§17 Commentary on Romans?
This commentary will give us the opportunity to take note of the essentials of one of the most important sides of Calvin’s theology that thus far we have only touched on in passing, namely, his quality as an expositor of the Bible. Scripture did not play quite the same part in Reformed Protestantism as in Lutheran. Its dignity here was one of principle as it never was in Lutheranism, no matter how highly the latter regarded it. Introducing reformation now meant establishing the Word of God in the Bible as the norm of faith and life. The Reformed church is first of all the school in which we learn and then the institution in which we are brought up. The right attitude is first one of docility, then of obedience.” Scripture is the guide and teacher (Inst. I, 6, title).8
All this may sound terribly legalistic. It is not meant that way. But the priority of the scripture principle in Reformed Protestantism, the lesser
4, OS II, 11-18:
5. CO 49, 1-292. New ed. Leiden, 1981 (ed. T. H. L. Parker).
6. Editorial emendation.
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8. OS III, 60, Of.
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prominence given to the content, which was the starting point for Luther and Lutheranism, is undeniably beset by ambiguity. This is the ambiguity of the whole Reformed turn given to the Reformation of which we spoke earlier. It was unavoidably linked to the attempt to relate eternity to time, the forgiveness of sins to the life of the sinner, spirit to existence in the flesh, incomparable love to more humdrum obedience. Those who see themselves set the task of recognizing these relations and putting them into effect cannot fail to give the false impression, the more zealously they do it, of losing the whole freedom that comes with the positing of what is incomparable, replacing it by a dreadful tutelage such as we often think we should connect with the OT and that we therefore describe as legalism. Lutheranism, too, was in its own way an attempt, an attempt to let eternity, forgiveness, spirit, and love stand as entities in their own right, making them the cone at the head as it were, maintaining indeed the relation but leaving it to the good Lord to establish it. The bad impression that was made in this case was not one of tutelage but of a great and blessed laissez-faire.
Both attempts gave ample cause for these bad impressions. We will not try to decide here which of the two compromises took Christianity more seriously or which promoted and proclaimed it the more vehemently in spite of every compromise. We can only emphasize constantly the inner necessity of both and their inner relationship. If the Reformed effort is ventured, then the special importance of holy scripture arises out of the quest for a norm by which to regulate the relations, the quest for a rule of faith and life, of knowledge and action. This becomes the primary and vital question. The relation to time to which this concern is linked makes it essential that there be a temporal form and order for us. The real relation is certainly to eternity, but since this is now related to time, form and order are required.
Reformed Protestantism began everywhere as a rejection and contesting of forms and orders that were only apparently and ostensibly the required form and order, that is, of Roman Catholicism, which seemed to be a bringing down of the eternal to the temporal, to which there cannot be accorded the dignity of the form and order in which the relation finds true fulfillment. Reformed Protestantism began by establishing biblical authority. The burning issue for it was how to give God, the true God, the glory, how to do it here and now. In this question it lifted its gaze above the carefully erected steplike structure of medieval authorities until it came to rest on the canonical writings of the primitive Christian era.
Strassburg Stay, 1538-1541
There, and there for the first time, and there alone, it found the expression of a dignity, form, and order that imposed themselves and that it could and should respect, the norm with which it could make its venture to the glory of God without falling victim to an illusion. We have to understand the free and revolutionary forward pressure behind this establishment of the Reformed scripture principle and we will then be able to handle at least more cautiously the concept of legalism.
There were inner reasons, then, why the Zurich reformation should begin in such a banal way with a series of sermons on Matthew's Gospel,? and we have seen that Calvin had hardly arrived in Geneva before he began at once, not to preach, but to lecture on the Epistle to the Romans. Wherever, as with the Reformed, it is a matter of acting with God and for God, knowledge of God has to come first. And wherever it is a matter of knowledge of God, what else calls for consideration but the Bible, the Epistle to the Romans? That we have to handle the concept of legalism cautiously, as I have said, emerges already from the fact that Calvin took Romans as the first subject of his practical proclamation, also as the first subject of his scholarly work. The way things go is remarkable enough: ethical concern for the glorifying of God on earth leads to the question of the intellectual norm and then to the classical record of Paulinism. If we take note of this, we cannot fail to see what is the root of the ethical fervor of Reformed Protestantism. Truly it was not any lack of understanding for that which was so important for Luther as the pure and simple gospel of forgiveness and faith, but the very desire to understand this gospel. The ethical turn did not imply any abandonment of this gospel but was meant to'lead back the more forcefully to it. Knowledge of God engenders a desire to act. A desire to act engenders a new seeking of God. The new quest for God engenders new knowledge of God. That is the way that Reformed thinking goes.
