Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction

Jon Balserak, Calvinism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. ?7.99.

Jon Balserak's volume on Calvinism in the Very Short Introduction series offers a profoundly accessible and well-written introduction to the 'living body of doctrines' (p. xvi) that is the Reformed faith. This 'family resemblance' approach to Calvinism is extremely salutary insofar as it gives Balserak the ability not to overemphasize any particular architectonic feature of Reformed culture as the sine qua non of the movement. Like John Meyendorff's characterization of Orthodoxy as a 'living tradition', Balserak's opening salvo suggests to the reader that what he will be expounding is more a gestalt, an overall approach to Scripture, the tradition of interpretation of the Scriptures, and interaction of the redeemed community and the host culture in which it is embedded than a confessional entity per se.

Given the space limitations of the Very Short Introduction series, Balserak is especially to be commended on the balance that his volume exhibits. Given the diversity - doctrinal, geographic, and ethnic - that Calvinism exhibits, Balserak is able to unfold with lapidary style the principal contours of this family of Christian churches and their cultural productions.

One particular debate that Balserak skirts throughout this work is whether Calvinism is a salubrious term to begin with. Many contemporary scholars such as Richard Muller and Carl Trueman see the term Calvinism as inherently distortive. Calvin, as is now well understood, was a respected, though by no means dominant, figure in the development of Reformed thought, and the 'cult of Calvin', as Ernestine van der Wall calls it, is a nineteenth-century evolution....