A Review Article by Roy Middleton
- This article reviews Letters of John Calvin, published by the Banner of Truth Trust, hardback, 316 pages, £12.00; it is available from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom. Page numbers in the text of this article refer to this edition of the Letters.
This book is a re-typeset, hardback version of a paperback edition published by the Banner of Truth in 1980. The small volume contains 70 letters, selected by the publishers from the four-volume Jules Bonnet edition of Calvin’s correspondence. That edition includes 686 letters written by Calvin and is the largest collection of his correspondence in English. Even the Bonnet edition contains only a portion of Calvin’s letters. The 59-volume Latin edition of his Works has 11 large volumes devoted to correspondence both from and to Calvin. In his Latin Works there are 4271 letters, of which around 1300 were written by Calvin. A recent book on the Reformer estimates that he wrote around 8500 letters between 1530, when he was 21, and his death in 1564. If this is the case, much of his correspondence appears to have been lost.
The Reformation letter-writer.
In a Europe with no newspapers, no news media or postal system (other than for diplomatic traffic) the letter delivered by a messenger was the main source of communication. In case a letter was intercepted, messengers would often transmit oral information that was regarded as too sensitive to be put in writing. Calvin’s correspondents fell basically into three categories. The first group were the powerful men and women of Europe. The second group were the Reformers in France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, England and Scotland. The third group, for which he had the most tender regard, was made up of prisoners and those facing martyrdom for their Protestant faith.
The publishers are to be commended for their judicious selection of letters which, though such a small proportion of Calvin’s correspondence, has retained this balance. Among those sent to powerful men and women are letters to Edward VI of England, the King of Poland, the King and Queen of Navarre, Admiral Coligny, the Earl of Arran, the Duke of Somerset and William Cecil. In his correspondence to Reformation leaders are letters to Martin Luther, Henry Bullinger, Philip Melanchthon, Thomas Cranmer, John Knox, Edmund Grindal, Jerome Zanchi, and to his close friends and colleagues, William Farel, Peter Viret and Martin Bucer. In the third category are four letters to the five prisoners of Lyon who were eventually burned at the stake, facing death with composure, singing psalms, repeating passages of Scripture and exhorting each other to courage.
Benjamin B Warfield of Princeton is surely correct when he calls Calvin, as the author of such an extensive correspondence, “the great letter writer of the Reformation age”. Calvin desired that selections of his correspondence should be published. A few days before his death, and in the course of one of the last conversations handed down to us by Theodore Beza, Calvin, “pointing with failing hand to his most precious furniture, his manuscripts, and the archives of the correspondence that during a quarter of a century he had kept up with the most illustrious personages of Europe, requested that these memorials might be carefully preserved, and that a selection from his letters, made by some of his friends, should be presented to the Reformed Churches, in token of the interest and affection of their founder”.
Letters to those in authority.
His letters to those in authority encourage them to embrace the reform movement and to witness for Christ. A majestic statement from Calvin to Edward VI was in these terms: “It is indeed a great thing to be a king, and yet more, over such a country; nevertheless, I have no doubt that you reckon it beyond comparison better to be a Christian. It is therefore an invaluable privilege that God has vouchsafed you, Sire, to be a Christian king, to serve as his lieutenant in ordering and maintaining the kingdom of Jesus Christ in England” (p 133). To the Duke of Somerset, when he was the Protector during the time that Edward VI was just a boy, Calvin writes, urging him to complete the Reformation in England by ensuring the people have sound instruction. He says, “Believe me, Monseigneur, the Church of God will never preserve itself without a catechism, for it is like the seed to keep the good grain from dying out, and causing it to multiply from age to age” (p 82). To this advice Calvin adds the necessity of rooting out abuses and corruptions in the worship of God and the repression and correction of vice in society.
Reformation letters.
To his fellow Reformers he gave both encouragement and advice. They were continually seeking his counsel on matters theological, ecclesiastical and with regard to public matters. Thomas Cranmer, when Archbishop of Canterbury, encouraged the continental Reformers to form a bond of union between their churches and his own. Calvin heartily approved of the idea and wrote back with these words: “Thus it is that the members of the Church being severed, the body lies bleeding. So much does this concern me that, could I be of any service, I would not grudge to cross even ten seas, if need were, on account of it. If it were but a question regarding the rendering of assistance to the kingdom of England, such a motive would at present be to me a sufficiently just one” (p 125).
In a response to Cranmer asking the Genevan Reformer for his opinion on the Church’s revenues being plundered, Calvin points out to the Archbishop another evil: “But iniquitous as this is, there appears to me to be another vice of equal magnitude, viz, that out of the public revenues of the Church, idle gluttons are supported who chant vespers in an unknown tongue. I shall say nothing farther on this point, except that it is inconsistent for you to approve of such mockery, and it is openly incompatible with the proper arrangements of the Church; besides, it is in itself exceedingly ridiculous” (p 136).
