136 - A Reading of Calvin's Institutes

A Reading of Calvin's Institutes
By Benjamin A. Reist
Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990. 124 pp. $14.95.

This small, but significant, book offers a fresh angle of vision on Calvin's magisterial work. Stressing the importance of the last edition (1559) and employing the definitive McNeill-Battles English translation, Reist gives us a glimpse of the working of Calvin's mind as it moved through various revisions toward the final form, noting the "ferment" and "creativity" throughout, including the shifts and possibly unresolved issues.

The author provides fourteen sign-posts to the endpoint, described as interacting "parameters" and "control vectors," arranging them according to the sequence of the 1559 edition. They include such themes as the inseparability of the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves, the authority of Scripture, Christ as mediator doing the work of reconciliation through the three-fold office, the Reformed understanding of the relationship between gospel and law, the role of the Spirit in the life of the believer, the partnership of justification and sanctification, the church and its pastoral office and the civil government and its magistrates as instruments of divine purpose, and election and predestination understood in the context of Christian experience.

The different way of construing all the familiar motifs is the "relational" or "Hebraic" framework Reist discerns throughout the Institutes, juxtaposing it to the standard interpretations of "Calvinist orthodoxy," with its remote deity and austere piety. For example, the better reading of Calvin discovers the relocation of

137 - A Reading of Calvin's Institutes

election/predestination from a speculative place in the doctrine of providence (early editions) to an experiential context in the doctrine of the Christian life (1559 edition) that follows the christological exposition. Such a reading stresses the testimony of the believer to the experience of the personal mercy of God rather than the focus on an inscrutable Determiner of double destinies. Reist sees Calvin's principle of accommodation as reinforcement of relationality, for once again we have to do not with sheer unresponsive sovereignty but, "as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont to 'lisp' in speaking to us ... not so much to express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity" (Institutes I.xiii,l). Thus, Reist holds that the comparable opening words of the Institutes about the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves is a programmatic statement about the inseparability of the disclosures of the "lisping God" from the present ceaseless working of deity in Christian experience.

Reist has shown the responsiveness to piety of Calvin's own ideas and made a case for this in the understanding the Institutes and, also, for interpreting Christian doctrine in relational terms today. However, as Pannenberg and others have argued, the themes of accommodation and the linkage of the Word with the internal testimony of the Spirit made its way over time into a subjectivism in which our personal experience took charge of the meaning of revelatory events. Wariness about this kind of temptation means we must not forget the accent in Calvin on the freedom of God from our Christian experience, as well as for it; hence, the majesty of God over, as well as the relationship of God to, experience, Christian or otherwise.

Gabriel Fackre,
Andover Newton Theological School,
Newton Centre, Mass.