John Calvin

and his Passion for the

MaJesty of God

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Books By John PiPer

God’s Passion for His Glory

Don’t Waste Your Life

The Pleasures of God

The Passion of Jesus Christ

Desiring God

Life as a Vapor

The Dangerous Duty of Delight

A God-Entranced Vision of

All Things

Future Grace

(with Justin Taylor)

When I Don’t Desire God

A Hunger for God

Sex and the Supremacy of Christ

Let the Nations Be Glad!

(with Justin Taylor)

A Godward Life

Taste and See

Pierced by the Word

Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die

Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ

God Is the Gospel

The Legacy of Sovereign Joy

Contending for Our All

The Hidden Smile of God

What Jesus Demands from the World

The Roots of Endurance

Amazing Grace in the Life of

The Misery of Job and

William Wilberforce

the Mercy of God

Battling Unbelief

The Innkeeper

Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

The Prodigal’s Sister

(with Justin Taylor)

Recovering Biblical Manhood

50 Crucial Questions

and Womanhood

When the Darkness Will Not Lift

What’s the Difference?

The Future of Justification

The Justification of God

The Supremacy of Christ in a

Counted Righteous in Christ

Postmodern World

(with Justin Taylor)

Brothers, We Are Not Professionals

Spectacular Sins

The Supremacy of God in Preaching

Beyond the Bounds (with Justin Taylor)

C R O S S W AY B O O K S

W H E A T O N , I L L I N O I S

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John Calvin

and His Passion for the Majesty of God

John PiPer

Foreword by Gerald L. Bray

C R O S S W AY B O O K S

W H E A T O N , I L L I N O I S

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John Calvin and His Passion for the Majesty of God

Copyright © 2009 by Desiring God Foundation

Published by Crossway Books

a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechan-

ical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the

publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Originally published in The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace

in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, 2006.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover illustration: Bridgeman Art Library

First printing 2009

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®,

copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News

Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-0568-8

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-0564-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Piper, John, 1946–

John Calvin and his passion for the majesty of God / John Piper;

foreword by Gerald L. Bray.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-0182-1 (tpb)

1. Calvin, Jean, 1509–1564. 2. Reformation—Switzerland—

Geneva—Biography. I. Title.

BX9418.P53 2008

284'.2092—dc22

2008010514

DP

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Contents

Foreword

7

1 God Is Who He Is

11

2 A Passion for the Glory of God in Christ

15

3 Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God

21

4 Ministry Made by the Majesty of the Word

29

5 Marriage to Idelette

35

6 Constant Trials

39

7 Constancy in Expounding the Word of God

45

Appendix

53

Calvin’s Barbaric World: The Case of

Michael Servetus

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foreword

The year 2009 marks the five-hundredth anniversary

of the birth of John Calvin, by common consent one

of the greatest, but also one of the most controversial,

Christian leaders who ever lived. Yet for a man who stood

at the center of the revolutionary upheavals of sixteenth-

century Europe and who was personally involved in trying

to reform churches from Scotland to Hungary, Calvin is

surprisingly little known.

People write plays and make films about Martin Luther

but not about John Calvin, who seems much harder to pin

down. We know very little about his early life and almost

nothing about his conversion, which must have happened

sometime in 1533 or 1534. His wanderings over the next

several years, including his extended stay with Martin

Bucer in Strasbourg, are better documented, but despite the

adventures his travels entailed, they have never seemed to

be the stuff of high drama.

The Geneva years are the best known, but even they

are widely misunderstood. Few people realize that Calvin

was a foreigner in Geneva who was not granted citizenship

there until 1559, and so he could never take part in the

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8 Foreword

city’s government. Even fewer realize that Calvin’s Geneva

was not a theocracy but a worldly city-state with which he

was frequently at odds. Never a well man, there were times

when he almost had to be dragged out of his sickbed to

preach from the pulpit of the main city church, and it was

something of a miracle that he lived as long as he did.

Yet today more people read Calvin’s writings than those

of any other Christian outside the New Testament writers.

His commentaries remain standard works in and are gener-

ally regarded as the first great monument of modern biblical

scholarship. His Institutes of the Christian Religion are still

required reading for any serious theologian. Even some of

his sermons are still in print, though they are unfortunately

less well known than his other writings, and many remain

in nearly undecipherable manuscript in Geneva, while many

more have been lost because the manuscripts were sold for

scrap a couple of centuries ago.

Calvin was not an original thinker in the sense that

Martin Luther or Erasmus of Rotterdam were. He did not

discover any new theological principle to set the church

on fire, as Luther did. He did not recover any secrets of

ancient wisdom as Erasmus was known for doing. His

lifelong ambition was to see the conversion of France to

Protestantism, but although he was able to gather French

Protestants under his wing, they failed to take over France,

and Calvin had to be content with England and Scotland

instead—Holland did not accept his teachings until after

his death. Calvin was great, not for his originality or for

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Foreword 9

his achievements, but for his deep grasp of the coherence of

the Christian message, which stemmed from his profound

relationship with God.

Calvin was a man possessed by the Holy Spirit. He knew

that he had been called to meet with God in Christ and to

spread God’s Word to a hungry and dying world, and he

never flagged in that mission. From the start, he understood

that to know God is to step into another world, to be born

again into a relationship with the One who made and gov-

erns all things, and who had called a people, who did not

deserve it, to rule that creation at his side. He knew that this

relationship had many facets to it, but he also understood

its fundamental coherence, and it was this that he brought

to his study and exposition of Christian theology.

Fundamental to that theology was the Word of God,

the Old and New Testaments that together make up the

Bible. Here the variety and inner coherence of God and his

plan for his creatures was displayed to the full. Systematic

theology was an exposition of that coherence, and in his

sermons Calvin applied that understanding to the practi-

cal needs of the church. Everything hung together because

there was only one God and one eternal mind at work,

undergirding it all. It is this knowledge that gave Calvin’s

work its strength, and it was this that struck fear into the

hearts of his enemies.

Men like Luther and Augustine have had devoted

followers, but few have had as many equally dedicated

enemies as Calvin has attracted over the years. He has never

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10 Foreword

left people indifferent—either you follow him or you turn

against his teaching. In that respect, he was uncannily like

Jesus, who likewise left none of his hearers untouched one

way or the other. If Calvin himself had realized this similar-

ity, it would have pleased him more than anything in the

world, because his only ambition was to take up his cross

and follow his Lord.

