After many long years, I finally ticked one book off my great books list. Instead of reading excerpts and quotes and never being sure whether they were taken out of context or not, I have read for myself John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Hi, my name is Terence, and I’m your host for Reading and Readers, a podcast where I review Christian books for you. Today, I review Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. Calvin wrote a few editions of this classic book. The first edition was published in 1536 and is around 200 pages long. That was in Latin. Later, he would write one in French. The final Latin edition was published in 1559 and is over 1500 pages.

I chose to review the French edition of 1541, translated by Robert White. 920 pages, published by Banner of Truth, in September 2014. Available on Amazon for 40.00 USD. As this is a Banner of Truth publication, there is no electronic version of this book.

Big Motivation for a Big Book

Like many classics, Calvin’s Institutes can be intimidating to read. If you have always wanted to read it but lacked the motivation, then I suggest you do what I did. Enrol in a Christian History Course. Choose Calvin’s Institutes from the list to do your assignment. You either read it or fail the course.

After I read the book, I now face the next and, perhaps, harder task, and that is to review it. Unlike, say, Augustine’s The City of God or Anselm’s Why God Man?, Calvin’s Institutes draws a lot more heat. His original readers were so worked up in his time, and over the centuries, more and more readers got more and more worked up.

And to answer why, let’s go to the book which some of us are predestined to read and some predestined to review.

A Book Born of Persecution

In August 1535, John Calvin, a Frenchman, sent his book, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, to the French King Francis I, with a letter.

In this letter, Calvin writes:

… observing that certain wicked men had stirred up such fury in your kingdom that no place remained for wholesome doctrine, I thought it worthwhile to use the present book both for the instruction of those I had originally meant to teach, and as a confession of faith for yourself, so that you might know what this teaching is which so inflames the rage of those who today, by fire and sword, are troubling your kingdom.

“So inflames the rage” describes well the effect Calvin or Calvinism has on people. But if we are going to be inflamed, we should at least be inflamed by what he actually taught.

Calvin wrote:

Among the common folk, terrible rumours about our teaching are being spread which, if they were true, would, in the eyes of all, justly condemn it and its authors to a thousand deaths by fire and gibbet.

Just as it was then, so it is now; some have misrepresented what Calvin actually taught, whether intentional or not, we don’t know. Whenever we have a situation like this, we really should go to the original source and, whenever possible, get the whole picture, the full context and judge for ourselves. That is Calvin’s purpose in sending this book to the King, and that is my intent in reading and reviewing this book.

Here is a hint of what has so inflamed so many. Listen to this:

For what befits faith more than to recognise that we are bare of all virtue, in order to be clothed by God? That we are empty of all good, in order to be filled by him? That we are slaves to sin, to be rescued by him? Blind, to be illumined by him? Lame, to be set on our feet by him? Frail, to be sustained by him? And to cast aside every motive for vainglory, so that he alone might be glorified, and we in him?

The keywords are “bare of all virtue”, “empty of all good”, “slaves to sin”. Are we truly so blind and frail that we can’t even choose God?

Theology and Practice

The Institutes can be divided into two parts.

The first half, from chapters 1 to 8, covers theology. Here we have the Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Man, Law, Faith, Repentance, Justification, Predestination and Providence of God. There is even a chapter here on the Similarity and Difference between the Old and New Testaments, which I thought was a nice inclusion because it is a common question for Christians.

The second half, from chapters 9 to 17, covers the practice of faith. We have here a chapter on prayer which includes an explanation of the Lord’s Prayer, four chapters on Sacraments including Baptism, The Lord’s Supper, and the Five Ceremonies Falsely Called Sacraments, which is a blistering critique of Roman Catholic practise! We then have three chapters on Christian Freedom, and the book ends with chapter 17, “The Christian Life”.

Man’s Corrupted Will

If you ask anyone who knows anything about John Calvin or Calvinism, “What is the controversy?”, one answer is Free Will. And that is a topic that John Calvin gets into surprisingly fast.

After proving without doubt in Chapter 1 that the Knowledge of God is only attainable through His Word, not through the church authority, but only through the Bible, Calvin brings the readers to the next chapter to understand the Knowledge of Man and Free Will.

