Related articles and links |  1 of 4

Calvin's First Catechism: A Commentary, by I. John Hesselink, featuring Ford Lewis Battles's translation of the 1538 Catechism (Westminster John Knox Press, 224 pp.; $19, hardcover). Reviewed by Michael Horton, associate professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in California.

Why are we here? If God has planned everything, why pray? How do we know God's will for our lives? What is God like? How can I be sure that I'm forgiven? Hardly academic questions, these form the warp and woof of Christian experience. How one answers them makes all the difference.

Although the ancient church provided manuals of instruction for new believers and children, only in the Reformation was the practice of explicitly "catechizing" the laity restored as part of a program to raise up a new generation of Word-shaped people. Among these catechisms, some became official standards (e.g., Luther's Large and Small catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism, and Westminster's Shorter and Larger Catechisms). Despite the popular impression that such formal statements of doctrinal belief cause division, they have actually bound together diverse church bodies across geographical, historical, linguistic, socioeconomic, and ethnic lines.

Some catechisms, however, did not fare so well, usually because they were replaced. Such is the case with the first catechism of the Genevan reformer, John Calvin (1509-64). Not even rediscovered until 1877, it was republished in Geneva, in Germany, and even in Italy, but no English translation of the Latin text existed until now. Before his death in 1979, the distinguished Calvin translator-scholar, Ford Lewis Battles, agreed to have his English translation bound together with a commentary by the Reformed theologian I. John Hesselink, and the result is in many ways superb. English translations of both the French edition of this first catechism (Fuhrmann, 1949) and of Calvin's later catechism, which has been in continuous circulation (the so-called Geneva Catechism [French 1541; Latin 1545]), make this joint effort something short of a landmark, but important nonetheless.

First, the catechism itself. Similar to his preface in the Institutes (1535), Calvin's preface to the catechism announces both pastoral and polemical objectives, instructing children and new believers in the gospel as well as refuting false charges. Friends and family members were being imprisoned, tortured, and even burned for their confidence in the gospel, while Geneva swelled with refugees. These were hardly moments of calm, ivory-tower, academic speculation. And ordinary Christians were willing to give up everything for the beliefs that Calvin here summarizes.

Organized in a topical format that Calvin would later abandon for the more practical question-and-answer approach, this first catechism reads like a select anthology of the Institutes, which was still evolving at this time. Like Luther's catechisms, it follows the pattern of Law (Ten Commandments) and Gospel (the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the sacraments). And, like the catechisms influenced by Calvin (Heidelberg and Westminster), it begins with the claim that all people are created for God; though being preoccupied with the immediate and with our own demands, we engage in idolatry and selfish ambition, failing to attain that true and saving knowledge of God for which we were created.

So how do we know God? Is it by stealing into God's presence by speculation? "Now since God's majesty in itself far outstrips the capacity of human understanding and cannot even be comprehended by it at all, it is fitting for us to adore rather than to investigate its loftiness, lest we be utterly overwhelmed by such great splendor." Professor Hesselink marks Calvin's contempt for speculation and his insistence that truth was chiefly aimed at the affections, not merely to "flit about the brain." Thus, it is not by philosophizing but by actually paying attention to God's works in history, narrated and interpreted by Scripture, that one gains the sort of knowledge that is of eternal value. "This is not something that keeps our minds in suspense with vain and empty speculations, but something that is beneficient for us to know," says Calvin. And this knowledge has to do chiefly with two things: the depth of our misery and the depth of God's grace in Christ (which is also the division of the Heidelberg Catechism).

next page... |  1 of 4

share this page

June 15 1998, Vol. 42, No. 7