This book attempts to understand Calvin in his sixteenth-century context, with attention to continuities and discontinuities between his thought and that of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Richard Muller is particularly interested in the interplay between theological and philosophical themes common to Calvin and the medieval doctors, and in developments in rhetoric and method associated with humanism. He shows that Calvin's theology evidences the impact of humanist philology and rhetoric, of patristics, and also - both positively and negatively - of the categories of medieval scholastic thought. Calvin's conclusions, together with those of a group of contemporary Reformed and Lutheran thinkers, famously became the basis of much later Protestant theology. But understood in its sixteenth-century context, Muller argues, Calvin's theology proves both intriguing and intractable to twentieth-century concerns. This intractable and unaccomodated Calvin, he says, is important to our historical understanding in direct proportion to the level of distortion found in several generations of modern dogmatic analysis of Calvin's thought.
Reviews
Muller's scholarship is so strong and his arguments so convincing that future Calvin scholars will only be able to ignore this book at their peril ... essential reading for anyone wishing to study Calvin's theology and exegesis, both as a model of critical historical methodology and for it's illumination of Calvin's program and the development of his thought. * Sixteenth Century Review *
Muller begins this extraordinary book by doing something modern scholars too seldom do: he puts John Calvin and his thought back into their sixteenth-century historical context ... Muller shows how Calvin's view of faith was not radically different from that of medieval scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas. This buttresses Muller's assertion that many of Calvin's attacks were aimed not so much as scholastics as at theologians of Paris in his day ... stimulating and impressive analysis. * American History Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780195151688
Author Richard A. Muller
Format Paperback
Page Count 324
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 445g
Dimensions(mm) 165mm * 226mm * 19mm