John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion

A Biography

Bruce Gordon

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400880508
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Denominations

An essential biography of the most important book of the Protestant Reformation John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion is a defining book of the Reformation and a pillar of Protestant theology. First published in Latin in 1536 and in Calvin's native French in 1541, the Institutes argues for the majesty of God and for justification by faith alone. The book decisively shaped Calvinism as a major religious and intellectual force in Europe and throughout the world. Here, Bruce Gordon provides an essential biography of Calvin's influential and enduring theological masterpiece, tracing the diverse ways it has been read and interpreted from Calvin's time to today.Gordon explores the origins and character of the Institutes, looking closely at its theological and historical roots, and explaining how it evolved through numerous editions to become a complete summary of Reformation doctrine. He shows how the development of the book reflected the evolving thought of Calvin, who instilled in the work a restlessness that reflected his understanding of the Christian life as a journey to God. Following Calvin's death in 1564, the Institutes continued to be reprinted, reedited, and reworked through the centuries. Gordon describes how it has been used in radically different ways, such as in South Africa, where it was invoked both to defend and attack the horror of apartheid. He examines its vexed relationship with the historical Calvin—a figure both revered and despised—and charts its robust and contentious reception history, taking readers from the Puritans and Voltaire to YouTube, the novels of Marilynne Robinson, and to China and Africa, where the Institutes continues to find new audiences today.

A Book Emerges

CHAPTER 1

I have given a summary of religion in all its parts.

—John Calvin

The young John Calvin was surprised by the positive reception accorded his Institutes in 1536. In his letter to the reader written for the 1559 Latin edition, the Frenchman reflected on what had happened almost twenty-five years earlier, recalling that he had not “the least expectation of the success which God, in his boundless goodness, has been pleased to give it.”¹ It was, however, the last time he permitted his book the unexpected. Over the years following its initial appearance, he revised and reworked his summary of Christian doctrine by adding material, repositioning arguments, and refining language.

With each edition, Calvin imposed himself more forcefully on his readers, establishing his authorial voice as a man chosen by God to interpret the whole of scripture to the confused and perplexed, but willing. Calvin never doubted he possessed a singular calling, that he was a David, Isaiah, or Paul to his age. He regarded Martin Luther as an apostle, while he was a pastor and teacher.² Despite suggestions to the contrary, Calvin never called himself a prophet. His self-belief, however, was evident as he spoke from the pulpit, sat at sessions of the Consistory in Geneva, and appeared before the magistrates of the city, many of whom detested him. An unbowed sense of purpose flowed from the printing press in countless editions of treatises and commentaries, and, naturally, from his beloved Institutes of the Christian Religion.

A tireless worker, Calvin permitted himself ten-minute breaks to walk around the room and then returned to his labors.³ In his later years, as he grew ever frailer he dictated many of his works from his bed, yet his zeal for a punishing regime of study, reading, and writing never diminished. He produced almost a hundred titles. His discipline was astonishing. After early morning prayers, books were brought to him in bed. By his own account, he could not leave a piece of work alone, a tendency evident in the revisions to the Institutes. He believed that every minute God had given was to be used fruitfully.

The Book

The Geneva monument completed in 1917 has Calvin stepping out before his contemporaries like a Reformation Diana Ross in front of the Supremes. His preeminence is unchallenged. Out of the vast amount of literature written in the sixteenth century, Calvin’s Institutes remains one of the few identifiable works, even among those who revile both author and book. Why? In short, what Calvin wrote was powerful, persuasive, and readable. Like a small number of books in any age, the Institutes perfectly identified and addressed the needs of the time. It spoke with the voice of certainty in a crumbling world.

