It runs against the grain today to suggest that anything past could be of interest, let alone of importance. Nevertheless, A.D. 2009 will be the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin. It will be appropriate to celebrate by reading his works, especially because he helps us to remember, and to know, the One born 1,500 years earlier than he.

John Calvin was born in Noyon, France, on July 10, 1509. He lived in an age of struggle, when the church had obscured the gospel. He benefited from the rebirth of learning. He appropriated the knowledge and wisdom of the past. He synthesized this into his Institutes of the Christian Religion, a coherent and expansive articulation of the gospel that not only addressed the concerns of his day but did so with an incisiveness that continues to inform us today.

Calvin preached through, and commented on, almost every book of the Bible. He composed the Institutes as a handbook for pastors, a guide to the Scriptures drawn from the Scriptures. It is not meant to supplant his commentaries but to supplement them. He published the first edition 1536, at age 26, and the last in 1559, not long before his death on May 27, 1564.

The four books of Calvin’s Institutes follow four divisions of the Apostles’ Creed: the knowledge of God, the knowledge of Christ, the way we receive the grace of Christ (i.e., the Holy Spirit), and the means of grace (e.g., the church in its preaching and teaching). This pattern shows us that he was not merely a man of his own day but instead was articulating anew the ancient faith of the church. A look at the indices of the Ford Lewis Battles translation2 confirms this, with forty pages (triple columns) of references to the Bible, seven pages (double columns) of references to Augustine, a page to John Chrysostom, a page to Cicero, a page to Peter Lombard, a page to Martin Luther, a page-and-a-half to Thomas Aquinas, four-and-one-half pages to Peter Martyr Vermigli, and so on.

Calvin begins his Institutes with an acknowledgment of the two-sidedness of human knowledge:

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. … In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves.” …

Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself. …

Yet, however the knowledge of God and of ourselves may be mutually connected, the order of right teaching requires that we discuss the former first, then proceed afterward to treat the latter.3

Moreover, Calvin teaches that saving faith is not a feeling or an intuition but a special and particular kind of knowledge: “Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”4 And this is not abstruse or esoteric knowledge. It has practical implications:

We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours.

Conversely, we are God’s: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God’s: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal. O, how much has that man profited who, having been taught that he is not his own, has taken away dominion and rule from his own reason that he may yield it to God!

… Let this therefore be the first step, that a man depart from himself in order that he may apply the whole force of his ability in the service of the Lord.5

Because, and to the extent that, Calvin followed his own teaching, he has had an influence upon the church and the world beyond reckoning:

The Institutes became for three centuries the essential textbook of theology in the Reformed churches. It remains for the historian the readiest key to the thought of the Reformation, and for the theologian a still invigorating treatise. … All that follows in … all modern Western history, would have been unrecognizably different without the perpetual play of Calvin’s influence.6

Consider, then, that he could continue to influence us today. For those who yet hunger for a word of truth and challenge, for those who seek help in serving the Lord, for those who dare not think that truth belongs exclusively to the present, for those who concede that our appropriation of the gospel of Jesus Christ may be guided by those who have gone before us, we can hardly do better than to read Calvin (see www.foundationrt.org for suggested readings for 2009).

It runs against the grain today to suggest that anything past could be of interest, let alone of importance. But if we do not know church history and theology, do we not run the risk of ceasing to be the church and of falling away from her Lord? It will be important next year to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin by reading his works, because he continues to help us to remember, and to know, the One born 1,500 years earlier than he.

James C. Goodlow IV is executive director of the Foundation for Reformed Theology In Richmond, Va. — www.foundationrt.org.

1John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. from the 1559 Latin ed. by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. in Library of Christian Classics, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), cited by book, chapter, section, and, in parentheses, volume and page

2Calvin, Institutes, 1.1.1, 2, 3 (1.35, 37, 39).

3Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.7 (1:551).

4Calvin, Institutes, 3.7.1 (1:690).

5John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 234.

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