You could write a chapter on Biblical Anthropology without mentioning Free Will. For example, you could emphasise how we are created in the image of God, how Adam’s Fall has been overcome by the Second Adam, Christ, and how believers are justified, sanctified, and soon to be glorified. That would be a reasonably good chapter outline on the subject of Man.

But that’s not how Calvin does it. While he does tell us that we are created in the image of God, he quickly moves to Original Sin, then he is off and running on Free Will.

If this is your first touch on the problem of Free Will, you might be thinking, “Of course we have Free Will! We are not robots!”

Just to make one thing clear, we are not talking about determinism, the idea that everything that happens has already been determined. Nor is the issue whether genetics is destiny. These are all related but are peripheral to Calvin’s central question of Free Will: “To what extent is man’s will corrupted?”

If anyone can explain why man’s will is corrupted and give a solution to this corruption, you are looking at solving world hunger, world peace, forget the Nobel Prize, this is not a mere million-dollar question. Ultimately, the cost to solve this truly existential crisis is the life of the eternal Son of God.

Calvin feeds us the Bible. Romans 7:15, 19. “I do not do the good I would, but I do the evil I would not. I have the will but fail in the performance.”

Galatians 5:17. Romans 7:22-23. Genesis 8:21. John 8:34. He doesn’t just fling them at the reader; he explains Scripture.

He quotes John 3:6, “what is born of flesh, is flesh.” What is meant by flesh? He explains. Some object and say that the flesh refers to other people, the sensual man. Calvin objects and brings out John 3:3, Romans 8:6-9. He interprets, expounds, and teaches. He does not seek to impress us with big theological words and concepts; he seeks to convince us of Biblical-informed reality, and when people object, he answers those objections.

I know that many disagree strongly with his interpretations, but we can all learn how he builds his case on the Bible. He does not just assert. He substantiates his point, which is something many people don’t know how to do, or think they do, but don’t.

And I think Calvin’s ability to make a strong case is why the Institutes has proven so influential and so difficult for opponents even today to dismiss.

Necessity vs. Constraint

Let me show you what I mean. Let’s look at a smaller issue, a sub-problem of the larger Free Will argument.

Calvin’s opponents argue that if what he says of Free Will is true, that we are captives to sin as Augustine argues, then it would not be right for God to punish sinners because sinners, after all, cannot help sinning; they are forced, by their nature, to sin.

To refute that idea, Calvin asks, “Is God necessarily good?” “Is the Devil necessarily evil?” Or, in other words, are they forced to behave as they do?

Calvin writes:

It is certain that God’s goodness is so much tightly bound to his divinity that it is just as necessary for him to be good as it is for him to be God.

A bit later, he continues:

Now if some blasphemer were to mutter that God does not deserve much praise for his goodness, since he is constrained to preserve it, is there not an easy answer? It is because of his infinite goodness that he can do no evil, not because of some irresistible constraint.

So, we can agree that God deserves praise and worship because he is good, not that he is forced to be good, but he is good by necessity of who he is. In the same way, the Devil deserves punishment, not because he is forced to be bad, for he voluntarily sins. Who forces the Devil to sin? The Devil is the only one who can say, “The Devil made me do it.” For he himself is morally responsible for his actions.

Then, what about us? What about all of mankind?

Calvin writes:

Man, corrupted by his fall, sins willingly, not despite himself or by compulsion. He sins, I say again, through inclination and not because he is forcibly constrained; he sins because he is prompted by his own appetites, not by external force. Nevertheless his nature is so perverse that he can only be moved, driven or led to evil. If that is true, it is obvious that he is subject to the necessity of sinning.

There is so much to say, so many lines to follow, and I simply cannot say more because this is a subject that deserves more thought. We need to consider the premises and the implications of what Calvin teaches on Free Will. And that is what we get in all the chapters, the Law, Faith, Repentance, all the way to Predestination in chapter 8, all of his teachings are built on the understanding of who we are: we are sinners, and who we need: Jesus Christ.

Introducing Pastor John Calvin

In the review of the second half of the book, the practical side of faith, I want to highlight the often-neglected side of Pastor John Calvin.

