new John Calvin resources

Today is John Calvin’s birthday, five hundred years ago. In celebration, there have been several new works on Calvin published. Here are some notable ones:

Calvin (Yale, 2009) by Bruce Gordon, Professor of Reformation History at Yale Divinity School. This is the most significant biography of Calvin since T. H. L. Parker’s John Calvin: A Biography, published in 1975.

Calvin: A Brief Guide to His Life and Thought (WJK, 2009) by Willem van ‘t Spijker, Emeritus Professor at the Theological University of Apeldoorn, Netherlands. Translated by Lyle Bierma.

Friends of Calvin (Eerdmans, 2009) by Machiel A. van den Berg, a Reformed pastor in the Netherlands. Translated by Reinder Bruinsma.

John Calvin: Pilgrim and Pastor (Crossway, 2009) by W. Robert Godfrey, Professor of Church History at Westminster Seminary California.

John Calvin’s Impact on Church and Society, 1509-2009 (Eerdmans, 2009), edited by Martin Ernst Hirzel and Martin Sallmann.

A Reader’s Guide to Calvin’s Institutes (Baker Academic, 2009) by Anthony N. S. Lane, Professor of Historical Theology at the London School of Theology.

A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes: Essays and Analysis (P&R, 2008), edited by David W. Hall and Peter A. Lillback.

Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition (Eerdmans, 2009) by John Calvin. Translated by Elsie Anne McKee, Professor of Reformation Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary.

1541 French Institutes

The first English translation of the 1541 French edition of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion will soon be available (cbd, amazon). Google Books has already put the book online with a generous amount of preview pages.

It will be nice to have another approach to the Institutes. The 1541 French edition followed after the second Latin edition (1539) and was the first French translation of the Institutes. According to the translator’s introduction, Calvin wanted to make the work accessible to the common layperson of his homeland. However, the average  person was still illiterate, so the few who could read would read aloud. This oral-aural culture was the context for Calvin’s reworking of his Latin text with the intent of greater clarity and pastoral concern. Interestingly, the 1541 Institutes is considered a pioneer in the legitimacy of using French as a “vehicle for serious subjects, and thus it is also recognized as one of the founding documents of the modern French language” (p. xi). The full title of the 1541 edition is Institution of the Christian Religion: in which is comprised a summary of piety and practically all that is necessary to know about the teaching of salvation.

The translator is Elsie Anne McKee, Professor of Reformation Studies at PTS.

John Calvin on the Trinity

Review of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, chapter 13, on the doctrine of the Trinity.

Here we find a classic delineation of the Trinity, spawned by attacks on the doctrine during Calvin’s time that parallel those found in the early church. Thus we have an occasional piece of literature, filled with the customary rhetoric, but also a piece of constructive dogmatics as Calvin develops a scripturally-founded apologetic for this received doctrine in the West. Calvin repeats what he takes to be the simple definition of the doctrine, namely that the essence of God is undivided but equally belonging to Father, Son, and Spirit who themselves are differentiated by a “certain characteristic” which nonetheless causes no division or partitioning of God’s essence. Calvin is quite certain that if we simply keep this formula in mind we shall be saved from all heretical deviations, but, of course, a host of problems must be attended to, including some important qualifications on Calvin’s part. The main treatment of this formula of the Trinity is found in sections 16-20 where some interesting questions arise, but we will first briefly look at the preceding sections.