Why Eugene Peterson Keeps Reading Calvin’s Institutes

Eugene Peterson, writing in Books & Culture:

Although I had been a pastor for a couple of years, I had little interest in theology. It was worse than that. My experience of theology was contaminated by adolescent polemics and hairsplitting apologetics. When I arrived at my university, my first impression was that the students most interested in religion were mostly interested in arguing. Theological discussions always seemed to set off a combative instinct among my peers. They left me with a sour taste. The grand and soaring realities of God and the Holy Spirit, Scripture and Jesus, salvation and creation and a holy life always seemed to get ground down into contentious, mean-spirited arguments: predestination and freewill, grace and works, Calvinism and Arminianism, liberal and conservative, supra- and infralapsarianism. The name Calvin was in particularly bad odor. I took refuge in philosophy and literature, where I was able to find companions for cultivating wonder and exploring meaning. When I entered seminary I managed to keep theology benched on the sidelines by plunging into the biblical languages.   Continue at Justin Taylor

9 Things You Should Know about John Calvin

Today is the 504th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin (July 10, 1509). Here are nine things you should know about the French theologian and Reformer.

1. From an early age, Calvin was a precocious student who excelled at Latin and philosophy. He was prepared to go to study of theology in Paris, when his father decided he should become a lawyer. Calvin spend half a decade at the University of Orleans studying law, a subject he did not love.

 

2. Calvin wrote his magnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, at the age of 27 (though he updated the work and published new editions throughout his life). The work was intended as an elementary manual for those who wanted to know something about the evangelical faith—"the whole sum of godliness and whatever it is necessary to know about saving doctrine."   Continue at Joe Carter

The Counterintuitive Calvin

So what did I do last summer vacation? I continued to do something that I started January 1 of this year. Late last fall I came upon a plan for reading through all of John Calvin's Institutes---his four-volume, 1,500-or-so-page systematic exposition of the teachings of the Christian faith---in one year. Calvin and Martin Luther together were the two leading lights of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Today, however, Calvin has a dismal reputation as a pinched, narrow-minded, cold, and cerebral dogmatician.

I knew much of this image was caricature, and, while over the years I had read a good deal of the Institutes, I treated the books like an encyclopedia or dictionary that one dipped into to learn about specific topics. I had never read it straight through, consecutively, until this year when I began the program, which allots an average of six pages a night, five nights a week, for an entire year. Almost immediately I was amazed by several things.

True Work of Literature 

First, it is not just a textbook, but also a true work of literature. It was written in Latin and French and is a landmark in the history of the French language. Calvin was a lawyer and seems at time to relish debate too much (a flaw he confesses in his letters). But despite such passages, even in English translation it is obvious that this is no mere textbook, but a masterpiece of literary art, sometimes astonishing in its power and eloquence.

Second, it is nothing if not biblical. Even if you don't agree with what Calvin is saying, you will always have to deal with one or two dozen texts of Scripture, carefully interpreted and organized as he presents his case to you. To describe these volumes as "theology" or "doctrine" is almost misleading---it is mainly a Bible Digest, a distilled readers' guide to the main teachings of the Scripture and how they fit together.   Continue at Tim Keller

Concerns You About Modern-Day Protestant Christianity

We recently interviewed Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, author of In Christ Alone (Reformation Trust Publishing, 2007) and speaker at this week’s 2008 National Conference:

You begin your book In Christ Alone with a poetic treatment of a passage from John Calvin’s Institutes. Many folks have a view of Calvin that he was cold, stern, and rigid. Yet, you clearly appreciate Calvin’s contribution to the everyday Christian life. In every chapter, your book exudes a practical and passionate view of the Christian life. Has Calvin been misunderstood? 

I think you are right in suggesting that Calvin’s reputation gives a very lop-sided view of the man. In some respects he was “stern.” (I think I would be if I suffered from as many serious illnesses as he did.) He was always in earnest about spiritual things. But the passage I re-translated from his Institutes is a piece of prose that sings like poetry and really does underline that — like many serious, even “stern” people — he had a poetic spirit, born out of his love for Christ.

