Karin Maag To Receive Honorary Doctorate from the Theological University of Utrecht in The Netherlands
On December 6, 2024, Karin Maag, director of the H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies (Meeter Center), will receive an honorary doctorate from the Theological University of Utrecht. Maag will become the first woman to receive this honor from this Dutch school. Previous recipients of this honor have included Dr. Richard Mouw and Masaaki Suzuki, director of the Bach Collegium Japan.
“I was stunned,” said Maag upon opening an email earlier in the year from the rector of the institution. “You don’t put your name forward for these things, it just happens. I was very, very surprised.”
While Maag’s reaction is modest, the contributions she’s made to her field over the past three decades have been significant. After receiving her PhD from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 1994, where she also taught and worked as a research fellow, she’s spent the next quarter century teaching at Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary and fulfilling her primary role of directing the Meeter Center.
An international reputation
Her research and publications, which focus on higher education, the training of pastors, and worship in sixteenth-century Geneva and French church history, have significance in her field. However, Maag credits the international reputation of the center that she leads as opening the door for this honor.
“This honorary doctorate is to mark my contributions to the field of Calvin studies over my lifetime so far, but it also says something about the international reputation and importance of the Meeter Center, which I direct,” said Maag. “In other words, I don’t know if they’d be considering me for this honorary doctorate if I was just a professor of Reformation history, but it’s because I’m a professor of Reformation history and the director of the Meeter Center.”
Convening important conversations
Maag says the Meeter Center has been this nexus point for contacts with scholars around the world. She says that for over 40 years since it opened its doors in 1982, the Center has been nurturing and facilitating research and scholarship in Reformation studies, holding high-level conferences, bringing people together around the field of Reformation studies.
Maag’s desire to bring people together stems from her own fascination with the past, in particular 16th-century Geneva.
“I’ve been interested in the Reformation since my early graduate school. I find this period of history fascinating, because it’s a time where there’s a lot of turmoil, there’s religious conflict, people are going in different directions,” said Maag. “What I find fascinating is to see how everyone from leading reformers, but also all the way down to ordinary people, were deeply invested in trying to understand what is it that God wants of us in terms of living faithful Christian lives? Is the way we’ve been doing it up to now, the right way or not? And if it’s not the right way, what needs to change? And they come up with different answers and what I’m fascinated in is the interplay between the high-level doctrinal reflection and ordinary people’s lives.”
Reformational relevance
While Maag’s headspace often is in the past, she’s very attuned to how what happened “back then” is absolutely relevant to what’s happening today.
“How do we have a Christian lifestyle, what does that look like? These are not new problems, they date back to the Reformation era,” said Maag. “The 16th-century comes up with different answers, but they’re dealing with the same kinds of problems. If I say there is this truth and you don’t believe that same truth, how do I relate to you? What’s our point of contact? Do we have to hate each other? Is there a way we can coexist in the public space especially?”
Maag says these were burning questions in the 16th century, sometimes “literally” burning questions, and yet they are still relevant today.
“It’s not like, “oh, it’s way back then, and I’m just interested in old stuff,” said Maag. “Because what the problems were and the conversations that took place and the issues people wrestled with are the same kinds of issues we are wrestling with today.”
Called to this work
While Maag is more than a quarter century into this work, every day she walks onto the Calvin campus ready to discover new insights and convene important conversations. She says the source of her ongoing excitement … a deeply rooted calling.
“One of the things we value at Calvin University is what we call vocation or calling: what are we called to? What I’ve always appreciated with my work at Calvin and my work with my colleagues is that I have found colleagues across the board to have a strong sense of calling, not just professors in their classes with their teaching, but folks who work for physical plant and folks who work in the mail room, they have a sense of calling. And my sense of calling is integrated into that. In other words, I feel that I am being asked to serve here in this space, and in this role, and that doing this particular work—the research, the scholarship, the connecting to others—it’s not simply that earns my paycheck, but this is what God wants me to do in terms of building community. Research can be a very solitary activity and sometimes a very competitive activity. I have always through my life thought it vital and part of my Christian calling to model a different way, to model a way of scholarship which is supportive, which is cooperative, which is collaborative, and I really feel that that is what I’ve been called to do and what I feel I can most contribute to the field, and I think that’s also what’s partly being recognized.”
The conferral of the honorary doctorate will take place in Utrecht on Friday, December 6. The other recipient this year is South African theologian Dr. Craig Bartholomew. Maag has been asked to give a 15-minute talk after the formal ceremony on her recent research: she will speak on pastoral care in Reformation Geneva. We are waiting to hear from our Dutch colleagues whether the ceremony will be available on live-stream.