c. 2007 Religion News Service
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. _ The nibbles of a bookworm are evident in the ancient volume, but only at the margins, not in the text itself. Serendipitous? Or providential?
Judging the book by its cover _ and its author _ it’s probably the latter.
Calvin College recently acquired a 16th century text that spells out the views of its namesake, the French Reformation theologian John Calvin, on a divisive tenet of Reformed doctrine: predestination.
“Congregation sur l’election eternelle de Dieu,” or “On the Eternal Election of God,” was published in 1562, two years before Calvin died. The tiny book, slightly larger than a deck of cards, recently arrived at the school’s H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies. It is one of six original copies known to be held in public hands, and the first in North America.
“It’s very rare,” said Karin Maag, director of the center that houses one of the world’s premier collections of historic books on Calvinism. “The survival of these books is a very mysterious thing.”
Written in French, the 118-page book was published in Geneva as an account of a 1551 presentation by Calvin “in which the matter of God’s eternal election was summarily and clearly explained by him and ratified by a common accord by his fellow ministers.”
Calvin’s perspective on the issue _ whether salvation is available to all, or just those “predestined” by God _ takes up the first half of the book, with the rest containing commentary from other pastors who attended the gathering that Maag described as a kind of 16th century Bible study.
“It gives you an insight into this particular debate and a sense of why this doctrine mattered so much,” Maag said.
Calvin’s exposition on the issue came in response to the challenge of a former Catholic monk named Jerome Bolsec, who objected to predestination and is referred to on the opening page as “a sower of false doctrine, who brazenly has spilled his poison.”
Calvin’s stinging response led to Bolsec’s banishment from Geneva, a fate Calvin himself had suffered about a decade earlier before the city’s noblemen invited him back.
Philip Holtrop, a retired Calvin professor who wrote a 1,300-page, two-volume dissertation on the Bolsec controversy, said the “predestination fixation” of the Reformation cannot be understood apart from the social and political context of 16th century Geneva.
Although it recently has waned in most mainstream Reformed churches, the church-splitting polemics of Calvin’s theology became pre-eminent in Reformed orthodoxy for much of the following four centuries, Holtrop said.
“This is not merely a biblical study,” he said. “There are factors of power politics going on and there’s a lot of internal feuding going on. Calvin himself was very much involved in that whole intrigue.”
The college purchased the book from the Rev. William Nottingham, a former church missions executive from Indiana who is moving into a retirement facility and cleaning out his personal book collection. He was put in contact with the Meeter Center through Theological Book Network Inc., a Grandville, Mich.-based nonprofit that distributes academic texts overseas.
“I just had it on a shelf,” Nottingham said. “I just had it here as kind of a keepsake.”
He said the center paid him $2,500 for the book, $1,000 of which he forwarded to a retired French Reformed minister who gave Nottingham the book about 15 years ago in gratitude for some personal financial assistance. The man, whom Nottingham met while doing mission work in France, found Calvin’s book after World War II while browsing bookstands along the Seine River in Paris.
“He got it, I suppose, for next to nothing,” Nottingham said. “It’s hard to tell how many hands that has gone through, how many theological arguments were over it.
“Who had it during the French Revolution? Maybe this went through the hands of somebody like Pascal. It’s exciting.”
KRE/JM END VANDE BUNTE
