Calvin was not a philosopher, Paul Helm acknowledges in this extensive and very helpful study of the reformer's theological ideas. But nor was he the anti-philosophical, anti-scholastic theologian of certain Protestant caricatures. Drawing support from scholarship of the last generation viewing the sixteenth-century Reformation ‘in medieval perspective’, Helm insists that the thought-world of medieval philosophy and theology was Calvin's world too. But, in contrast to this scholarship, Helm's aim is not principally to place Calvin in historical context; it is, rather, to understand Calvin's ideas – ideas which Helm believes participate in philosophical traditions of thought extending from medieval scholasticism to the Protestant scholasticisms of the seventeenth century. To serve this aim, Helm brings Calvin's thought into conversation with antecedent thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus and his Reformed successors Lambert Daneau and François Turretin. Of course, to contextualise Calvin in this way serves to buttress the point that, although he was not what we might call a philosophical theologian, nor was he a fideistic biblical theologian who disdained all speculation and theory and saw no proper use for reason.
The basic point is presented fairly convincingly. Helm does not attempt to give a complete account of Calvin's theology, but rather to select a range of philosophical-theological issues with which Calvin was concerned, seeking to bring out the distinctive character of Calvin's contributions. He deals first with issues and themes he dubs metaphysical. The first chapter, on Calvin's use of the traditional distinction between God in Godself and God as revealed to creatures (in se and quoad nos), articulates a foundational theme. There exists what Helm calls an ‘epistemic gap’ between God and the human knower, a gap that obviates the univocal application of language to humans and to God. It is a gap, however, and not the chasm suggested by the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomena or by the Barthian claim of God's ‘wholly otherness’, because, for Calvin, God's unknowable essence is nonetheless reflected in the nature disclosed in accommodated form to the human knower. This theme runs particularly strongly through chapters 2 and 3, which deal with the Trinity and Christology, respectively. Thus Helm sees Calvin insisting on a distinction between who God is in se (as, for example, in the notion of the immanent Trinity) and who God is quoad nos (in the redemptive working of the economic Trinity) but also demanding that there be no sense of disjunction between the two. Calvin's Christology, insisting on the ‘extra’ dimension of the Logos (the life of the Word beyond the confines of the incarnation) and on a view of the communication of idioms which maintains both the distinction of divine and human natures as well as their unity in the one person of Christ, continues the theme.
The following three chapters maintain the metaphysical focus, attending to questions of freedom and determination. Chapter 4, on providence and evil, displays Calvin's distance from modern ‘theodicy’ projects and seeks to qualify the sense in which Calvin may be called a determinist. The fifth chapter, ‘The Soul’, explores immortality, reason and agency in light of human fallenness, while chapter 6 extends the anthropological analysis in discussing Calvin's nuanced account of the freedom and bondage of the will.
Helm turns next to epistemological issues. A pivotal chapter 7, on divine accommodation, builds on the foundation of the early chapters and considers a much-discussed aspect of Calvin's characterisation of revelation. Accommodation takes several forms in Calvin's theological idiom. First, there is God's adaptation of moral requirements to Israel's fallen condition. Here Helm links Calvin to Scotus' contention that God temporarily allowed polygamy among the biblical patriarchs (an unfortunate linking in view of the fact that Calvin stood almost alone among medieval and early modern exegetes of the Pentateuch in holding that the law of monogamy was never relaxed by God). Second, Calvin refers to the human need to accommodate ourselves to God. Third, and most characteristic, is Calvin's sense of God's accommodation to us in God's self-disclosure in scripture. The focus of this discussion is the divine activity in relation to creatures and the apparently conflicting biblical testimony to God's immutability and constancy, on one hand, and change or ‘repentance’, on the other. The principle of accommodated revelation allows Calvin to claim the full literalness of the first sort of testimony, as an indication of what God is (in se), and the less than full literalness of the second sort, which testifies to what God is like (quoad nos). But Helm insists that Calvin's use of the principle not be confused with Enlightenment deployments of accommodation ‘as a cure-all for any problem of understanding which the text of scripture might present’ (p. 187). Here Helm cites Calvin's literal interpretation of the long day of Joshua 10 in which Calvin saw no reason to explain away a supernatural interruption of a natural course of events. It is unfortunate that Helm did not also attend to exercises in biblical interpretation, such as the early chapters of the Genesis commentary, in which Calvin did in fact invoke accommodated revelation when the biblical narrative seemed to conflict with what he thought we know reliably on the basis of scientific study of the natural world. Calvin's statement, that readers who want to learn astronomy should look elsewhere than scripture (Comm. Gen. 1:6), perhaps indicates that the gap between the reformer's concerns and modern questions is not quite as great as Helm imagines. Chapters 8 and 9 round out the treatment of epistemology with attention to ‘Natural Theology and the Sensus Divinitatis’ and ‘Revelation’. On both controverted topics Helm attempts a via media: Natural theology for Calvin may be seen to be possible, but not necessary; revelation is grounded in the unmediated authority of a self-authenticating scripture, an authority substantiated by the internal ‘proof’ of the Holy Spirit's persuasive assurance and not on external indicia.