Today the world has changed in many ways, but at

bottom it remains the same as ever. The hearts of people,

including many church people, are cold and led astray by

an array of false gods. Material prosperity has dulled the

spirits of many, and our civilization is drowning in intel-

lectual trivia and moral turpitude, while at the same time it

convinces itself that it is the highest form of life yet achieved

by the human race. In this world, Calvin’s voice needs to

be heard again. God will not be mocked, and in the end we

shall discover that he is our Sovereign Lord. What will he

say to you on the day of judgment?

Calvin had no doubts about this—he knew that he

would be welcomed into the joy of his Lord as a good and

faithful servant. John Piper has brought that message to life

for a new generation, and I hope and pray that this study of

the great Reformer will stir the hearts of all who read it to

seek God’s face again and to turn to him and live.

Gerald Bray, Research Professor,

Beeson Divinity School, Samford University,

Birmingham, Alabama

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C h a P t e r o n e

God is who he is

John Calvin would approve that we begin with God rather

than with him. Nothing mattered more to Calvin than

the supremacy of God over all things. Focus your attention,

then, on God’s self-identification in Exodus 3:14–15. Here

we will see the sun in the solar system of John Calvin’s

thought and life.

God calls Moses and commissions him to go to Egypt

and bring his people out of bondage. Moses is frightened

at this prospect and raises the objection that he is not the

person to do this. God responds by saying, “I will be with

you” (Ex. 3:12). Then Moses says, “[When I] say to them,

‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and [when]

they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

(v. 13). God’s response is one of the most important revela-

tions that has ever been given to man:

God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say

this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God

also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The

Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the

God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’

This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered

throughout all generations. (vv. 14–15)

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12 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

In other words, the great, central, biblical name of Yahweh

is explicitly rooted by God himself in the phrase “I am who

I am.” “Tell them, the one who simply and absolutely is

has sent you. Tell them that the essential thing about me is

that I am.”

A Passion for the Centrality and Supremacy of God

I begin with this biblical self-identification of God because

the unhidden and unashamed aim in this book is to fan

the flame of your passion for the centrality and supremacy

of God. Does not our heart burn when we hear God say,

“My name is, ‘I am who I am’”? The absoluteness of

God’s existence enthralls the mind: God’s never beginning,

never ending, never becoming, never improving, simply

and absolutely there—to be dealt with on his terms or not

at all.

Let this sink in: God—the God who holds you in being

this very moment—never had a beginning. Ponder it. Do

you remember the first time you thought about this as a

child or young teenager? Let that speechless wonder rise.

God never had a beginning! “I am” has sent me to you.

And one who never had a beginning, but always was and

is and will be, defines all things. Whether we want him to

be there or not, he is there. We do not negotiate what we

want for reality. God defines reality. When we come into

existence, we stand before a God who made us and owns

us. We have absolutely no choice in this matter. We do not

choose to be. And when we are, we do not choose that God

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God Is Who He Is 13

be. No ranting and raving, no sophisticated doubt or skepti-

cism, has any effect on the existence of God. He simply and

absolutely is. “Tell them ‘I am’ has sent you.”

If we don’t like it, we can change, to our joy, or we can

resist, to our destruction. But one thing remains absolutely

unassailed: God is. He was there before we came. He will be

there after we are gone. And therefore what matters in life

above all things is this God. We cannot escape the simple

and obvious truth that God must be the main thing in life.

Life has to do with God because all the universe has to do

with God, and the universe has to do with God because

every atom and every emotion and every soul of every

angelic, demonic, and human being belongs to God, who

absolutely is. He created all that is, he sustains everything

in being, he directs the course of all events, because “from

him and through him and to him are all things. To him be

glory forever” (Rom. 11:36).

A Passion for the Majesty of God

May God inflame in you a passion for his centrality and

supremacy in your life. May it be so that when you are

dead and gone the people you love and serve will say,

“This one knew God. This one loved God and lived for

the glory of God and showed us God day after day. This

one, as the apostle said, was ‘filled with all the fullness of

God’” (Eph. 3:19).

This is the aim and the burden of this book. Not only

because the majesty of God is im plicit in the sheer, awesome

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14 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

existence of God, and not only because it is ex plicit in the

Word of God, but also because David Wells is staggeringly

right when he says, “It is this God, majestic and holy in his

being . . . who has disappeared from the modern evangeli-

cal world.”1 Lesslie Newbigin says much the same thing: “I

suddenly saw that someone could use all the language of

evangelical Christianity, and yet the center was fundamen-

tally the self, my need of salvation. And God is auxiliary to

that. . . . I also saw that quite a lot of evangelical Christianity

can easily slip, can become centered in me and my need of

salvation, and not in the glory of God.”2 And, oh, have we

slipped. Where are the churches today where the dominant

experience is the precious weight of the glory of God? May

God restore a passion for his majesty in our day.

1David Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 300.

2Quoted in Tim Stafford, “God’s Missionary to Us,” Christianity Today, December 9, 1996, 29.

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C h a P t e r t w o

a Passion for the

Glory of God in Christ

God rests lightly on the church in our time, and John

Calvin saw the same thing in his own day.

In 1538, the Italian Cardinal Sadolet wrote to the leaders

of Geneva trying to win them back to the Roman Catholic

Church after they had turned to the Reformed teachings.

He began his letter with a long conciliatory section on the

preciousness of eternal life, before coming to his accusations

of the Reformation. Calvin wrote the response to Sadolet in

six days in the fall of 1539. It was one of his earliest writings

and spread his name as a reformer across Europe. Luther

read it and said, “Here is a writing which has hands and feet.

I rejoice that God raises up such men.”1

Calvin’s Unremitting Zeal to Illustrate the

Glory of God

Calvin’s response to Sadolet is important because it uncov-

ers the root of Calvin’s quarrel with Rome, which would

determine his whole life. The issue is not, first, the well-

known sticking points of the Reformation: justification,

1Henry F. Henderson, Calvin in His Letters (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 68.

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16 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

priestly abuses, transubstantiation, prayers to saints, and

papal authority. All those will come in for discussion.

