One of my goals this summer is to read through John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. One, because I am an unashamed Calvinist, and two, in preparation for a course dedicated to it I am taking this fall at Talbot. My plan is to blog as much as possible offering quotes from the text and my thoughts.
In the prefatory address, Calvin writes:
… we are (if you will) the mere dregs and off—scourings of the world, or worse, if 6worse can be named: so that before God there remains nothing of which we can glory save only his mercy, by which, without any merit of our own, we are admitted to the hope of eternal salvation: and before men not even this much remains, since we can glory only in our infirmity, a thing which, in the estimation of men, it is the greatest ignominy even tacitly to confess. But our doctrine must stand sublime above all the glory of the world, and invincible by all its power, because it is not ours, but that of the living God and his Anointed, whom the Father has appointed King, that he may rule from sea to sea, and from the rivers even to the ends of the earth; and so rule as to smite the whole earth and its strength of iron and brass, its splendour of gold and silver, with the mere rod of his mouth, and break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel; according to the magnificent predictions of the prophets respecting his kingdom (Dan. 2:34; Isaiah 11:4; Psalm 2:9).
What beautiful words. This is crucial to our lives, that the glory of God reigns above all. And not just reigns, for there is no glory to be found in us apart from the hand of God.
Later Calvin writes of the Catholic church,
Why, then, do they war for the mass, purgatory, pilgrimage, and similar follies, with such fierceness and acerbity, that though they cannot prove one of them from the word of God, they deny godliness can be safe without faith in these things …
We must be ever watchful that we do not allow that which is not found in scripture to rule our lives and our hearts, that we would deny godliness because of acts of man.
Our gospel is not new.
In demanding miracles from us, they act dishonestly; for we have not coined some new gospel, but retain the very one the truth of which is confirmed by all the miracles which Christ and the apostles ever wrought.