Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Trinity Journal
Volume: TRINJ 09:2 (Fall 1988)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Calvin. Geneva and the Reformation: A Study of Calvin as Social Reformer, Churchman, Pastor and Theologian by Ronald S. Wallace. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988. 310 pp.

Ronald Wallace’s Calvin, Geneva and The Reformation is the capstone work of the now retired Church History professor at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. His previous works on Calvin include Calvins Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament and Calvins Doctrine of the Christian Life.

Wallace divides his series of essays into four sections: 1) Calvin’s conversion and call to the ministry; 2) The Reformer and his city; 3) Calvin as churchman and pastor; 4) Calvin the theologian. His purpose in such an organizational pattern is not to compose yet another biography of Calvin, but to propose a series of essays on Calvin’s ministry “as a social reformer, churchman and pastor” (i). Although Wallace does include some essays on aspects of Calvin’s theology, he primarily approaches Calvin’s theology from a pastoral perspective.

In the first section, Wallace credits humanism with Calvin’s initial move against the Roman Catholic Church because humanism “was a movement of protest against everything that restricted human thought” (6). He does not believe that Calvin’s conversion was a gradual one, even though he does not believe that Calvin’s reminiscences of a “sudden conversion” meant that Calvin placed his faith in Christ as early as 1527. Wallace instead dates the conversion at 1534 when Calvin returned to Noyon to resign his benifices. The fact that Calvin had been in Noyon in 1533 without any tangible evidence that he had broken with Rome supports Wallace’s theory.

Wallace places his study of Calvin in the pastoral setting by noting that Calvin was a pastor in a relatively small parish with a ministry marked by a series of petty disputes that pale in comparison with his stature as the leader of the international Reformed movement. Wallace points out that Calvin may have been unaware that his very concern for the seemingly petty needs of the local church may have been one of the major sources for his effectiveness in the ministry and one of his foremost paradigms for the contemporary clergy. In all of his writings, Calvin reflected the pastoral concern for each individual in his parish. As a result, his writings were not the typical academic treatises of his generation, but were more personal and forceful.

Wallace asserts that, for Calvin, the pastor had a special function and responsibility to the whole flock. He has the unique responsibility of guiding and teaching, but also of disciplining. Wallace writes that the pastor’s

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