Introduction

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. JOHN 17:3

Few names in Christian history call up such strong feelings as John Calvin’s, and few are so little read. To some he is the theologian of grace, the teacher who gave the Reformation its mind and taught half of Protestant Europe to read the Bible. To others he is a byword for gloom and severity, the stern magistrate of Geneva who burned a heretic and taught that God had damned most of the human race before it was born. Both pictures are drawn from real things. Neither is the man. The best way to meet Calvin is not through his admirers or his enemies, but through his own pages, and most people who do so are surprised by what they find: a warm, reverent, careful teacher of Scripture, overwhelmed by the goodness of God.

He was a Frenchman, born in 1509 in the cathedral town of Noyon in Picardy, trained in the law, converted in his early twenties, and driven out of France by persecution. He wrote the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion at twenty-six. He meant to live quietly as a scholar and was instead pressed into service at Geneva, a small, quarrelsome city on the edge of the Swiss lands, where, apart from three years of exile in Strasbourg, he spent the rest of his life. He preached there several times a week for over twenty years, wrote commentaries on most of the Bible, trained pastors for France and beyond, and died in 1564, not yet fifty-five, worn out. He asked to be buried without a stone.

Why he still matters

Calvin matters, first, because of his influence, which is hard to overstate. The Reformed churches of France, the Netherlands, Scotland, Hungary and the English Puritans all looked to Geneva. The Presbyterian and Reformed traditions, much of the Baptist and Congregational world, and a great deal of evangelical theology besides, still speak in his accents, often without knowing it.

But he matters more because of what he saw. Calvin was not an innovator; he wanted nothing more than to set out plainly what the Scriptures teach and what the church of the early centuries had believed. What he did have was an extraordinary gift for clarity, order and proportion. In the Institutes he took the great truths of the gospel and set each in its place, so that the reader can see how they belong together — creation and redemption, grace and holiness, faith and prayer, the church and the Christian in the world.

The one thread

If you look for the single thread running through all that Calvin wrote, you find it in the very first sentence of the Institutes. Nearly all the wisdom we possess, he says there, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Everything else in his teaching is those two kinds of knowledge unfolded side by side.

The knowledge Calvin means is never merely in the head. It is knowledge that moves the heart to reverence and trust. He calls it piety: a reverence for God joined with love, which comes from knowing the benefits He gives. To know God is to know Him as Creator and Lord, as the fountain of every good, and above all as a Father who has reconciled us to Himself in Christ. To know ourselves is to know our dignity as His creatures, our ruin as sinners, and our utter dependence on His grace. The two are always held together. We cannot look at God without being humbled, and we cannot see our need without being driven to look at God.

Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me. JEREMIAH 9:23–24

This is why Calvin’s motto, stamped on his seal, showed a hand holding out a heart. It is a picture of what knowing God does. A person who has truly seen God’s goodness gives himself back to Him.

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells his life. The twenty-one chapters that follow each take one of his key teachings, and they follow the order of the Institutes itself, from the knowledge of God the Creator, through Christ the Redeemer and the way we receive His grace, to the church, the sacraments, civil government and the practical shape of Calvin’s Geneva.

Ochorus hosts four of his sermons, and where Calvin is quoted in these pages it is from those, in their older English translation. The Institutes and the commentaries are described and paraphrased, with the book and chapter of the Institutes named wherever it helps the reader to find the place. Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Calvin would approve. He closed his lectures with prayer, and he taught that prayer is the chief exercise of faith.

Reading him with care

This book is not a monument. Calvin himself asked not to have one. He must be read gratefully, but also honestly, and four matters in particular need to be named.

The first is the death of Michael Servetus. In 1553 the Spanish physician and anti-Trinitarian writer was arrested in Geneva, tried and burned alive. Calvin drew up the charges, sought his conviction and afterwards defended the punishment of heretics in print. Most churches of the time would have done the same; that does not make it right. It stands against the gospel he preached, and it will be faced squarely in these pages.

The second is the discipline of Geneva. The consistory of pastors and elders summoned men and women for drunkenness, quarrelling, dancing, superstition and absence from sermons. Calvin believed discipline was the sinews of the church, and much of it was pastoral. But it could be intrusive and harsh, and it was backed by the power of the city.

The third is his teaching on predestination. Calvin taught not only that God chooses some to salvation by free grace, but that He passes by others and ordains them to just condemnation. He himself called it a dreadful decree. Many who love his teaching on grace cannot follow him all the way here, and the chapter on election will set out both what he said and the pastoral cautions he himself placed around it.

The fourth is his polemic. Calvin wrote against Rome, against the Anabaptists, against Lutheran opponents on the Lord’s Supper and against many others, and he could be scornful and sharp. His sermons in the Ochorus library show it. The reader should learn from his zeal for truth without copying his contempt.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

He was a reserved, ill, anxious and hard-working man who believed God had laid hold of him against his will, and he spent himself for others to the end. He would not want to be admired. He would want you to know God, and to know yourself in His light.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before reading further, write down what you have heard about Calvin and where you heard it. Hold it loosely until you have read him for yourself.

2. Ask yourself honestly which you think about more: God, or yourself. Then ask whether each kind of knowledge is leading you towards the other.

3. Read the first chapter of the Institutes this week; it is only a few pages long.

4. Where a teacher you admire has done wrong, practise naming it plainly without throwing away what was true in him.

5. Set a time each week to read one chapter of this book, and do not move on until you have prayed its prayer.

A PRAYER

Lord God, the only true God, this is life eternal, to know You and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

Show me Yourself, that I may see myself truly; and show me my need, that I may run to You.

Thank You for Your servant John Calvin, for his clear mind and his reverent heart. Where he was faithful to Your Word, teach me through him; where he sinned and erred, keep me from following.

Take my heart, which I offer to You now, promptly and sincerely, and make it wholly Yours. Amen.