The Heart of John Calvin

Many believers today are unaware of the debt all Christians owe to John Calvin.  Both the man himself and the understanding of Scripture that is associated with his name are by many either totally ignored or tragically misunderstood.  B. B. Warfield, a great theologian and teacher in his own right, devoted much time and effort to understand Calvin and to correct the misconceptions and prejudices people have of Calvinism.  I want to further this endeavor by looking at Calvin through Warfield’s eyes.  Calvin had a passion to glorify God.  Warfield contended that this passion, and the underlying view of God which created it, is the foundation of Calvinsim.  He stressed that the heart of Calvin’s theology is not predestination, or the so-called “five points,” but first and foremost a view of God as the Sovereign Lord of the universe.  Warfield wrote: “It is the vision of God and His majesty which lies at the foundation of the entirety of Calvinistic thinking.  The Calvinist is the man who has seen God, and who, having seen God in His glory, is filled on the one hand, with a sense of his own unworthiness to stand in God’s sight as a creature, and much more as a sinner, and on the other hand, with adoring wonder that nevertheless this God is a God who receives sinners.  He who believes in God without reserve and is determined that God shall be God to him, in all his thinking, feeling, willing—in the entire compass of his life-activities, intellectual, moral, spiritual—is by the very necessity  of the case, a Calvinist.”