John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans

In this section I will briefly expose Chrysostom's exegetical approach to Paul's Epistle to the Romans. Paul is Chrysostom's favourite apostle amongst all the biblical authors. He sees in him a reflection of his very own spiritual and ministerial passion and struggles. He also perceives, in Paul's zeal for bringing the people into an intimate relationship with the saviour, Lord Jesus Christ, an educative and exemplary lesson to the church. And, among all Paul's letters, Chrysostom considers his letter to the Romans the first lesson the believers should learn on their way toward a full understanding of God's Gospel.

Right from the outset of his text on the Epistle to the Romans, Chrysostom states why he embarks upon interpreting this Pauline epistle. He says:

Chrysostom does not seek to offer intellectual analysis or sophisticated theorisation. He attempts instead to create a relationship between the ordinary people – who have no time to spend studying due to life duties – and the apostle Paul. He opens Paul's writings to the eyes of his audience by showing them the great power of the Pauline spiritual words.Footnote ⁴ What is worth pondering here is that this concern about the accessibility of Paul's literature to ordinary audiences does not make Chrysostom appeal to simplistic, literalist exposition of the text of Romans. He maintains a robust catechetical style of interpretation all through his homilies, yet insists on conveying the core of Paul's theological message in a pertinent and easy language. This reflects Chrysostom's penetrative perception of the message of the text; a message, that is, about truths that, in the first place, exceed understanding and language.Footnote ⁵

The depth of Chrysostom's hermeneutical style appears in his methodological departure from an inquiry on the historicity of Romans: when was this epistle composed and for what purpose? Chrysostom takes into consideration the question of history because he believes that only through discerning the historical background of Paul's letters, and realising generally the different styles of writing Paul uses in his various letters to convey the same Gospel to different contexts, can the contemporary scripture reader grasp the differences between Paul's letters.Footnote ⁶ For Chrysostom, Paul's intellectual profoundness and theological depth appear in his carefully made choice of words and linguistic expressions. All through his commentary on Romans, therefore, Chrysostom extracts the meaning of Paul's argument by thinking about the logic behind Paul's style of writing and textual structuring, not about the philosophical and conceptual speculations which are pertinent to his ideas. Anthony Thiselton's claim that Chrysostom believes that ‘we must not examine the words as bare words . . . nor examine the language by itself, but we must mark the mind of the writer’ makes sense when we read it from the aforementioned perspective. This does not only mean that we should ‘reflect upon the written texts as expressive of their author's interaction with life from the angle of his relationship with the divine’.Footnote ⁷ It also implies that this interaction shapes the author's style of writing and appears through it.

This methodological framework explains why Chrysostom's exegetical style is characterised by verse-to-verse elucidation, careful analysis of terms and phrases and rational exploration of the reasons behind the author's choice of terminology. He extracts answers to these enquiries by tracing the correspondence between the different parts of the text he studies. He follows an intra-textual hermeneutical method, relying on the plain claims and expressions of the written verses. This does not prevent him, nevertheless, from digging deeper into the hidden dimensions of the text when he feels that Paul's wording in certain places is not sufficiently conspicuous or apparently tautological.Footnote ⁸

For example, Chrysostom argues that the meaning of Romans 1:4, ‘and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, even Jesus Christ’, is obscured by ‘the close-folding of the words’,Footnote ⁹ as he says. Thus, he dedicates the following lines of his homily to unfold the connotations of the term ‘declared’. When, furthermore, it comes to Romans 1:19, ‘for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them’, Chrysostom also feels that what the verse says as such is not clear enough. In a rhetorical manner he asks ‘now, has what was said become clear to you, or must one make it still clearer?’Footnote ¹⁰ He is ready to go as deep as it takes when profound theologisation is demanded and when the understanding of the readers is at stake. For him, this not only enlightens the reader about the text per se, it also depicts the profound systematic mind-set of Paul the thinker.Footnote ¹¹

Be that as it may, Chrysostom's polemics against the philosophical wisdom of Aristotle and Plato in the same homily must not misguide us.Footnote ¹² Chrysostom is not placing rational, critical thinking over against the plain meaning of biblical texts, as if they were two contradictory reading approaches. His comparison of Paul's logic with that of the Greeks indicates his knowledge of philosophical thinking. Because Chrysostom is not exhibiting the high quality of his own intellectual calibre, his criticism serves here the prior purpose of making his audience grasp the meaning of the biblical text. He does not cast away the rational reading of the Greeks as if he were one of the contemporary literalist, fundamentalist commentators who appeal to a mechanical reiteration of the written words, showing indifference to what the texts reveal about their author's style of writing and authorship character. He uses rational argument to explicate Paul's criticism of Greek philosophy, hoping thereby to make the reasons for such criticism understandable and justifiable to the mind of the readers.

