Book Review: Sermons on Job
The Director of Church Society, a lecturer in Church History at Union School of Theology, and with Shawn D. Wright is series editor of The Complete Works of John Owen to be published by Crossway in 40 volumes from 2023.
John Calvin, Sermons on Job: 3 Volume Set. Translated by Rob Roy McGregor.
Banner of Truth Trust, 2022. 2120 pp. h/b. (60, banneroftruth.org).
This is a fresh translation by Rob Roy McGregor from the original French of John Calvin’s 159 weekday sermons on the book of Job, from 1554-1555. For work on the recent ESV Church History Study Bible (Crossway) I used the original alongside a much older translation by Arthur Golding from 1574, which was helpful but badly needed updating. (There was also an early German translation, and Beza himself translated these sermons into Latin, indicating something of the high esteem in which they were held, and their perceived usefulness to a wider audience.) It is safe to say that this is a far superior and much easier to read edition of these edifying expositions which will feed, inspire, rebuke, and teach anyone with the courage to sit at the feet of Calvin with an open mind and a willing heart. He was a great preacher, with close attention to the text, clarity of thought and communication, penetrating insight into the human condition, and some tremendous turns of phrase in which he beautifully expounds the gospel of God’s grace to us in Jesus Christ.
The Hebrew text that Calvin used is different in many places to that which is agreed upon today. So occasionally one will find insights in his sermons which bear little resemblance to the modern text of Job and so may not be reusable. McGregor (who has also translated some of Calvin’s sermons on Acts and Genesis, so he knows what he is doing) has helpfully translated and presented what Calvin’s biblical text said, so we can more easily compare and note any differences if we want to spend time doing so. He has also helpfully incorporated marginal biblical references, but this is not a critical edition, so don’t expect footnotes to the commentators he’s talking about when Calvin says “some people say this or that”.
As he preaches these hour-long weekday sermons – delivered in a period of great opposition to his ministry and in the midst of personal, physical weakness – one can almost feel Calvin himself turning to the book of Job for spiritual help and comfort during these trials. As he says in the first sermon, in his spiritual warfare against us, the devil “finds men who are always ready to harass us and increase and exacerbate the pain. Thus we see how Job, apart from the pain he was suffering, was tormented, yes tormented, by his friends, his wife, and especially those who came to test him spiritually.” Calvin, who never doubts that Job is a true story, was allowed to experience similar torments himself so that he might better understand the book of Job and better unravel and apply it in the light of Christ for our benefit. So whereas Aquinas the academic (for example) saw Job’s friends as disputants in a scholastic debate, Calvin the pastor sees them as tormentors who try to undermine his Christian life and ministry. Many of the things Job’s comforters say are true, and Calvin unpacks what the Spirit teaches us through them; but he also notes how they twist the truth by misapplying it in Job’s case. He also sees Job’s main concern as a spiritual one rather than being primarily focused on his diverse physical and mental trials and personal tragedies. This enables him to open the book up as more than just a manual of how to cope with the bad things that happen to us in this life. It’s about a relationship with God, first and foremost. When he talks about the “fanciful imaginings” that come into our heads during times of trial, he seems to be confessing to what we might nowadays call “intrusive thoughts”, but he gives us gospel remedies for these to help us maintain that relationship (Sermon 55). At the same time, he has some sharp words (e.g. in Sermon 57) for unedifying theologies forged by ambitious men who wish to be thought well-versed and learned.
Every sermon has been given a title; a long one usually, more a sort of mini-description of the content than a title per se. They are not always reflective of everything in a sermon or even what I would have considered the main point, but having them does mean that scanning the contents pages alone can be edifying and instructive. Some of the sermons are quite punchy, and many would offend polite sensibilities today, such as Sermon 16 (that’s a salty one!) which is so positive about sola scriptura that he excoriates Roman Catholics, Muslims, and what we could call Pentecostals because of their “devil-driven curiosity which was not satisfied to be instructed by holy Scripture alone.” Lunatics all, he says, like Servetus; though his main point is to inculcate in us a contentment with God’s revelation of himself in holy scripture not a hatred of other people (still less is he encouraging us to burn all our opponents!). There were other moments of wincing too, as I read, even though I so often agreed with him in general theologically. Perhaps he would rephrase some things today. Yet this is not, by any means, all feisty polemics, but a serious attempt to take the text of Job seriously and preach it to ordinary people in lucid, profound, and richly-applied ways. Some of it just leapt off the page to me, as if applied directly to the 21st century (Sermons 20 and 26, for example, contain what you might say are prophecies of episcopal craftiness in today’s Church of England).