Against this background the task of exposition was important. The relation to the Bible is a living one. The spring does not flow of itself. It has to be tapped. Its waters have to be drawn. The answer is not already there; we have to ask what it is. The Bible calls for objective study. What is in it is, of course, known already insofar as it is a matter of the relation about which we cannot ask without first knowing it, but because it is a matter of the form and order of this relation in time, we do not yet know what is in the Bible, and, as is unavoidable in time, we have to seek and
9. See above, 258f.
GIF Commentary on Romans
find this by work. The Bible is thus opened and listened to with a readiness to receive what is not yet known, not for the purpose of finding again what is known already. In exposition it is a matter of opening up the mind of scripture, as Calvin says in the commentary’s dedicatory epistle to Grynaeus. !° f
To this we must add at once, of course, that according to Calvin’s express view in /nst. 1, 7, God himself must bear witness concerning himself to those who would receive and pass on the witness of the biblical author. God is not just the theme but also the Lord of biblical truth. A purely historical understanding of the mind of scripture would be for Calvin no understanding at all. The mind of scripture cannot be merely the object of exposition but has to be its subject as well. “The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.”!! Nevertheless, that does not alter the fact that the mind of scripture is also an object that deserves and demands objective study. Exegesis has to be a conversation in which the one speaks and the other listens. Listening, even if on the premise of secret identity with the one who speaks, is the task of the exegete.:
This is what gives Calvin’s expository skill its first distinctive feature: its extraordinary objectivity. We can learn from Calvin what it means to stay close to the text, to focus with tense attention on what is actually there. Everything else derives from this. But it has to derive from this. If it does not, then the expounding is not real questioning and readiness to listen. Calvin once wrote of Luther’s exegesis that he was not too much concerned about the literal wording or the historical circumstances of the text but was content to derive fruitful doctrine from it (Briefe, 217).!2 We see gentle criticism here. Calvin wanted to derive fruitful doctrine from the actual wording and historical circumstances, not by ignoring them. This is a feature of the way he goes about his task. Thus he engaged in textual criticism insofar as he was able with the tools available and without having the philological skill of an Erasmus. Nor did he shrink from higher criticism, seriously questioning the authenticity of 2 Peter and Jude, and definitely contesting Paul’s authorship of Hebrews.!9
10. CO 10/II, 403 (no. 191).
11. Inst I; 7,4; OS IM 70, 2-8.
12. CO 11, 36, letter to Viret, 5.19.1540.
13. On the former see CO 55, 441 and 485; on the latter, 55, 5.
Strassburg Stay, 1538-1 541
~~ The actual exposition follows the text word for word. Only rarely does Calvin allow himself brief digressions. Naturally he does engage in what we call eisegesis, and rightly so, for if we read nothing into the Bible we will also read nothing out of it. But whichever he is doing he keeps his eye firmly on the actual text. He proceeds methodically and steadfastly, seeking diligently to follow the text in all its twists and turns. His aim is to do justice to everything in it. He displays extraordinary freedom relative to the exegetical tradition even at points where, as in the messianic prophecies of the OT, he likes to see what traditiom thought it had seen before him. He stays close to what is there because what is there is enough for him, because the one biblical truth is dear and important to him precisely in the form and passage in which it is communicated and not in some other. There is, for example, remarkable tension between his well-known basic view that Christ speaks already in the OT! and the great caution with which he critically tests each individual OT passage to see whether and to what extent, either more closely or more remotely, it can carry a reference to Christ. To get a clear picture of this compare Luther's exposition of Psalm 2 in his Operationes with that of Calvin.!>
It is self-evident that Calvin would make only the most cautious use of what is called allegorizing even where NT parallels seem to call for it directly by their hina plerothé (“that it might be fulfilled”). It was naturally no accident that of all the NT books he did not write a commentary only on Revelation. He hated what he called on one occasion the pleasurable playing about!® with every possible interpretation of the text that we can hardly avoid when it comes to Revelation, and wherever he could he avoided leaving us with two or more meanings. This is perhaps connected with the fact that he seldom engages in the adducing of parallel passages that plays so big a role in many commentaries both old and new (Luther's merry chasing after deer).!7 Each passage has its own truth. Each is self-grounded. Each must be expounded in its own context. The harmony of the whole will emerge of itself without having to be more or less questionably documented in detail. What he still reads into the Bible at every point, in contrast to more recent historical study with which his approach must not, of course, be confused, is the unity of truth, the
14. Jnsz. I, 9 and 10; OS TH, 398ff., 403ff.
15. WA 5, 47-74; CO 31, 41ff
16. CO 10/II, 405 (no. 191).
17. Ch. WA 5, 34, 8-12 (on Ps. 28:8).
assumption that though there are many voices, in the last resort they are all seeking to say the same thing. This did not prevent him, however, from seeing what was distinctive as such, from finding the reason for it, and from emphasizing it and establishing its validity in its own place.