Chrysostom knows that the literalist approach to the texts can easily twist their meaning and produce a perverted form of reading. In Homily VI, he exegetes Romans 3:8, which says: ‘and why not do evil that good may come? – As some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.’ He recognises in this verse an allusion to readers who twist Paul's teaching by taking his words at face value and claiming that man must commit sin in order to obtain good. Chrysostom criticises this literalist reading. He argues that the meaning of Paul's ideas was not as plain as Paul's readers thought. Chrysostom decides to rescue his audience from such a mistaken literalism. He, therefore, insists that, rather than calling us to commit evil, Paul is reminding the newly fledged Christians of their sinful past and calling them to change their old paths completely. By doing this, Chrysostom showed that the meaning of the text can sometimes be unwittingly obscured when the reader turns the textual wording into a blasphemous language which serves the purpose and the convictions of the reader alone.Footnote ¹³ The plain meaning of the text is not, then, always immediately evident to the reader. The manner by which the reader uses this meaning indicates whether this reader grasped the message accurately or not: using this meaning to glorify God, or to justify his human, sinful life.

In his important study of the early fathers’ commentary on Romans, Peter Gorday describes Chrysostom's exegetical style in the following way:

Chrysostom, in other words, studies the textual content as a contextual message which is designed originally to meet the specific needs of a past community of God, before he subsequently applies the conclusions of this study to the community of God in the present. He believes that the psychological and spiritual needs of Paul's readers mirror needs which are inherent to people's life at any time and help the readers of today to understand themselves in the light of this comparison.

In her seminal study of Chrysostom's portraiture of the apostle Paul, Margaret Mitchell analyses what she calls Chrysostom's ‘hermeneutics of inter-subjectivity’ from the angle of his endeavour to animate Paul's human character before the community of his age. Chrysostom creates this portrait by means of a reader–author method of interactive reading of Paul's letters. He believes, according to Mitchell, that these letters ‘sketch the image of their writer's soul’, not only his theological mind. The inter-subjective aspect of this ‘animation-via-textual-interpretation’ appears in the fact that Chrysostom does not seek an abstract speculation on Paul's character per se. His goal is to bring Paul into accessible and relevant contact with the readers of today. This is why, as Mitchell perceptively states, Chrysostom urges that ‘the portraits of Paul also be redrawn through preaching and exegesis [i.e. hermeneutics of inter-subjectivity] so that the hearers can have the model displayed before their eyes for imitation’.Footnote ¹⁵ Why is such an animation exegetically important? Not only because it enables the readers of the Pauline literature to meet the author as almost enfleshed before their eyes. It also enables the readers, as well as the interpreter, to encounter their own souls mirrored in the portrait of Paul.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the previously stated points, it is important to keep in mind that Chrysostom is not a Bible reader who encourages others to project their subjective needs and personal wishful thinking on the texts. Chrysostom is an exegete who seeks the meaning of the text as something related to life-settings and existential factors, not to purely speculative and abstract intuition. He seeks the plain meaning that is not a simplistic one at all. It is rather a meaning which needs a highly systematised and thorough scrutiny to be understood.Footnote ¹⁷ For Chrysostom, the search for the literal sense does not at all conflict with a careful observation of ‘whether [the author] states something absolutely (apolelumenous, effectively context-free) or from a circumstantial position towards certain persons’. The literal meaning is not directly given. It is rather the outcome of the interaction between the text and the self-situation of its author. It is a meaning which emerges, as Anthony Thiselton also realises, for a hermeneutics of ‘inter-subjectivity’.Footnote ¹⁸ It, therefore, needs serious interaction between the reader and the method of elaboration which is used by the author.

