Introduction

it, but not at all abandoning it, and in any case first seeking what seems to us to be wooden, banal, perverse, or meaningless in the text in our own view of it rather than in the text itself, which may be a little better than we suppose, even the objectionable feature being meant in a much more vivid way than first appears.

I cannot stress too strongly that you should always treat an author with a certain humility on the one side and on the other — and this is much the same thing

— with a certain free and understanding humor, presuming that the author is probably always right in some sense even when wrong, so that our only task is to see how far this is always so, perhaps even unintentionally. Insofar as I know Calvin thus far, I would not dare in this respect to put him absolutely on a par with Paul and Luther, but in a modified sense I would still say the same about him. Hence we need not feel under any pressure when we read his words and thoughts as they are before us, but may do so quietly and if need be with a full inner freedom to hold aloof from what he says. At the same time we will not do violence to him by not entering into the dynamic of his thoughts, into what he wanted to say even if in some cases he was unable to do so. For we are aware ourselves that, being human, we can only to a limited extent say what we really want to say. If others want to understand us historically, they may not simply read what we have really said, or work on it, but must at least have the skill to detect what we wanted to say. Those who as readers of a historical source will not even to the very end think after and beyond the author's thoughts as he has expressed them are thinking just as unhistorically as those who believe they must inject their own thoughts into the author's. Obviously it is not easy, and indeed it is incredibly dangerous, to steer a golden path between this Scylla and Charybdis. But that does not alter the fact that we must at any rate seek ve

Since these methodological observations do not enjoy universal recognition, | must support them with some basic theses.

There is much talk of objectivity in historical research. But how far can history be just an object, a theme, something detached from the eyes that see it? As intellectual history at any rate — and when is history not intellectual history? — history is at least as much subject as object, at least as much here in my eyes as there in the sources. The historical Calvin is not a fixed, finished, dead entity imprisoned in the years 1509-1564 and unable to leave them. The 59 volumes of the Corpus Reformatorum that contain his works are not secretly his coffin. In Calvin studies we cannot