This leads us to the second ‘distinctive feature of his method. I might call this its uniformity. We see this even outwardly in his commentaries in the equal way in which each word and chapter is taken up and exploited. He does not give special prominence to Romans 1-8 because these chapters are the biblical basis of Reformation soteriology. He expounds the whole epistle with the same care and attention. Nor does he stop at Romans and some other leading and central writings. Romans is for him, as he says, an entrance that has been opened up to an understanding of all scripture.!8 In gentle criticism he complained that Melanchthon expounded only a few particularly essential chapters and because he was occupied with these he neglected many others that ought not to be neglected.!9 If in principle it is seen to be right to listen to the Bible, then we should listen to the whole Bible.
Calvin too, of course, did allow himself some tacit exceptions. I have already mentioned Revelation. In the OT he omitted especially the works attributed to Solomon. The feeling of being engaged in battle on a long and extended front enabled him to deal with detailed passages in a relaxed and sober manner. He had his eye on the whole, and therefore he did not need to break out and win victories at every point which could be in his view only sham victories. The whole of a single book and the whole of all the books speaks for itself. I do not think that we should view the doctrine of verbal inspiration, which is obviously in the background here, in the rigid and mythological way in which people usually see it.2? What does it amount to in practice but the hypothesis that in some sense the text is trustworthy, the premise that there has to be a meaning in it, a meaning, indeed, in its wording? This premise did not prevent Calvin in fact from closely examining that trustworthiness any more than his doctrine of predestination prevented him from taking our human responsibility in bitter earnest. But it gave him also a consistent zeal to track down the content of the whole Bible, a zeal that incidentally would also stand historical investigation of the Bible in good stead.
18. CO 10/II, 405.
19. Ibid., 404.
20. For examples in works used by Barth cf. Loofs, Leitfaden, 882f.; Seeberg, Lehrbuch, 1V/2, 566f£.; Lang, 74f Bauke, 47-52.
Strassburg Stay, I 538-1541
We now come to the third distinctive feature of Calvin’s exegesis. I would call this its relevance. This is the more striking in Calvin because his objectivity often borders on what we call historicism. At this point we see again one of the tensions in which his theology is so rich. Like no other Reformation exegete, he gives free play to what is unique in each passage. He really emerges above all the others as a true biblical investigator and scholar. But then he can handle the material in such:a way that we do not have the impression with him any more than with others that all we have here is mere history. History is indeed being studied, but it is also being made. It did not simply need such common expressions as “Hence we say” and “Hence we recall,” or the occasional attacks on papists, monks, and schoolmen,?! to make clear to us that the commentary has a purpose, that something is happening in it, that a fruitful and living dialogue is in fact taking place here across the cleft of the centuries. We are in the Ist century but we are equally in the 16th. We hear Paul, and we also hear Calvin. The voices merge into one another so that we can hardly distinguish them, and we get some sense of the truth of the saying that the Spirit who spoke by the prophets must penetrate into our hearts.22 This relevance of Calvin’s exposition, quite apart from specific applications, means that it still speaks and teaches and persuades today. We believe Calvin the more readily because he is not deliberately trying to make us believe but simply setting out what he finds in Paul, yet not, of course, without being able or even trying to hide the fact that he himself believes it. This quiet kinship between the apostle and the exegete speaks for itself.
We have to read Calvin attentively, of course, if we are to profit from him. At a first glance most of us might find him rather tedious. Initially his thoroughness, restraint, and uniformity seem overdone. But finally, especially when we compare him enough with others, we are grateful for these qualities and rejoice to see how here and there between the lines of the commentaries there can be just as powerful lightning flashes as in Luther, but with the advantage that we never lose sight of the primary goal of exposition as we often do in Luther. Whenever I have myself consulted Calvin's commentaries for my own use, I have found pleasure in his distinctive combination of historical and pneumatic exegesis even?3
21. Barth seems to have the commentaries in general in mind here, since these expressions are not at all common in Calvin's Romans. See below, 393.
22. See above, 389 n. 11.
23. The form of this statement rests on a pencil correction Barth made in the when I have permitted myself to go my own way. His work not only provided an external model for my own special study of Romans but also laid a firm foundation for its content.24 The exegetical virtue that Calvin held up for himself was “perspicuous brevity.”25 He advocated this in contrast to Bucer, who, he said, had hardly laid hold of the content before the incredible fruitfulness of his mind poured out such a fullness that he could no longer hold it in or reach an end.26 But why brevity? Does the answer lie in his own character, in the relation to his system, the boundaries here being fluid, since the Institutes is a web of exegesis? Exegesis as part of the work of laying the foundations of truth stands in need of brevity. It is in its relation to the practical goal of systematics, though without prejudice to its own significance, that the importance of Calvin's exegesis finally lies.27