Without realising these characteristics of his hermeneutics, we may not perceive the profound implications of Chrysostom's belief that the thorough and meticulous exegete is the one who realises that Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans, does the following: (1) he speaks about the relation between law and grace in a language that, according to Chrysostom, throws the hearer ‘into a great deal of perplexity’. Yet Paul (2) offers in the same text the rationale which postulates and explains such a perplexity.Footnote ¹⁹ Such an inter-subjective correspondence with the thought of the author protects interpretation from possible inconsistencies which could be ‘gendered by tracking the words [of the text] literally’.Footnote ²⁰

Chrysostom, as Peter Gorday argues, is an ideal Antiochene exegete, who is ‘sensitive . . . to the thought-development in the text, with the way in which one point leads to the next and finally to the ultimate conclusion’.Footnote ²¹ Chrysostom's profound, yet applicable and accessible, style of interpretation made the majority of scholars believe that in the writings of this father we have a pastor and preacher more than a theological scholar.Footnote ²² ‘Theology’ for Chrysostom is the church's pastoral and biblical reflection on God's salvation which seeks the spiritual formation of the human being after the image of the incarnate God. Gorday is right to say that Chrysostom's main concern is to proclaim the relationship between God and ‘the soul's thirst to partake of [His] holiness’. In other words, he ‘is not interested in cosmogony or theodicy or a theology of history, or in exploring the purposes, mechanics and ultimate intentions of God's will. He is interested, however, in . . . the pursuit by individual Christians of spiritual and moral perfection.’Footnote ²³

Today, scholars of early Christian exegesis and patristic scholars alike consider John Chrysostom's commentaries on Paul's letters a monumentally significant literature on the early trends of exegesis and approaches to Pauline literature in the church.Footnote ²⁴ Right after their publication in Greek, his homilies were directly translated into Latin and, in the following centuries, many of his claims and ideas found their way into the writings of scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, humanists like Erasmus and the Protestant reformers.Footnote ²⁵ Among the Protestants, John Calvin, more than other reformers, appreciated Chrysostom's attention to the plain meaning and the context of the texts. Scholars have wondered if a careful study of Calvin's literature and thinking could suggest a possible ‘methodological affinity’ between Calvin and Chrysostom.Footnote ²⁶ In the following paragraphs, I will first look at Calvin's evaluation of Chrysostom's exegesis in the proposal he wrote for a translation of his homilies to Romans. I will then single out some possible marks of Chrysostom's method of interpretation from Calvin's exegesis of Paul's epistle to the Romans.

Translating Chrysostom: Calvin's unaccomplished project

John Calvin's theological and biblical writings reveal a belief that the church fathers’ exegesis of scripture is a helpful hermeneutical means for understanding God's salvation in Jesus Christ. He used to cite the early fathers’ sayings, considering the early fathers, not the scholastic or contemporary writers, his major scholarly references.Footnote ²⁷ One of the things which proves this affinity to patristic heritage is Calvin's interest in John Chrysostom's writings at an early stage of his career. Calvin notices in Chrysostom's exegesis, as John Thompson states, an authentic ‘guidance in the meaning of scripture, examples of and exhortation to moral uprightness and discipline’. He uses this father's exegetical works as ‘aids for the reading of Scripture, indeed, resources provided by the Lord to serve in tandem with the inward illuminating work of the Holy Spirit’.Footnote ²⁸

Nothing is more demonstrative of Calvin's affinity to Chrysostom's exegesis than a text he wrote on a translation project. In an important essay on this project, Ian Hazlett narrates how Calvin once attempted to translate John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans into French. After publishing the second edition of his Institutes of Christian Religion, Calvin decided to contribute to the translating work of the other contemporary humanists (e.g. Erasmus, Oecolampadius, Capito, Musculus, etc). Driven by the ad fontes slogan, many humanists started to translate patristic literature from Greek into Latin. Appreciative as he was of the translations that were made into a language known for the educated and intellectuals, Calvin wanted to translate the exegetical homilies of Chrysostom not only because he found them of great theological value for scholars, but primarily because he perceived in them a tremendous contribution for the lay members of the church.