Our sense of what has survived from a particular period reveals not only our limitations and prejudices but also the distinctive and even peculiar qualities of that past age. Those with even a passing acquaintance with medieval history and theology can likely name Saint Anselm’s Why God Became Man, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, or Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, even if they have never read them. Curiously, Protestant reformers, despite the backing of Gutenberg’s printing press, produced few classics whose titles roll off the tongue. The Ninety-Five Theses were crucially important, but a terrible read. One could make a case for the notoriety of Luther’s Babylonian Captivity of the Church or his Freedom of a Christian from 1520; however, for a readership beyond Lutherans and theologians, it’s a stretch.⁴

The point is not that the writers of the Reformation were of inferior quality. Quite the opposite. Following the model of Erasmus, and as part of the revival of Cicero, sixteenth-century authors wrote profoundly beautiful works of religion in elegant, economical prose. The vernacular emerged in poetry, Bible translation, and drama; we need think only of Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Calvin was not alone as an accomplished author.

So where, then, are the great works of the Reformation? The absence of identifiable best sellers in the sixteenth century owes much to the very nature of the Reformation. The core teaching of sola scriptura put biblical interpretation at the heart of the movement; the creation of new church orders required pedagogical and pastoral writings; and the poisonous polemic of the age demanded cut and thrust rather than contemplative classics.⁵ Calvin’s Institutes was by no means the only comprehensive summary of doctrine, but in style and conception it was distinctive, both eloquent and accessible. As a literary voice on doctrine, Calvin was alone.

Calvin’s Institutes emerged in a perfect storm. His passionate, lucid account of the Christian life found a broad clerical and lay audience among the emerging Reformed churches. But his work made its way to those readers as a result of Calvin’s ready access to leading printers and book distributors. Latin was certainly an international language, but the Institutes was soon also available in all the principal European languages. A shrewd businessman, Calvin understood the interplay of learning, piety, and marketing.

The Institutes is best known through translations of the 1559 Latin edition, which has come to be regarded as the version of the book, a position, whether informed or not, that largely disregards the editions of the previous twenty years. True, most of Calvin’s work on the earlier editions is inaccessible to those without Latin or sixteenth-century French, making the English translations of the 1536, 1541, and 1559 Latin and French editions most welcome. But a yawning gap remains, because the Institutes was not one book but a project that evolved over twenty years.

The earlier volumes of the book are not to be dismissed because they were overtaken. They represent distinct phases in the evolution of Calvin’s thought, a development that ended only with his death. Calvin’s revisions did not overthrow his past. Each edition belongs to and expresses the historical moment in which it was created. One can through successive instantiations of the Institutes map Calvin’s life and work, as well as his doctrinal thought and his anxieties and cares. One hears the voices of his opponents as he heard them. Calvin’s life and thought were in a constant state of becoming. Calvin was becoming Calvin.

The Book in Context

We do not diminish Calvin’s achievement in the Institutes by identifying its place within his wider project of interpreting the Word of God and providing a summary of the Catholic faith. In preaching and writing, his eye never drifted from scripture, and in the Consistory and other offices of church and state he saw himself applying the Word of God to the building of Christian community. Theology and preaching were to be nothing other than the interpretation and application of the Word of God, illumination through the Spirit of God’s revelation. Scripture revealed God and the manner in which men and women should live, leading them from the dullness of life that is their sinful state.

Famously, in the first book of the Institutes, Calvin speaks of scripture as spectacles:

Just as old and bleary-eyed men or those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly: so scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.⁶

In his zeal to interpret the Bible for the people, Calvin was not alone. He belonged to a community of churchmen whose passion for the Word was by no means inferior to his. Writing in the decades that spanned the 1530s through the 1560s, he belonged to a generation of reformers, notably including Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg and Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, who sought to draw together the theological advances of Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli in a rapidly changing world. These men, Calvin among them, believed the Word of God was the only basis for the unity of a broken church, which made the imperative to study, write, and preach the Gospel all the more pressing.

As the Reformation moved from breakthrough to establishment and bitter internal quarrels, this generation refined, expanded, and furthered the thought of their forebears, attempting to express the faith of the Reformed churches in ordered compendia that could be used to instruct and build Christian polities. The genesis of the Institutes therefore was within a corpus of Reformed theological literature with which it was in conversation and by which it was heavily influenced.