He does not forget that we are Christians, not Old Testament believers, and so Christ and the Spirit (and the New Testament) are not absent from his expositions, yet there is no mechanical biblical-theology schema at work here as such, just an awareness that God has not changed and neither have we, and this book is in the Bible to teach us. His almost casual way of speaking of the Spirit teaching us and guiding us through Job (and through life) was particularly striking to me; is it a thoughtless verbal tick, or a deliberate strategy to inculcate into his hearers the Testament-unifying thought that the same Spirit is at work in us who was at work in Job and the author of the book of Job? It is noteworthy that he does not rely solely on references to the work of Christ to join the dots between Job and us but is more profoundly Trinitarian in his underlying homiletical approach than many might be today. In Sermon 38, he even notes at one point how Job’s own intention in speaking is at odds with the Holy Spirit’s intention – which is a fascinating reflection for our hermeneutical theories of human and divine authorial intent to grapple with.
Calvin is also great at homely illustrations and using speech-in-character (prosopoeia) as a rhetorical device to get under our skins in application. He was clearly a master of various contemporary colloquial idioms too, which he scatters here and there in his sermons (sometimes to the modern reader’s amusement), all of which makes him eminently readable and helps us connect with the doctrine he has to teach us. The translator has taken some liberties here, of course. For example, in the original, Sermon 32 has the phrase “les meschans s’esgayent, et qu’ils ayent le meilleur temps” (the wicked must make merry and they must have the best time) which is here rendered as “the wicked have to be footloose and fancy-free and enjoy the best of times.” That is a loose translation of s’esgayent, and might give the wrong impression to some that Calvin used or invented the phrase “footloose and fancy-free” (which idiomatically is a nineteenth-century American coinage); but this is a dynamic-equivalence, NIV sort of translation not a woodenly literalistic ESV-style affair. And none the worse for that. To say the wicked must be gay (an old-fashioned literal translation of s’esgayent perhaps) would have misleading connotations today, and the 1574 translation has a more obscure “the wicked must ruffle it out, and have the better hande for the tyme”. Although, the same “footloose and fancy-free” phrase occurs later in this new translation of Sermon 60 too, without any underlying basis in the French at all: “courir à travers champs comme bestes esgarees” is simply running across fields like stray beasts; the beasts do not really need to be described as footloose and fancy-free.
On another point, for some reason it always tickles me that Calvin (in the standard edition of the French text that I have, at any rate) habitually referred to “Saint Paul” in his sermons (including here, in New Testament cross-references); whereas Banner of Truth translations always deny the apostle that title of sanctity which Calvin constantly ascribed to him. I often wonder why.
There is a huge amount of material here: three volumes running to 2,120 pages in total. These days, we probably would not preach such short sections of Job at a time (each sermon is usually about a handful of verses), as it can lead to a certain amount of repetition and a loss of the big picture. Who is going to read literally a million words of 16th century sermons on Job? I don’t know, but whoever they are, they will be blessed in abundance and learn a great deal as their hearts are warmed and warned, comforted and corrected. Of course, people won’t read this if, like some modern preachers, they talk a great deal about what the Spirit has revealed to them but care so little about what he has said to other people who came before them (on which see Sermon 31 for a great defence of the value of reading history). If you read one sermon a day – what a great devotional discipline and experience! – you get through these sermons in less than six months and will be disappointed by the more sugary diet which passes for daily spiritual reading elsewhere if you then turn to that. Plus; so many quotable quotes (many of them absolutely still true today), and some astounding mic-drop moments against his opponents – my favourite being this: “We have seen some pitiful dumb dumbheads, for although they become doctors in one field or another, they are still so blatantly ignorant that it is a shame, and it is clear stupidity is their companion” (Sermon 47).
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