Calvin in Context.

This collection of essays on Calvin's exegesis of specific biblical passages offers many of the same pleasures as are to be found in Luther in Context. There is the close, attentive, and sensitive reading of less familiar texts in Calvin's oeuvre, which opens up new insights into or refines contemporary understandings of broader themes in Calvin's thought. There is the humane insistence on the conversational nature of Calvin's work, both those intellectual engagements he explicitly recognized and those he did not. There is the nuanced attention to differences of tone, specific formulation, and choice of terms, and the broad familiarity with other works, to suggest allusions, intentional and perhaps unintentional associations of broader constructions of ideas.

The volume consists of thirteen essays, an incisive introduction to Calvin's thought, and a conclusion. Twelve of the essays appeared previously, though all have been "revised and updated" (xi). As Steinmetz says, "What holds this book together, aside from the fact that it deals in every chapter with the theology of John Calvin, is its methodology" (209). Each essay seeks to place Calvin "in the context of the theological and exegetical traditions that formed him and in the lively company of the friends and enemies from whom he learned and with whom he quarreled" (209). All but one of the essays, on the monastic ideal, trace an exegetical conversation between Calvin and one or more of his predecessors and contemporaries; among the commentators treated here one finds Augustine, Denis the Carthusian, Scotus, Ockham, Lyra, Cajetan, Politus, as well as Bucer, Zwingli, Luther, and Melanchthon. Nine chapters each take up a verse or two from Scripture - the majority (six chapters), from Romans - and explore how a range of scholars treated that passage and the theological positions those exegeses reveal. One chapter explores scholastic, nominalist, and Calvinist understandings of the absolute power of God through Thomas, Scotus, Ockham, and Calvin's commentaries on five key verses: Gen. 18:13, Jer. 12:1, Isaiah 23:9, Gen. 25:29, and Romans 9:19. The following chapter, of particular interest to this reviewer, traces the debates on the content of the First Commandment and its prescriptive intent among Ursinus, Carlstadt, Luther, Zwingli, Eck, and Calvin.

The effect of each chapter is to refine and sharpen our understanding of Calvin's thought - his choice of vocabulary, his potential points of reference, his own intellectual predilections. Each chapter also offers deeper insights into specific core themes in Calvin's theology - such as the natural knowledge of God, the "divided self," the significance of baptism, the nature of the Eucharist - adding substantially to the work on Calvin's thought carried forward in major monographs by Wenzel, Bouwsma, Parker, McGrath, and others. Steinmetz succeeds eloquently in his effort to clarify "the actual range of intellectual options open to" Calvin (209). He also succeeds in a second enterprise: to locate Calvin in conversations with Church Fathers, scholastic theologians, contemporaries both evangelical and Catholic, and thereby, to bring greater nuance to our sense of what is distinctive in Calvin's theology, and what is more deeply embedded in broader discussions.

Steinmetz's collection of essays is salutary. Calvin's biblical commentaries, long slighted in treatments of Calvin's thought, comprise the bulk of his writings as well as what he believed was his most important work the Institutes, after all, was intended to provide a guide for reading Scripture. With his characteristic clarity and precision, Steinmetz makes evident both the pleasures of entering the world of sixteenth-century biblical commentary and the importance of it.

LEE PALMER WANDEL Yale University