John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait

by William J. Bouwsma and Dina Nayeri

Book Overview

Historians have credited--or blamed--Calvinism for many developments in the modern world, including capitalism, modern science, secularization, democracy, individualism, and unitarianism. These same historians, however, have largely ignored John Calvin the man. When people consider him at all, they tend to view him as little more than the joyless tyrant of Geneva who created an abstract theology as forbidding as himself.
This volume, written by...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195059514
• ISBN13: 9780195059519
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Calvin's Psycology and his Major Themes

It is important before committing to this text that one recognizes the author's distinction between a biography and a portrait. If you are looking for a narrative biography (or even a summary of Calvin's teachings) I would look somewhere else. In either of those categories I would have given this 2 or 3 stars. But this Bouswama's work is not intended to be either of these. It would almost be best described as a reflection on Calvin's psychology as expressed in his major themes. The themes chosen are not those that I would have. However, I would estimate that nearly a quarter of this text is composed of direct Calvin quotes, and the author displays a fairly high level of rigor and competence with respect to Calvin's body of work. There were times that I was unhappy with inferences made from some of the reformers statements and tracking some quotes to the source left myself and others I have talked to wondering about the consistency of the author's fidelity to context. However, on the whole it is a helpful text that provides a non-traditional (but not necessarily negative) view of John Calvin. I would not recommend it as an introduction, but it is an interesting analysis for advanced study.

Calvin and the Sixteenth Century

William J. Bouwsma considers John Calvin the least known and most misunderstood of all the great figures of the sixteenth-century. Bouwsma's unique attempt to elucidate John Calvin for a contemporary thinker is contextually driven and methodologically persistent. John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait aims to read, understand, and interpret Calvin within his sixteenth-century setting. In order to give the reader a clear picture of Calvin and through him the mood of his generation, Bouwsma begins with Calvin's anxiety. This aspect of Calvin's life gives the contemporary reader, in Bouwsma's opinion, the opportunity to get a glimpse of an anxiety-filled age. This approach allows Bouwsma, at least in theory, to understand Calvin even better than Calvin understood himself. Taken together, the external influences and internal struggles show Calvin as a man who saw himself in a world on the edge of a great calamity, even divine judgment. This aspect of Calvin and his society is the point of departure for Bouwsma's major thesis: humanism is the umbilical cord between the "labyrinth" and the "abyss" in Calvin's thought. Bouwsma uses "labyrinth" to denote the safe, yet problematic philosophical worldview the Europeans inherited from the Hellenistic and Hebraic cultures. While these two worldviews were woven together with relative ease in antiquity, the Renaissance would unravel and lay bare the problem. Bouwsma believes Calvin has but a glimpse of this and knows that his sixteenth-century context is a labyrinth of dangers, but still safer than the "abyss" of doubt. Bouwsma asserts that as Calvin tried to alleviate his anxieties he clung to certain assumptions inherent in the labyrinth. The issues brought forth by the labyrinth include the cosmological inheritances such as an intelligible universe, a cyclical view of time, and the imago dei. In addition to this view, Calvin continually strove for order through moderation, control, and high moralism. Finally, Calvin's "cultural baggage" in Geneva was his strict adherence to rational religion (i.e., the mind rules the other human faculties and is capable of grasping reality). Ultimately Calvin was unable find solace in the complexities of his inherited philosophical culture and sought an opening. The opening for Calvin was Humanism. Here, Calvin found a way to hold to the eruditio while pursuing persuasio. The task of the preacher is not just to explicate the scriptures; it is also to move the listener to action. Humanistic rhetoric allowed Calvin to do this in a manner he found comfortable. In a strange semantic twist Bouwsma's opening for Calvin finds its way into the "abyss" where a rhetorical culture had presuppositions about the human condition, the possibilities of knowledge, human experience of the world, and the organization of life. Bouwsma now uses "abyss" in a manner which left Calvin on the edge of an ambiguous unknown. What is human? What capacity d

