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WorkJohn Calvin

Institutes of the Christian Religion

A refugee's short Latin defence of persecuted French Protestants in 1536, it grew through twenty-three years of revision into eighty chapters.

by John Calvin2,402 passages held

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Original title
Institutio Christianae Religionis
First published
(aged 27)
Original language
Latin

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Overview

In October 1534 posters attacking the Catholic Mass went up in several French cities, and the arrests and burnings that followed drove a twenty-five-year-old law graduate from Noyon, John Calvin, into exile in Basel. Francis I, the king of France, wanted to stamp out reform at home without offending the Protestant princes of Germany, so the French evangelicals were presented as Anabaptists, radicals who rejected every civil authority. Calvin answered with a short Latin handbook of their faith, printed in Basel in March 1536 with a preface asking the king to hear them before he condemned them. Its central claim is that people cannot know themselves truly without knowing God, and can know God truly only through Scripture, whose authority rests on the inner witness of the Holy Spirit and not on the word of the church. Salvation comes by grace, received through faith, and God's eternal choice decides who receives it. The book sold out within a year, and Calvin spent the rest of his life rebuilding it. The Strasbourg edition of 1539 ran to seventeen chapters where the first had six. The authorities in Paris condemned his own French version of 1541; it helped shape written French for generations. The final Latin edition, printed in Geneva in 1559, recast the whole into four books and eighty chapters. Ill with a fever late in 1558, Calvin forced himself to finish it, afraid he would die first. That edition carries the quarrels of his Geneva years. It refutes Michael Servetus, the Spanish physician and theologian whom Geneva burned as a heretic in 1553 after Calvin denounced him, and Andreas Osiander, the Lutheran theologian at Königsberg who taught that believers are made righteous by Christ's divine nature dwelling in them. Its fourth book turns the argument on the church, measuring the papacy against Scripture and finding it a usurpation. Thomas Norton, the son-in-law of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, published an English translation in 1561, three years before Calvin's death. Scholars still treat the 1559 text as the authoritative one.

Key concepts

What is the twofold knowledge of God in the Institutes?

It is the knowledge of God in two roles, which gives the Institutes its plan. First God is known as Creator, from the order of the world and the hint of him in every conscience. Since sin has blurred that knowledge, God must also be known as Redeemer, who rescues people in Christ. Book One treats the Creator, Book Two the Redeemer, and the last two books show how that rescue reaches us.

What does Calvin mean by the inner witness of the Spirit?

It is God's Spirit persuading a reader from within that Scripture is God's own word. Calvin denies that the Bible's authority depends on the church vouching for it, since the church itself rests on the Bible. Arguments for Scripture's truth help, but they cannot create certainty. That comes as directly as tasting tells sweet from bitter: the same Spirit who spoke through the prophets confirms their words in the heart.

What does it mean to be justified, according to Calvin?

To be justified is to be declared righteous by God, as a judge acquits the accused, not to be made morally good first. Calvin says it consists of two things: God forgives sins and counts Christ's righteousness as the believer's own. The righteousness is borrowed, never earned, and faith is the hand that receives it. A change of life follows, but it is never the reason for the verdict.

What are mortification and vivification in Calvin's account of repentance?

They are the two parts of repentance: the dying of the old self and the coming alive of a new one. Mortification is the sorrow and dread that follow a true sight of one's sin, until self-will gives way. Vivification is not simply the relief that follows, as others had taught, but a new desire to live a holy life, born of being remade. For Calvin both go on for the whole of a life.

What are election and reprobation in the Institutes?

Election is God's choice, made before the world began, of those he will save. Reprobation is the other side of that choice: those passed over are left to the just penalty of their own sin. Calvin grounds the difference in God's will alone, not in any merit God foresaw, so that salvation is wholly free. He forbids prying into the reasons, and points those who worry about it to Christ.

Why does Calvin call the sacraments seals?

A sacrament is an outward sign, such as water or bread, which God attaches to a promise in order to confirm it. Calvin compares it to a seal on a document: the seal adds no new content, but it makes the promise surer to a weak believer. Following Augustine, he also calls it a visible word, because it shows the promise as a picture shows its subject.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Knowing God, Knowing Ourselves

Can anyone know themselves without knowing God, and where is God to be known reliably? The answer sets Scripture, not the church, at the base of everything that follows.

Calvin opens by tying two kinds of knowledge together: whoever looks at their own poverty is driven to look for God, and whoever sees God sees their own smallness. Every human being has a seed of religion, yet the mind turns it into a workshop of idols. Scripture corrects the blur as spectacles help weak eyes, and its authority comes from the Spirit's inner witness, not from the church's say-so. When it speaks of God's hands and eyes, God is stooping to our level, as a nurse talks to an infant.

  • scripture
  • scriptural authority
  • scriptural interpretation
  • biblical interpretation
  • holy spirit
  • worship

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Nothing Left to Chance

If God rules every event, from a fall in the street to the eternal fate of each person, is that a terror or a comfort? The book argues it must become the second.

Against the idea of fortune, Calvin holds that God governs each event, down to the merchant whom robbers kill in a wood. Wicked people carry out God's purposes and remain guilty, because they act from their own malice. The same hidden will chooses some for salvation and passes over others, a decree Calvin himself calls awful. He teaches it so that grace is seen as free, warns that curiosity beyond Scripture loses itself in a labyrinth, and tells the anxious to look for their election in Christ.

  • divine providence
  • divine judgment
  • divine mercy
  • salvation

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A Will That Cannot Free Itself

After the fall, can a human being still choose the good on their own? Everything depends on that answer, because a will that could would need no rescue.

Adam's fall passed corruption to all his descendants by birth, Calvin argues, not merely by bad example, as the followers of Pelagius held. People still choose, and choose willingly, so they sin by necessity yet without compulsion, and remain answerable. Decent pagans owe their virtues to God's restraining kindness, not to sound nature. The moral law, which nobody keeps, works like a mirror that shows us the spots on our face, so that we stop trusting ourselves and look to grace.

  • sin
  • free will
  • human nature
  • moral responsibility
  • grace

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A Righteousness Received, Not Earned

How can a guilty person stand before God as righteous? Not by improving enough, the book answers, but by receiving the righteousness of Christ through faith.

Faith, in Calvin's definition, is a firm and certain knowledge of God's goodwill toward us, grounded in the promise given in Christ and sealed on the heart by the Spirit. Justification means that God pardons sins and counts Christ's righteousness as ours. Against Andreas Osiander, who located it in Christ's divine nature dwelling in believers, Calvin keeps it outside us. Holiness still follows, because Christ cannot be divided, and the good works of the accepted please God only once the person already has his favour.

  • faith
  • justification
  • forgiveness
  • atonement
  • christology
  • divine grace

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A Life That Belongs to Another

What changes in an ordinary day if a person belongs to God and not to themselves? The book turns doctrine into a rule for work, money, enemies and prayer.

'We are not our own' is the sentence Calvin sets at the head of the Christian life. Repentance lasts a lifetime, as the old self dies and a new one grows. Kindness is owed even to an enemy, because God's image in him claims it. Self-denial does not forbid joy, since God made flowers beautiful to be enjoyed, and each person's calling is a post assigned by God. Prayer is conversation with God, and Christian freedom leaves indifferent things free while sparing a weaker neighbour.

  • repentance
  • prayer
  • conscience
  • charity

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The Church and Its Visible Signs

Faith is inward, so why does God bind it to a church, a pulpit, water, bread and rulers? Weak people, the last book answers, need outward helps.

Calvin calls the church the mother of believers and recognises it wherever the word is purely preached and the sacraments rightly given, flaws and all. Measured against the ancient church, the papacy appears a usurpation and the Mass a profanation of the Supper. A sacrament is a visible word and a seal of God's promise. In the Supper, the Spirit joins believers to Christ's body in heaven. Infants are baptised against the Anabaptists. Civil rulers, even cruel ones, are honoured, though appointed officials may restrain them.

  • church
  • sacraments
  • baptism
  • religious authority
  • church history

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Within this work

passages held
2,402
distinct concepts
1,226
by passages held, corpus-wide
#18

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “faith” and “grace”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
faithgrace61
faithsacraments48
faithsalvation39
gracesalvation37
gracesin24
christologysalvation22
christologyfaith21
divine providencefaith20
christologygrace17
christologysacraments15
faithsin14
gracesacraments14
salvationsin13
faithreligious authority8
religious authoritysacraments8
christologyreligious authority5
divine providencegrace5
divine providencesin5
christologysin4
divine providencesalvation4
religious authoritysalvation4
sacramentssalvation3
gracereligious authority2
religious authoritysin2
sacramentssin2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Institutio Christianae Religionis) you are here EN
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