We need to remember that Calvin was a man who, in his early twenties, knew that his life was forfeit because of his Gospel convictions. He was on the run! In his mid-twenties he was already a significant author and theologian, having spent much of the second half of his life training young people for a life of cross-bearing consecration and even martyrdom.  I have never forgotten a Korean doctoral student I once had who began a seminar on Calvin’s teaching on “Life under the Cross” by saying: “I am so grateful for the opportunity to have studied these chapters. They have helped me understand my grandfather. You see, he was a martyr.” Actually, in my own view probably no theologian has understood the deep humanity of the Lord Jesus better than Calvin. It seems to me that is often the measure not only of a man’s mind, but also of his heart.  Continue at Chris Larson

A Double Grace: John Calvin on Justification and Sanctification

John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Reformer of Geneva, is probably talked about more often than he is read. This is unfortunate. Christian readers who are willing to risk his Institutes of the Christian Religion will discover a treasury of Christ-centered theology that is precise in exegesis and lyrical in expression.

Calvin may be at his most helpful in Book III of the Institutes, on “The Way We Receive the Grace of Christ.” I have benefited much from Calvin’s reflections on grace and salvation. Here is a powerful summary statement:

Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.[i]

Grasping Christ by faith, we receive a “double grace.” We receive justification and sanctification.

Justification: Reconciled through Christ’s Blamelessness

When we grasp Jesus with the hand of faith, we are “reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness.” This is clearly Calvin’s meaning, for he goes on to say:

Justified by faith is he who, excluded from the righteousness of works, grasps the righteousness of Christ through faith, and clothed in it, appears in God’s sight not as a sinner but as a righteous man. Therefore, we explain justification simply as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favor as righteous men. And we say that it consists in the remission of sins and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.   Continue at  Brian Hedges

Commending Good Works

How essential are “good works”—virtuous behavior growing out of one’s character, manifested in tangible form—in the course of justification? For many evangelicals, the idea of placing these terms in the same sentence (“good works” and “justification”) is problematic enough. Adjoining them in our preaching and discipleship would be dicey at best, if not patently provocative. Such a bold act might result in a late night invasion of one’s office in which elders and informed laymen examine your bookshelves to see whether its dark corners reveal titles by authors such as Wright, Hafemann, or Ratzinger. You don’t want that. 

In the following extract from Professor Tony Lane’s chapter, Justification: 

What’s at Stake in the Current Debates?, we learn why it is not only faithful to the Reformed tradition to insist on good works (even in the same sentence as “justification”), but it is the only pastorally responsible thing to do (yes, the pencil drawing is of Professor Lane, pleading with you to read Calvin’s Institutes and see these truths for yourself. Notice the dramatic position of his hands, which is how Englishmen express passion). 

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There is the good news of free grace but there is also the call to discipleship – not as an optional extra for the zealous but as part of the basic package. As someone once put it, the entrance fee for the Christian faith is nothing, but the annual subscription is everything. When we are in Christ we receive the free gift of justification but we also need to press on with the arduous task of sanctification. At different times one or other side of this tension has been lost. At times the church has lapsed into preaching cheap grace, as Bonhoeffer put it, and Christians have been shamefully indistinct from the ungodly. At other times the stress has been on the moral demands of Christian faith and the radical message of forgiveness has faded into the background.  Continue at Chris Castaldo

Co-operative or Effectual Grace

IT IS NOT A CASE OF THE BELIEVER'S "CO-OPERATION" WITH GRACE; THE WILL IS FIRST ACTUATED THROUGH GRACE

But perhaps some will concede that the will is turned away from the good by its own nature and is converted by the Lord's power alone, yet in such a way that, having been prepared, it then has its own part in the action. As Augustine teaches, grace precedes every good work; while will does not go before as its leader but follows after as its attendant. This statement, which the holy man made with no evil intention, has by Lombard been preposterously twisted to that way of thinking. But I contend that in the words of the prophet that I have cited, as well as in other passages, two things are clearly signified: 

(1) the Lord corrects our evil will, or rather extinguishes it; 

(2) he substitutes for it a good one from himself. 