The uniqueness of Calvin's aforementioned project, compared to other humanists’ translations, lies in Calvin's aspiration to make Chrysostom's literature accessible to the wider sphere of society. But why translate the writings of a church father from the past? Ian Hazlett believes that Calvin's enthusiasm about publishing a French translation of a patristic writing stems from his principal belief in ‘the desirability of circulating secondary aids to assist with the study and interpretation of Scripture’.Footnote ²⁹ Rather than just supplying people with secondary aids, Calvin wanted to supply the biblical readers with authentic and authoritative secondary literature; one, that is, they could safely rely on for understanding the message of the scriptures as the church understood it ever since it was founded in history. These authentic and authoritative sources are none other than the patristic heritage. In this patristic heritage we see the most authentic proclamation of the Gospel.

Calvin expected his project to be an ‘unconventional’ contribution because it would offer a rare translation of a church father's heritage into a language comprehensible to all levels of believers, educated and uneducated. Calvin looked carefully at his contemporary Christian community and saw that ‘not all pastors and teachers are competent in the classical languages’. He concluded that ‘they too could benefit from a translation’ of old texts into a common language.Footnote ³⁰ Underlying this conclusion is Calvin's foundational belief that the work of the reformers and the humanists in translating had already made the scriptures available to ordinary people in their local languages. It was time now to supply those readers with authoritative commentaries readable in their spoken languages to help them grasp the profound meaning of what they read. If reading and understanding are two parts of one and the same equation, and if reading and understanding are common rights of all the members of the church, patristic commentaries should not only be translated into languages known to scholars who enjoy knowledge of classical languages. They should also be accessible to those lay readers who were now able to read the biblical texts by themselves.

But why translate John Chrysostom's homilies and not the commentaries of any other church father? In his proposal, Calvin gives a clear answer to this question. He wants to translate Chrysostom's homilies into French because he considers him in particular ‘the interpreter and the presenter of the Word par excellence in Antiquity’. Chrysostom, according to Calvin, is the best exegete of his generation because he is ‘clearly committed to communication with and instruction of the common people’.Footnote ³¹ This commitment is more than enough, in Calvin's opinion, to motivate a translation of Chrysostom's homilies, despite the questions that were raised against some of his theological views on election, free will and grace. Calvin's words of admiration for Chrysostom's exegetical method and pastoral concern override, as Hazlett correctly notices, his criticism of the theological content of Chrysostom's commentaries. Calvin believes that, even if one eventually disagreed with most of what Chrysostom says on the role of grace and of man's role in salvation, the value of Chrysostom's hermeneutical conclusions on Christian life, worship and discipline during his age is hard to overrate.

It is of crucial significance to acknowledge, however, that in this preface in which he proposed a translation of Chrysostom's homilies, Calvin states clearly that the motive behind his attempt is theological and not merely socio-cultural (i.e. not just to pay attention to the intellectual growth of common people at a time when all the educational activities are aimed at intellectuals alone). Among the Protestant Reformation's schools of thought, the school of radical Reformation was one which conformed fanatically to the principle of sola scriptura. Radical reformers like Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Carlstadt affirmed that scripture is self-interpretative and does not need any extra-biblical aids to be understood. Müntzer sharply attacked other co-reformers who were keen on reading the writings of the church fathers because they believed that the scriptures could be understood correctly without a great deal of study. He called them ‘mischievous scripture thieves’, ‘spiteful biblical scholars’, or even the ‘modern Pharisees’.Footnote ³² The previous standpoint contrasts with the Radicals’ opinion on the translation of the scriptures. These reformers were totally supportive of translating the Bible itself into folk languages. They believed that, if the Bible is God's sole means of salvation for all humanity, it should not, as Calvin elaborates on their view, be ‘hidden in the libraries of a select few, inaccessible to the general public’.Footnote ³³ On the one hand, the radical reformers believed that the divine word of God is offered to all God's elect and not only to the educated priests or scholars. On the other hand, they were against translating extra-scriptural teachings into readable languages and using them in the teaching activity of the church. For them, such translations would distract the believers’ relationship with the word of God rather than enhance it. It would drive the elect away from the sole, authoritative source of salvation into the trap of the fatal reliance on false secondary commentaries which are not capable of offering God's salvation.

