Blogging The Institutes

How can we happily contemplate the future life when the access route to it is by death? The natural fear of the dissolution of our bodies surely makes encouragement to contemplate the future life a counsel of perfection. Not for Calvin! He is convinced that there are other laws at work which...

Christians are not the only ones who have discussed the virtue of patience. But what distinguishes biblical teaching from that of the philosophers is the grand sense of purpose and design. Granted pagan philosophers at times saw that affliction tests us--but to what glorious end? By contrast the...

Christians are crucifers, cross bearers. The cross is laid across the back of the spiritually obese. We are "fattened and flabby" wrote the lean and spare Genevan reformer. We might say, keeping Calvin's universe of discourse but employing a contemporary idiom: the cross is the spiritual lap-band...

The Institutes almost demand multiple readings. Not only because the work is so rich in doctrinal perspective, but also because it is, in fact, full of striking "one-liners." Such surely include these words: "the chief part of self-denial ... looks to God" (III. 7.8). There is a verbal paradox here...

Calvin begins a new section here comprising five chapters given over to the nature of the Christian life. It knew a separate existence from the Institutes published as a booklet in its right. Referring to his love of brevity (yes!), Calvin begins by outlining his plan and method. Christians must...

This is one of the most memorable passages in all of the Institutes beginning with those words, "We are not our own..." For Calvin, self-denial and cross-bearing are the twin (negative) marks of our holiness. In this section Calvin is at his most eloquent. You can hear the preacher in him: "we are...

Yet more on purgatory; Calvin really does not like this absurd doctrine and takes up a passage, the interpretation of which has bothered folk in our time in an entirely different manner. What did Paul mean by saying that some will be saved "but only as through fire" (1 Cor.3: 15)? Those who...

3.5.3 - 3.5.8 More on the error of indulgences, "this impious dogma" and "more astounding blasphemy" which, by suggesting the worth of "the heavenly treasury" turns Christ into a mere "saintlet." He accuses the Roman church of twisting Paul's words in Colossians 1:24 - that in his own body he makes...

More attacks on man's perennial problem of a works-righteousness mentality, this time by medieval Catholic insistence that "love covers a multitude of sins" - that is, with God. Calvin correctly interprets misinterpreted passages of Scriptures viewed as suggesting that works of pity, love and...

Here Calvin turns to the issue of God's chastisement of his children as opposed to vengeance and punishment of his enemies, no easy subject to talk about let alone experience. A couple of things may be worth emphasizing. First is Calvin's setting God's chastisement in the context of God as father...