Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe

Essays in Honour of Brian G. Armstrong

Mack P. Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754651499
• eBook ISBN: 9781317185529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Traditional historiography has always viewed Calvin's Geneva as the benchmark against which all other Reformed communities must inevitably be measured, judging those communities who did not follow Geneva's institutional and doctrinal example as somehow inferior and incomplete versions of the original. Adaptations of Calvinism in Reformation Europe builds upon recent scholarship that challenges this concept of the 'fragmentation' of Calvinism, and instead offers a more positive view of Reformed communities beyond Geneva. The essays in this volume highlight the different paths that Calvinism followed as it took root in Western Europe and which allowed it to develop within fifty years into the dominant Protestant confession. Each chapter reinforces the notion that whilst many reformers did try to duplicate the kind of community that Calvin had established, most had to compromise by adapting to the particular political and cultural landscapes in which they lived. The result was a situation in which Reformed churches across Europe differed markedly from Calvin's Geneva in explicit ways. Summarizing recent research in the field through selected French, German, English and Scottish case studies, this collection adds to the emerging picture of a flexible Calvinism that could adapt to meet specific local conditions and needs in order to allow the Reformed tradition to thrive and prosper. The volume is dedicated to Brian G. Armstrong, whose own scholarship demonstrated how far Calvinism in seventeenth-century France had become divided by significant disagreements over how Calvin's original ideas and doctrines were to be understood.

PART I
Calvin, Beza and Geneva

CHAPTER ONE
John Calvin’s Interpretation of Psalm 22

Bernard Roussel

Brian Armstrong has enjoyed very strong ties with his French friends and colleagues for more than fifteen years, when he was first invited to become a visiting professor and Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the Religious Studies department. Moreover, our home in Perray-en-Yvelines was his home away from home whenever he came to Europe to continue his research on the correspondence of Pierre du Moulin in European libraries. Thus, to write about a text of Calvin seems to me a very fitting way to render homage to Brian Armstrong, a historian of Reformed theology. Psalm 22 (numbered as Psalm 21 in the Vulgate) was for Calvin a mirror that reflected the image of David to the reader. In this psalm it is clear that the words of David are not expressions of his despair, but affirmations of his faith. This mirror is in the same way offered to Brian Armstrong and his family. One discovers in such a text sources of Brian’s personality, warmth, and strength, as well as the friendship he has offered us, which is sometimes tumultuous, but always generous and loyal.

John Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms were originally texts for teaching before being published in the form of a book. They were first given to students in Geneva at the Auditoire (special lectures in the chapel of Notre Dame la Neuve) from 1552, then to those students admitted to the Friday lectures starting in 1555.¹ From then on, however, Calvin was content to remain silent on the subject. When he was asked if some of his students’ notes on the Psalms could be published, for example – specifically the notes of Jean Budé, Charles de Jonvillier, and Nicolas des Gallars – Calvin replied that the writings of Martin Bucer or those of Wolfgang Musculus, just published in 1551, were sufficient.² Finally, Robert Estienne published a Latin edition of Calvin’s commentaries on the Psalms in July 1557, and Conrad Badius brought out the first French translation the following year.³

When he did analyze the Psalms – and I will only deal here with Psalm 22 – Calvin joined in a very long tradition of interpreting the Psalter, a tradition whose methods he understood very well. In the pages that follow, I shall try to elucidate what Calvin made of this tradition, but my purpose is not to propose some new and erudite analysis of Calvin’s exegesis of Psalm 22. Instead I shall try to show how Calvin’s reading of this Psalm was shaped by the particular circumstances in Geneva at the time of his elaboration. To be sure, Calvin was an actor in the politics and religion of his day and was not just a prisoner of his immediate circumstances. Nevertheless, when he was teaching, Calvin encountered the horizon of local expectations and needs to which he was hardly a stranger, as well as the public Calvin addressed and hoped would learn from him. In short, then, his commentary on Psalm 22 is thus a useful text to help us understand not only the history of Geneva, but also the life of Calvin himself in the decade of the 1550s.

The particular circumstances surrounding Calvin’s teaching and later publication of Psalm 22 are hinted at in the preface to his commentaries. For example, during the years 1552 to 1555 Calvin’s ambition and strategy to direct the church in Geneva encountered two principal hurdles. On the one hand, members of Geneva’s municipal councils were opposed to the creation of a rival ecclesiastical power, and they did not want the ministers to be able to use the power of excommunication. At the same time, they were equally cool to one of Calvin’s principal doctrines, predestination, and Jerome Bolsec’s criticism of this doctrine found some sympathetic ears in Geneva. After a lengthy trial Bolsec was not banished until 23 December 1551, which caused Calvin some concern. Indeed, he indicated in some of his letters that he was often discouraged and regularly suffered bouts of exasperation in this period, at one point even threatening to leave Geneva.

