John Calvin
The Institutes of the Christian Religion is a notable work produced by the theologian and Protestant reformer John Calvin. Beyond its title, it stands as the marker by which Calvin's name has most persistently been attached to the broader history of Christian thought.
Calvin was born on July 20, 1509, in Noyon, at the time part of the Kingdom of France. His early schooling brought him to the Collège de la Marche and then the Collège de Montaigu, before he pursued legal studies at the Universities of Orléans and Bourges. That legal formation joined his other occupations: he worked as a lawyer, and in time as a pastor, a theologian, a writer, and a Protestant reformer. He conducted his work across several languages — Latin, French, Middle French, and German — a range that positioned him to address varied audiences throughout his career.
His life eventually centered on Geneva. A citizen of the Republic of Geneva, Calvin worked there as pastor and reformer until his death in the city on June 6, 1564. The move from his origins in the Kingdom of France to a settled life in Geneva marks the broad geographical arc of his biography, from Noyon in the north of France to the Swiss city where he would spend his final decades and where he died.
The Institutes of the Christian Religion remained the notable work associated with his name through all of this. Calvin died in Geneva, the city that had been his home and the place where his occupations as pastor, theologian, and writer converged. He was fifty-four years old at his death, having been born in the summer of 1509 and having died in the early summer of 1564, with the Institutes standing as the single named work that the record of his life carries forward.
Quotes by John Calvin
John Calvin's insights on:
The Scriptures obtain full authority among believers only when men regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard.
The Scriptures should be read with the aim of finding Christ in them. Whoever turns aside from this object, even though he wears himself out all his life in learning, he will never reach the knowledge of the truth.
Distinction between virtuous and vicious actions has been engraven by the Lord in the heart of every man.
If anyone cannot set his mind at rest by disregarding death, that man should know that he has not yet gone far enough in the faith of Christ.
The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.
There is nothing which God more abominates than when men endeavor to cloak themselves by submitting signs and external appearance for integrity of heart.
The word hope I take for faith; and indeed hope is nothing else but the constancy of faith.
I call it not humility, so long as we think there is any good remaining in us. Those who have joined together two things, to think humbly of ourselves before God and yet hold our own righteousness in some estimation, have . . . a pernicious hypocrisy.