Institutes of the Christian Religion (1541) by John Calvin Review
We started this series asking who were the Puritans? and looked at Lloyd-Jones's The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors. I planned to stop next at Peter Toon's Puritans and Calvinism, but I couldn't find my copy! (It turned up later, and here's that review.) So instead I'm skipping ahead to what the Puritans believed, starting with what influenced them: John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, the 1541 edition, translated from the French by Robert White. The cover calls it Calvin's own "essentials" edition. We could go back one step further, since Calvin was influenced by Augustine, but we'll stop here.
The book
It's 882 pages, with Scripture, names and principal subjects indexes; between the three you can find pretty much anything in the book. It's clothbound, Smyth-sewn, printed in the USA by Versa Press. My copy has been thrown around and mistreated, carried all over the place for a couple of years, and it's still in great shape. Banner of Truth, fantastic job as always.
About Calvin
Calvin is famous enough that I'll keep it brief. He was born on July 10, 1509, and died on May 27, 1564, at 54. These men of old died so young and yet accomplished so much. Nowadays we live to a hundred and hardly do anything with our lives!
Calvin was a French reformer and pastor whose teaching came to be called Calvinism and heavily influenced the Anglican, Presbyterian and other Reformed churches. Trained as a lawyer, he broke from the Catholic Church around 1530, fled to Switzerland, and wrote the first edition of the Institutes in 1536. He expanded it through many editions; I think the final edition ended up in four or five volumes. (My brother owns it; I've never read the full Institutes.) This 1541 edition includes everything Calvin believed and taught, just in a much smaller form; the later editions add more and more to each point.
He labored to reform the church through many difficulties and controversies, at the risk of his life. In 1558 he became ill and feared he wouldn't finish the last edition, and he spent his remaining years working on it until a blood vessel in his lung burst and he slowly died. No one knows exactly where he's buried, though tradition holds his grave is in Geneva.
What's in it
Like every systematic theology, Calvin touches nearly every doctrine. After the translator's introduction, an outline, and a prefatory letter to Francis I (which I found very interesting), the 17 chapters are: the knowledge of God; the knowledge of man and free will; the law; faith, with an explanation of the Apostles' Creed; repentance; justification by faith and the merits of works; the similarity and difference between the Old and New Testaments; the predestination and providence of God; prayer, with an explanation of the Lord's Prayer; the sacraments; baptism; the Lord's Supper; the five ceremonies falsely called sacraments; Christian freedom; the power of the church; civil government; and the Christian life. An appendix compares the 1541 and 1560 editions.
Usually I'd share quotes here, but this time I won't. If you want to know what Calvin says on those 17 points, read it yourself!
French or Latin?
Calvin wrote the French edition so that people who didn't read Latin could read it, and I've found it seems softer than the Latin. From what I learned this semester, I believe translations from the Latin are more accurate to what Calvin was actually saying. That doesn't mean the French is inaccurate. Robert White did an excellent job and a great service to the church. And the French is definitely easier to read if you aren't used to older texts; this is nearly 500 years old. So it may be the better place to start.
Are there better books on this topic?
Possibly: the Latin may be better. But this is a great start, and a classic every Christian should read. It would even work on your coffee table if you're out of shelf space!
Would I buy it?
Definitely. It's very important to this series on the Puritans, and it's worth every moment spent reading it. The first time I read it, I took a chapter a week for 17 weeks. If you'd like that reading plan, let me know and I'll make it available.
Robert White's note on the dust jacket sums it up well: Calvin shows there's a good and a bad way to do theology. Speculative theology, asking questions Scripture doesn't answer, or working upward from man to God, is bad theology. Only God can speak of God, and since we don't recognize Him in creation and providence, we must seek Him in His written Word, sealed to us by the Holy Spirit. The 1541 Institutes contain well over 2,000 biblical references, and Scripture isn't a peg to hang doctrine on; it's the foundation doctrine rests on, the standard it's judged by and the rule it's corrected by.
Next in the series: the Westminster Confession of Faith.
Soli Deo Gloria!
Buy Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1541 French Edition by John Calvin, trans. Robert White →
