Calvin: A Biography [Hardcover]

Bernard Cottret (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2000

Widely acclaimed in its French edition, this sterling biography of John Calvin sheds new light on the great Reformer’s personality by concentrating on the milieu in which he did his life’s work.

In the largest part of the book, Bernard Cottret develops a chronological examination of Calvin’s life, from his birth in Noyon to his ministry and administration in Geneva. In the final chapters Cottret explores thematic aspects of Calvin’s persona— Calvin the polemicist, the preacher, and the writer—and looks with greater depth at Calvin’s foremost work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Balanced, cogent, and written with literary beauty, this biography will take its place among the best—and most enjoyable—portraits of Calvin’s life, work, and lasting influence.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What is it that makes a good biography so satisfying? An interesting subject, of course, but also one that is treated with both fairness and depth, placing that figure in the richness of his or her historical context. In this way we get all the pleasures of a good story along with the delight of learning. This is what Bernard Cottret accomplishes in his biography of John Calvin, now translated into English from the French. More historian than theologian, Cottret brings a useful objectivity to this study. In doing so the book reminds us of the fascination of subjects we might too easily consider merely academic. Immensely influential in his own time (and in our own, almost 500 years later), this biography gives us the story of Calvin's life in its historical context and a succinct analysis of his theology. It appropriately detours in order to remind the reader of the context in which Calvin was growing up: brief explorations of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, for example, remind us that these were not simply subjects in school in the early 1500's. As Cottret notes, Calvin turned 21 in 1530: what would it mean to be an immensely gifted and driven young man at such a time in Europe? It's a great question to ask, and in this book Cottret answers it with style and depth. --Doug Thorpe

From Booklist

Calling this book "a history of faith," Cottret says that "the history of a particular man is also a history of the hope he entertained as much as a history of what actually happened." That this is a history of John Calvin's hope as much as a biography of him helps account for the careful attention to political developments in Switzerland and France that makes it also a history of ideas that pivots on the sixteenth century's religious controversies. Readers will encounter Calvin at that pivot point, as if more at the edge of the eye than face-to-face. As Cottret notes, this view fittingly contrasts with the full-bodied, earthy, and personal portraits of Luther that emerge from the same period. We meet Calvin in the institutions he shaped and not as a figure with whom we might enjoy a drink at the corner bar. We see him as a behind-the-scenes architect of an edifice that casts a shadow across the more than four centuries that separate us from the man, John Calvin. Steven Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 391 pages
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (September 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802842895
• ISBN-13: 978-0802842893
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,594,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Supurb biography of a misunderstood man, July 7, 2001

By 

Chris Johnson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Calvin: A Biography (Hardcover)

Whatever else may be said about French intellectuals, French historians are the finest in the world. Their biases don't get as flagrantly in the way as is sometimes the case with British and American historians. They are less chatty than the British can often be and they are far less inclined to the grand, sweeping statement than the Americans. The best of them observe even French people and events with scientific detachment.

This new biography of Calvin could only have been written by a Frenchman and Bernard Cottret does a wonderful job. The Calvin who emerges here is a far more complex figure than the cartoon that other historians have drawn. Far from a firebrand, John Calvin was a remote, shy, almost withdrawn figure who had whatever offices he held forced upon him. Geneva had gone in for Reformed Protestantism long before he arrived there and Calvin's Geneva was far from the "theocracy" it is often caricatured as.

Calvin's faults are not papered over; Cottret does not attempt to hide his displeasure at the burning in Geneva of many accused of witchcraft or of the burning of Michael Servetus, for example. But in the case of Servetus which is dealt with extensively here, he points out that Geneva only did what the Roman Church would have done if it had the chance and that Calvin actually cooperated with the Roman Catholic Church in this matter, seeing Rome as less of a threat than certain radical Protestants, rather cutting the ground out from under those who believe Calvin was rabidly anti-Catholic.

All in all, Calvin is an outstanding book that I cannot recommend too highly.

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars 'Poor Calvin, a victim of his system.', June 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Calvin: A Biography (Hardcover)

Cottret does give an abundance of interesting historical and biographical detail, his description of the early years of reform in France (e.g., the affair of the Placards, 1534) is wonderful, and his portrait of Geneva is fascinating (Parts I and II of the book). But when it comes to Calvin's theology (Part III), he does a shockingly poor job.

