|
Cornerstone Presbyterian Church Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)
|
|||
|
back to Library
|
Calvin’s Commentaries on the Bible, 23 volumes. Between 1539 and his death in 1564 John Calvin wrote commentaries on all of the New Testament except Revelation and Second and Third John, and on 24 books of the Old Testament. The library has been given the full set of these, a set which also includes Calvin’s best known work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion.. Phillip Johnson advises “No theologian can possibly afford to neglect his Institutes; [and] no pastor or serious student of Scripture should ever overlook Calvin’s commentaries.” Calvin’s first commentary was on Romans. In the preface to the Romans commentary, dedicated to a friend, he explained the style that he had in mind: I remember that three years ago we had a friendly discussion about the best way of interpreting scripture. The plan which you particularly favored was also the one which at that time I preferred to any others. Both of us felt that lucid brevity constituted the particular virtue of an interpreter. Some commentators of the reformation era took different approaches. One illustrated the principal points but neglected others. Another was, in Calvin’s opinion, “too verbose to be read quickly by those who have other matters to deal with, and too profound to be easily understood by … less attentive readers.” Calvin’s goal was to write clearly, to cover all the points he felt needed to be covered, and to be brief. His goal was to write for people like us. Six years passed after Romans before the next, which was on 1 Corinthians. In the next four years he covered all of Paul’s epistles and revised Romans. The first of the Gospels to be treated was John, followed by, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, treated as a harmony. The harmony can be quite useful. For each event in Christ’s life, the stories in Matthew, Mark and Luke, as they are present, are collected together and the story they together tell is the subject of comment. The Gospels were the last books in the New Testament to be covered, done by 1555 or 1556, when they were all revised and republished together as a set. Why was John the first of the Gospels to be written about? Calvin compares John with the other gospels, and in so doing he shows his priorities: “Yet there is also this difference between [the Gospels], that the other three narrate the life and death of Christ more fully, whereas our present one emphasizes more the doctrine in which Christ’s office and the power of His death and resurrection are explained. … The doctrine which points out to us the power and fruit of Christ’s coming appears far more clearly in him than in the others. … John shows his soul. For this reason I am accustomed to say that this Gospel is a key to open the door to the understanding of the others. For whoever grasps the power of Christ as it is here graphically portrayed, will afterwards read with advantage what the others relate… We should first learn from John to what end He was manifested.” The Old Testament commentaries were not, strictly speaking, written by Calvin but were his transcribed lectures, given from 1557. It is interesting to see how literal the transcribers were. The material on Jeremiah 1:8-12 ends “… It then follows—but as the clock strikes, I cannot proceed farther today.” Calvin plainly states his own opinion in the first person. For example, “I prefer this literal retention of Paul’s language, since I think that his intention was to …” “Omitting the various interpretations of the passage, I understand it in this sense …” It is in the preface to the first volume of his Commentary on Psalms that Calvin reveals much about himself, including his conversion: …since I was too obstinately devoted to the superstitions of Popery to be easily extricated from so profound an abyss of mire, God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life. Having thus received some taste and knowledge of true godliness I was immediately inflamed with so intense a desire to make progress therein, that although I did not altogether leave off other studies, I yet perused them with less ardor. To Sinclair Ferguson, two things stand out. “First, his pre-conversion condition was marked by a ‘hardened’ and resistant (‘unteachable’) mind, and, by implication, a distaste for true godliness. … This, of course, was the informed biblical analysis of one who believed that the fallen human mind is ‘a perpetual factory of idols’ and therefore deeply resistant to the iconoclasm of grace. Second, for Calvin, conversion to Christ meant not only a transition from condemnation to justification, but from ignorance to knowledge and from arrogant rebellion to a humble heart. His mind was thus softened and brought ‘to a teachable frame.’ From this flowed powerful new affections. He now was ‘inflamed’ with ‘intense … desire’ to make progress in ‘true godliness.’ Thus, to have a heart for God meant to have a desire to grow in the “Knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness’ (Titus 1:1)” You never know to what uses the Commentaries might be put. Here’s an example from one household: In the 1920s my father, the Rev. Thomas Miller, M.A., was minister of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Feilding, New Zealand. He was a lifelong student and had accumulated a fine library. … As a teenager [probably in the 1930s] I was aware that my mother used Calvin for her own purpose. She was the treasurer for the manse family budget. She cashed the monthly salary cheque for about £26 and kept the cash in a small canvas bag. Every night she secreted this behind Calvin’s commentaries in father’s study. If thieves broke in, she reckoned that those black volumes, row on row, would be the last place they would go for the family treasure. Calvin was protected, above and below, by rows of the Puritans in faded brown covers, and by the Works of Augustine in the Marcus Dods edition. In closing, let these excerpts display the overall spirit of the Commentaries: “Whenever God declares that He will be propitious to men and forgives their sins, He sets forth Christ at the same time, whose property it is to shed abroad the rays of joy wherever He shines.” “This passage … shows us that we obtain righteousness by embracing the goodness of God offered to us in the Gospel. We are, there, justified by our believing that God is gracious to us in Christ.” “The outstanding thing about faith is that it delivers us from eternal destruction. For He especially wanted to say that although we seem to have been born for death, sure deliverance is offered to us by the faith of Christ… And He has used a general term, both to invite indiscriminately all to share in life and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers. … He is favorable to the whole world when He calls all without exception to the faith of Christ, which is indeed an entry into life.”
-- Dean Brown |
|
|
|
471 Mathews Rd, Boardman, OH 44512 Phone/Fax 330-758-5628 email: info@cornerstonepch.org |
|||