In Calvin, the Bible, and History, Barbara Pitkin explores what she considers to be the most distinctive feature of Calvin's interpretation of Scripture, namely his historicizing approach. Even though Calvin sees the Spirit as inspiring all of Scripture, he is highly attuned to the unique historical context of each human author of Scripture and seeks to reveal the mind of the human author by means of that context. Calvin then applies that meaning to his contemporary historical situation by analogy, given the similarity amid difference of the author's historical context and his own. The goal of this historicizing interpretation is to build up the life of faith in the contemporary church, especially by the use of historical examples like David. Pitkin focuses in particular on the role of sacred history as found in Scripture, for that provides the means of testing all historical writing and alone supplies reliable examples for the life of the pious. Pitkin argues that the unity of Scripture lies in the doctrine of providence, for it allows Calvin to make analogies from sacred history to his own context.

In the various chapters of the book, Pitkin gives case studies of Calvin's historicizing interpretation of Scripture by examining his interpretation of Paul, John, the Psalms, Isaiah, Moses, Daniel, and David. She begins with Paul, not only because Calvin's first commentaries were on the apostle, but also because Calvin sees Paul's letter to the Romans as opening access to the rest of Scripture. But this raises the question of the context that Calvin gives the reader for his own interpretation of Scripture, namely the Institutes. Beginning with the 1539 edition, Calvin claims that this summary of doctrine is a necessary tool with which to read his subsequent commentaries, beginning with Paul's letter to the Romans. Pitkin notes that his commentary on Romans is not only complementary to the Institutes, but “it is also functionally identical” (59). But this means that Calvin does not read Romans in a historicizing way with an eye on Paul's own context, but instead reads it doctrinally with an eye to the order of teaching that Paul pursues, similar to the order of teaching in the Institutes. In fact, Calvin does not discuss the historical setting of Romans in his commentary, unlike in any of his other commentaries on Paul. Pitkin runs into the same issue in her discussion of Calvin's unique interpretation of the last four books of Moses, in which Calvin detaches all of the commandments from their historical setting and organizes them doctrinally according to the right order of teaching. This reveals that Calvin does not just read Scripture in a historicizing way, but he also reads it in a doctrinal way. The former follows the order of the context, while the latter follows the right order of teaching. Pitkin's analysis of Calvin's interpretation of Scripture would be stronger if she took both of his approaches—the contextual and the doctrinal—directly into account, to show why he thinks that both approaches are necessary to understand Scripture.

A similar tension arises regarding Calvin's use of profane or secular historical writings in his interpretation of Scripture. In the various chapters of the book, Pitkin makes a strong case that Calvin uses only the sacred history found in Scripture, for this history alone is normative. Thus, in her discussion of Daniel, Pitkin notes that Calvin refers directly to Greek and Latin histories, which he says even schoolboys know, but she does not show how he evaluates them as historical sources or how he uses them to set the context of Daniel. In her conclusion, however, she insists that, for Calvin, “profane histories and secular knowledge all aid in understanding sacred history” (225). The book would have been much stronger had this issue been pursued throughout and not brought up in the conclusion, for Calvin assumes that the interpreter of Scripture has these histories in mind when reading Scripture because, without them, it is much harder to determine the contexts in which the authors are writing.

In sum, more attention to the relation of historical context to doctrinal teaching on the one hand, and to profane history in relation to secular history on the other, would make this illuminating examination of Calvin's exegetical method even stronger.