Calvin principally concurs with the radicals’ emphasis on the significance of making the Bible available to ordinary people. He also similarly believes that all Christians are called to read scripture rather than leaving this duty to priests and monks. However, Calvin rejects the radicals’ rejection of the secondary Christian catechetic literature. He, on the contrary, maintains that the Bible reader needs guiding tools capable of directing him through the texts of the scriptures. In his translation proposal, Calvin expresses this conviction in the following way:

In other words, putting scripture into the hands of people is not meant to lead the reader to take the message of God in the Bible as at the disposal of his personal and circumstantial needs and expectations. Calvin consistently affirms that in order to grasp God's salvific message to humanity and ‘to know what one ought to look for’ in the Bible in an accurate, objective and authentic manner, we need to surrender to, rather than try to control, God's Spirit. The Holy Spirit enlightens our souls and minds in such a mysterious manner that God's heavenly wisdom which is conveyed through the texts becomes clear before our eyes. The question Calvin tries answering with his reflection on the Spirit is the following: what if the Spirit, in his divine free will, decided to use extra-biblical sources to guide and enlighten our minds and enable us to perceive truly the content of scripture? Calvin believes that the Spirit not only has the free will to do so but actually and consistently does this in reality. The Spirit certainly uses such means to assess the investigation we conduct in seeking the divine truth in scripture.

Be that as it may, ‘there is no reason for us’, as Calvin concludes, ‘either to neglect [these means] as superfluous, or even to care less about them as if irrelevant’.Footnote ³⁵ Lest the ordinary believers be deprived of their right to read the scriptures and understand them accurately, God and his Spirit do not want to deny the community of Christ the assisting means and the hermeneutical resources which the Spirit guided the patristic predecessors to write. The church fathers’ exegetical heritage is an authentic educating aid because it was composed by interpreters ‘who have advanced in the knowledge of God to a level that they can guide others to as well’.Footnote ³⁶

From a theological point of view, Calvin seeks through translating Chrysostom's homilies to show the Christian public that the Holy Spirit does not work only through the canonical texts. He also works via the hard scholarly work of the church teachers who study these texts. The Spirit works through the word, but also through the mind. Calvin desired to produce a literature demonstrative of how the Spirit guides the church's exegetes to produce a biblical interpretation which is accessible to all people and not only to the educated elite. Contrary to the radical reformers’ rejection of theological elitism, Calvin argues that one of the major evidences of the Spirit's guiding influence is the accessibility and apprehensibility of the commentaries of the old church to all levels of believers.

When we perceive this theological logic, we can easily follow, if not identify with, Calvin's sympathetic belief that John Chrysostom's homilies are, more than any other, central exegetical aids worthy of translation. In his proposal, Calvin clearly discloses to his publisher that John Chrysostom in particular is a ‘man specialized in sermons which he delivered to a wide public . . . he plainly adjusts both [his] approach and language as if he had the instruction of the common people in mind’.Footnote ³⁷ Calvin not only acknowledges the value of Chrysostom's homilies to the education of ordinary people. He noticeably concedes that he and this father share one and the same ministerial focus (though each follows his own particular theological thesis).

In Chrysostom's homilies, Calvin recognises an exemplary commitment to the apostles’ request from the members of the community of Christ to invest the skills that God bestowed upon them in the service of the simple and the uneducated.Footnote ³⁸ Chrysostom, in Calvin's opinion, excels in such perceptions. He presents very complicated theological ideas in a down-to-earth form of preaching which is reflective of God's infinite love and intimate presence in human existence. This is not to say, nevertheless, that Chrysostom's ideas are theologically simplistic or biblically baseless. In his homilies, Chrysostom reflects a sola scriptura theology, in that he makes biblical interpretation his priority. Among the other church fathers, Chrysostom, as Calvin concedes, is one of the most able theologians in expounding scripture thoroughly and explaining its content practically at the same time. In his era, Chrysostom surpassed his other colleagues (e.g. Origen, Athanasius, Basil and Gregory Nazianzen). His exegesis is more appropriate than theirs, in Calvin's opinion, because far from obscuring the plain meaning in a constant allegorisation (e.g. Origen) or in rhetorical elaboration and language (e.g. Basil and Gregory), Chrysostom extracts the plain meaning of the texts in the clearest language possible. Lucidity is for Calvin the main value of Chrysostom's commentaries. This is how Calvin articulates this:

As I said earlier, those who study Calvin's and Chrysostom's theological thought will realise a noticeable difference between their understanding of central theological issues, like free will, divine grace and the role of man in God's salvation. In comparison with Calvin's emphasis on sola gratia, Chrysostom's theology allows space for some semi-Pelagian ideas. Calvin revealed the theological points he is critical about in Chrysostom's thinking. Despite his clear disagreement with Chrysostom in terms of theological content,Footnote ⁴⁰ Calvin's attempt to translate Chrysostom's homilies indicates that there is an evident methodological agreement between the two scholars on biblical exegesis. In the next section, I will shed light on the impact of Chrysostom's exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans on Calvin's approach to the same Pauline letter. I do not attempt a detailed comparison of these two exegetes’ interpretations but I will identify some points from their commentaries which allude to such similarity.

Calvin and Chrysostom: the exegetical congruence

There is no better indicator of Calvin's exegetical skills than his commentaries on the Epistles of Paul. Calvin's commentaries on Pauline literature are very reliable for grasping his understanding of the canonicity of the Bible and for tracing the process of self-training Calvin pursued to become an exegete.Footnote ⁴¹ I will look at his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans to trace the impact of Chrysostom on this commentary because of Calvin's interest in translating Chrysostom's homilies on Romans rather than any other. This attempt at translation reveals Calvin's appreciation of these homilies, and in specific colours his appraisal and exegesis of the same Pauline letter.

Calvin's commentary on Romans is one of his earliest exegetical writings. In an attempt to explain his exegetical strategy in this commentary, Calvin writes a preface dedicating this work to his friend Simon Grynaeus. In it Calvin expresses modesty before what he considers ‘a brave’ task of presenting a commentary on the major text in scripture. Calvin's modesty stems from his feeling that ‘so many scholars of pre-eminent learning have previously devoted their efforts to explaining [Romans]’, which makes it difficult for someone like him to ‘produce something better’.Footnote ⁴² By ‘previous scholars’, Calvin means the patristic exegetes (as well as other reformers, like Melancthon and Bucer). He discloses to Grynaeus that he ascribes to the fathers great authority and rejects any undermining of ‘anything which they have produced’.Footnote ⁴³ He further states that the least a contemporary interpreter can do to venerate these fathers’ hermeneutics is to imitate them in evading purely speculative readings and undertaking an exegesis which aims at the common good of the church. Calvin maintains that in his commentary on Romans he has ‘striven to prevent any complaint that the present work is superfluous in many details’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This reminds the reader of what I stated earlier about Chrysostom's purpose in his Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans. Chrysostom, like Calvin, wants to make Paul and his teaching accessible to the church, because in these teachings there is a common good for the practical life and spiritual well-being of the people of Christ.

Like Chrysostom, Calvin also believes that the texts of Romans plainly display their meaning and lay open their message. ‘At the very beginning’, Calvin says, ‘the epistle introduces itself better and explains itself in a much better way than any words can describe.’Footnote ⁴⁵ The words of the text guide the reader into their proper meaning and intended message. On the other hand, Calvin is ready to travel, along with Chrysostom, deep into the world of the text and discover its philological, contextual and inter-subjectivist dimensions whenever it is necessary. They both perceive that the words of the text invite the interpreter to go deeper than their literal connotations into the sphere of the intellectual elements of their author's thinking to understand the text's spiritual message. Why is this necessary? Because, in scripture ‘the power of God . . . is often set forth in elevated terms’; in words, that is, which are never ‘naked and empty’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Calvin is even ready to go further in his terminological analysis than Chrysostom when he feels there is a need to do so. When, for example, Calvin looks at Paul's words in Romans 5:5–6, ‘and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly’, he discovers that the words are not as clear as even Chrysostom states in his own commentary. Calvin rather believes that the words per se do not disclose fully the substance of Paul's claim in these verses.Footnote ⁴⁷ This tells us that Calvin does not unreservedly or mechanically echo the fathers’ interpretation in his commentary despite stating in the preface that after the fathers’ exegetical work nothing further can be said. Calvin maintains a scholarly critical attention to the hermeneutical heritage of the church, showing readiness to exceed it whenever he thinks that Chrysostom and other fathers bestowed a ‘harsh sense’Footnote ⁴⁸ upon the words of the texts. In referring, therefore, to the patristic interpretation of Romans, Calvin is not a present interpreter who endeavours to deconstruct and alter the legacy of the past. Rather, he interacts with Romans while launching an imagined dialogue on its message with other previous interpreters, the most important among whom is John Chrysostom.