Calvin, however, did not create the book ex nihilo; models from the tradition were readily available. Already the name “Institutes” had been used by the early Christian father Lactantius (ca. 240–ca. 320) for a summary of Christian doctrine that opened with the words “We undertake, therefore, to discuss religion and divine things.” Calvin owed a deep debt to his friend Philip Melanchthon, whose Loci communes likewise traced the development of its author’s theology.⁷ Between 1521 and 1559, the Loci appeared in various revised editions in both Latin and German. Calvin’s 1539 Institutes was deeply shaped by Melanchthon’s Loci of four years earlier, and changes Melanchthon made through the 1540s were often followed by changes the Frenchman made. It has also been persuasively shown that the great work of medieval theological education, Lombard’s Sentences, left its mark on Calvin.⁸ Readers of the Institutes also soon encounter Calvin’s great admiration for Bernard of Clairvaux.

Calvin was an exile who could speak to exiles as only a fellow sojourner could. He was a humanist writer who had found refuge in Basel while Erasmus still lived, a Frenchman who could address his countrymen and women in their language, not as a foreign German professor but as one who knew dialects and colloquialisms. He was a pastor who spent much of the week listening to the trivial disputes of the people before the Consistory. He knew exactly what Genevan men and women believed or did not believe, and what they had made of his sermons.

Language, however, served a higher purpose. No other major religious book of the Reformation apart from Melanchthon’s Loci was so heavily revised, went through so many editions, and reached so many people. It was a work of a restless author who saw his life in terms of a journey to God, just as his spiritual and intellectual mentor Augustine famously expressed at the opening of his Confessions. “You stir man,” the African bishop wrote, “to take pleasure in you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it rests in you.” With each step, guided by scripture and the Holy Spirit, Calvin found something more of the self-revealing divinity. That was the regenerate life of becoming more Christ-like, the hallmark of the Reformed journey.

Contrary to long-standing reputation, Calvin’s God was inviting and hospitable, drawing the faithful to experience him in a relationship. God had surrounded his people with the wonders of creation, in which his craftsmanship, glory, and love would have been visible if only women and men had not fallen. Sin obscures reality, requiring the spectacles of faith, that metaphor we have just encountered, to restore vision. All that humans can know of God has been revealed in scripture, and, mired in the bog of sin, the lost have no other support to grasp.

Calvin was an exile in Geneva and preached from its pulpits, but the Institutes carried his presence to distant lands in tongues he could not speak. The book taught people what they needed to know of true doctrine and how to read the Bible, and it exhorted them to lives of piety. Like a sermon, the Institutes was rhetorical, but not in our modern sense. Through argument and literary beauty, Calvin sought to move intellect and senses, the whole human person. He wanted not to persuade readers of a few principles or aphorisms, to achieve mere intellectual assent, but rather to bring about transformation to the life of Christ, a goal that would end in union with Christ. In the third book of the Institutes, the Christian life is presented as the imitation of Christ, a discipline requiring daily training of spirit, mind, and body.

We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours. On the other hand, we are God’s; let us, therefore, live and die to him. (Romans 14:8)⁹

Particularly in the final two books of the 1559 edition, Calvin assumes a highly pastoral voice, concerned with how doctrine is manifested in the lives of the people.

The Man

But what of the author? Born on August 10, 1509, Jean Cauvin grew up in the shadow of the cathedral in Noyon, France, in neither affluence nor deprivation.¹⁰ His father had a respectable job and had high hopes for his bright son. As Calvin related in his autobiographical account written in the preface to his psalms commentary of 1557, his father intended him to study law in the hope of a lucrative career. Following a conversion experience to the Gospel, however, Calvin remained in Paris until forced to flee on account of the crackdown on evangelicals.

Calvin left France in 1534, but he already seems to have abandoned his spiritual homeland, for he had begun to write Protestant works. He settled in Basel, where the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was spending his last years. There is no evidence that the two men met, but the influence of the Dutchman on the young Frenchman was pervasive. Calvin had already written a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia (1532), which had been a very limited success, but while in Basel, where he encountered the full presence of the Protestant Reformation, he started on theological works. Most notable was the first version of the Institutes, which immediately brought approbation and praise for an otherwise unknown young man.

While returning to Basel in 1536 from a visit to France to attend to family matters, Calvin stopped in Geneva, where he encountered the fiery Guillaume Farel, who threatened and cajoled him into staying i...