If you want to listen in to the conversation that some very fine pastors and thinkers are having about Calvin, then invest the necessary money and time into purchasing and reading this book.

Review of Derek Thomas and John Tweeddale (eds), John Calvin: For a New Reformation, Crossway, 2019, 567 pages.

“It’s always better to read Calvin than about Calvin.”

My old pastor said this to me very early in my training. That’s because it is much better to engage the man first-hand and unfiltered. There’s a reason Calvin is so great, still in print, and still very much in the minds of pastors and scholars everywhere: he is a not-to-be-missed genius writer.

Having said this, it never hurts to hear what other people have said about Calvin, both as a check on our own interpretation, and by way of appreciation.

I have sat in on a number of pre-concert talks given by the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra. When the conductor explains when and why the composer wrote the work, how it fitted or not with his contemporaries, how the work is structured and orchestrated, how a melody is introduced and developed, and so on, then I get far more out of the performance. The conductor’s expert hand helps me not to get lost, points me to things I would not have heard, and helps me to appreciate the work far more.

That’s the value of this book.

Its nineteen chapters are written by more-or-less well-known Reformed scholars and pastors, including Joel Beeke, Robert Godfrey, and Scott Oliphant, with an afterword by R.C. Sproul—one of his last published writings.

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