Calvin’s careless rushed last minute corner cutting

Perhaps there is hope for us all. Despite Calvin’s brilliance and influence for good, Lane says: “… Calvin usually wrote in extreme haste without the (relative) leisure normally available for scholarship. His need to work from memory and to cut corners for some of his errors [in the use of the Fathers and the Medievals]. Jean-Francois Gilmont lists some of the distractions that Calvin faced as he sought to write and shows how he was inclined to write in haste and at the last minute. He didn’t normally correct his proofs and was careless in revising texts. Such a practice would be reprehensible today but was more acceptable in his own time…. Calvin wrote not as a detached scholar but as a polemicist in the heat of battle. His concern was not to present a balanced and objective account of the fathers but to cite them in his support. This may distinguish Calvin from present-day scholarship; it did not distinguish him from his contemporaries.” (Lane, Calvin: Student of the Fathers, pp52-53).

I’m not sure we live in an age of such great objectivity or that that stuff would be so bad, especially not in a busy pastor-theologian.