But beneath all of them, the fundamental issue for John

Calvin—from the beginning of his life to the end—was

the issue of the centrality and supremacy and majesty of

the glory of God. He saw in Sadolet’s letter the same thing

Newbigin sees in self-saturated evangelicalism.2

Here’s what Calvin said to the Cardinal: “[Your] zeal

for heavenly life [is] a zeal which keeps a man entirely

devoted to himself, and does not, even by one expression,

arouse him to sanctify the name of God.” In other words,

even precious truth about eternal life can be so skewed as to

displace God as the center and goal. This was Calvin’s chief

contention with Rome, and it comes out in his writings over

and over again. He goes on and says to Sadolet that what he

should do—and what Calvin aims to do with all his life—is

“set before [man], as the prime motive of his existence, zeal

to illustrate the glory of God.”3

I think this would be a fitting banner over all of John

Calvin’s life and work—zeal to illustrate the glory of God.

The essential meaning of John Calvin’s life and preaching is

that he recovered and embodied a passion for the absolute

reality and majesty of God. That is what I want us to see

most clearly. Benjamin Warfield said of Calvin, “No man

2Quoted in Tim Stafford, “God’s Missionary to Us,” Christianity Today, December 9, 1996, 29.

3John Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 89; emphasis added.

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A Passion for the Glory of God in Christ 17

ever had a profounder sense of God than he.”4 There’s the

key to Calvin’s life and theology.

Geerhardus Vos, the Princeton New Testament scholar,

asked this question in 1891: Why has Reformed theology

been able to grasp the fullness of Scripture unlike any other

branch of Christendom? He answered, “Because Reformed

theology took hold of the Scriptures in their deepest root

idea. . . . This root idea which served as the key to unlock the

rich treasuries of the Scriptures was the preeminence of God’s

glory in the consideration of all that has been created.”5 It is

this relentless orientation toward the glory of God that gives

coherence to John Calvin’s life and to the Reformed tradition

that followed. Vos said that the “all-embracing slogan of the

Reformed faith is this: the work of grace in the sinner is a

mirror for the glory of God.”6 Mirroring the glory of God is

the meaning of John Calvin’s life and ministry.

When Calvin did eventually get to the issue of justifi-

cation in his response to Sadolet, he said, “You . . . touch

upon justification by faith, the first and keenest subject of

controversy between us. . . . Wherever the knowledge of it

is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished.”7 So here

again we can see what is fundamental. Justification by faith

is crucial. But there is a deeper reason why it is crucial. The

glory of Christ is at stake. Wherever the knowledge of jus-

4Benjamin Warfield, Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), 24.

5Geerhardus Vos, “The Doctrine of the Covenant in Reformed Theology,” in

Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1980), 241–42; emphasis added.

6Ibid., 248; emphasis added.

7Dillenberger, John Calvin, 95; emphasis added.

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18 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

tification is taken away, the glory of Christ is extinguished.

This is always the deepest issue for Calvin. What truth and

what behavior will “illustrate the glory of God”?

Moved by a Passion to Display God’s Glory

For Calvin, the need for the Reformation was fundamen-

tally this: Rome had “destroyed the glory of Christ in many

ways—by calling upon the saints to intercede, when Jesus

Christ is the one mediator between God and man; by ador-

ing the Blessed Virgin, when Christ alone shall be adored;

by offering a continual sacrifice in the Mass, when the sac-

rifice of Christ upon the Cross is complete and sufficient,”8

by elevating tradition to the level of Scripture and even

making the word of Christ dependent for its authority on

the word of man.9 Calvin asks, in his Commentary on

Colossians, “How comes it that we are ‘carried about with

so many strange doctrines’ (Hebrews 13:9)?” He answers,

“Because the excellence of Christ is not perceived by us.”10

In other words, the great guardian of biblical orthodoxy

throughout the centuries is a passion for the glory and the

excellency of God in Christ. Where the center shifts from

God, everything begins to shift everywhere—a fact which

does not bode well for doctrinal faithfulness in our own

non-God-centered day.

8T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 109.

9John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. 1, chap., 7, 1. “A most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men!” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian religion, ed. John Thomas McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics, vol. 21 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).

10Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 55.

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A Passion for the Glory of God in Christ 19

Therefore the unifying root of all of Calvin’s labors is

his passion to display the glory of God in Christ. When he

was thirty years old, he described an imaginary scene of

himself at the end of his life, giving an account to God. He

said, “The thing [O God] at which I chiefly aimed, and for

which I most diligently labored, was, that the glory of thy

goodness and justice . . . might shine forth conspicuous,

that the virtue and blessings of thy Christ . . . might be fully

displayed.”11

Twenty-four years later, unchanged in his passions and

goals, and one month before he actually did give an account

to Christ in heaven (he died at age fifty-four), he said in

his last will and testament, “I have written nothing out of

hatred to any one, but I have always faithfully propounded

what I esteemed to be for the glory of God.”12

11Dillenberger, John Calvin, 110.

12Ibid., 42; emphasis added.

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C h a P t e r t h r e e

MaSTeRed By The MaJeSTy

aNd WoRd of God

What happened to John Calvin to make him a man so

mastered by the majesty of God? And what kind of

ministry did this produce in his life?

He was born July 10, 1509, in Noyon, France, when

Martin Luther was twenty-five years old and had just begun

to teach the Bible in Wittenberg. We know almost nothing

of Calvin’s early home life. When he was fourteen, his father

sent him to study theology at the University of Paris, which

at that time was untouched by the Reformation and steeped

in medieval theology. But five years later (when Calvin was

nineteen) his father ran afoul of the church and told his son

to leave theology and study law, which he did for the next

three years at Orleans and Bourges.

During these years Calvin mastered Greek and was

immersed in the thought of Duns Scotus, William Ockham,

and Gabriel Biel, and he completed his law course. His

father died in May of 1531, when Calvin was twenty-one.

Calvin felt free then to turn from law to his first love, which

had become the classics. He published his first book, a

Commentary on Seneca, in 1532, at the age of twenty-three.

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22 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

But sometime during these years he came into contact with

the message and the spirit of the Reformation, and by 1533

something dramatic had happened in his life.

