On Translating Calvin: An Interview with Robert White

Dr Robert White has translated a number of the works of John Calvin for the Banner of Truth Trust, including a respected edition of the Reformer’s 1541 Institutes of the Christian Religion. Joshua Kellard, Communications Manager at the Banner, recently interviewed Robert by email, to find out a bit more about his background, translation work, and estimation of Calvin.

JK: Robert, thank you so much for being willing to share something about your life and work with us. You have translated a number of John Calvin’s titles with the Trust, starting, I think, with Sermons on the Beatitudes (2006). Have you always been interested in languages?

RW: Yes, languages have always been my special interest. In my early teens, at high school, I soon discovered that Science and Maths were not my strong point. French and Latin were much more rewarding, so at the end of my secondary education they were the languages I chose to major in at university. My original intention was to be a Classics or Modern Languages teacher in a state school, but I was fortunate enough to secure a postgraduate scholarship in 1962 which took me to France, where four years later I completed a doctorate at the University of Paris. For the next 33 years I lectured in French at the University of Sydney, teaching fairly broadly in both language and literature, but with a decided preference for the early modern (Renaissance) period. From time to time, I have been able to use my Latin in a university setting, so my Latin major has not been entirely forgotten.

JK: It’s fascinating to hear that your doctoral work took place in Paris – a place that would have been very familiar to John Calvin in the early sixteenth century. Were you aware of Calvin at that stage in your life? How did you first become interested in his life, faith, and work?

RW: I first met Calvin’s name and read a few chapters of his Institutes when doing a first-year History course at university in 1956. Two years later, as a new Christian, aware of the key role Calvin had played as a reformer, I bought a French edition of his Institutes (4 volumes) and spent quite a long time reading through them. So I was reasonably well primed when I arrived in Paris.

Paris itself has little to remind one of the five or six years which Calvin spent there as a student, apart, perhaps, from the narrow, winding streets in sections of the Latin Quarter along which he no doubt passed. The colleges he attended no longer exist, and the Sorbonne which awarded him his degree was completely rebuilt in the late nineteenth century—no longer a theological faculty, but a vast modern university. (The Noyon cathedral where Calvin was baptized in 1509 still stands, however, bearing the scars of its First World War pounding, and is worth a visit.)

Paris nevertheless did put me in touch with Calvin, in a manner of speaking, in the Sunday services I attended in the Reformed Church of Passy, where worship and preaching were very much modelled on, and inspired by, Calvin’s practice in Geneva. Another place in Paris which has for me a strong association with Calvin is the library of the Society for the History of French Protestantism, in the sixth arrondissement. As well as artefacts and displays illustrating various aspects of Huguenot history, the library possesses a rich collection of sixteenth-century books by Calvin and his contemporaries, including a superb copy of the first French Protestant Bible, the so-called Olivetan Bible of 1535, to which Calvin contributed two prefaces. They are among the earliest pieces he is known to have written.

JK: I imagine that you have spent many thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours in Calvin’s company, as it were. How would you describe his cast of mind? What are some of the things you’ve learned about him as a man and as a brother in Christ?

RW: I view Calvin’s cast of mind as continuous with that of his medieval predecessors: that is, it is resolutely oriented to the supernatural. We are made by God, and for God, to whom we are answerable and on whom we depend for life, breath and everything. Here is not our home. We are pilgrims, simply passing, as Calvin says, through this life; conscious, certainly, of our earthly ties and God-given vocation,  and thankful for his generous provision for all our needs, but having heaven as our goal. Calvin’s mindset is, at the same time, thoroughly Trinitarian. God in whose presence all life is lived is not only almighty Creator, Sustainer and Provider; he is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose death we are reconciled and by whose resurrection we rise to new life, through the power of the Holy Spirit who, by uniting us to Christ, makes us fit to be citizens of heaven. The contrast with our own secular age could not be greater.

I see the man behind the mask of preacher, pastor and theologian as rather quick of temper (a fact he often recognizes and regrets), combative when it comes to essential doctrines or serious errors, a shrewd judge of character and motives, plain-spoken in rebuking misconduct (including that of his own congregation), and surprisingly reticent as to personal details (except in his correspondence with friends). For all that he is humble, without pretensions to personal merit, industrious, making the most of every hour, and enormously compassionate, knowing that we are mere dust before God, and that it is God’s love for the sinner that must always be our model. As a brother in Christ he sees us both as one in the Lord, called to bear each other’s burdens, to encourage one another, to pray for one another. We are both equal debtors to grace, each having faults which need to be ‘pruned’ (a frequent metaphor), and hard hearts that need to be softened by the Spirit’s continuous work.

JK: It is good to be reminded of those two aspects – of Calvin as a man of like passions with ourselves, a sinner who struggled, yet also a man of great faith in God, given great gifts by God. Robert, you’ve translated a large tract of Calvin’s teaching, from the 1541 Institutes of the Christian Religion to many of his sermons. What is it like to translate Calvin for a twenty-first century audience? What are some of the unique joys and challenges of translating Calvin specifically?

RW: The audience which Calvin addressed in his own day was naturally very different from today’s. It was at best only partly literate, being more attuned to the spoken than to the written word; it had a high mortality rate, so that a person of 50 was reckoned old; it was fairly immobile, socially, economically, geographically. But, like today’s audience, it needed to hear the gospel of redeeming grace. So while I always try to make my translations as intelligible as possible to the modern reader, I keep reminding myself that for all the profound changes of culture and psychology of the last 500 years, Calvin’s message does not have to be dressed up to make it for today’s reader something more (or less!) than it was for his contemporaries. I am usually content for Calvin to find his own way to command the attention, and hopefully the consent, of today’s reader.

