H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies

08/14/2026

Save the date! The H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies warmly invites you to a half-day colloquium:

Spiritual Equality and Social Divisions in Early Modern Puritanism
📅 Friday, September 18
🕜 1:30–7:00 p.m.
📍 Calvin Seminary Auditorium

The colloquium will explore how early modern Christians understood spiritual equality—and how those convictions intersected with slavery, religious difference, social division, and emerging ideas of religious freedom.

Our speakers are:
John T. Lowe | University of Louisville
“Benevolence & Bo***ge: Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, Race and the Paradox of Spiritual Equality”
Examining the tension between Edwards’s theology of Christian benevolence and his participation in and defense of slavery.

Andrew M. McGinnis | Calvin University
“‘That Perfect and Entire Equality among All Persuasions’: Patrick Allison and the Polemics and Practice of Religious Equality in Maryland”
Exploring Patrick Allison’s opposition to religious establishment and the complexities of putting religious equality into practice in the early United States.

Jim Honeyford | University of Manitoba
“Religious Societies as Nurseries of Piety and Social Division”
Considering how early modern religious societies fostered Christian piety while also shaping new forms of social association and division.

The conference will conclude with dinner and a roundtable discussion with our speakers.

We warmly invite you to join us. A registration page with additional details is coming soon. Stay tuned!

08/07/2026

We are pleased to share the recording of Dr. Charles C. Helmer IV’s recent presentation at the Meeter Center: “‘Look to the Heavens!’ Ontological Alterity and Analogical Reasoning in Calvin’s Job Sermons.”

Dr. Charles “Chad” Helmer IV joined us as a visiting scholar from early July to early August. Chad worked in the information technology industry before joining the staff of Cru, a campus ministry, at Ohio University in 2007, where he became ministry director in 2011. He holds an M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Durham University. He is also the author of The LORD Who Listens (Brill, 2024). During his time at the Meeter Center, he worked primarily with Calvin’s sermons, examining how Calvin speaks about knowing God, divine transcendence, and God’s accommodation to human understanding.

You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ms1OxQGRHew

Here’s the short abstract:
Examining three of Calvin’s sermons on Job, this presentation explores how the principle of accommodation shapes Calvin’s preaching. It argues that Calvin’s sermons reflect a metaphysics grounded in the radical ontological distinction between God and creation, inherited from the patristic and medieval traditions. The presentation considers Calvin’s distinction between God as he is in himself and God’s self-revelation in Scripture, his attention to the manner in which Scripture speaks about God, and his use of analogical reasoning. It also highlights the pastoral implications of this approach. By preaching within an “analogical frame,” Calvin remains closely bound to the language of Scripture while maintaining a robust Creator-creature distinction and speaking of God as God speaks of himself.

Examining three sermons from Job, this presentation will argue that...

07/31/2026

We are delighted to introduce Jihye Park, the 2026 recipient of the Meeter Center Student Fellowship!

She is a Ph.D. student at Boston University School of Theology, who earned her Master of Divinity from Calvin Theological Seminary and her Master of Theology from Duke Divinity School. Her research explores motherhood, pregnancy, and childbirth in Christian history, with particular attention to the theological significance of women’s experiences in the Protestant Reformation.

She will share her research in a visiting scholar presentation titled:
“Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Sixteenth-Century Reformed Tradition: Theology and Practices”

Her presentation will investigate the theological meaning of childbearing and its embodied practices in the sixteenth-century Reformed tradition. By attending to theological elements of reproduction, she will show how pregnancy and childbirth were understood as important sites for the practice of piety, practices that fostered communal engagement and reflected confessional identity and theological teaching in the early modern Reformed tradition.

The presentation will take place on Wednesday, August 19, at 3:30 PM in the Meeter Center, located on the 4th floor of Hekman Library.

We warmly invite you to learn from her research on motherhood, women’s experiences, and embodied practices of faith in the early modern Reformed tradition.

