What is the knowledge of God that Scripture makes sense of? Calvin insists that, before it is the knowledge of God the redeemer, Scripture gives us the true knowledge of God our Creator and sustainer. First nature, then grace. The…
Whether or not Calvin patterns the Institutes after the Letter to the Romans it is pretty clear that at this point he has Romans 1-2 in mind. God manifests his nature, his power and goodness, to all men and women…
God has revealed himself above and below man, in the cosmos; he has also revealed himself in man, since he is God’s image. But we might also say that God reveals himself around man in his providential governing of the…
The heavens declare God’s glory, and so the astronomer is also a theologian who explores the Book of Nature in which God has inscribed his glory. But “what is man that you care for him?” means that the anatomist who…
Man is God’s image. The implanted knowledge of God is universal. Yes, perverted and fragmented by the fall, but still real.. It gives rise to the seed of religion, notes Calvin. An instinct to praise and worship is inbuilt in…
If my first question about God is “What is he?” then I am already mistaken. The really important question is “Who is he?” “What is God like?” The biblical answer is that he is the fountain of all good and…
Calvin’s Institutes opens with a strikingly important sentence–crafted first by a young man in his mid-twenties and only fine tuned between its first appearance in 1536 and its final expression a few years before his death. Wisdom–the knowledge coupled with…
“Catabaptists” is Calvin’s term for “Anabaptists” – the sixteenth century radicals who basically wanted nothing to do with the earthly state, and did not encourage concern for the office of a magistrate or (in this case) the monarch. Calvin is…
How is the true church to be known? Calvin’s response in the preface to the Institutes is clear: it is known by “the pure preaching of God’s Word and the lawful administration of the sacraments.” Contrary to Roman insistence that…
Rome’s antagonism towards the Reformers, and Calvin in particular, was that what they taught was “new” and “of recent birth.” To this charge Calvin responds with evident feeling: “First, by calling it “new” they do great wrong to God, whose…