Calvin’s Conversion

In November of 1533, Nicholas Cop, a friend of Calvin,

preached at the opening of the winter term at the University

of Paris and was called to account by the Parliament for

his Lutheran-like doctrines. He fled the city, and a general

persecution broke out against what King Francis I called

“the cursed Lutheran sect.” Calvin was among those who

escaped. The connection with Cop was so close that some

suspect Calvin actually wrote the message that Cop deliv-

ered. So by 1533 Calvin had crossed the line. He was now

wholly devoted to the cause of the Reformation.

What had happened? Calvin recounts, seven years

later, how his conversion came about. He describes how

he had been struggling to live out the Catholic faith with

zeal,

. . . when, lo, a very different form of doctrine started up,

not one which led us away from the Christian profession,

but one which brought it back to its fountain . . . to its

original purity. Offended by the novelty, I lent an unwill-

ing ear, and at first, I confess, strenuously and passionately

resisted . . . to confess that I had all my life long been in

ignorance and error. . . .

I at length perceived, as if light had broken in upon me

[a very key phrase, in view of what we will see], in what

a sty of error I had wallowed, and how much pollution

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Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God 23

and impurity I had thereby contracted. Being exceedingly

alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen . . . as in duty

bound, [I] made it my first business to betake myself to

thy way [O God], condemning my past life, not without

groans and tears.1

God, by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my

mind to a teachable frame. . . . Having thus received

some taste and knowledge of true godliness, I was

immediately inflamed with [an] intense desire to make

progress.2

What was the foundation of Calvin’s faith that yielded

a life devoted utterly to displaying the glory and majesty of

God? The answer seems to be that Calvin suddenly, as he

says, saw and tasted in Scripture the majesty of God. And

in that moment, both God and the Word of God were so

powerfully and unquestionably authenticated to his soul

that he became the loving servant of God and his Word the

rest of his life. This experience and conviction dethroned

the church as the authority that accredits the Scriptures for

the saints. The majesty of God himself in the Word was suf-

ficient for this work.3

1John Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 114–15.

2Ibid., 26.

3Calvin, as he so often did, laid hold on Augustine to strengthen his claim that this was the historic position of the church, in spite of the Roman Catholic teaching that the church authorizes the Scriptures for the believer. Commenting on Augustine’s view of

the role of the authority of the church in leading to a well-founded faith in Scripture, Calvin wrote, “He only meant to indicate what we also confess as true: those who have not yet been illumined by the Spirit of God are rendered teachable by reverence for the church, so that they may persevere in learning faith in Christ from the gospel. Thus, he avers, the authority of the church is an introduction through which we are prepared for faith in the gospel. For, as we see, he wants the certainty of the godly to rest upon a far different foundation” ( Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.7.3).

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24 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

The Majesty of God: Ground for Confidence

in His Word

How this happened is extremely important, and we need

to see how Calvin himself describes it in the Institutes,

especially book 1, chapters 7 and 8. Here he wrestles with

how we can come to a saving knowledge of God through

the Scriptures. His answer is the famous phrase “the inter-

nal testimony of the Holy Spirit.” For example, he says,

“Scripture will ultimately suffice for a saving knowledge

of God only when its certainty is founded upon the inward

persuasion of the Holy Spirit” (I, viii, 13). So two things

came together for Calvin to give him a “saving knowledge

of God”: Scripture and the “inward persuasion of the Holy

Spirit.” Neither alone suffices to save.

But how does this actually work? What does the Spirit

do? The answer is not that the Spirit gives us added revela-

tion to what is in Scripture,4 but that he awakens us, as

from the dead, to see and taste the divine reality of God

in Scripture, which authenticates it as God’s own Word.

He says, “Our Heavenly Father, revealing his majesty [in

Scripture], lifts reverence for Scripture beyond the realm of

controversy” (I, viii, 13). There is the key for Calvin: the

witness of God to Scripture is the immediate, unassailable,

4J. I. Packer, “Calvin the Theologian,” in Honouring the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer, vol. 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), 156. “Rejecting both the Roman contention that the Scripture is to be received as authoritative on the church’s authority, and the idea that Scripture could be proved divinely authoritative by rational argument alone, Calvin affirms Scripture to be self-authenticating through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. What is this ‘inner witness’? Not a special quality of experience, nor a new, private revelation, nor an existential ‘decision,’ but a work of enlightenment whereby, through the medium of verbal testimony, the blind eyes of the spirit are opened, and divine realities come to be recognized and embraced for what they are.”

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Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God 25

life-giving revelation to our minds of the majesty of God

that is manifest in the Scriptures themselves. The majesty of

God is the ground of our confidence in his Word.

Over and over again in Calvin’s description of what

happens in coming to faith, you see his references to

the majesty of God revealed in Scripture and vindicating

Scripture. So already in the dynamics of his conversion, the

central passion of his life is being ignited.

The Word Mediating the Majesty

We are almost at the bottom of this experience now. If

we go just a bit deeper we will see more clearly why this

conversion resulted in such an “invincible constancy” in

Calvin’s lifelong allegiance to the majesty of God and the

truth of God’s Word. Here are the words that will take us

deeper:

Therefore illumined by [the Spirit’s] power, we believe nei-

ther by our own [note this!] nor by anyone else’s judgment

that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we

affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon

the majesty of God himself) that it has flowed to us from

the very mouth of God by the ministry of men.5

This is almost baffling. He says that his conviction

concerning the majesty of God in Scripture rests not on any

human judgment—not even his own. What does he mean?

Perhaps the words of the apostle John shed the most helpful

5Calvin, Institutes 1.7.5.

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26 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

light on what Calvin is trying to explain. Here are the key

words from 1 John 5:6–11:

The Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the

truth. . . . If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony

of God [the Spirit] is greater, for this is the testimony of

God that he has borne concerning his Son. . . . And this is

the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life

is in his Son.

In other words, the “testimony of God,” that is, the

inward witness of the Spirit, is greater than any human

witness—including, John would probably say in this con-

text, the witness of our own judgment. And what is that

witness of God? It is not merely a word delivered to our

judgment for reflection, for then our conviction would rely

on that reflection. What is it then? Verse 11 is the key: “This

is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life.” I take that to

mean that God witnesses to us of his reality and the reality

of his Son and his Word by giving us life from the dead so

that we come alive. His witness is the gift of spiritual life.