If you would like to join us via Zoom, please email [email protected] to receive a Zoom link.

07/24/2026

We are pleased to share the recording of Dr. Alden McCray’s recent presentation at the Meeter Center: “Grace, the Beatific Vision, and the End of Creatureliness: Calvin and Modern Theology.”

Dr. Alden McCray was the 2025 recipient of the Faculty Research Fellowship and stayed with us from June 20 to July 11 to complete the remainder of his fellowship term. He is an Assistant Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/qUitq7B7Ceg

Here’s the short abstract:

This talk explores Calvin’s discussion of the telos of creatures in contrast with diverse modern accounts of eschatology. Despite different inflections about role and shape of human corporeality or the precise sequence of events, the patristic, medieval, and reformation traditions showed remarkable consistency in affirming that the vision of God was the gracious, supernatural goal of human beings. Several streams of modern theology, however, demur. Discussing some reformed ‘restorationist’ accounts of eschatology, on the one hand, and portraits of an already-deified creation which collapses grace into nature, on the other, this presentation will explore the key theological commitments of these positions, and locate Calvin’s view of creaturely teleology and the beatific vision in relation to them. It will argue that Calvin consistently claims that the purpose of human creatureliness lies beyond this created life in the vision of God, and expounds the role of divine grace and salvation in the possibility of achieving this end.

This presentation will locate Calvin’s view of creaturely teleology...

07/17/2026

On July 10, the Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary community gathered to celebrate John Calvin’s 517th birthday with cake, fresh fruit, refreshing punch, and plenty of good fellowship.

The Meeter Center was delighted to welcome many members of the campus community for this joyful occasion.

Here is the heart of his 2-minute speech and some photos of the event - thanks to all who participated, including Amanda Matthysse (Hekman Library) as a 16th century Genevan and especially Abraham Ceballos-Zapata (World Languages, Calvin University) as John Calvin!

Calvin: "My friends, God himself calls us to this holy work! Listen to what he says in Leviticus 19, starting at verse 33: 'When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.' As I said in my sermon on Galatians 6:9-11, '…we are not to consider what each person is like, or what he deserves; we must rise above this and realize that God has placed us in this world to the end that we might be united and joined together. Since he has stamped his image upon us, and since we share a common nature, this ought to inspire us to provide for one another. The one who seeks to be exempt from the care of his neighbor is disfiguring himself and declaring that he no longer wishes to be a man. For whilst we are human beings, we must see our own faces reflected, as by a mirror, in the faces of the poor and despised, who can go no further and who are trembling under their burdens, even if they are people who are most alien to us.'

The Meeter Center remains open throughout the summer. Those eager to learn more about Calvin and his enduring legacy are warmly invited to visit us!

07/10/2026

We are delighted to introduce another visiting scholar who is joining us at the Meeter Center from early July to early August: Dr. Charles “Chad” Helmer IV.

Chad worked in the information technology industry before joining the staff of Cru, a campus ministry, at Ohio University in 2007, where he became ministry director in 2011. He holds an M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Durham University in the United Kingdom. He is also the author of The LORD Who Listens (Brill, 2024).

His research focuses on the relationship between God and creation, human flourishing, biblical language about God, and divine transcendence. During his time at the Meeter Center, Chad will be working primarily with Calvin’s sermons, exploring how Calvin speaks about knowing God and divine transcendence in his preaching.

In particular, Chad is interested in whether Calvin’s preaching reflects what he describes as an “interpretive reflex” when speaking about God: a way of handling biblical language that attends carefully to both God’s transcendence and God’s accommodation to human understanding. While Calvin’s doctrine of accommodation is well known, Chad hopes to explore how prominently this approach appears in Calvin’s sermons.

We welcome Chad to the Meeter Center and look forward to learning more about his research!

07/02/2026

Greetings from the Meeter Center!

