“What else do prophets [pastors] do but continually preach God’s free call?” So Calvin ends paragraph 1 of this section on the thorny issue of election to salvation and of reprobation. I was stumped by this. Should we not juts…
Calvin turns his attention to a second objection, one that extends further the conversation in which he was engaged in the previous paragraph: “why should God impute those things to men as sin, the necessity of which he has imposed…
The other side of divine election for Calvin is divine reprobation, which is necessary if the case of election is to stand. Reprobation means “those whom God passes over, he condemns; and this he does for no other reason than…
Even though Calvin’s principle that God’s good pleasure is the determining factor in human destiny seems well established in Romans 9-11 and the words of Jesus, he also dealt with the support or opposition of church fathers. After all, Ambrose,…
Calvin moves to establish his argument that election is rooted in God’s sovereign determination and not in human merit by turning to Romans 9-11. There he finds in the case of Jacob and Esau this basic principle: “If the will…
God’s sovereign election of Israel as a means of blessing to the world also included a delimiting decree, by which individual Israelites were chosen to be heirs of salvation. The conditionality of the covenant was a means by which individual…
From prayer Calvin has turned his attention to predestination, a subject which many naively assume to be the cornerstone of Calvin’s theology, if not the sum of it. It is interesting that he should raise the subject at this point;…
Calvin discusses the adequacy of the Lord’s prayer as a binding rule for his people. It is a summary both of what is acceptable to God, and what, consequently, is necessary for us. To add to this, or go beyond…
The remaining petitions deal with all that pertains to our spiritual life, and Calvin sees a correlation between them and the nature of the new covenant. The promise of God in the covenant to forgive the sins of his people…
The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘thy will be done on earth’, is a necessary corollary of the first two. If God is truly our Father, and if our desire is truly for the expansion of his kingdom, we…
