John Calvin

I just finished “Portrait of Calvin”, by T.H.L. Parker, a short biography on John Calvin. Here are a few things I learned about John Calvin from the book.

John Calvin married a widower who already had 2 kids. His wife became pregnant with what turned out to be Calvin’s only biological child. However, the son was born prematurely and died. Calvin’s wife never fully recovered and died three years after the death of his son. In an amazing show of faith in God, Calvin wrote to one of his friends:
“The Lord has certainly inflicted a severe and bitter wound in the death of our baby son. But He is Himself a Father and knows best what is good for His children.”

Calvin also was grounded in several doctrines that seem commonplace, but aren’t. Calvin held strongly that the only way that we can know God is His word, the Bible. Calvin was extremely emphatic that men, in particular preachers, must not teach anything but the Bible. In the Institutes he says “When we enter into the pulpit it is not so that we may introduce our own ideas and dreams”. Calvin was very aware that man often wants to follow his own God, not the true God: “Men’s conceptions of God are formed, not according to the representations He gives of Himself, but by the inventions of their own presumptuous imaginations...They worship, not God, but a figment of their own brains in His stead”. This is why we must only follow the scriptures, God’s word to us. Calvin’s theology on this topic can best be summed up in this quote from the Institutes:

“The very unhappy results of this temerity should warn us to study this question with more docility than subtlety, and not allow ourselves to investigate God anywhere but in His sacred Word, or to form any ideas of Him but such as are agreeable to His Word, or to speak anything concerning Him but what is derived from the same Word.”

Calvin also held a lofty view of the excellency of Christ. Calvin believed that the best way to live the Christian life was to live with Christ in the center of all things. We must always look to and understand the excellency of Christ, something one of my favorite present day preachers, John Piper, would call “Future Grace”. Here, in his commentary on Colossians, Calvin emphasizes this:

“For Christ alone makes all other things suddenly vanish. Hence thee is nothing that Satan so much tries to effect as to call up mists so as to obscure Christ; because he knows that by this means the way is opened up for every kind of falsehood. This, therefore, is the only means of retaining, as well as restoring, pure doctrine: to place Christ before the view such as He is with all his blessings, that His excellence may be truly perceived.”

There are many other things I could mention: Calvin’s surrender to the will of God , his emphatic defense of predestination, or his astounding commentaries on almost every book of the Bible. Still, I think the only thing I can do is recommend that you familiar yourself with Calvin, as I have begun, and I further recommend the starting point of this journey to be “Portrait of Calvin”, by T.H.L. Parker. It is a short 130 page book that will wet your appetite for this theologian from Geneva.