On Thursday, July 9, at 3:30 PM, please join us on Zoom or in person in the Meeter Center on the fourth floor of Hekman Library for the next in our series of summer scholar presentations. We'll be hearing from Dr. Alden McCray (Grove City College), holder of the Meeter Center faculty fellowship, about his research on John Calvin, creatureliness, and the beatific vision.

If you would like to join us via Zoom, please send us an email at [email protected], and we will send you the link.

Here is his presentation title and a short abstract:

Grace, the Beatific Vision, and the End of Creatureliness: Calvin and Modern Theology

This talk explores Calvin’s discussion of the telos of creatures in contrast with diverse modern accounts of eschatology. Despite different inflections about role and shape of human corporeality or the precise sequence of events, the patristic, medieval, and reformation traditions showed remarkable consistency in affirming that the vision of God was the gracious, supernatural goal of human beings. Several streams of modern theology, however, demur. Discussing some reformed ‘restorationist’ accounts of eschatology, on the one hand, and portraits of an already-deified creation which collapses grace into nature, on the other, this presentation will explore the key theological commitments of these positions, and locate Calvin’s view of creaturely teleology and the beatific vision in relation to them. It will argue that Calvin consistently claims that the purpose of human creatureliness lies beyond this created life in the vision of God, and expounds the role of divine grace and salvation in the possibility of achieving this end.

06/26/2026

We are pleased to share the recording of Gideon Rossouw’s recent presentation at the Meeter Center: “Erasmus, Humanism, and the Heidelberg Catechism.”

Gideon is a 2025 recipient of the Emo Van Halsema Fellowship for pastors in the Reformed tradition. His larger doctoral research focuses on “The Heidelberg Catechism’s Theological Embrace of Consolatio.” Gideon currently serves as Assistant Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Norway in Stavanger and is a PhD student at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

We are grateful for his time with us at the Meeter Center and glad to make this presentation available to a wider audience.

Watch the recording here:

Presented by Gideon Rossouw, a 2025 recipient of the Emo Van Halsem...

06/19/2026

Continuing from one of our previous posts, we are delighted to welcome another visiting scholar this summer!

Today, we are excited to introduce the second of our summer fellows.

Dr. Alden McCray is returning to the Meeter Center as the 2025 recipient of the Faculty Research Fellowship to complete the remainder of his fellowship term. He is an Assistant Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and will be in residence in Grand Rapids from June 20 to July 11.

He earned his PhD from the University of St Andrews in Scotland in 2020 and then lectured at Oak Hill College in London, England, before moving to the United States. He is no stranger to the Meeter Center: we first had the pleasure of getting to know him in 2017, when he received one of our Student Research Fellowships.

During his time at the Meeter Center this summer, Alden plans to revise his dissertation on John Calvin and the divine attributes and to work on an article on Calvin’s hermeneutics. We are very much looking forward to having him with us and to hearing his presentation near the end of his research stay. Stay tuned for presentation details!

06/05/2026

And now for something different - alongside announcements of events and upcoming presentations, we want to continue to highlight what lies at the heart of the Meeter Center, namely its outstanding collection of books and articles, from current studies to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imprints. Each month, we'll shine a spotlight on an aspect or theme of our collection.

This month's theme is early printed Bibles. Over the years, the Meeter Center has acquired a number of these, from the "Saincte Bible" published by Martin Lempereur in Antwerp in 1534 to Sebastian Castellio's "Biblia Sacra" of 1573, to a 1630 Luther Bible, to various editions of the Geneva Bible, first published by English exiles under Mary Tudor in Geneva in 1560. The illustrations in the Geneva Bible were shared with the French "Bible, qui est toute la saincte Escriture" that first appeared in 1567. Of particular note is the massive revised version of 1588, which includes some fascinating illustrations, including a very detailed depiction of Noah's Ark.

There are so many ways these early printed Bibles could be used in research, from iconographical studies to explorations of the content of the paratextual commentaries...we welcome enquiries from scholars who want to make use of these materials - consider applying for a Meeter Center fellowship to pursue these research opportunities!