The tide turned in his favor, however, in the autumn of 1552, the result of three separate events. First, on 6 October 1552, in denouncing a partisan of the banished Bolsec named Trolliet, Calvin declared that “[I am] certain that everything that I have ever taught and written is not solely the product of my brain, but I have taken it from God. And I must always maintain it if I do not want to be a traitor to the truth.” Second, on 9 November the Council finally recognized him as a “good and true minister ... for whom all doctrine is the holy doctrine of God.”⁴ A system of Reformed orthodoxy was thus recognized and established. Finally, on Sunday 3 September 1553 in the middle of the trial of Miguel Servetus, a man named Philibert Berthelier was excommunicated after he absented himself from the Lord’s Supper, evidence that the debate over excommunication was turning in Calvin’s favor.⁵ At last, as the trial of Servetus himself unfolded from 13 August to 27 October 1553, Calvin seized the opportunity, which he was unable to do in the Bolsec trial, to demonstrate that “true doctrine” was protected in Geneva and that heresy could be effectively defeated there for the benefit of all of Christendom.⁶ In fact, two years later the preeminence of John Calvin and his followers would be clearly recognized in Geneva. This very summary account is nevertheless sufficient to suggest that Calvin was able to find in these circumstances several reasons for recognizing the person of the psalmist David as he perceived him in the “mirror” of Psalm 22. According to Calvin, David wrote this Psalm when he was certain of being delivered from Saul and his other enemies, in part as a hymn to sing with the assembly – the Church – of his people as a hymn of trust and gratitude (see verses 23 to 32).⁷ Thus, Calvin’s place in the hermeneutical circle of interpretations of Psalm 22 can be defined as an original and personal interpretation, which went well beyond traditional borrowings from standard sources.

One observation immediately stands out. It is well known that Calvin was a man busily occupied with multiple tasks and jobs in Geneva, and his work did not leave him with a lot of time to prepare his teaching courses. Thus, it is not surprising that he used only three sources for his commentary, with the exception of verse 17 when Calvin plagiarized an annotation he had read in the Biblia of Sebastien Munster (1534–35). The three sources Calvin used were Martin Luther’s Operationes in Psalmos, an edition of Martin Bucer’s commentaries on the Psalms (either the 1532 or 1547 edition), and finally, to gain access to the Hebrew text of the Psalm, the works of Louis Budé.⁸

Calvin’s commentary on Psalm 22 offered a clean break from the Catholic tradition, which is hardly surprising by this date, and his translation and commentary were based on the Hebrew text of the Psalm, borrowing from the philological erudition of both Bucer and Budé. The versions of the Septuagint (LXX), the Psalterium Gallicum, and the Psalterium Romanum were thus all cast aside, even the Psalterium juxta Hebraeos of Jerome, which Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples had taken for the “Hebrew truth.”⁹ So, unlike Luther, Calvin made no attempt to try to unify these different versions, which had immediate consequences in his understanding of the Psalm. For example, in the second part of verse 2 the Septuagint reads: “Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my faults?” The last phrase of the Vulgate supports this translation (“verba delictorum meorum”). But in holding to the original meaning of the Hebrew text – “the words of my roaring (rugissement)” – Calvin did not read the opening of the Psalm as an admission of any fault. Whoever prays to God is thus in no way responsible for his own misfortune; he is nevertheless in the tragic situation of someone struck down without any apparent motive. Another consequence of this preliminary decision not to try to unify the various texts of the Psalm was very evident in the French translation of Calvin’s text: Calvin tried as much as possible to follow the word order of the Hebrew text. Even though he may have smoothed over some Hebrew phrases, Calvin nevertheless retained enough of the original Hebrew word order to indicate to his readers that he could read the ancient language, which only added to his authority. Thus, in verse 13b Calvin mentioned the “bulls de Bashan” and not just “taureaux forts.”

Calvin obviously affirmed the authority of the biblical text, but he also emphasized his own personal authority. Thus, twenty-two times Calvin expressed himself in the first person in his commentary – “I” – while most ordinary authors of biblical exegesis were more discreet. That said, I will not analyze Calvin’s translation and his commentary of the Psalm verse by verse, but I shall begin by discussing how he understood the structure of the Psalm and how he explained verses 2 and 3, which is the key to the originality of his interpretation. Following this, I shall discuss the critical usage Calvin made of the various methodologies of interpretation of this Psalm.

According to the Christian tradition of reading this Psalm, most recently underscored by Martin Bucer, the Psalm was divided into two parts, supposedly corresponding to the chronology of David’s recounting of his own life. Thus, in verses 2–22 David evoked the ever-increasing persecutions that Saul had first inflicted upon him, with David pleading to God for deliverance from his despair. Then, secure and established as king in Jerusalem – almost born again one could say – David intoned in verses 23–32 a hymn of action of thanksgiving, in a vision of his reign that embraced the political and temporal limits of this world.

John Calvin broke with this tradition, however. According to him, David did not write this Psalm to reconstitute two successive stages of his life. On the contrary, he was remembering the experience of having felt two almost antithetical feelings at the same time: hope and despair, an experience very difficult to write about because words and sentences can describe one then the other, but are insufficient to express both simultaneously. David was describing in effect a spiritual wound. I may be risking an anachronism, but David was describing a “Bergsonian moment,” not a chronology of his life.¹⁰ In other words, David was not recounting what he experienced in the past and then dreaming about what might happen in the future in this Psalm. Instead, according to Calvin he was remembering both the confidence in God of his foregathers in verses 1a and 5–6 as well as the total human desperation expressed in verse 1b. The Psalm thus opens with verse 2 as an expression of this perception of self, which according to Calvin, consisted of “deux phrases remarquables [qui] semblent être contraires en apparence, toutefois ... etc.” These two sentiments thus seemed to be written for whoever could understand them, and they were not “contrary” to one another. Moreover, in his commentary on this vers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Calvin, Beza and Geneva
• Part II Reformed Ideas Outside Geneva
• Part III The Reformation in France
• Part IV The Reformations in England and Scotland
• Index