As an exegete, Calvin is primarily interested in a textual form of criticism which focuses on interpreting words, phrases and linguistic expressions. A careful reading of his commentary shows that the counter-criticism he avoids and rejects is the highly obscure and rationalised speculation on the texts. Reformation scholars generally concede that John Calvin does not in principle show any interest in an exegesis which allegorises the words of the text. Calvin, as David Steinmetz argues, does not acknowledge ‘distinction between the “natural” story line of the text and a deeper “spiritual” meaning hidden beneath it’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Calvin, Steinmetz continues, follows a method of exegesis which is sensitive to the ‘plain’ meaning of the text without reducing what the text states as its natural meaning into a ‘woody literal’ attestation.Footnote ⁵⁰

Against speculation, then, Calvin develops an interpretation which allows the words to express accurately the mind of their author and the historical elements inherent in the act of writing.Footnote ⁵¹ The best interpretation of the textual wording, according to Calvin, is the one which reveals the true life occupations of the author, not the one which proves the sharp speculative mind of the exegete. This logic generates, for instance, Calvin's attention to Paul's historical relationship with the Jewish community of the first century ad and shapes his reading of Paul's understanding of the salvation of the Jews. It drives Calvin to concur with Chrysostom's position with regard to the same subject. They both give priority to clarifying Paul's personal, historical contact with the Jews because they think that this clarification would enable the present reader to appraise fairly and perceptively Paul's speech on the Jewish law and the Jews.Footnote ⁵² I conclude from this approach that, when it comes to making a choice between either bestowing upon the words of the text a deeper sense reflective of the profound mind of the exegete or a sense which is more congenial with the text's simple expressions and more pertinent to the mind of the author, Calvin, like Chrysostom, would go for the second option.Footnote ⁵³ He would endeavour to simplify the interpretation of the text rather than impose sophisticated significations which are not in the text in the first place. Accessibility rather than speculation is Calvin and Chrysostom's exegetical concern.Footnote ⁵⁴ Accessibility, which they both advocate, needs ‘investigation’ and pursuing the causes, time and intentions.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is tenable to argue that Calvin concurs with Chrysostom's attention to the contextual intentions and causes as factors that are explicative of the author's style of writing, choice of wording and meaning.Footnote ⁵⁶ Discerning the context of the text and the mindset of the author influences when the interpreter should only take the words of the text at face value and when he uses other words to convey their meaning. He confidently refers to the context of Paul whenever he feels this necessary for developing an accurate interpretation of his words. What is the practical criterion Calvin follows in applying one of these two options on a certain occasion and not on another? Calvin does not say. He seems to follow a hermeneutical method he trustfully borrowed from John Chrysostom because he believes that this method worked successfully for Chrysostom, Augustine and others in their attempt to make Paul's literature accessible to the common people. Putting the issue of the criterion aside, discerning Calvin's appreciation and adoption of Chrysostom's hermeneutical method, helps us to realise one of the main features of Calvin's exegesis, namely his attention to the contextual factors which underlie the author's style and language, more than scholars had been ready to admit previously.

In an article on biblical interpretation in general and Calvin's exegesis in particular, Roy Kearsley states that the traditional studies of Calvin's hermeneutics fail generally to note Calvin's ‘awareness of the living character of the biblical texts’, and his attention to their contextual components and implications.Footnote ⁵⁷ Probing the roots of John Calvin's exegetical method supports Kearsley's warning. It shows that the French reformer does not restrict himself to the humanist trends of thought of the sixteenth century, but follows a long tradition of hermeneutics which goes back to the patristic age. Calvin maintains an attention to the causes and intentions behind the author's style because he shares Chrysostom's belief that the words of the text influence the believers’ attitude toward the Bible and their evaluation of its content's significance for their daily life: how we convey the message influences the people's reaction to this message. Thus, seeking the audiences’ adoption of God's message is the main goal of any attempt to explain the words of the transmitting means, the Bible. This concern about the context of writing reflects Calvin's principal conviction, as Thomas Torrance once noticed, that ‘knowledge of God is practical’.Footnote ⁵⁸