It is interesting that of all the spiritual disciplines: reading the Bible, attending church, tithing, John Calvin only includes praying in his book. This does not mean Calvin considers the other spiritual disciplines less important than praying, but he must have known from firsthand experience that of all the spiritual disciplines, Christians need guidance most in prayer.

When he ends the book, Calvin presents the end of this life to the reader. He appeals to us to live our lives for God, for as he says, “…we are not our own, but belong instead to the Lord.” He comforts the suffering, saying, “The afflictions he [God] sends are not without purpose.” We suffer so that “learning to despise the world, we may long with all our heart to meditate on the life to come.” Yet, we should not be contemptuous of our life here but instead acknowledge that “this present life helps us understand something of God’s goodness.”

You will rarely see Calvin’s more pastoral words being quoted because, well, I believe it is because the gentle side of Calvin does not provoke the desired reaction. People would prefer to quote Calvin when he writes, “God is the author of evil,” which first, he does not believe that, so he didn’t write that, and second, he has clarified his position in the Institutes and other writings and yet the accusations continue.

It’s like a non-Christian saying, “God the Father is an abuser because he requires his son, Jesus, to die a painful death on the cross.” That is massively reductionistic and deliberately misrepresents Christianity.

I believe when we get to know the pastoral side of John Calvin, we will have a better handle on his teachings. And I say this even for people I strongly disagree with.

For example, Pelagius is a man whose beliefs are abhorrent to Augustine, Calvin and every sound church today. I consider Pelagianism a distortion of Scripture and harmful to the Gospel. Yet, even Augustine, who was the tip of the spear in countering Pelagius, commended the moral fortitude of the man. Pelagius had feared that Augustine’s teaching on Original Sin would lead to a defeatist or fatalistic view of the Christian’s moral struggle. Knowing Pelagius as a good man has not compromised my view of his teaching, but it has made me aware that we are all susceptible to theological blindspots, and it has led me to come humbly before God for illumination.

John Calvin the Political Theorist

There are other aspects to the Institutes that I have not covered. We have met Calvin the thinking theologian, Calvin the caring pastor, but there is more. We have not yet met Calvin, the Roman Catholic Church Critic, or Calvin, the Political Theorist.

I must say something about the political theorist bit. The last book I reviewed is Augustine’s The City of God, and in that review, I commented how I expected to read a Christian political theory book but was surprised to read a Biblical Theology book instead. Well, I read Calvin’s Institutes expecting to only read Theology and was surprised to read a really good chapter on Civil Government. In this chapter, Calvin references Cicero. He discusses taxes and laws, unjust rulers and just wars.

In a previous book review, Episode 92, “The Legacy of John Calvin” by David Hall, I had questioned Calvin’s influence on politics. Well, perhaps there is more to it than I thought.

Making the Institutes Required Reading

Let me now give my concluding thoughts on the book.

First, I hope I could one day re-read the first half, the theologically heavy half of the Institutes. In my first read through, I don’t think I have fully grasped Calvin’s arguments.

This is not the translator’s fault, as I said, it reads as if it were written by an English speaker. Nor is it Calvin’s fault because it is well-written for a subject so difficult. The subject matter is non-trivial, and while I have read quite a bit on free will, God’s sovereignty, election, and predestination, the material never comes easily for me. I have to keep in tight tension two statements that sound as if they contradict each other, but are, according to the Bible, simultaneously true. Anti-Calvinists may take this as proof that Calvin’s teaching is incomprehensible and, thus, absurd, but I see the same tension when I think of the Trinity or Christ’s dual nature.

Would I recommend people to read the Institutes? It would be hard going for anyone. Even those who love reading theology would find the 900-page book a commitment. Yet, I would still say, if you can read, you should because whether you love him or hate him, whether you are a Calvinist or you consider Calvinism a cancer in Christianity, you may not know what you are talking about until you read what Calvin wrote. That is why Calvin sent the Institutes to the King of France, so that His Majesty would not rely on what other people say but could read for themselves what Calvin believes and teaches.

If I were King of the World, I would make it a law that anyone who quotes Calvin is required to read the Institutes in its entirety. Maybe that is the only way we can get edifying discussions on the French pastor-theologian’s contribution to our knowledge of God and Man.

This is a Reading and Reader’s review of John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated from the French Edition of 1541 by Robert White. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Book List

• The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Amazon.