His witness is that we come alive to his majesty and see him

for who he is in his Word. In that instant, we do not reason

from premises to conclusions—we see that we are awake,

and there is not even a prior human judgment about it to

lean on. When Lazarus was awakened in the tomb by the

call or the “testimony” of Christ, he knew without reason-

ing that he was alive and that this call had wakened him.

Here’s the way J. I. Packer puts it:

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Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God 27

[The internal witness of the Spirit in John Calvin] is a

work of enlightenment whereby, through the medium of

verbal testimony, the blind eyes of the spirit are opened,

and divine realities come to be recognized and embraced

for what they are. This recognition, Calvin says, is as

immediate and unanalysable as the perceiving of a colour,

or a taste, by physical sense—an event about which no

more can be said than that when appropriate stimuli were

present it happened, and when it happened we knew it

had happened.6

Blind Eyes Opened

So in his early twenties John Calvin experienced the

miracle of having the blind eyes of his spirit opened by

the Spirit of God. And what he saw immediately, and with-

out any intervening chain of human reasoning, were two

things so interwoven that they would determine the rest

of his life: the majesty of God and the Word of God. The

Word mediated the majesty, and the majesty vindicated

the Word. Henceforth he would be a man utterly devoted

to displaying the majesty of God by the exposition of the

Word of God.

6Packer, “Calvin the Theologian,” 156.

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C h a P t e r f o U r

Ministry Made by the

MaJesty of the word

What form would Calvin’s ministry take? He knew

what he wanted. He wanted the enjoyment of liter-

ary ease so he could promote the Reformed faith as a liter-

ary scholar.1 That is what he thought he was cut out for by

nature. But God had radically different plans—as he had

for Augustine and Luther—and for many of us who did not

plan our lives the way they have turned out.

An Unexpected Ministry

After escaping from Paris and finally leaving France

entirely, Calvin spent his exile in Basel, Switzerland,

between 1534 and 1536. To redeem the time, “he devoted

himself to the study of Hebrew.”2 (Imagine such a thing!

Would any pastor today, exiled from his church and coun-

try, and living in mortal danger, study Hebrew? What has

become of the vision of ministry that such a thing seems

unthinkable today?) In March of 1536, he published the

1John Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 86.

2Theodore Beza, The Life of John Calvin (Milwaukee, OR: Back Home Industries, 1996, from the 1844 Edinburgh edition of the Calvin Translation Society), 21.

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30 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

first edition of his most famous work, The Institutes

of the Christian Religion, which would go through five

enlargements before reaching its present form in 1559.

And we should not think that this was a merely academic

exercise for Calvin. Years later he tells us what was driv-

ing him:

But lo! while I lay hidden at Basel, and known only to few

people, many faithful and holy persons were burnt alive

in France. . . . It appeared to me, that unless I opposed

[the perpetrators] to the utmost of my ability, my silence

could not be vindicated from the charge of cowardice and

treachery. This was the consideration which induced me to

publish my Institutes of the Christian Religion. . . . It was

published with no other design than that men might know

what was the faith held by those whom I saw basely and

wickedly defamed. 3

Theology Forged in the Furnace of Martyrdom

So when you hold the Institutes of John Calvin in your

hand, remember that theology, for John Calvin, was forged

in the furnace of martyrdom, and that Calvin could not sit

idly by without some effort to vindicate the faithful and the

God for whom they suffered. I think we would, perhaps,

do our theology better today if more were at stake in what

we said.

In 1536, France gave a temporary amnesty to those

who had fled. Calvin returned, put his things in order,

and left, never to return, taking his brother Antoine and

3Dillenberger, John Calvin, 27.

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Ministry Made by the Majesty of the Word 31

sister Marie with him. He intended to go to Strasbourg

and continue his life of peaceful literary production. But

he wrote later to a friend, “I have learned from experience

that we cannot see very far before us. When I promised

myself an easy, tranquil life, what I least expected was at

hand.”4 A war between Charles V and Francis I resulted

in troop movements that blocked the road to Strasbourg,

and Calvin had to detour through Geneva. In retrospect,

one has to marvel at the providence of God that he should

so arrange armies to position his pastors where he wanted

them.

The night that Calvin stayed in Geneva, William Farel,

the fiery leader of the Reformation in that city, found out

he was there and sought him out. It was a meeting that

changed the course of history—not just for Geneva, but

for the world. In his preface to his commentary on Psalms

Calvin tells us what happened:

Farel, who burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance

the gospel, immediately learned that my heart was set

upon devoting myself to private studies, for which I wished

to keep myself free from other pursuits, and finding that

he gained nothing by entreaties, he proceeded to utter an

imprecation that God would curse my retirement, and

the tranquillity of the studies which I sought, if I should

withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the neces-

sity was so urgent. By this imprecation I was so stricken

with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had

undertaken.5

4T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 24.

5Dillenberger, John Calvin, 28.

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32 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

The Anvil of Pastoral Responsibility

The course of his life was irrevocably changed—not just

geographically, but vocationally. Never again would Calvin

work in what he called the “tranquility of . . . studies.”

From then on, every page of the forty-eight volumes of

books and tracts and sermons and commentaries and let-

ters that he wrote would be hammered out on the anvil of

pastoral responsibility.

He took up his responsibilities in Geneva first as pro-

fessor of sacred Scripture, and within four months was

appointed pastor of St. Peter’s church—one of the three

parishes in the ten-thousand-person town of Geneva. But

the city council was not altogether happy, because Farel and

Calvin did not bow to all their wishes. So the two of them

were banished in April of 1538.

Calvin breathed a sigh of relief and thought God was

relieving him from the crush of pastoral duties so that

he could be about his studies. But when Martin Bucer

found out about Calvin’s availability, he did the same

thing to get him to Strasbourg that Farel had done to

get him to Geneva. Calvin wrote, “That most excellent

servant of Christ, Martin Bucer, employing a similar

kind of remonstrance and protestation as that to which

Farel had recourse, before, drew me back to a new sta-

tion. Alarmed by the example of Jonah which he set

before me, I still continued in the work of teaching.”6

That is, he agreed to go to Strasbourg and teach. In fact,

6Ibid., 29.

