being too a-historical. The historian William Bouwsma, for example, might well have avoided presenting a false portrait of Calvin as a man wracked by anxiety, we are told, if only he had not bracketed Calvin’s confident doctrinal affirmations, which would have informed him otherwise. Contemporary theologians come in for even greater rebuke than historians, especially theologians of a Schleiermacherian and Barthian stripe, as well as postmodern interpreters who focus on Calvin’s rhetoric. Indeed, any scholar or theologian who attempts to bring Calvin into constructive dialogue with contemporary concerns is thoroughly scolded and dismissed.

So vehement are the author’s rejections of modern appropriations of Calvin, in fact, that one begins to wonder what exactly is going on here, though the answer is not hard to discover. Richard Muller, who is the P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, is also the author of one of the finest studies we have on seventeenth century Reformed orthodoxy. And there you have it: unlike a number of recent historians of the sixteenth century who are bothered by any sort of theological study of Calvin’s work, Muller has no problem affirming those theological appropriations of Calvin that see him as a dogmatic theologian who laid the foundation for the orthodox “Calvinism” that followed. Apparently, the only constructive applications of Calvin’s work that Muller thinks permissible are those firmly rooted in the seventeenth century. As it turns out, there is really just one legitimate approach to Calvin that matters, namely, the dogmatic approach of Calvinist scholasticism.

Yet herein lies the great irony of this work. It is really not a contextual study of Calvin at all—not, that is, if context includes such things as social, political, and economic factors. Rather, it is a study in the history of doctrine, a purportedly objective study of the history of ideas, which Muller gives to us without the least acknowledgment that this genre itself is under assault today both within the historical guild and without. The goal of Muller’s study is to tell us what Calvin “really” thought. Although Muller is much too good a historian to think we can ever do this perfectly, still this is his ideal. He is quite convinced, for instance, that we can speak legitimately and straight-forwardly of “the sixteenth century mind.” Moreover, he believes he knows quite well what that “mind” thinks.

What sort of project is this recovery of objective “ideas” from the past, if not one that is thoroughly modernist? It is certainly an ideal that has little continuity with Calvin’s own practice in regard to appropriating historical figures. In reading patristic sources, for example, Calvin was wont to pick and choose only those items which he planned to press into the service of his own argument. To that extent, then, Calvin himself was a prime example of the very sort of engaged and tendentious reading practice that Muller declares to be illegitimate.

Make no mistake: my purpose here is not to turn the tables on Muller and declare his particular approach to be illegitimate. I only wish he would acknowledge that a variety of contemporary approaches to Calvin, far from creating a scandal, may actually enhance our knowledge. Muller’s work is fascinating and often brilliant in what it affirms, even if, at the same time, it is rather overbearing and narrow in what it denies.

Nevertheless, the book is a must-read for anyone who cares at all about John Calvin. It contains a wealth of knowledge, research, and scholarly insight; and it is not being too “accommodating” to Muller to say that with this book he has distinguished himself as one of John Calvin’s finest and most illuminating contemporary theological interpreters. 

William Stacy Johnson
Arthur M. Adams Associate Professor of Systematic Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, WINTER 2002, VOL. 2, #3.