Calvin, hermeneutics and history…

On the final page of his authoritative work The Unaccommodated Calvin, Richard A. Muller writes: 'A clever theologian can accommodate Calvin to nearly any agenda; a faithful theologian – and a good historian – will seek to listen to Calvin, not to use him.' Professor Muller's warning is salutary, not the least in the area of Calvin's hermeneutics. If anything, there has been since the 1960s a revival in interest in Calvin's interpretation of scripture, and an unseemly rush to appropriate or 'accommodate' him to new hermeneutical models. In the light of the slow dismemberment of the text of the Bible by scholars who hunkered around it like vultures pecking at a carcass, what else was to be done? The problem is that while this clinging to our forebear is driven by motives that are indubitably noble, it is by no means clear that Calvin has been listened to, and not used.

That is all very easy to say. The honest truth is that it is by no means obvious that listening to Calvin on the matter of hermeneutics is possible five centuries after his birth. The providential unity of the historical and Christological senses of scripture is no longer a assumption with which the contemporary interpreter can proceed. Stephen Edmondson voices the disquiet:

'These developments over the last four centuries have shut off any direct appropriation of Calvin's scriptural hermeneutic for contemporary interpreters concerned with the historical sense of the text. …it is problematic at this point to offer an historical reading of Scripture that is either unitive or generally theological, much less one that roots the unity of the narrative in a robust Christology. Calvin's history, then, is not our history.'

On the one hand, Calvin posited a single divine authorship to the Scriptures that was evidenced in its unity of voice and continuity of narrative; and that the text was a direct description of what actually happened in history. In direct and mutually-informing relationship with it, on the other hand, he held to a Christological theology of providence – the divine will shaped the events of history such that Christ was their consummation. If, first, the text could be shown to be not a united text but a plurality of competing texts, with an at best uncertain relationship to what actually happened in history, and second, if the view of the divine superintendence of historical events could be challenged and even discredited, then Calvin's reading of scripture could be made to look very odd indeed. Both of these were held to have occurred by the beginning of the nineteenth century; and so Calvin's narrative reading of scripture was 'eclipsed'.

[to be continued...]