John Calvin in Context

Description

John Calvin in Context offers a comprehensive overview of Calvin's world. Including essays from social, cultural, feminist, and intellectual historians, each specially commissioned for this volume, the book considers the various early modern contexts in which Calvin worked and wrote. It captures his concerns for Northern humanism, his deep involvement in the politics of Geneva, his relationships with contemporaries, and the polemic necessities of responding to developments in Rome and other Protestant sects, notably Lutheran and Anabaptist. The volume also explores Calvin's tasks as a pastor and doctor of the church, who was constantly explicating the text of scripture and applying it to the context of sixteenth-century Geneva, as well as the reception of his role in the Reformation and beyond. Demonstrating the complexity of the world in which Calvin lived, John Calvin in Context serves as an essential research tool for scholars and students of early modern Europe.

R. Ward Holder is Professor of Theology at Saint Anselm College, New Hampshire. He is the author of John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation: Calvin's First Commentaries (2005), and Crisis and Renewal: The Era of the Reformation (2009). He has edited Reformation Readings of Romans (2008), with Kathy Ehrensperger, A Companion to Paul in the Reformation (2009), and co-edited Emancipating Calvin: Culture and Confessional Identity in Francophone Reformed Communities (2017) with Karen Spierling and Erik de Boer. His current work focuses on Calvin's use of the theological tradition as a source for his own doctrinal formulations.

'The clarity and economy of the essays will prove useful to instructors introducing students to Calvin and his world, and to more advanced students seeking a clear overview of an aspect of Calvin's thought and career.' J. Harrie, Choice 'The purpose of R. Ward Holder's splendid handbook ... is not to justify the ways of Calvin to men. And yet it may partly achieve that, since its mission is to explain him: to look at his myriad contexts, social, political, theological, and more.' Alec Ryrie, Church Times 'The volume is brought to a masterful conclusion by a forty-eighth chapter that surveys the fortunes of Calvinism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ... each chapter was excellent in its own right ... if one must choose only one, let it be Calvin in Context.' Kenneth J. Stewart, Calvin Theological Journal 'The expert guidance provided by authors on such a wide range of topics in this admirable collection also highlights possibilities for further research. All contributions to this volume are supported by short reading lists to assist in that endeavour.' Graeme Murdock, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History