The Inquisitor’s Secretary, by W. J. D. vanDijck. Tr. Cornelius Lambregste. Sioux Center, IA: Netherlands Reformed Book and Publishing, 1993. 155 pp. N. p. (cloth). [Reviewed by the Editor.]

Reformed parents are always on the lookout for good reading for their children, particularly good fiction. What we desire are books that give a Reformed view of life, are instructive, hold the interest, and are well written.

It is surprising that there are so few such books produced by Reformed writers in English. We Reformed have had our Christian schools for many years. There are many talented college graduates. But good, Reformed fiction for children and young people is rare.

For the most part, we are dependent upon the translation of books by Dutch authors. The Inquisitor’s Secretary is another such book. Written originally in Dutch, it has recently been translated by Cornelius Lambregste.

It tells a story about a Protestant preacher in the Netherlands during the time of the persecution of the Reformed church by the Roman Catholics in the middle of the 16th century. Harm Hiddesz is captured, imprisoned in the dark, rat-infested prison in Amsterdam, and tortured by the dreaded “drip.”

Then the drip became unbearable. It was no longer drops of water that fell down – they were sledgehammers that threatened to split the head of the tortured man. His eyes became more and more cloudy. It seemed as if he heard all kinds of noises, the rumbling of wagon wheels, the rolling of thunder. In vain he tried to collect his thoughts; in vain he tried to arrange words into a prayer. Every time the small drop of water came down on his head with a terrible impact (p. 139).

Harm’s long-lost son is the secretary of the persecuting inquisitor. Raised in the Roman Catholic religion, the son has been taught to hate the Protestant “heresy.” Will the son help his father? Will he heed his father’s preaching in prison and be converted?

At points, the book is, as the Dutch would say, “een beetje over-vroom” (“a little too pious”). Characters converse by quoting Bible texts to each other. But this is not a prevailing spiritual weakness of our age, and our children will certainly not be hurt by this.

This is good reading for older grade-school children.

Meanwhile, will some of our capable, educated young men and young women give some thought to the possibility of their writing for our children and young people?

Calvin’s Preaching, by T. H. L. Parker. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1992. xiii + 202 pp. $22.99 (paper). [Reviewed by the Editor.]

There is much to be learned by both the Reformed preacher and the congregation about preaching from the preaching of John Calvin. Calvin scholar T.H.L. Parker gives us a fine study of Calvin’s preaching in this book. Basing the study largely on Calvin’s series of sermons on I and II Timothy, the latter half of Job, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah 30-41, Parker shows us what Calvin thought about the Word, about the preacher, about the congregation, about preparing to preach, and about preaching itself. He also analyzes Calvin’s own preaching as to method, content, and style.

The value of the work is enhanced by lengthy quotations from Calvin’s sermons, some of which are not available in English.

Parker is incisive and very helpful in his analysis of the various aspects of Calvin’s preaching. Regarding Calvin’s manner of admonishing his congregation, Parker points out:

There is no threshing himself into a fever of impatience or frustration, no holier-than-thou rebuking of the people, no begging them in terms of hyperbole to give some physical sign that the message has been accepted. It is simply one man, conscious of his sins, aware how little progress he makes and how hard it is to be a doer of the Word, sympathetically passing on to his people (whom he knows to have the same sort of problems as himself) what God has said to them and to him. We even notice that in the examples given above there is not one direct imperative in the second person. He is content to pass on the message, to declare how unwilling “we” are to accept it and how weak “we” are in general, how slack and rebellious, and then to use the firm but gentle first person plural imperative, “let us” . . . (p. 119).

Sunday after Sunday (and throughout the week) Calvin “simply” explained and applied the Scriptures, Old Testament and New Testament, verse after verse, chapter after chapter, book after book as he followed his policy of series-preaching. He did this in the conviction that the preaching of Holy Scripture is the Word of God. By such preaching, the church lives.