Pulling Calvin out of predestination’s shadow

When I was in graduate school, I wryly referred to myself as the most Reformed living human since John Calvin. To my surprise, this assertion did not win me friends or influence people. A cradle Presbyterian, I was startled to find that “Reformed” for my classmates indicated not any kind of blessed assurance in the Providence of God but rather cruelty, caprice, repression, and a total absence of any sense of humor. The problem, of course, was with Calvin’s soteriology, the unavoidable fact of double predestination, which looms so large that it blots out the rest of his writing with its shadow.

Rubén Rosario Rodríguez wants to pull some of that writing out of that shadow. Rodríguez rightly does not touch soteriology, which would only invite a fight and is not material to the points he wishes to make. Rather, he takes Calvin in his context as a migrant, a refugee, a lawyer, and a political operator, mining his writing for potentially surprising relevance to pressing contemporary issues of justice and advocacy. Rodríguez loves Calvin, and this alone is a refreshing change. Calvin for the World introduces Calvin as a serious thinker and generative resource for justice work, taking seriously both Calvin’s limitations and his insights.

This balance sometimes falters under the weight of a desire to color Calvin himself as a relative progressive, which is different from arguing for a reconsideration of his legacy, or indeed from arguing that his thought is valuable in the struggle for justice. Rodríguez’s historical contextualization of Calvin is a much-needed corrective, as the Reformer often bears the brunt of blame for viewpoints and actions more reasonably blamed on most of early modern Europe. (The execution of Michael Servetus is a prime example.) But this desire to correct the record also pushes Rodríguez into a defensive posture that is weaker than his more positive framings.