Editorial: Calvin amongst the Systematicians? (original) (raw)

2009, International Journal of Systematic Theology

As I write, the 500th anniversary of Jean Calvin's birth has just been marked in a variety of ways. This issue is IJST's own celebration of the legacy of Calvin. The articles were invited, and each author was asked to address Calvin's thought or influence as it relates to the discipline of systematic theology. There has been something of a renaissance in Calvin studies in the past couple of decades, which, however, has often been rather hostile to any attempt to draw Calvin into the conversations of systematicians. As a result, the very attempt to put together this journal number may need some defence. Scholarly engagement with Calvin has been revitalized by careful, disciplined and excellent historical work that focuses on locating Calvin within his own intellectual, ecclesial and social context. This work arose in large part as a reaction against an earlier tradition, flourishing in the middle decades of the last century, which found in Calvin, and particularly in the Institutio, a systematic theology par excellence, an ordered exposition of the doctrines of the Christian faith which could and should be engaged with in an ahistorical way. This reading was often accompanied by a rather strange account of theological history, in which Calvin (and some of the other Reformers) shone as a brief moment of gospel light, throwing into sharp contrast the darkness of the arid Aristotelian scholasticisms that preceded and followed. There is much to celebrate in the reaction to these types of readings. The end of the odd desire to set 'Calvin against the Calvinists'; the increased insight into Calvin's ideas and logic that comes at every turn when he is read against the background of late medieval scholastic debates; the understanding that the Institutio is not a modern text of systematics; and that aspects of the book that were found strange or puzzling are rendered merely commonplace by a correct grasp of the proper literary form of the book-all this is to be welcomed by any scholar concerned for accuracy and fair representation. For the present writer, most valuable of all is the recovery-bizarre that the point had ever been lost-of Calvin's primary work as the disciplined exposition of Holy Scripture, and his primary literary output as the commentaries (and sermons), which the Institutio and many of the other more directly doctrinal works were meant merely to illuminate or serve. (The major exceptions are some of Calvin's directly controversial works, which are simply occasional pieces written to address particular urgent situations.