Happy birthday, John Calvin
Posted by Don Bryant on July 10, 2009
July 19, 1509 is the date. 27 years later Calvin would write his first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first great summary of Christian doctrine in the newly born Protestant movement. 500 years later it is still considered a magisterial piece of Christian writing.
I am rereading the Institutes. Max Lucado it isn’t. It is a book written from the highest peak of the tallest mountain range that sees the majesty of a sovereign God. It is not a book that makes much of us and puts us at the center of the spinning world. Instead it gives the soul what the soul yearns for – the desire for God to be all, the desire to spend and be spent for his glory. We innately know that churches built around us – our tastes, our needs, our wants, our preferred styles, our delicate sensibilities, our slavery to fads, trends and coolness – are missing the mark even as we demand as consumers that they make us the center of their market-driven strategy. The more the church yields to these forces, the less respect we have for it. John Calvin puts steel in the spine of the church.
The great contribution of John Calvin is expository preaching, preaching that focuses on and explains a specific text of the bible. It is in his commentaries and sermons that are found the riches of the Reformational world. The reliance upon ritual, liturgy and sacramentalism evaporates before the fullness that comes with an open Bible in the pulpit. John Calvin is an enduring force in the church because he led the campaign to give the bible back to the church in all of its true glory.
