The Consolation of History in Calvin’s Sermons on Second Samuel

Abstract

In May 1562, John Calvin began a series of sermons on Second Samuel, seeking to shape the response of ordinary Genevans to the first French religious-civil war by appealing to biblical history to illuminate the present. Calvin teaches how to learn from scripture and distinguish elements of perpetual significance from anachronisms relevant only to the history of Israel. He presents sacred history as a unique record of the past that, unlike profane history, can speak to the present through its chronicle of past events. Calvin urges his listeners to compare the events depicted in Second Samuel to their own experience. This historical vision, in which biblical history becomes a living and lived lesson, also shapes a treatise written during the third war by François Hotman, Calvin’s colleague and theorist of legal history. Hotman also sought and found the consolation of the Holy Spirit through Old Testament history, viewed afresh from the experience of wartime affliction. For both Reformed thinkers, the biblical past and the experience of war combined to forge a key spiritual weapon: a historical vision of the present tied into divine providence throughout the ages.