ABSTRACT
Indeed, Calvin’s scholarly and teaching work had never really been interrupted. For one thing, he had worked incessantly on his series of scriptural commentaries, which were in fact published lectures. Calvin’s main literary and scholarly work – and this includes the Institutes – consists largely of scriptural commentaries. Now we might think that the most fruitful periods for that kind of reflective work would have been those spells of seclusion from public affairs, in particular the months before 1541 in enforced absence from his work at Geneva. Indeed, in that period Calvin composed such works as his great tribute to the main source of Reformation theology, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans. However, not only did Calvin subsequently find time, amidst the cares of his Genevan ministry, to teach, research, write, and publish, but that kind of work was essential to him above all in the most stressful phases of his career. Then his long hours of study raised his horizons, recalled to him the scholar that he really was, allowed him to speak to an European audience, and fortified him for the almost incessant conflicts that he faced in Geneva between the mid-1540s and the mid-1550s. Indeed, as Professor Parker points out, the years of opposition to Calvin’s ‘godly society’ saw the production of ‘new editions of the Institutes and commentaries on nearly all the books of the New Testament’. By 1555, Calvin had completed and published his majestic series of commentaries on the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament, and had begun the commentaries on the books of
and then relied on his better students to provide him with transcripts of what were in fact superbly structured and entirely articulate productions. These lectures – especially those on the Hebrew Old Testament – also show Calvin’s profound linguistic learning and proficiency. Incidentally, the reverential way in which Calvin’s words were conserved indicates his growing status as a kind of guru: in just the same way, though with rather less justification, Martin Luther’s dinner-table monologues were copied down by his students with rapt concentration.
