To readers who are contemplating their first venture into Calvin's thought, or teachers seeking to give their college and/or seminary students a preliminary, working acquaintance with Calvin, I suggest T. H. L. Parker's more modest, still superb, Calvin: An Introduction to His Thought (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995). To enthusiasts of the Reformer, however, I submit that Partee's book deserves to be ranked above Wilhelm Niesel's The Theology of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956; repr. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2002) and alongside Wendel's Calvin in that small collection of magisterial surveys of Calvin's thought with which both present and future Calvin interpreters will be obliged to reckon.