The challenges facing a translator of Calvin are not specific to the Reformer; they apply to all works of translation: the aim is to be true to the thought, meaning and mood of the text, and to provide a readable version in today’s idiom. The temptation to make the text mine rather than Calvin’s—to ‘improve’ on Calvin, since his sermons (but not of course his highly polished Institutes) were taken down verbatim—is one I sometimes find hard to resist, but resist it I must if I am to do a proper piece of work. As translator I am simply an intermediary, a conduit, between text and reader. The less visible I am, the better. I am not however so restricted as not to be able to innovate from time to time. (That, by the way, is a very Calvin-like statement: one negative negating another!) A certain amount of stylistic variation is possible, as is the reordering of long sentences so as to highlight the core idea. The translator’s task, it should be said, is greatly helped by the Reformer’s use of simple, non-technical language, and by his preference for what he calls a familiar, homely mode of expression. He aims not at elegance, but at directness. Clarity of thought is matched by coherence of argument, a remarkable feat, given that Calvin improvised when preaching, having no more than a page of rough notes in front of him.

Translating Calvin has given me very much pleasure. It has been truly satisfying to discover that Calvin can be made to speak English without too much painstaking effort. It has been especially pleasant to be able to ‘see’ Calvin at work in the pulpit, his Bible open before him, an hour-glass by his elbow, fixing his eye on his attentive (or restive!) congregation, patiently expounding his text, instructing, exhorting, encouraging, warning, rebuking, always busy in the pastor’s work of feeding and gathering in the sheep. To translate him is rather like having a one-to-one tutorial with a gifted teacher and valued counsellor. He has the habit of bringing to light truths which tend to be forgotten because of over-familiarity of relative invisibility: God’s compassion, for example, for our sorrows, stored like tears in a bottle (Psa. 56:8), or the pithy summary of the gospel—’great is the mystery of godliness’—which Paul sandwiches between a description of the role of deacon and a warning against apostasy (1 Tim. 3:16). The translator is in this sense the first to benefit from the work of translation. His (or her) prayer is, of course, that others too may benefit as much, or more.

JK: Thank you, Robert. I know many will appreciate those insights into the work and burden of the translator. As we close, I wonder if I could ask your thoughts on the future of Calvin translation. Is there much still to do in terms of the translation into English of Calvin’s work, or is the task of the future that of stewarding what we already have and extending what is available in other languages?

Calvin’s major works, his Institutes, Bible commentaries, catechisms, liturgies, and polemical works have been well worked over, both by the original Elizabethans and by able translators of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reason why, except for the 1541 Institutes, I chose the sermons, was that they had either not been translated into English before, or, if so, by the Elizabethans, whose style and language needed to be recast.

I have worked mainly on Calvin’s New Testament sermons: the Harmony of the Gospels (see Sermons on the Beatitudes [2006], In the Power of the Spirit [2024]) the Passion narratives (Crucified and Risen [2020]) and the Pastorals (Sermons on 1 Timothy [2018], Sermons on 2 Timothy [2018], Sermons on Titus [2015]). Banner had already published the Reformer’s Sermons on the Epistle to Ephesians (a modernized version of Arthur Golding’s translation of 1577), Sermons on Galatians (translated by Kathy Childress) and on Acts 1–7 (translated by Rob Roy McGregor). So far as I can see that leaves only the nineteen sermons on 1 Corinthians 10–11 (the only ones to be published in Calvin’s lifetime ). I have more or less finished translating them. They are among the very few sermon series not to have attracted the Elizabethans, or, to my knowledge, anyone else. Beyond that, the only New Testament expositions which deserve attention are three short ‘congregations’—Bible studies on portions of John 1, Galatians 2 and the letter of Jude.

Of the Old Testament sermon collections, the only items which might be newly translated (replacing Elizabethan versions) are 3 sermons on Abraham’s sacrifice, 200 (!) sermons on Deuteronomy, 22 on Psalm 119 and 4 on the Song of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38). It would be good, too, to see translations (for the first time in English) of 107 sermons on 1 Samuel (only the Latin text survives) and 47 on Daniel 5–12.

All of these texts appear in the nineteenth century edition of Calvin’s collected works, and are thus in the public domain. Since 1961, the World Reformed Alliance has published—or is in the process of publishing—Old Testament and New Testament sermon collections previously preserved in manuscript form, as part of the Supplementa Calviniana series. These, I think, are subject to copyright restrictions, though some English translations have appeared.

If I were asked what else might be done, I would suggest looking at Calvin’s letters (almost 1,200 pieces in all).  Selections of these were translated in the nineteenth century, under the editorship of Jules Bonnet, and appear in vols. 4–7 of Calvin’s Tracts and Letters, published by Banner in 2009. Banner has also published, separately, 70 pieces (ed. Bonnet), under the title Letters of John Calvin. Much of Calvin’s correspondence is in Latin, which can be a deterrent, but enough exists in French to allow for coherent choices to be made (letters to friends and acquaintances, to the persecuted, to the French nobility, to the refugee churches, etc.) I find the correspondence gripping, not only for the insight it gives into the Reformer’s heavy burden for Christ’s cause in Europe,  but for the man that it reveals—a tactful diplomat, a prudent counsellor, a persistent encourager and—at times—a stern critic.

The work of translating Calvin is not, I think, quite done. There are gaps to be filled, but readers to be wooed as well!

JK: Robert, thank you so much for your time in answering these enquiries. We at the Banner are most grateful for your labours over the years in translating Calvin, and trust that with the Lord’s blessing these resources will continue to minister to others and bear much fruit. 

Robert White at his home in New South Wales.

Listen to Robert White’s lecture, Calvin our Contemporary, from the Banner of Truth Australia Conference 2016 or watch here

Banner Titles Translated by Robert White: