Lessons Learned from Reading Calvin’s Institutes
Calvin had a vast knowledge of Scripture. Not only was Scripture the most important source in the Institutes, cited far more frequently than any other, but the range of his citations was astonishing. Scholars emphasize that Calvin often used the Institutes to address issues that didn’t really fit into his sermons or commentaries and that good readers of Calvin will want to interact with all three genres—Institutes, commentaries, and sermons—to get the full picture. No doubt this is correct but his familiarity with the Bible bleeds over from his exegetical efforts into his Institutes. Seeing such wide and deep exegetical knowledge brought to bear in a theological work of this scale is a marvel to behold.
Calvin was deeply engaged with church history. He understood that being a Christian meant being connected to all of the Christians who preceded him. He read (widely) among the Church Fathers and (not quite as widely) among the medievals as well as among the theologians of his own day. This engagement with the sources allowed him to bring the debates of the past into conversation with the controversies of the present and, by considering how the church and her theologians had previously engaged those issues, move his readers through confusion toward conclusion.
Calvin’s reading of Scripture and church history flowed out of his formation as a Renaissance thinker rather than an academic theologian. The way we’re formed intellectually determines our approach to many topics because pedagogical methods are not neutral.
For Calvin, the result was that, having been formed in a different mould, he could engage Scripture and theological reflection in ways that were both different from and (often) superior to those trained in more traditional contexts in medieval universities. Most strikingly, Calvin read the Old and New Testaments in their original language with care to the meaning of the words in their biblical context. Herman Selderhuis comments, “This freed [Calvin], to a certain extent, from the intrinsic and formal ballast that the average theologian received from the study of scholastic handbooks.”2
There’s not a lot of Calvin the man in here. It’s difficult to recall any personal anecdotes that grace the pages of the Institutes. Some theologians don’t hesitate to insert themselves into their writing, but Calvin, who famously sought a life of reclusive scholarship only to find himself called into a life of public service to the church, avoids the limelight. In fact, he’s hardly even in the shadows. This is all the more remarkable given that the Institutes have a strong authorial voice. Although Calvin frequently addresses the reader and his adversaries, he very much operates in a ministerial capacity, in service to God and his church.
The Institutes are a big book. Really big. To be sure, that adjective applies to impact, influence, and importance, but for the moment I primarily want emphasize simply that the Institutes are extremely long. English translations of the “definitive” 1559 edition (as opposed to the rather briefer earlier editions of 1536, 1539, 1543, 1550) vary from about 1,300 to over 1,600 pages, and we’re not talking about large print editions. Nor does Calvin coddle his readers. There’s little fluff here; each paragraph is dense.
It’s genuinely hard to imagine the acuity of the mind that could think all of these thoughts, set them out succinctly and clearly, and expect others to receive them. To profit from a reading of this behemoth requires focus, and even then…. As I turned the corner into Book Four it dawned on me that I was only now, perhaps, ready to read the Institutes for the first time.
Despite its size—indeed, because of its size—the work is tightly organized. The whole thing holds together in a remarkably coherent fashion. Calvin clearly knows where he’s going and when he plans to address each issue. Anyone who has ever written a long article, essay, or report—let alone worked on a book-length project—will know how challenging it is to keep everything in its proper place, avoiding repetition or failing to introduce a concept at its first appearance. Calvin does this majestically on a grand scale as well as anyone I’ve ever read.
The Institutes were not composed as a systematic theology intended to cover every locus in a logically organized way or to show how every topic is connected to every other topic. It’s a much more dialogical work than, say, Mastricht, Hodge, or Berkhof. Calvin leaned heavily on the Apostles’ Creed as the frame upon which he built. Hence, the entire work is divided into four “books,” following the Creed, devoted to the God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit, and the church.
Now, it wouldn’t be altogether wrong to describe the Institutes as a systematic theology but if we do so, we should keep in mind a couple of goals that Calvin had for the work, which distinguish it from most recent systematic theologies. First, Calvin wrote the Institutes so that pastors and future pastors would have, in a single accessible book, the doctrinal knowledge that they’d need for their labors in the trenches as ministers. In other words, it wasn’t an academic work written primarily for professional theologians or scholars. Second, as is clear from the very outset in the dedicatory letter to King Francis I of France (no friend to the Reformed churches), the Institutes were meant to function as an apologetic for biblical Christianity, a polemic against false teaching, and an elenctic (that is, an effort to persuade) for those who disagreed.
This work has been profoundly influential. Proof of this is that so much of what he says now seems obvious. Calvin, however, was the first Protestant author to produce an overview of Christian belief that was so exegetically grounded, so vast in scope, and so internally coherent. If you read the Institutes and find yourself thinking, “What’s the big deal? Isn’t that just what Christians believe?” then you’re testifying not to the fact that Calvin is derivative but rather that he was a master at making plain what Scripture teaches.
The Institutes are not primarily about the doctrine of predestination. Those who have been reared to understand that “Calvinism” is tantamount to the TULIP acroymn will find themselves sorely disappointed. It’s not that Calvin doesn’t teach predestination or even that the doctrines of grace aren’t important to his theological system. They are. But they constitute one small piece of a much larger project that aims at a much larger goal than convincing readers that divine election preceded the creation.
We come a lot closer to grasping the heart of the Institutes if we understand that Calvin’s purpose for the work was to strengthen his readers in Christian piety and devotion. That may seem an odd claim for a work that contained so much heady and precise doctrine. But Calvin believed that the better God’s people understood the Scriptures, the more they would love their Savior. In Calvin’s vision of the Christian life, doctrine and piety were not opposed to one another. In this, as in so much else, Calvin and his Institutes are faithful guides for the church.
1 I read from Henry Beveridge’s translation of the 1559 Latin edition of the Institutes originally published by the Calvin Translation Society in 1845.
2 Herman J. Selderhuis, The Calvin Handbook (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 200.