There are scholars who believe that Calvin's main target and point of departure in his commentaries is his own historical context and not the context of the text's writing. They, accordingly, question the objectivity of his interpretation and claim that his exegesis distorts the real intention of the textual author.Footnote ⁵⁹ John Chrysostom looks at Paul's own personal intentions and searches for the questions Paul was answering in his letter to the Romans, before he states the practical conclusions he deems helpful for understanding the situation of the church.Footnote ⁶⁰ Reading through Calvin's commentary on Romans similarly shows his interest in understanding Paul's context and thinking first before developing ideas pertinent to his (Calvin's) church context. Calvin does not subject the scriptural message to the personal demands of the interpreter's context. He conducts instead, as T. H. L. Parker once said, a continual, mutual correspondence between the details of the texts with their contextual aspects and the wider context in which he exists. Parker expresses this hermeneutical inter-subjectivity in the following manner

In the preface to his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Calvin reflects his identification with Chrysostom's hermeneutics of inter-subjectivity. There, Calvin says to Simon Grynaeus:

Two claims which are reminiscent of Chrysostom's approach to Romans are at work here. First, Calvin's saying that the first task of the interpreter is ‘to unfold the mind of the writer’ is reflective of an affinity to Chrysostom's concern about treating the texts as a mirror of the contextual, inner feelings and spiritual views of a human, living author, not of a speculative theoretical mind from the past. Second, Calvin points to a dangerous consequence which can stem from the interpreter's overoccupation with a personal involvement in exegesis. Such an involvement may make the interpreter, according to Calvin, lead his readers away from the meaning intended by the author. This attention is also similar to Chrysostom's concern about linking the meaning of the text to the present situation of his contemporary readers without imposing their needs, convictions and expectations on the text. Both Calvin and Chrysostom pursue a hermeneutics of inter-subjectivity which takes the subjectivity of the author and his addressee, on the one hand, and the subjectivity of the interpreter and the present readers, on the other, proportionately into consideration.

Contemporary Calvin scholars concede that John Calvin emphasises a unique literal interpretation of scripture. They concede with no reservations that Calvin stands within a long traditional stream of attention to, and prioritisation of, the scriptural sensus literalis which goes back to the early patristic tradition.Footnote ⁶³ Calvin follows this tradition's belief that ‘what the Bible is literally about is Jesus Christ’ and that the scriptures ‘do not make sense apart from the Gospel accounts being literally about the suffering, obedience, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In addition, as the church fathers were confronted with the threatening consequences of the reliance on metaphorical and allegorical interpretations of scripture (i.e. the school of Origen), Calvin feels that the primacy of the literal sense was threatened by allegorical reading at his time.Footnote ⁶⁵ Calvin even echoes a patristic insistence that the allegorical reading is a permitted device of interpretation only if it acknowledges the intrinsic nature and the priority of the sensus literalis.Footnote ⁶⁶

This said, scholars still need to maintain a more serious view of Calvin's understanding of the central elements of patristic exegesis, his adoption of Chrysostom's hermeneutics of inter-subjectivity and the impact of his appreciation of the latter's exegetical approach to Calvin's emphasis on the plain meaning of the biblical texts. Only taking these three perspectives and studying them carefully will prove the accuracy of Richard Burnett and Hans Frei's claim that:

Those who accuse Calvin of denying any distinction between the ‘written’ and the ‘written about’, or who may like to consider him the father of the Protestant fundamentalist literalism,Footnote ⁶⁸ would seriously reconsider their accusations when they analyse Calvin's exegetical method in comparison with the exegetical approach of John Chrysostom. They will realise that Calvin is as alert to the contextual factors behind the written text, and to the personal conditions and concerns of the author of the text, as Chrysostom was before him. They both attempt to make Romans accessible to their audience not by echoing mechanically what is literally recorded in the text, but by analytically and philologically pursuing the author's message and his reasoning for saying it in a particular way. Read John Chrysostom and Calvin's commentaries on Romans and you will see an application of almost exactly the same process of hearing-asking, of seeking the mind of the author. No wonder that Calvin aspired to translate Chrysostom's Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans into French. It is unfortunate that he did not. He would have probably made a translation that was authentically reflective of Chrysostom's thoughts. The best translation is one that is made by a translator whose thinking is very close to that of the author of the translated text.