Jean-Daniel Benoit does not exaggerate when he writes, “It would not be untrue to say that Calvin’s house in the Rue des Chanoines was like the Genevan Foreign Office. His position was unique. He had made Geneva ‘The Church on the hill’, and its light shone over the whole world. From all parts men looked to Geneva. They consulted Geneva. They listened to Geneva, and Geneva meant Calvin.”
Letters to those persecuted for Christ.
The third main group to whom Calvin corresponded were those suffering for adherence to the Saviour and to the Reformed faith. For these sufferers he was most concerned. To the persecuted in his native France in the face of increased persecution he writes, “Meanwhile, since you see that the poor flock of God’s Son is scattered by the wolves, repair to Him, praying Him to have compassion on you and strengthen your weakness, to stretch out His mighty arm to repel them, to shut their bloody mouths and break their claws, or finally to change them into harmless lambs. Above all, pray Him to make manifest that He is seated on the right hand of God His Father to maintain both the honour of His majesty and the salvation of His children. It is in this way that you will derive relief from Him, humbling yourselves with tears and prayers, and not in murmuring and gnashing your teeth against the tyrants, as some do who seek not the refuge to which persecutions ought to drive us.
“For my own part, I could wish that God had given me the means of being nearer at hand to assist you, but since that is not possible, I will pray our merciful Father that, since He has once confided you to the keeping of our Lord Jesus Christ, He would cause you to feel how safe you are under so good a protector, to the end that you may cast all your cares upon Him; and that He would be pleased to have compassion on you and all those who are in affliction, delivering you from the hands of the ungodly” (pp 236-237).
That Calvin’s letters to the five prisoners in Lyon were appreciated is evident from the reply from one of the prisoners: “Sir and brother . . . I cannot express to you the great comfort I have received . . . from the letter which you have sent to my brother Denis Pelouquin, who found means to deliver it to one of our brethren who was in a vaulted cell above me, and read it to me aloud, as I could not read it myself, being unable to see anything in my dungeon. I entreat of you, therefore, to persevere in helping us with similar consolation, for it invites us to weep and to pray” (p 149, n 1)
The publishers have included at the beginning of the book a brief life of Calvin and, like the Bonnet edition of his letters, have concluded with the Last Will and Testament of Master John Calvin, Calvin’s farewell to the Seigneurs of Geneva, and his Farewell to the Ministers of Geneva.
There are few better ways of becoming acquainted with a person than by reading his private letters. Benoit in his article on Calvin the letter writer concludes with these words, “It is in his letters that he can be seen giving himself to his friends. . . . His other books were written with pen and ink, and we see in them his mind, clear, logical even ruthless perhaps, but we never move out of the realm of the intellect. . . . It is in his letters . . . that he gives himself completely to us. It is here that we must look if we want to find the whole man. It is here too that all those caricatures which have done such outrage to his memory fade and vanish, and Calvin appears in his full stature. A man, a real man, a great man.”
We warmly recommend this book to our readers. It is produced to the Banner of Truth Trust’s usual high standards and gives an insight into the rich material contained in Calvin’s correspondence and may lead you to buy the seven-volume set of the Reformer’s Tracts and Letters also published by the Trust.
- The Bonnet edition was published in two volumes in Paris in 1854. The English edition was translated by David Constable and Marcus Robert Gilchrist in four volumes between 1855 and 1858. It was reprinted by the Banner of Truth along with Calvin’s Tracts and Treatises as a seven-volume set in 2009. The letters are contained in volumes 4-7.
- Calvin’s Latin Works comprise volumes 29 to 87 of the Corpus Reformatorem (CR) edited by J W Baum, A E Cunitz and E Reuss, Brunswick, 1863-1900. In citations from these volumes, the works of Calvin are frequently renumbered from vol 1. On this basis vol 29 of CR becomes vol 1 of Calvin’s Works. Correspondence to and from Calvin on the renumbered basis are in volumes 10b-20.
- Herman J Selderhuis (ed), The Calvin Handbook, Eerdmans, 2009, p 215.
- B B Warfield, Calvin and Calvinism, Oxford University Press, 1931, p 14.
- Jules Bonnet (ed), Letters of John Calvin, Baker reprint, 1983, vol 1, p 5.
- Jean-Daniel Benoit, “Calvin the Letter-writer” in Gervase Duffield (ed), John Calvin, Sutton Courtenay Press, 1966, p 69.
- Benoit, “Calvin the Letter-writer”, pp 97-98.