also very different from reading Scripture as a late twentieth-century inerr-
antist says it should be read. Calvin was not an inerrantist!
Calvin famously said that much of Scripture should be understood as God
accommodating himself to the weakness of our understanding. This can be
seen as a specific application to Scripture of the general humanist doctrine
of decorum: decorum consists of writers and speakers accommodating
themselves to the particularities of their audience in order to communicate.
Here is what Calvin says in one place about accommodation in Scripture:
‘Because our weakness does not attain to [God’s] exalted state, the descrip-
tion of [God] that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so
that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him
to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us.’^22
Obviously this doctrine of accommodation has important implications
for exegesis.
Calvin goes farther. He confesses that in some of the genealogies to be
found in Scripture he can find nothing that contributes to piety. Not
infrequently, hefinds Scripture ambiguous. In such cases, he then proposes
a number of possible interpretations of a passage, often without settling on
one in particular. For example, he says in one place, ‘It is possible to
expound this passage in four different ways. Everyone may use his own
judgment.’^23 He thinks that the texts we have are corrupt at certain points.
And even where there is no indication of corruption in the text, he some-
times declares the text to be erroneous. He thinks, for example, that in
describing the journey of the magi, Matthew improperly labelled as a star
what must really have been a comet. And he denies the existence of afixed
New Testament canon.^24
‘But the deepest mark of [Calvin’s] humanism’, says Bouwsma,
was his recognition that the bible is throughout a rhetorical document and a work
of interpretation. So, he wrote of the Gospels,‘because bare history would not be
enough, indeed would be of no value for salvation, the Evangelists do not simply
narrate that Christ was born, died, and conquered death, but at the same time
they explain for what purpose he was born, died, and rose again, and what benefit
thence comes to us.’The Evangelists were not annalists but artists. Calvin was
little troubled, therefore, by discrepancies among their accounts; indeed he was
scrupulous to identify them. The authors of the Gospels, he explained, had not
written‘in such a way as always to preserve the exact order of events, but rather to
bring everything together so as to place before us a kind of mirror or screen on
which the most useful things of Christ could be known’.^25(^22) Calvin,InstitutesI.xvii.13. (^23) Quoted in Bouwsma,John Calvin, 120.
(^24) For the above points, see Bouwsma,John Calvin, 120.
(^25) Bouwsma,John Calvin, 121.
86 Nicholas Wolterstorff