Lifting Hearts to the Lord: Worship with John Calvin in Sixteenth-Century Geneva by Karin Maag (review)

This is a volume in the series "The Church at Worship," "a series of documentary case studies of specific worshiping communities from around the world and throughout Christian history—case studies that can inform and enrich worship practices today" (back cover). For contemporary Reformed communities, it can perhaps be recommended: Karin Maag has assembled and, in the majority, herself translated a range of different kinds of sources which speak to many different aspects of worship in Geneva during Calvin's time there. The sources include, in roughly the order arranged in the volume, excerpts from the Registers of the Consistory; black and white photographs of early modern objects and images; treatises, letters, and other works by Calvin; a "Catholic" polemical treatise; the various orders of service; Calvin's sermons; Calvin's teaching on baptism, prayer, and the Supper; the Ecclesiastical Ordinances; Consistory records; Genevan Council minutes; Ordinances for Supervision of Churches in the Country; Statutes of the Genevan Academy. As this quick list suggests, the documents are neither in chronological order nor organized according to topic.

But these splendid sources are framed in ways that interfere directly with their use, even, one might argue, by those today who view Calvin as the founder of their Church, and certainly by historians. The largest of those frames impedes her own interpretation of the sources and perpetuates a number of old chestnuts of Reformation polemics. Throughout the volume Maag uses the term, "the Reformation." She neither offers a definition nor acknowledges how very contested the term is, nor does she at any point acknowledge that "reform" might precede the sixteenth century. Instead, she uses the term foremost to refer to the changes in Geneva's practice of Christianity that were instituted during Calvin's time there. "The Reformation," then, becomes an act of a particular time and place, against what she repeatedly calls "Roman Catholicism," which she equates, without discussion, with medieval Christianity. This leads to a number of errors, not least confusion about the protean nature of the Mass, its own changes over time, of liturgy more generally, and about medieval prayers. Her confessional lens leads to her errors of definition, embedded in the margins ("Chrism," for example, or "paternoster"); and to perpetuate a number of caricatures from Protestant polemics, one of the most egregious, the notion that medieval Christians received communion only once a year, which was the minimum—not the maximum—of medieval practice; depending on a person's prior practice, then, four times a year could also be a reduction in access to the sacrament. Following those polemics, she also elides the categorical difference between popular appropriations and formal rites, particularly in the section of sources drawn from the Consistory records.

The literature that appears in notes or as recommended reading at the end of the volume is confessionally exclusive and monolingual. Most critically missing is Christian Grosse's careful and archivally rich study of worship in Geneva, Les Rituels de la Cène. Maag recommends no readings in English outside those exclusively on the Reformed tradition.

Sadly, it is also not possible simply to direct students to read the sources, as they are also visually framed in the margins by those errors of definition, as well as directions that reinforce sixteenth-century "Protestants'" own representation of history and liturgy. I hope very much that Karin Maag will publish the sources she has so carefully gathered in a form open to multiple readings and to other understandings of the sixteenth century.