In treating Calvin's theology, Cottret deals first, and at rather greater length, with Calvin's polemical works and sermons (chapters 12-13), and only then does he turn to a brief analysis of the Institutes (chapter 14). Cottret thus gives to an apparently random sampling of Calvin's occasional pieces (especially the treatise On Scandals, 1550) greater interpretive weight for Calvin as a theologian than to Calvin's life-work of systematic theology. This is absurd. What's worse, we get no real consideration of Calvin's theology as expressed in his commentaries. Does Cottret think that, because he is portraying `a historian's Calvin' (p. x), and not a theologian's, he can simply ignore this source? What's still worse, when Cottret does finally get to the Institutes, he totally arbitrarily, without explanation, and against the entire consensus of Calvin scholarship, selects as his basis of exposition the 1541 French edition as `the most significant version during the Reformer's lifetime' (p. 311)! Never mind that Calvin himself continued to refine this work through 1559-60, and that these final editions of the Institutes (not that of 1541) were the standards that fed subsequent Reformed theology.

When Cottret does speak of Calvin's theology from the Institutes (and elsewhere), he is surprisingly clumsy and extremely condescending. According to Cottret's Calvin, the Old Testament patriarchs have `a right to salvation' (p. 317). A right to it? Can anyone so grossly misunderstand Calvin's soteriology as to speak of human `rights' before God? (But perhaps this is just a very poor translation.) In Cottret's estimation, `"election," "faith," "vocation," and "conversion" are practically equivalent' in Calvin's theology (p. 322). Well, that just simplifies everything, doesn't it? Calvin, we are assured, was never fully convinced that the doctrine of the Trinity is exegetically warranted (308), and his disagreement with other Protestants over the nature of the Lord's Supper `was linguistic before it was theological' (340). Eh? Calvin's commentaries (look no further than that on the Prologue to John's Gospel) are by no means lacking in trinitarian confidence (or did Cottret check these?), and simply because Calvin debates the meaning of words does not make the debate a matter of linguistics. We learn that, in his entire teaching about predestination, Calvin was `not wise', but was `carried away by polemics and his authorial vanity'; moreover, he took a `malign pleasure' in this `system of death' (p. 322). `Poor Calvin, a victim of his system' (p. 323)! One may certainly disagree with Calvin's doctrine of predestination, but so to caricature both the doctrine itself and Calvin's intention in teaching it hardly counts as good history.

As a final example of Cottret's carelessness and doctrinal confusion, take his statement on p. 337: `Calvin's Christ is "at the same time the God who elected and the man who was elected."' Cottret footnotes here Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics II/2, p. 1 (in the French edition-no thanks to the translator). Apparently, Cottret thinks that, because Barth is classed as a Reformed theologian, what Barth says must be what Calvin said. In fact, Barth chastises Calvin on precisely this point, that Calvin saw Christ as the prototype of elected man, but did not see the implications of the fact that Christ is also the electing God (see, for example, pp. 110-11 in the English edition of Barth's Church Dogmatics II/2). If Cottret had perhaps read Barth's preface, he might have caught the following hint: "I would have preferred to follow Calvin's doctrine of predestination much more closely, instead of departing from it so radically" (p. x). So not only does Cottret think he can make statements about Calvin's theology with no reference whatsoever to Calvin himself. He also thinks he can glance over a few pages of a recent work of `Reformed' theology and assume he's getting pure Calvin. This is inexcusable negligence.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, June 18, 2007

By 

M. Parks (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Calvin: A Biography (Hardcover)

This is an admirable biography of an important figure. Cottret opens up a world to readers and takes them for a tour of Calvin's life. Reading this was pleasurable because it opened up 16th c. Geneva and, as far as is possible, portrayed a very human John Calvin. My only negative issue with this book is the prose. Perhaps it's because of French styles of narrative. It read as though one were having a conversation. So, given the book's good qualities that such a style lends--warmth combined with good scholarship--, it was not tightly conveyed, thereby dropping the prose into a style of loosely strung thoughts at times. However, the book's good qualities outweigh such criticism. The scholarship is excellent and the subject is examined with care, presenting truly a portrait.