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G. Sujin Pak, The Judaizing Calvin: Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 216. $65.00.
This book began its life as a doctoral dissertation at Duke University under the supervision of David Steinmetz, the doyen of the history of biblical interpretation. This may explain, in part, the lucid brevity of this book: the body of the text is a mere 136 pages, with an additional 5 1 pages of endnotes. The author, assistant professor of the history of Christianity at the Divinity School of Duke University, deserves credit for a very clearly argued and compelling study. While the book does indeed have a specific focus, it ought to attract the attention of those more broadly interested in the history of biblical interpretation, Reformation theology, and the history of Jewish-Christian relations. The specific focus of this study is derived from an intriguing debate over the integrity of Calvin's exegesis that surfaced twenty-five years after his death. The Lutheran theologian Aegidus Hunnius (1550-1603) and the Reformed pastor and professor David Pareus (1548-1622) engaged in a literary debate instigated principally by Hunnius' treatise Calvinus ludaizans (1593), in which he castigated Calvin's exegesis of the Psalms for its "Jewish perversions" (8); in other words, Calvin's exegesis lacked a Christological presumption, and this meant he was an aberration in the Christian exegetical tradition. Hunnius' charges against Calvin, and Pareus' defense, form the backdrop for...