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Ministry Made by the Majesty of the Word 33

for three years Calvin served as the pastor to about five

hundred French refugees in Strasbourg, as well as teach-

ing New Testament. He also wrote his first commentary,

on Romans, and put out the second enlarged edition of

the Institutes.

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C h a P t e r f i v e

MarriaGe to idelette

Perhaps the most important providence during this

three-year stay in Strasbourg was finding a wife.

Several had tried to find a wife for Calvin, who was

thirty-one years old. Numerous women had shown inter-

est. Calvin had told his friend and matchmaker William

Farel what he wanted in a wife: “The only beauty which

allures me is this—that she be chaste, not too nice or

fastidious, economical, patient, likely to take care of my

health.”1 Parker comments, “Romantic love . . . seems to

have had no place in his character. Yet prosaic wooing led

to a happy marriage.”2 I think Parker was wrong about

romantic love (see below on Idelette’s death).

An Anabaptist widow named Idelette Stordeur was the

subject of John Calvin’s “prosaic wooing.” She and her

husband, John, had joined Calvin’s congregation. In the

spring of 1540, John died of plague, and on August 6, 1540,

Calvin and Idelette were married. She brought a son and

daughter with her into Calvin’s home.

Meanwhile, back in Geneva, chaos was making the city

1T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 70.

2Ibid., 69.

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36 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

fathers think that maybe Calvin and Farel were not so bad

after all. On May 1, 1541, the city council rescinded the

ban on Calvin and even held him up as a man of God. This

created an agonizing decision for Calvin, because he knew

that life in Geneva would be full of controversy and danger.

Earlier in October, he said to Farel that though he preferred

not to go, “yet because I know that I am not my own

master, I offer my heart as a true sacrifice to the Lord.”3

This became Calvin’s motto, and the picture on his emblem

included a hand holding out a heart to God with the inscrip-

tion prompte et sincere (“promptly and sincerely”).

Personal Sorrow

On Tuesday, September 13, 1541, Calvin entered Geneva

for the second time to serve the church there until his death

on May 27, 1564. His first son, Jacques, was born July

28, 1542, and died two weeks later. He wrote to his friend

Viret, “The Lord has certainly inflicted a severe and bitter

wound in the death of our baby son. But He is Himself a

Father and knows best what is good for his children.”4

This is the kind of submission to the sovereign hand of God

that Calvin rendered in all of his countless trials.

Idelette was never well again. They had two more chil-

dren who also died at or soon after birth. Then on March

29, 1549, Idelette died of what was probably tuberculosis.

Calvin wrote to Viret:

3W. de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide, trans. Lyle D.

Bierma (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), 38.

4Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 71.

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Marriage to Idelette 37

You know well how tender, or rather soft, my mind is.

Had not a powerful self-control been given to me, I could

not have borne up so long. And truly, mine is no common

source of grief. I have been bereaved of the best companion

of my life, of one who, had it been so ordained, would have

willingly shared not only my poverty but even my death.

During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry.

From her I never experienced the slightest hindrance. She

was never troublesome to me throughout the whole course

of her illness, but was more anxious about her children

than about herself. As I feared these private worries might

upset her to no purpose, I took occasion three days before

she died, to mention that I would not fail in discharging

my duty towards her children.5

5Ibid.

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C h a P t e r s i X

Constant trials

Calvin never remarried. And it is just as well. The pace

he kept would not have left much time for wife or

children. His acquaintance Nicolas Colladon, who lived in

Geneva during these years, describes his life:

Calvin for his part did not spare himself at all, working

far beyond what his power and regard for his health could

stand. He preached commonly every day for one week in

two [and twice on every Sunday, or a total of about ten

times every fortnight]. Every week he lectured three times

in theology. . . . Every Friday at the Bible Study . . . what

he added after the leader had made his declaration was

almost a lecture. He never failed in visiting the sick, in pri-

vate warning and counsel, and the rest of the numberless

matters arising out of the ordinary exercise of his ministry.

But besides these ordinary tasks, he had great care for

believers in France, both in teaching them and exhorting

and counseling them and consoling them by letters when

they were being persecuted, and also in interceding for

them. . . . Yet all that did not prevent him from going on

working at his special study and composing many splendid

and very useful books.1

1T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Preaching (Louisville: Westminster,1992), 62–63.

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40 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

Calvin’s Perseverance

He was, as the Reformer Wolfgang Musculus called him, “a

bow always strung.” In one way, he tried to take heed to his

health, but it probably did more harm than good. Colladon

says that “he took little regard to his health, mostly being con-

tent for many years with a single meal a day and never taking

anything between two meals.” His reasons were that the weak-

ness of his stomach and his migraines could only be controlled,

he had found by experiment, by continual abstinence.2

Contrarily, Calvin was apparently careless of his health

and worked night and day with scarcely a break. You can

hear the drivenness in this letter to Falais in 1546: “Apart

from the sermons and the lectures, there is a month gone

by in which I have scarce done anything, in such wise I am

almost ashamed to live thus useless”3—a mere twenty ser-

mons and twelve lectures in that month!

To get a clearer picture of his iron constancy, add to

his work schedule the continuous ill health he endured. He

wrote to his physicians in 1564, when he was fifty-three

years old, and described his colic and spitting of blood and

ague and gout and the “excruciating sufferings” of his hem-

orrhoids.4 But worst of all seemed to be the kidney stones

that had to pass, unrelieved by any sedative.

[They] gave me exquisite pain. . . . At length not without

the most painful strainings I ejected a calculus which in

2Quoted in T. H. L. Parker, John Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), 104.

3Ibid., 103–4.

4John Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 78.

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Constant Trials 41

some degree mitigated my sufferings, but such was its size

that it lacerated the urinary canal and a copious discharge

of blood followed. This hemorrhage could only be arrested

by an injection of milk through a syringe.5

On top of all this pressure and physical suffering were

the threats to his life. “He was not unfamiliar with the

sound of mobs outside his house [in Geneva] threatening

to throw him in the river and firing their muskets.”6 On

his deathbed Calvin said to the pastors gathered, “I have

lived here amid continual bickerings. I have been from

derision saluted of an evening before my door with forty

or fifty shots of an arquebus [a large gun].”7 In a letter

to Philipp Melanchthon in 1558, he wrote that war was

imminent in the region and that enemy troops could reach

Geneva within half an hour. “Whence you may conclude,”

he said, “that we have not only exile to fear, but that all

the most cruel varieties of death are impending over us,

for in the cause of religion they will set no bounds to their

barbarity.”8 In other words, when he slept, he pondered

from time to time what sorts of tortures would be inflicted

on him if the armies entered Geneva.

Libertines and the Lord’s Table

One of the most persistent thorns in Calvin’s side was the

libertines in Geneva. But here too his perseverance was

5Ibid.

6T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 29.

7Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings, 42.

8Ibid., 71.

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42 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

triumphant in a remarkable way. In every city in Europe,

men kept mistresses. When Calvin began his ministry in

Geneva in 1536 at the age of twenty-seven, there was a

law that said a man could keep only one mistress.9 After

Calvin had been preaching as pastor in St. Peter’s church for

over fifteen years, immorality was still a plague, even in the

church. The libertines boasted in their license. For them, the

“communion of saints” meant the common possession of

goods, houses, bodies, and wives. So they practiced adultery and indulged in sexual promiscuity in the name of Christian

freedom. And at the same time, they claimed the right to sit

at the Lord’s Table.10

The crisis of the Communion came to a head in 1553.

A well-to-do libertine named Berthelier was forbidden

by the Consistory of the church to eat the Lord’s Supper

but appealed the decision to the council of the city, which

overturned the ruling. This created a crisis for Calvin

who would not think of yielding to the state the rights

of excommunication, nor of admitting a libertine to the

Lord’s Table.

The issue, as always, was the glory of Christ. He wrote

to Viret:

I . . . took an oath that I had resolved rather to meet

death than profane so shamefully the Holy Supper of

the Lord. . . . My ministry is abandoned if I suffer the

authority of the Consistory to be trampled upon, and

extend the Supper of Christ to open scoffers. . . . I should

9Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 29.

10Henry F. Henderson, Calvin in His Letters (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 75.

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Constant Trials 43

rather die a hundred times than subject Christ to such

foul mockery.11

The Lord’s day of testing arrived. The libertines were

present to eat the Lord’s Supper. It was a critical moment

for the Reformed faith in Geneva:

The sermon had been preached, the prayers had been

offered, and Calvin descended from the pulpit to take his

place beside the elements at the communion table. The

bread and wine were duly consecrated by him, and he was

now ready to distribute them to the communicants. Then

on a sudden a rush was begun by the troublers in Israel in

the direction of the communion table. . . . Calvin flung his

arms around the sacramental vessels as if to protect them

from sacrilege, while his voice rang through the building:

“These hands you may crush, these arms you may lop off,

my life you may take, my blood is yours, you may shed

it; but you shall never force me to give holy things to the

profaned, and dishonor the table of my God.”

“After this,” says Beza, Calvin’s first biographer, “the

sacred ordinance was celebrated with a profound silence,

and under solemn awe in all present, as if the Deity

Himself had been visible among them.”12

Invincible Constancy

The point of mentioning all these woes in Geneva is to set

in bold relief the invincible constancy of John Calvin in the

ministry that God had called him to. We asked earlier, What

happened to John Calvin to make him a man so mastered

11Ibid., 77.

12Ibid., 78–79.

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44 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

by the majesty of God? And what kind of ministry did this

produce in his life? We answered the first question by saying

that Calvin experienced the supernatural, inward witness

of the Spirit to the majesty of God in Scripture. From then

on, everything in his thinking and writing and ministry was

aimed at illustrating the majesty and glory of God.

Now, what is the answer to the second question—w hat

kind of ministry did his commitment to the majesty of God

produce? Part of the answer has been given: it produced

a ministry of incredible steadfastness—a ministry, to use

Calvin’s own description of faithful ministers of the Word,

of “invincible constancy.”13 But that is only half the answer.

It was a ministry of unrelenting exposition of the Word of

God. The constancy had a focus: the exposition of the Word

of God, to which we turn in the next chapter.

13In a sermon on Job 33:1–7, Calvin calls preachers to constancy: “When men so forget themselves that they cannot subject themselves to Him Who has created and fashioned

them, it behooves us to have an invincible constancy, and to reckon that we shall have enmity and displeasure when we do our duty; yet nevertheless let us go through it without bending.” John Calvin, Sermons from Job by John Calvin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1952), 245.

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C h a P t e r s e v e n

ConstanCy in

eXPoUndinG the word

of God

Calvin had seen the majesty of God in the Scriptures.

This persuaded him that the Scriptures were the very

Word of God. He said, “We owe to the Scripture the same

reverence which we owe to God, because it has proceeded

from Him alone, and has nothing of man mixed with it.”1

His own experience had taught him that “the highest proof

of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in

person speaks in it.”2 These truths led to an inevitable con-

clusion for Calvin. Since the Scriptures are the very voice

of God, and since they are therefore self-authenticating in

revealing the majesty of God, and since the majesty and

glory of God are the reason for all existence, it follows that

Calvin’s life would be marked by “invincible constancy” in

the exposition of Scripture.

1Quoted in J. I. Packer, “Calvin the Theologian,” in Honouring the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer, vol. 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), 162.

Calvin does not mean that there is not human agency in the inspiration of Scripture.

His many commentaries bear witness to his careful attention to the human dimension

of Scripture. He means that nothing human is mixed with God’s intention in Scripture

that would corrupt it.

2John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.7.4.

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46 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

Everything an Exposition of Scripture

He wrote tracts; he wrote the great Institutes; he wrote

commentaries (on all the New Testament books except

Revelation, plus the Old Testaments books of the Pentateuch,

Joshua, Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah); he gave biblical lec-

tures (many of which were published as essentially com-

mentaries); and he preached ten sermons every two weeks.

But all of it was exposition of Scripture. John Dillenberger

says, “[Calvin] assumed that his whole theological labor

was the exposition of Scripture.”3 In his last will and testa-

ment, Calvin said, “I have endeavored, both in my sermons

and also in my writings and commentaries, to preach the

Word purely and chastely, and faithfully to interpret His

sacred Scriptures.”4

Everything was exposition of Scripture. This was

the ministry unleashed by seeing the majesty of God in

Scripture. The Scriptures were absolutely central because

they were absolutely the Word of God and had as their self-

authenticating theme the majesty and glory of God. But of

all these labors of exposition, preaching was supreme.

