Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ. By J. TODD BILLINGS.

Abstract

While working as a community developer in Uganda, Todd Billings experienced gifts as patronizing responses to poverty. The search for a genuine gift led him to consider recent philosophical and theological discussions of ‘the Gift’. Yet it was not this literature, but the writings of one of its common foils, John Calvin, that provided him with the most satisfying framework for conceiving gift-giving and receiving, both human and divine. This book, a revision of his doctoral thesis at Harvard University under Sarah Coakley and winner in 2009 of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, is his attempt to correct misinterpretations of Calvin by Gift theologians, to demonstrate that their dismissal of him has been too cavalier, and to commend Calvin to the conversation. The opening chapter identifies the relevant criticisms of Calvin by Stephen Webb, Kathryn Tanner, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and Simon Oliver and then likens them to perennial complaints against Calvin’s theology, most notably that it annihilates human agency. Billings sets as his goal the vindication of Calvin’s theology of participation against suggestions that it is underdeveloped, contradicted by a view of salvation as imputation, nominalist, ignorant of the Church Fathers’ achievement, and the worst of theories of ‘unilateral gift’ in which human response and receptivity are immaterial.