In his commentaries on Scripture, he scarcely slights a verse, or fails to pause over any issue of interpretation of the Hebrew or Greek. By dint of unimaginable labor he creates a body of interpretation that is not allegorical, not analogical, and not offered by him as certainly true. Where he is uncertain, he offers alternative interpretations and tells the reader to decide among them. He tries to avoid forced readings, and he is carefully attentive to the immediate context of a phrase or passage. He is sometimes called the father of modern exegesis.
Cauvin emphasizes the literary character of the books of the Bible and their human authorship — while at the same time claiming for them unique sacredness and authority. Like all controversial writing of the period, his commentaries are marred by bursts of polemic. But even these are not entirely without interest. He frequently vents outrage and exasperation at Jewish interpretations of Old Testament passages, as well as at Catholic interpretations. In the second instance he clearly wishes to refute traditional understandings he might assume were in the minds of his readers. But he would have no grounds for assuming that his readers would be aware of Jewish interpretations or attracted by them. All the complaining means that Cauvin, for the purposes of exegesis, made a habit of consulting the Jewish interpreters. His attention to them is not surprising. He considered the covenant of God with Israel in effect identical with the covenant of Christ, and the Old and New Testaments one continuous revelation — “all men adopted by God into the company of his people since the beginning of the world were covenanted to him by the same law and by the bond of the same doctrine as obtains among us.” His exasperation with Jewish scholars is not surprising either, since their methods of interpretation are very remote from his. Still, they seem to have helped him toward a certain objectivity. For example, though the doctrine of the Trinity was a sensitive point with him, Cauvin refused to follow other Christian writers in finding evidence for it in the use in Genesis of the plural form Elohim to refer to God, insisting instead on the Hebrew use of the plural to emphasize or intensify.
Cauvin is sometimes called the father of the modern university, because he designed an academy at Geneva to prepare Reform clergy, training them in languages and literature and in scholarship and criticism, to anchor the biblicism of the movement in humanist learning. Clearly such training would liberate those who followed him from dependency on his commentaries, and would diminish the authority of his own great learning. Evidence of his success may lie in the fact that one can read very far into the voluble literature of his tradition — not a tradition inclined to spare citations or balk at footnotes — and never find him quoted or even alluded to. I offer our own Jonathan Edwards as a case in point. His revivalism has no basis in Cauvin, who would surely have denounced these efforts to precipitate salvation as Catabaptist or worse. But his philosophical essays are grounded in Cauvin absolutely. Clearly Edwards feels no need to account for his departure in the first instance or to declare his indebtedness in the second, and no need to invoke authority in any case whatever.
Marguerite de Navarre was the sister of the king of France, and they were devoted to each other. She frustrated, so far as she could, her brother’s attempts to destroy the Reform movement by persecution, and he tolerated her efforts to encourage it by her patronage and influence and by her own writing. Perhaps for her sake he protected Protestants in other countries even while he oppressed them at home. Navarre, of which she was titular queen, lay in a region of northern Spain once beyond full control of either Spain or France, in the old land of the Cathars. Whatever significance the title still held seems to have been customary, a courtesy to the king’s relatives. Nevertheless it became a great rallying point of Protestant resistance to royal power, which was led by these same relatives. Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, was to make a gift of all her jewelry to the Protestant cause, and of her son as well, Henri de Navarre, who became Henri IV.
Jean Cauvin had contact with the influence of Marguerite (then Marguerite d’Angoulême) in many forms. It is speculated that he fled Paris because he had written a defense of a book of her poetry, which was under scrutiny for “Lutheran” sympathies. It is known that he went to her court at Nérac in Angoulême, where she sheltered Reform preachers and writers who were suffering persecution. He went from there to the house of the aristocratic du Tillet family, also in Angoulême, where he studied theology in their vast private library, and then to Basel, where he lived under a pseudonym while he wrote the first version of the Institutes. He prefaced his book with an address — not an appeal or a dedication — to François I, the king himself, in which he declares that the intention of his book is to prove that the movement being persecuted in France is neither heretical nor seditious. This second point was crucial, since the persecutions had stirred sympathy for the French dissenters in Germany, and the French had justified themselves by claiming that the dissenters were a threat to public order. In the circumstances, Cauvin’s “address” seems itself oddly seditious. This reading of it is very much reinforced by the chapter on civil government with which his treatise ends. Through all his revisions, and even after the death of François I, Cauvin left the address and the chapter on civil government unchanged.
In the address, the obscure young man tells the great king that it is in fact the Established Church which is heretical, using the drastic examples of Elijah and Noah to make the point that the True Church is sometimes very small indeed. This is not the soft answer which turneth away wrath. Elijah can hardly be imagined working out a compromise with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, or Noah reaching an understanding with his neighbors. It certainly does not suggest that kings are in all cases (or in this case) to be deferred to. The obscure young man warns the great king not to “connive” with those who oppress the dissenters, that “the strong hand of the Lord” will “come forth armed to deliver the poor from their affliction and also to punish their despisers.” What must Marguerite have thought of this production? After the publication of the Institutes, Cauvin was invited to the court of her cousin, Renée de France, duchess of Ferrara, also a Reform sympathizer and a protector of Protestant exiles and refugees. It appears Marguerite took it in good part, and feared her brother might not.
Cauvin begins his chapter on civil government by saying that authority must be obeyed even when it is corrupt or tyrannous, because it is established by God. Indeed, a tyrant is a punishment ordained by God. Yet, in biblical history, one whose calling it was to overthrow a tyrant, was “armed from heaven [and] subdued the lesser power with the greater, just as it is lawful for kings to punish their subordinates.” Even wicked rebels did God’s work “unwittingly” — accommodation to events is the genius of providential history. Cauvin’s conclusion tells us what is salient for him in this argument: “Let princes hear and be afraid.”
The last section of the chapter is titled “Obedience to Man Must Not Become Disobedience to God,” an allusion to Acts 5:29, in which Peter says, “We must obey God rather than men.” Cauvin published his commentary on Acts in 1560, and it was published in English in 1585. The gloss on 5:29 says “So soon as rulers do lead us away from obedience to God, because they strive against God with sacrilegious boldness, their pride must be abated, that God may be above all in authority. Then all smokes of honour vanish away … If a king, or ruler, or magistrate, do become so lofty that he diminisheth the honour and authority of God, he is but a man.” The same, adds Cauvin, is true of pastors. Furthermore, he says, “any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the willfulness of kings,” if they should tolerate kings “who fall upon and assault the lowly common folk … they [the magistrates] dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.” This view of revolution as the work of parliaments would have profound consequences in England and America.