The Bedrock of the Reformation—Calvin’s Institutes

John Calvin wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion to encourage believers that were suffering persecution.  Concerning this masterpiece of biblical theology, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “No book has had such an influence on man and on the history of civilization.”  Lloyd-Jones went on to say that it was the Institutes which upheld the Protestant Reformation and remains the clearest declaration of evangelical faith ever penned.  More than any of the reformers, John Calvin is responsible for giving the Protestant churches a body of theology that proved to be its greatest defence and support.  B. B. Warfield agreed that Calvin’s Institutes are “at the foundation of the whole development of Protestant theology, and has left an impress on evangelical thought which is ineffaceable.  After three centuries and a half, it retains its unquestioned preeminence as the greatest and most influential of all dogmatic treatises.”  It is a shame that so few Christians today have ever opened its pages.  Far from being “dry as dust,” I have found the Institutes to be easy to read and understand, and more importantly, very edifying and encouraging.  Calvin designed his book to be a doctrinal introduction to the study of the Scriptures that any Christian could benefit from.  Lloyd-Jones wrote that “in addition to its massive and sublime thought, it is written in a style which is most moving, and at times thrilling.  No book repays reading more than this.”  Lloyd-Jones concluded that the most urgent reason why all should read the Institutes of the Christian Religion is to be found in the superficial times in which we live.  Like the rest of our culture, modern evangelicals are very fragile, and nothing is so calculated to strengthen and stabilize the soul as the glorious doctrine of the sovereign God that fills Calvin’s pages.