John Calvin, Myth and Reality: Images and Impact of Geneva’s Reformer ed. by Amy Nelson Burnett (review)

This collection comprises papers presented at a meeting of the Calvin Studies Society Colloquium, one of the diverse gatherings in 2009 marking the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. The overall theme of distinguishing myth from reality is sharply announced in Richard Muller’s opening essay, “Demoting Calvin.” He dismisses the work of interpreters who “decontextualize and dogmatize” Calvin, treating him as the icon of a timeless theology and the sole significant voice in the Reformed tradition. Muller insists that Calvin was a thoroughly sixteenth-century figure and one voice (not always the best informed) among several who shaped the tradition.

Other essays in the first section of the volume also treat the myth-reality theme. Elsie Anne McKee traces Calvin’s interpretation over time of a single Scripture passage to disprove the notion that Calvin “never changed his mind.” In “The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent,” John L. Thompson locates Calvin among other reformers of his day in his view of the limited legitimacy of public proclamation by women. While Calvin regarded Paul’s stricture against women speaking in public worship as a “matter indifferent,” he held that women could undertake this role only in emergent situations. Diane Margolf addresses “the ‘myth’ that Calvinist church discipline was a uniform and largely repressive system of morals control” (61). She observes that the registers of the Genevan consistory show that it aimed to effect reconciliation as much as penalize moral and spiritual failings. Later in the collection Irene Dingle makes an interesting judgment arising from her research on Lutheran-Reformed disagreement on eucharistic “real presence.” She observes that, in contrast to the role played by Luther in Lutheranism, “Genevan theology never gained the position as a secondary authority for doctrinal interpretation” (161).

Most of the other essays concern general and sometimes fascinating aspects of the Reformed tradition. In “The Elders’ Gaze,” Graeme Murdock consults the late sixteenth-century registers of the Consistory of Nimes (France) to discern the impact of church regulations on women of the town. Matters for which women were brought before the consistory include “raising their hair with wire and shaping it into horns,” the cleavage of “open bosoms,” using makeup, wearing hooped petticoats, and the display of finery at worship—all practices “that could lead men’s eyes to commit fornication” (89).

In “A Devil’s Siren or an Angel’s Throat?” Reformed pastor Randall Engel explains why the pipe organ created such controversy among the early Reformed. First, it was viewed as a popish instrument that was aimed at pleasing only the ear “as are all the quaverings and trills of Papistry” (109). Also, it was an idol, and a sounding idol at that, “breathing and exhaling.” Despite Calvin’s proscription, within one hundred years of his death all Reformed churches except the Scottish were using pipe organs. One reason is that Reformed polity permitted local adaptations in worship. Another is that the attempts of congregations to sing the Genevan Psalter without accompaniment were, by all accounts, disastrous (118)!

In “Cruel, Cold and False,” Mirjam van Veen describes the criticisms made by opponents of Dutch Calvinism, ranging from crude accusations that Calvin and his colleagues were skirt-chasers and sodomists to more credible assertions that, once the Calvinists had become the official church, they had become intolerant of others’ freedom. In “God’s Gracious Provision,” David Koyzis lifts up Calvin’s teaching that civil government is a mandate of God’s good creation and that “obedience to God and his law has political implications, which are not simply peripheral to faith” (196). Then there is the curious essay by Contantin Fasolt, who compares Wittgenstein and Calvin on respect for the Word, or “what they had against images.”

Other essays address the impact of the Reformed tradition in later mission contexts. One describes the introduction of Calvin’s theology and pastoral practice...