[Welcome! This post refers to a previous post, "Blogging Calvin (Yes, Really!)," from 31 December 2008, which describes a plan for reading John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion in one year.]

What’s the point, you might well ask, of reading Calvin’s nearly-five-hundred-year-old Institutes of the Christian Religion? Isn’t it out of date? Haven’t the world and the church changed too much for Calvin to be all that relevant any more? Isn’t it almost idolatrous for us to let one man’s views shape everything we believe?

Well, Calvin himself had a ready answer to the question, “Why read the Institutes?” He believed that it would help the reader to better understand and interpret the Bible:

“Although Holy Scripture contains a perfect doctrine, to which one can add nothing, . . . yet a person who has not much practice in it has good reason for some guidance and direction, to know what he ought to look for in it, in order not to wander hither and thither, but to hold to a sure path. . . . Perhaps the duty of those who have received from God fuller light than others is to help simple folk . . . to find the sum of what God meant to teach us in his Word” (“Subject Matter of the Present Work,” p. 6).

(Calvin, as you can probably tell, seems to have had a healthy ego; he tries to be modest from time to time and to ascribe the credit for his brilliance to God, but he often doesn’t bother. For instance, while he “would shrink from seeming to appraise [his] work too highly,” he promises nevertheless that “it can be a key to open a way for all children of God into a good and right understanding of Holy Scripture” ["Subject Matter," p. 7].)

Still, questions of relevance (or at least questions of priorities for busy people) are legitimate; for what it’s worth, here are my answers to such questions:

• Isn’t Calvin out of date? Yes. And no. . . .
• Haven’t the world and the church changed too much for Calvin to be all that relevant any more? Yes, both the world and the church have changed: in matters of science, for example, we’ve long since learned that many of Calvin’s assumptions about the universe and the natural world are not valid; and the church has abandoned some of Calvin’s theological ideas as well. But it’s important that we know where we’ve come from, and in fact the foundational system of belief that Calvin lays out still applies for those of us who consider ourselves Reformed Christians.
• Isn’t it almost idolatrous for us to let one man’s views shape everything we believe? It certainly would be, but Calvin (healthy ego and all) doesn’t claim to be infallible–and even if he did, there’s no reason why we need to consider him infallible. We should read Calvin to learn, not to be indoctrinated. How ever archaic, outdated, and quaint Calvin may seem, he was indisputably brilliant, and it’s good practice for us to wrestle with well-reasoned arguments and ideas, even if we ultimately reject some of them.
• What’s the point of reading the Institutes of the Christian Religion? In some ways, it’s like the familiar question asked of mountain climbers: Why climb it? Because it’s there!

And a final thought: We may choose a church because our friends go there, because we like the architecture of the building, or because our ancestors went there, but these reasons are not ultimately the reasons that different churches exist. Different Christian denominations exist because different ideas about God, about the world, about the Bible, and about the church exist. Whether you’ve been a Presbyterian all your life, for two weeks, or never, isn’t it worth knowing something about what, for better or for worse, makes us Presbyterians distinctive?

—Dwight Christenbury

Ever dreamed of reading John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion from cover to cover? No, seriously—stick with me . . .

I’ve recently discovered, thanks to my wife’s parents, that the Foundation for Reformed Theology, in honor of the 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth, has come up with a plan by which one can read the entire Institutes in the course of one calendar year (sort of like one of those read-the-Bible-in-a-year programs), and you can do it by reading only about seven pages per day. (You even get weekends off!) To get a copy of the plan, click here.

Institutes of the Christian Religion is Calvin’s major work—really his life’s work. It is the foundational work of Reformed theology and an important basis (some would argue the entire basis) of Presbyterianism. If you’re Presbyterian and you’ve always wondered who this Calvin character was and what he had to say, then this is your chance to find out!

If you’re interested and could use some help getting a copy of the Institutes, post a comment to this entry, send me an e-mail (dc [dot] trinity [at] mac [dot] com), or give me a call. And if you can’t quite picture yourself actually reading the Institutes but wish that someone else would, I’m going to give it a try and will occasionally post reflections on my reading on this blog.

Happy new year!

—Dwight Christenbury