A solid and insightful academic biography

This is one of the finest academic historical biographies to have appeared in the past couple of decades, and will provide nearly anyone with an insightful and in depth introduction to one of the most important figures of the early modern age. It must be stressed, however, that Bouwsma will not please everyone. He is a professional historian, and not a theologian nor an apologist. Many hardcore Calvinists might not enjoy the style with which he deals with his subject matter or his theologically neutral stance in discussing Calvin's work and thought. But most students of theology and all students of history will discover in this a study of Calvin that not only discusses his thought, but relates it to the particular period of history in which it was produced. Too many Calvinist treatments of Calvin discuss him in almost ahistorical fashion, as if his thought were developed in a vacuum. As Bouwsma demonstrates, however, the was very much the product of the Late Renaissance as much as he was the Reformation.One review below states that Bouwsma claims Calvin was a pagan. This is an important misunderstanding, the correction of which will take us to the heart of Bouwsma's central argument. Absolutely nowhere does Bouwsma assert that Calvin was a pagan, but his central argument in the book is that Calvin was deeply entrenched in renaissance humanism. The humanists went back to the pagan writers of Greece and Rome as literary models as well as alternative sources of inspiration to medieval Catholicism. As Bouwsma quite correctly points out, humanism was in no way antithetical to Protestantism. Calvin was absolutely not a pagan, nor does Bouwsma make that claim, but he did study the pagans such as Cicero and Quintillian, and modeled his writing style on them. Many biographers delight in the smashing of myths of their subjects. While Bouwsma might not please hardcore Calvinists, in that he isn't deferential or assuming that Calvin articulated truths nearly as authoritative as those of the New Testament, he also does not try in any sense to defame or criticize Calvin. On the contrary, he goes out of his way to debunk many of the negative myths concerning Calvin. What he does try to do is provide the most accurate portrait he can of a major figure of the 16th century, both his positive and negative traits, and situation him in his time and place. In this he succeeds marvelously. This volume could stand for some time as the premiere biography of one of the two most important figures in the history of Protestantism.

"A Theological Adventure"

Bouwsma's work on John Calvin is exciting and entertaining. He opens the mind of Calvin and conveys an image of his thought that is incomparable when contrasted with the immense and lengthy volumes you find in other works. I found this book to be clear, concise,and authoritative. Bouwsma places his focus on Calvin's thought rather than his life, and gives a more in-depth understanding of the man whose doctrines and aspirations changed the modern world.

Bouwsma, the interdisciplinary historian

In John Calvin, a Sixteenth Century Portrait Bouwsma attempts to find the historical Calvin. In other words, he seeks to strip Calvin of all the baggage which he has picked up over the last few centuries and show his reader a real man, not just the cold, hard, tight lipped, iron fist of Geneva. As an interdisciplinary historian Bouwsma makes use of disciplines such as sociology and psychology to reach back into the sixteenth century and uncover the insecure, dual personality of John Calvin. This book suprised me. Bouwsma's Calvin is one I never met in the Reformed tradition. It is important to note, however, that Bouwsma is by no means the final word on Calvin. One of Bouwsma's mistakes, in my judgement, is that he seemed to interpret all of Calvin's thoughts and actions in light of his own psychological analysis of Calvin. This becomes problematic when, according to Bouwsma, Calvin's Sola Fide is only a result of his psychological uneasiness. Bouwsma completely disregards Calvin's Sola Scriptura and reverence for sacred scripture. He interprets Calvin's doctrines of election and predestination in a like fashion. Calvin, according to Bouwsma, had a deep need for order; God's election and predestination provided this order for Calvin. The elect and reprobate could never be mixed. Therefore, in a fundamental sense, the doctrines of election and predestination provide psychological peace for an otherwise frightened and undone Frenchman. Bouwmsa is just as interested in examining the sixteenth century as he is in finding Calvin within it. He uses Calvin as a figure to illustrate the century and he shows how the century sculpted the reformer. Bouwsma's interdisciplinary style of history, his extensive use of Calvin's commentaries, letters, sermons, and Institutes, and his readability make him a good read for all sorts of people, who may be looking for very different things from a study of the great reformer.