Institutes of the Christian Religion

Overview

The Institutes is fifteen hundred pages in the form everyone means by the title, and it did not start that way. Calvin published the first version in Basel in 1536, aged twenty-six, and it was six chapters, a pocket-sized handbook for people being burned in France for reading the wrong books. He revised it four more times over twenty-three years. The 1559 Latin edition, which is the one translated and taught, is four books and eighty chapters, and it is a different kind of object: an ordered account of the whole of Christian doctrine, built to be worked through.

Two things make it more readable than its reputation suggests. Calvin was a trained humanist lawyer before he was a theologian, and he writes like one: clear structure, numbered arguments, no mysticism, a plain and forceful Latin. And he tells you at the front what the book is for, which is to prepare students of theology to read scripture, so that the commentaries he spent his life writing would not have to stop and explain doctrine every few pages.

The book also opens with a letter to Francis I of France, written when Calvin was in exile and his associates were being executed. It is a defence of people accused of sedition, addressed to the king who was killing them, and it is one of the finest pieces of Latin prose of the century.

Note the odd placement of the doctrine everyone associates with him. Predestination is not in Book I with God’s nature. It is in Book III, after faith and justification, among the things a believer may find consoling.

The argument

Book I: the knowledge of God the Creator. The first sentence sets the method: true wisdom consists of knowing God and knowing ourselves, and you cannot say which comes first, because each exposes the other. Calvin grants that every human being has an innate sense of divinity and that creation displays its maker plainly. He then argues that we invariably corrupt both, because the mind is a perpetual factory of idols, endlessly producing gods it prefers. So revelation is needed, not to supply what nature lacks but to correct what we do with it, and scripture is a pair of spectacles that turns a blur into a legible page. Its authority does not rest on the church’s endorsement but on the inward witness of the Spirit. The book closes with providence: God does not merely sustain the world but governs every particular in it, which Calvin presents as the opposite of fatalism, since a governed world has a purpose and blind fate does not.

Book II: the knowledge of God the Redeemer. The Fall, and what it did. Calvin’s position, taken from Augustine and pressed further, is that human nature is corrupted in every part, which is what total depravity means: not that people are as bad as possible, but that no faculty is untouched, including the reason and the will. The will remains free in the sense that nobody is coerced, and it is bound in the sense that it cannot want what it has no taste for. The law therefore functions three ways: it shows us our condition, it restrains the wicked by fear, and, for believers, it teaches how to live, which is the use Luther emphasised least and Calvin most. Christ is presented as mediator in three offices, prophet, priest and king.

Book III: how we receive the grace of Christ. The longest and, for most readers, the best book. Faith is defined not as assent to propositions but as a firm and certain knowledge of God’s goodwill toward us, sealed on the heart. Then regeneration, and a long section on the Christian life that was printed separately for centuries as a devotional work: self-denial, bearing the cross, meditation on the future life, and a balanced chapter on using the present one that is far less austere than Calvin’s reputation. Justification by faith alone, with an extended argument that it does not make works irrelevant but changes what they are for. Christian freedom. A substantial and practical treatment of prayer.

Only then, in chapters 21 to 24, election. Calvin’s case is that scripture plainly teaches it, that experience confirms it, since the same sermon converts one hearer and not another, and that the alternative makes salvation depend on something in us. He states the hard half without evasion: those not elected are passed over, and he calls the decree dreadful. His pastoral point is that a doctrine which locates salvation entirely outside the believer’s performance is the only one that can produce assurance.

Book IV: the external means. The visible church, its ministry, its discipline, and a long polemic against the papacy. Two sacraments, not seven. On the Lord’s Supper Calvin takes a position between Rome and Zurich: not a change of substance, and not a bare memorial, but a real feeding on Christ by the Spirit. The final chapter turns to civil government, which he defends warmly as a divine ordinance, distinct from the church and not subordinate to it. Private citizens must obey even bad rulers. Then the qualification that mattered historically: where a constitution provides lesser magistrates to check a king, they are obliged to act, and obedience to any ruler stops where obedience to God begins.

How to read it

Do not read all of it. Almost nobody does. Read Book I chapters 1 to 9, Book II chapters 1 to 3, all of Book III chapters 1 to 11 and 21 to 24, and Book IV chapter 20. That is a few hundred pages and it contains the argument.

Read the letter to Francis I first. It takes twenty minutes and it tells you that this is a book written by a young refugee defending people who were being killed.

Read the chapters on the Christian life in Book III as a unit. They are the part least like the reputation, and they are the part Calvin’s own readers copied out and carried around.

Use Battles unless you need a free text. His translation is accurate and heavily cross-referenced; Beveridge is public domain and dated, and quotations in older books usually come from him.

The common misreading is to start with predestination and read everything through it. Calvin did not organise the book that way and the order is an argument in itself: he wants you to have understood grace before you meet the doctrine of who receives it.

Questions it raises

• If the will is bound but not coerced, in what sense is anyone responsible for what they choose?
• Calvin says the mind is a factory of idols and also that creation plainly displays God. Can both be true, and what does that leave natural theology able to do?
• Election is offered as a comfort, since it removes salvation from the believer’s performance. Does it work as one?
• He calls the decree of reprobation dreadful and refuses to soften it. Is that intellectual honesty or a refusal to follow an argument where it leads?
• Book IV requires obedience to tyrants and then permits lesser magistrates to resist. Is that a coherent limit or a door left ajar?
• Weber claimed this theology produced the psychology that built capitalism. Is there anything in the text that supports the link?