Though perhaps having cooled somewhat from the heights of 2009 and the five-hundredth anniversary of his birth, scholarly interest in John Calvin (1509–64) shows no signs of slowing. Recent years have seen a number of significant edited collections exploring the Genevan Reformer’s life and work, a group that includes John Calvin in context (2019), edited by R. Ward Holder, Cultures of Calvinism in early modern Europe (2019), edited by Crawford Gribben and Graeme Murdock, and the massive Oxford handbook of Calvin and Calvinism (2021), edited by Bruce Gordon and Carl Trueman. To this list we can now add the book under review, a substantial volume edited by Yudha Thianto and featuring contributions from an impressive list of leading Calvin scholars.

The essays in this volume are all of a high standard when taken as individual efforts, though some questions remain as to the arrangement of the pieces and the balance struck between the elements named in the book’s title. For while all of the essays meaningfully engage aspects of Old Testament interpretation, I was somewhat surprised to find that only four out of twelve chapters focus primarily on Calvin himself (note that whilst there are five chapters in part i on ‘Calvin’s interpretation of the Old Testament’, the first of these is Yudha Thianto’s introductory essay that surveys the entire breadth of the volume). Chapters vi–x explore various aspects of the wider Reformed tradition, and while chapters xi and xii do return to Calvin, they are more directly concerned with the work of the contemporary novelist Marilynne Robinson. This is not necessarily a problem, but those looking for sustained engagement specifically with Calvin’s work and historical context should be forewarned that the balance is tilted somewhat towards wider historical and literary exploration.

As for the individual essays themselves, several stand out for particular mention. The collection begins with G. Sujin Pak’s exploration of Calvin’s hermeneutical method as he navigated the perennial question of how to approach Old Testament texts as distinctively Christian Scripture. Pak persuasively argues that Calvin was quite intentional in his rejection of both allegory and a bare literalism, preferring instead what she calls a ‘figurative’ reading. Like the allegorical alternative, such figurative exegesis identified deeper metaphorical and symbolic meanings within the text, but, unlike the medieval allegories that Calvin dismissed as ‘forced’ and ‘improbable’ (p. 27), figurative exegesis was disciplined by close attention to (1) authorial intent; (2) the text’s historical and literary contexts; and (3) ‘the analogy between the signs and the thing signified’ (p. 25).

One of the most historically rich and rewarding pieces in the book is the contribution from Scott Manetsch on Calvin’s public teaching on the prophet Jeremiah. Bringing the same sense of detailed historical immersion that characterised his previous work on Calvin’s company of pastors (Oxford 2012), Manetsch explores how Calvin’s relatively understudied lectures on Jeremiah ‘served as a kind of primer on pastoral theology’ (p. 35) for the hundreds of pastors and theological students who flocked to hear them.

Following on from these, a provocative essay by Todd Billings delves into Calvin’s interpretation and appropriation of the Psalms of lament. If one wished to identify a genre of Scripture with which Calvin is most closely and particularly associated, a strong case could be made for the Hebrew poetry found in the psalter, which Calvin famously adapted for use in congregational singing through his Genevan Psalter, finished in 1562. Given this close association, many readers may be surprised to encounter Billings’s chapter in which he highlights the extent to which Calvin ‘appeared to struggle with the content of many Psalms when he lectured on them beginning in 1552’ (p. 59, italics original). Calvin could describe these Psalms as containing ‘foolish and unadvised words’, going so far as to accuse David of making ‘sinful complaints’ (p. 59). In his attempt to contextualise and make sense of Calvin’s comments, Billings engages the work of two leading Old Testament scholars, Paul Riemann and Walter Bruggemann, both of whom criticise Calvin for allowing the theological presuppositions he brought to his exegesis to dictate and, ultimately, distort his reading of the Psalms. By way of response, Billings explains Calvin’s approach ‘within his overall theology of prayer’, making the case that Riemann and Bruggemann rather badly ‘misconstrue Calvin’s overall approach toward interpreting the Psalms as Christian scripture’ (p. 79). Whatever one makes of his conclusions, the essay represents a fascinating interweaving of history, theology and biblical exegesis.

In part ii of this volume, the scope widens to include historical study within the broader Reformed tradition beyond Calvin. These essays present a diverse array of case studies that includes Maarten Kuivenhoven’s analysis of the English theologian William Ames (1576–1633) on the Psalms, and Graeme Murdock’s examination of moralistic preaching from Old Testament texts within the context of the seventeenth-century Transylvanian Reformed Church. Two of the chapters take up ways in which the Old Testament historical narratives were appropriated by various actors for their own polemical and political ends. For Christine Kooi, the focus is on ‘the polemical usefulness’ of ancient Israel’s history to reformers in the Netherlands (p. 112), whereas Allison Brown surveys the gendered rhetoric of Old Testament historical analysis in the political writings of English reformers fleeing to the continent to escape persecution under Mary i.

One distinctive feature worth noting in this collection is its interdisciplinary aspect. We have already mentioned, for example, the willingness of Billings, a theologian, to engage both historians and biblical scholars in his interpretation of Calvin’s response to the Psalms of lament. But this appetite for interdisciplinary scholarship really shines in the final two chapters in which Thomas Davis, a professor of religious studies, and Michael Vander Weele, a professor of English, explore Calvin and the Old Testament as refracted through the contemporary lens of work by the celebrated novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson. In the case of Vander Weele’s essay, the range is wide indeed, as he draws into his analytical orbit not just Robinson’s work, particularly her novel Lila (2014), but also that of Virginia Woolf, offering extended comment on Woolf as an exemplar of the ‘novel-of-consciousness tradition’ as it has been described by the literary critic Erich Auerbach (p. 260).

These far-ranging themes in part ii of the collection are well-explored and certainly well worth exploring. They may not, however, be equally of interest to all readers and at times one wonders whether a tighter focus on the historical Calvin, whose portrait features on the book’s cover, would have yielded a more cohesive final product. But, these questions notwithstanding, this book brings together an outstanding group of scholars whose collective contribution here merits and rewards careful attention.