The final chapters turn to ethical issues, beginning in chapter 10, somewhat oddly, with the subject of angels. Using the Job commentary as ‘a kind of conceptual laboratory’ of Calvin's views of creaturely and divine righteousness, Helm explains the metaphysical and moral basis for Calvin's exclusion of the idea of creatures accruing merit before God. Chapter 11 attends to ‘The Power Dialectic’, arguing against the voluntarist interpretation of Calvin – that right action is determined exclusively by God's arbitrary will – but for the view that Calvin maintained the scholastic distinction between the two powers of God – the absolute (unrestrained and arbitrary) power and the ordained (or self-limited) power, what God in fact wills and accomplishes. Despite Calvin's frequent disparaging comments about the scholastic distinction, Helm maintains that Calvin only objected to speculative abuses of the concept of what God might possibly do or have done. In chapter 12, ‘Equity, Natural Law and Common Grace’, Helm continues to suggest a closer connection between Aquinas and Calvin than many of the latter's enthusiasts have allowed. With Aquinas, Calvin believed in a natural law to which all humans have access, although he differs from the angelic doctor in the relation he construes between revelation and knowledge of the natural law. In his concluding chapter on ‘Faith, Atonement and Time’, Helm changes course slightly, noting the more strongly ‘Protestant’ distance between Calvin and his scholastic predecessors, and discussing helpfully Calvin's approach to self-contradiction and logic in theology, the relation between divine wrath and love in atonement and the negotiation of types of causality in soteriology.
Those who take an interest in the content of Calvin's theological thought should be thankful for Helm's worthy contribution towards what he terms ‘detailed work on [Calvin's] ideas and arguments’ (p. viii). Objections are certainly possible. One may miss the crucial pastoral motive underlying all Calvin's thinking, writing and speaking. One may feel that, with Helm's interest in scholastic philosophy, the humanist influence on Calvin has not been given its due. Helm attempts to be sensitive to historical context, and yet as a philosopher or historian of ideas one senses that he is not convinced of the historical groundedness of all concepts. At times this appears as a liability. We would have a clearer grasp of what is at stake for Calvin and other Reformed in interpretations of the communicatio idiomatum were we able to see Calvin's ideas formed in the course of debate over Christ's presence in the eucharist. When Helm warns about exaggerating the influence of this controversy, we might well wonder if he has any conception of how Christological debate in sixteenth-century Europe was shaped! The suggestion that Zwingli developed a similar Christological view to Calvin's, but (‘as far as one can tell’) independently, deepens the suspicion – as Zwingli died before Calvin published a word and without doubt powerfully influenced Calvin's and other Reformed Christologies. One may also suspect that philosophical habits of attention occasionally distract Helm from matters that were key concerns of Calvin and his contemporaries, such as the important place of body in relation to soul. But these amount to minor quibbles in the context of a rich and precise reading of, and out of, Calvin's corpus and world of thought – a reading that should stimulate fruitful debate among theologians, philosophers and historians.