In so far as it is anticipated by grace, to that degree I concede that you may call your will an "attendant." But because the will reformed is the Lord's work, it is wrongly attributed to man that he obeys prevenient grace with his will as attendant. Therefore Chrysostom erroneously wrote: "Neither grace without will nor will without grace can do anything." As if grace did not also actuate the will itself, as we have just seen from Paul [cf. Philippians 2:13]! Nor was it Augustine's intent, in calling the human will the attendant of grace, to assign to the will in good works a function second to that of grace. His only purpose was, rather, to refute that very evil doctrine of Pelagius which lodged the first cause of salvation in man's merit.  Keep Reading >>>

Why and How to Read Calvin’s Institutes

If you haven’t yet read C. S. Lewis’s introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, I’d highly recommend it.

He wants to refute the “strange idea” “that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.”

Lewis finds the impulse humble and understandable: the layman looks at the class author and “feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him.”

“But,” Lewis explains, “if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.”

Lewis therefore made it a goal to convince students that “firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

I suspect this holds true with respect to evangelical Calvinists and Calvin’s Institutes. Are we in danger of being a generation of secondhanders?

Let me forestall the “I don’t have time” objection. If you have 15 minutes a day and a bit of self-discipline, you can get through the whole of the Institutes faster than you think. Listen to John Piper: Keep Reading >>>

John Calvin for Everybody

I consider myself a conscientious objector in the Calvinist/Arminian wars. First of all, it’s because I find the issue more complicated than such partisanship can convey, and I think both sides are right at certain points. Second, I find the polemics rather boring compared to the glory of the big scope of God’s kingdom. Third, I don’t think the distance between mainstream Calvinists and mainstream Arminians is really all that great. And, finally, because I find the professional Calvinists and professional anti-Calvinists to be shrill and exhausting. 

So when my friend John Mark Reynolds (an Eastern Orthodox dispensationalist; and I thought I was eclectic!) asked me to write an essay on Calvin for his new volume on the great books, I hesitated. But Calvin is more important than the coffee shop debates over the extent of the atonement and how many elders can dance on the head of a pulpit. So, here’s what I had to say about Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion:   Keep Reading...

The Gospel according to the Church Fathers

After the apostles died, was the gospel hopelessly lost until the Reformation?

 

That certainly seems to be a common assumption in some Protestant circles today. Thankfully, it is a false assumption.

I’m not entirely sure where that misconception started. But one thing I do know: it did not come from the Protestant Reformers.

The Reformers themselves (including Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and others) were convinced that their position was not only biblical, but also historical. In other words, they contended that both the apostles and the church fathers would have agreed with them on the heart of the gospel.

For example, the second-generation Lutheran reformer, Martin Chemnitz (1522-1586), wrote a treatise on justification in which he defended the Protestant position by extensively using the church fathers. And John Calvin (1509-1564), in his Institutes, similarly claimed that he could easily debunk his Roman Catholic opponents using nothing but patristic sources. Here’s what he wrote:

If the contest were to be determined by patristic authority, the tide of victory — to put it very modestly —would turn to our side. Now, these fathers have written many wise and excellent things.  . . . [Yet] the good things that these fathers have written they [the Roman Catholics] either do not notice, or misrepresent or pervert.  . . .  But we do not despise them [the church fathers]; in fact, if it were to our present purpose, I could with no trouble at all prove that the greater part of what we are saying today meets their approval.     Keep Reading...

Calvin on Radical Individualism

The Institutes of the Christian Religion

There are a very small number of books other than the Bible that have affected the course of history. One thinks immediately of books such as Nicholas Copernicus’ Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, or Albert Einstein’s Relativity. There are also a small number of books that have profoundly influenced the history and thought of the church. One might think, for example, of Augustine’s City of God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, or Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Among the few books that have shaped the course not only of church history but also of world history is John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. Read the rest HERE