What did the Reformation do for sodomy? The more or less established view, developed by social and cultural historians and contributors to the history of sexuality, is that it did relatively little. The evidence of the normative discourses of theology and law suggests that definitions and understandings of sodomy after the Reformation movements of the early and middle sixteenth century differed little from what had been proffered in the legal and moral writings of the medieval period. According to these defi nitions, which varied in their particulars, sodomy was a sin of unnatural lust which included, but was often not limited to, sexual contact between persons of the same sex. It was a sin whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants' penchant for unnatural sex led directly to their destruction in a hail of sulfur and fire—a dramatic event that was to stand as a warning both to those tempted to indulge in this vice and to those innocent of that particular sin who would nonetheless tolerate it in their neighbors. This view is found reflected in a wide range of writings from homiletic, exegetical, and penitential productions of late antiquity and the early, high, and late Middle Ages. And, indeed, while Protestant reforming ideas and practices changed many things in Europe of the sixteenth century, they seem to have left untouched this conception of the sin of the Sodomites. Confessions divided on many theological issues appear to have had no quarrel over what sodomy was, where it had come from, and what ought to be done about it. Definitions, then, remained more or less the same through the course of the Reformations; what changed was the capacity of local and regional jurisdictions to enforce legal proscriptions. And so, if the Reformation movements had any impact on the public discourse on sodomy, that impact was limited to the contribution the reforms made to the development of instruments of moral discipline and their facilitation (in some instances) of harsher responses to persons accused and convicted of the crime of sodomy.
's Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. x + 438. £60.00. Calvin was not a philosopher, Paul Helm acknowledges in this extensive and very helpful study of the reformer's theological ideas. But nor was he the anti-philosophical, anti-scholastic theologian of certain Protestant caricatures. Drawing support from scholarship of the last generation viewing the sixteenth-century Reformation 'in medieval perspective', Helm insists that the thought-world of medieval philosophy and theology was Calvin's world too. But, in contrast to this scholarship, Helm's aim is not principally to place Calvin in historical context; it is, rather, to understand Calvin's ideasideas which Helm believes participate in philosophical traditions of thought extending from medieval scholasticism to the Protestant scholasticisms of the seventeenth century. To serve this aim, Helm brings Calvin's thought into conversation with antecedent thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus and his Reformed successors Lambert Daneau and François Turretin. Of course, to contextualise Calvin in this way serves to buttress the point that, although he was not what we might call a philosophical theologian, nor was he a fideistic biblical theologian who disdained all speculation and theory and saw no proper use for reason. The basic point is presented fairly convincingly. Helm does not attempt to give a complete account of Calvin's theology, but rather to select a range of philosophical-theological issues with which Calvin was concerned, seeking to bring out the distinctive character of Calvin's contributions. He deals first with issues and themes he dubs metaphysical. The first chapter, on Calvin's use of the traditional distinction between God in Godself and God as revealed to creatures (in se and quoad nos), articulates a foundational theme. There exists what Helm calls an 'epistemic gap' between God and the human knower, a gap that obviates the univocal application of language to humans and to God. It is a gap, however, and not the chasm suggested by the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomena or by the Barthian claim of God's 'wholly otherness', because, for Calvin, God's unknowable essence is nonetheless reflected in the nature disclosed in accommodated form to the human knower. This theme runs particularly strongly through chapters 2 and 3, which deal with the Trinity and Christology, respectively. Thus Helm sees Calvin insisting on a distinction between who God is in se (as, for example, in the notion of the immanent Trinity) and who God is quoad nos (in the redemptive working of the economic Trinity) but also demanding that there be no sense of disjunction between the two. Calvin's Christology, insisting on the 'extra' dimension of the Logos (the life of the Word beyond the confines
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