Category: John Calvin

On Reading Calvin’s Institutes

While driving around and listening to Alister Begg yesterday, he quoted Calvin’s Institutes, which reminded me that I still need to read through his Institute.

I’ve read parts here and there before but never the whole thing.  Has anyone ever read through the Institutes? Do you have a reading plan?

This would be a good project for the new year. ;-)

Free (Kindle) Book: The Expository Genius of John Calvin by Steven J. Lawson

Amazon.com is giving away a free Kindle edition of Steven J. Lawson’s The Expository Genius of John Calvin. It is free today only! If you do not have a Kindle (as I do not) consider the Kindle app (like I have for my iPhone). You can download the book here.

I don’t know if I will actually read it, and you may not know either, but if this is the case we can always delete it down the road.

Doug Estes for Koinonia Blog

A former professor of mine, Dr. Doug Estes, has had a pretty big week over at Zondervan’s Koinonia blog. He wrote an article titled “John Calvin, Virtual Church Pioneer”, an article titled, “John Calvin: Why He Would Have Embraced Social Networking (and Why We Should, too), an article titled “Return to Calvin: A Personal Reflection on How Calvinism Lost It Way”, and one of those videos where the author is asked about their own favorite authors (in which he sports an amazing beard).

The Death of Michael Servetus: Not Calvin’s Fault?


Yesterday I updated my Facebook status through my Twitter with a message wishing the late, great John Calvin a wonderful five-hundredth birthday that read, “Brian LePort wishes the long departed John Calvin a wonderful 500th birthday. May you enjoy cake amongst the ‘great cloud of witnesses’. ” This was soon followed by a comment by an aquaintance associated with the Oneness Pentecostal movement who wrote, “Happy Birthday JC. Give a hug to Servetus for us”. This was a reference to Michael Servetus, a theologian who denied the doctrine of the Trinity, and whose death is said to have been at the hands of John Calvin. Oneness Pentecostals tend to see Servetus as a precursor to their movement.

Is John Calvin really the one who was responsible for the execution of Servetus? According to Michael E. Wittmer the answer is “no”. Read his article on Calvin here.

Meanwhile, is there anyone out there who has any thoughts on how responsible Calvin was or was not for the death of Michael Servetus? Are there any books or articles you would recommend?

John Calvin’s 500th Birthday: Today


It has been 500 years since the great theologian John Calvin was born. Today there will be many celebrations across the blogosphere. Let us try to get you started with some links:

You can visit the Calvin500.com website which includes links to a site listing what people at Twittering about Calvin, read blog post related to Calvin, or learn more about Calvin while eating your birthday cake. At the Koinonia blog you can already find a posting about Calvin’s work through commentaries as well as one on what he says about Psalm 1:1 and John 1:6. I am sure there will be more on that blog today.

There is a list of new Calvin resources on ‘After Existentialism, Light’. Nick Norelli reviews a new edition of the Institutes. ‘Desiring God’ has the book Portrait of Calvin on sale for two dollars. And the ‘Desiring God’ blog has several postings.

If your celebrating, here is a cake idea. Here is another (not as impressive) one. T.C. Robinson celebrates, kind of. Mark Stevens asks how you will be celebrating.

Ben Witherington has some positive things to say about Calvin. Collen Hansen has an article on the Christian History Blog. Jim West will be posting one post every hour all day beginning with this one. Fred Sanders lists several essays on Calvin found at Scriptorium Daily.

And if this is not enough, use Google!

Reformed Over Lutheran: N.T. Wright in Honor of John Calvin


N.T. Wright, in Justification:God’s Plan, Paul’s Vision, writes these words,

For John Calvin, the Mosaic law was given as the way of life for a people already redeemed. “It was to a delivered people that God addressed the words of his covenant at Sinai.” And that, stated crisply by an old-fashioned Calvinist in a book of impeccable old perspective provenance, edited by Don Carson himself, is the long and short of what Ed Sanders was arguing about Torah-keeping within Judaism. That is “covenantal nomism”: now that you’re in the covenant, here is the law to keep. (72)

He further states,

…if it had been the Reformed view of Paul and the law, rather than the Lutheran one, that had dominated biblical scholarship through the two hundred years since the Enlightenment, not only would the new perspective not have been necessary (or not in the same form), but the polarizing debates that have run for the last hundred years, between “participationist” and “juristic” forms of soteriology, would not have been necessary either. (72)

He continues,

It was the relentless insistence on the wickedness of Judaism, the folly of arrogant self-righteous lawkeeping on the one hand and the gloom of depressing lawkeeping on the other, the sense of Judaism as “the wrong kind of religion,” and so on–all of which slurs, though frequent in many would be Christian traditions, were always far more endemic in Lutheranism than in Calvinism– that represented the problem which Sanders, following Moore, Davies, Schoeps, Stendahl and others, was offering a fresh solution. (72)

Finally,

…within this kind of Calvinism, the point of the law–think of the endless debates over the meaning of telos in Romans 10:4–is not that God has brought it to an end, has put a stop to all that nonsense, but that he has brought it to its glad and proper goal. If we have to choose between Luther and Calvin, we must in my judgment choose Calvin every time, for both theological and exegetical reasons. (73)

I know I have not posted on Wright’s book in a while. I will be resuming that endeavor soon.