Emile Doumergue, the foremost biographer of John Calvin

with his six-volume life of Calvin, said as he stood in the

pulpit of John Calvin on the four hundredth anniversary

of Calvin’s birth, “That is the Calvin who seems to me to

be the real and authentic Calvin, the one who explains

all the others: Calvin the preacher of Geneva, molding

3John Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 14.

4Ibid., 35ff.

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Constancy in Expounding the Word of God 47

by his words the spirit of the Reformed of the sixteenth

century.”5

Calvin’s preaching was of one kind from beginning to

end: he preached steadily through book after book of the

Bible. He never wavered from this approach to preaching

for almost twenty-five years of ministry in St. Peter’s church

of Geneva—with the exception of a few high festivals and

special occasions.6 “On Sunday he took always the New

Testament, except for a few Psalms on Sunday afternoons.

During the week . . . it was always the Old Testament.”7

The records show fewer than half a dozen exceptions for

the sake of the Christian year. He almost entirely ignored

Christmas and Easter in the selection of his text.8

The Scope of Calvin’s Preaching

To give you some idea of the scope of Calvin’s pulpit,

he began his series on the book of Acts on August 25,

1549, and ended it in March of 1554. After Acts, he

went on to the epistles to the Thessalonians (46 sermons),

Corinthians (186 sermons), the Pastoral Epistles (86 ser-

mons), Galatians (43 sermons), Ephesians (48 sermons)—

until May of 1558. Then there is a gap when he was ill. In

5Quoted by Harold Dekker, in “Introduction,” Sermons from Job by John Calvin, xii.

6Calvin’s consistency is stunning at almost every level. J. I. Packer observes, “His consistency is remarkable. All that he wrote was homogeneous. He never changed his mind

on any doctrinal issue. . . . ‘Though he is of the number of those who grow old learning every day,’ wrote Beza toward the end of Calvin’s life, ‘from the very beginning up to now, in all his many laborious writings, he has never set before the church one dogma about which he needed to alter his mind and part company with himself.’” J. I. Packer,

“Calvin the Theologian,” 144.

7T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 82.

8John Calvin, The Deity of Christ and Other Sermons, trans. Leroy Nixon (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950), 8.

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48 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

the spring of 1559, he began the harmony of the Gospels

and was not finished when he died in May 1564. On the

weekdays during that season, he preached 159 sermons on

Job, 200 on Deuteronomy, 353 on Isaiah, 123 on Genesis,

and so on.9

One of the clearest illustrations that this was a self-

conscious choice on Calvin’s part was the fact that on Easter

Day of 1538, after preaching, he left the pulpit of St. Peter’s,

banished by the city council. He returned in September of

1541—over three years later—and picked up the exposition

in the next verse.10

Why this remarkable commitment to the centrality of

sequential expository preaching? Three reasons are just as

valid today as they were in the sixteenth century.

First, Calvin believed that the Word of God was a lamp

that had been taken away from the churches. He said in his

personal testimony, “Thy word, which ought to have shone

on all thy people like a lamp, was taken away, or at least

suppressed as to us. . . . And now, O Lord, what remains to

a wretch like me, but . . . earnestly to supplicate thee not to

judge according to [my] deserts that fearful abandonment

of thy word from which, in thy wondrous goodness thou

hast at last delivered me.”11 Calvin reckoned that the con-

tinuous exposition of books of the Bible was the best way to

overcome the “fearful abandonment of [God’s] Word.”

9For these statistics see Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 83, and W. de Greef, The Writings of John Calvin: An Introductory Guide, trans. Lyle D. Bierma (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1993), 111–12.

10T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Preaching (Louisville: Westminster, 1992), 60.

11Dillenberger, John Calvin, 115.

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Constancy in Expounding the Word of God 49

Second, T. H. L. Parker says that Calvin had a horror of

those who preached their own ideas in the pulpit. He said,

“When we enter the pulpit, it is not so that we may bring

our own dreams and fancies with us.”12 He believed that by

expounding the Scriptures as a whole, he would be forced

to deal with all that God wanted to say, not just what he

might want to say.

Third—and this brings us full circle to the beginning,

where Calvin saw the majesty of God in his Word— he

believed with all his heart that the Word of God was indeed

the Word of God, and that all of it was inspired and prof-

itable and radiant with the light of the glory of God. He

challenged pastors of his day and ours:

Let the pastors boldly dare all things by the word of

God. . . . Let them constrain all the power, glory, and excel-

lence of the world to give place to and to obey the divine

majesty of this word. Let them enjoin everyone by it, from

the highest to the lowest. Let them edify the body of Christ.

Let them devastate Satan’s reign. Let them pasture the

sheep, kill the wolves, instruct and exhort the rebellious. Let

them bind and loose thunder and lightning, if necessary, but

let them do all according to the word of God.13

The Divine Majesty of the Word

The key phrase here is “the divine majesty of this word.”

This was always the root issue for Calvin. How might he

best show forth for all of Geneva and all of Europe and all

12Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 83.

13John Calvin, Sermons on the Epistle to the Ephesians (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1973), xii; emphasis added.

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50 Calvin and the MaJesty of God

of history the majesty of God? He answered with a life of

continuous expository preaching. There would be no bet-

ter way to manifest the full range of the glories of God and

the majesty of his being than to spread out the full range

of God’s Word in the context of the pastoral ministry of

shepherding care.

This is why preaching remains a central event in the

life of the church even five hundred years after the print-

ing press and the arrival of radio and TV and computers.

God’s Word is mainly about the majesty of God and the

glory of God. That is the main issue in ministry. And even

though the glory and majesty of God in his Word can be

known in the still, small voice of whispered counsel by the

bedside of a dying saint, there is something in it that cries

out for expository exultation. This is why preaching will

never die. And radical, pervasive God-centeredness will

always create a hunger for preaching in God’s people. If

God is “I am who I am”—the great, absolute, sovereign,

mysterious, all-glorious God of majesty whom Calvin saw

in Scripture—there will always be preaching, because the

more this God is known and the more this God is central,

the more we will feel that he must not just be analyzed and

explained but acclaimed and heralded and magnified with

expository exultation.

The flaming legacy of sovereign joy,14 spread through

centuries of fervent saints, is ignited anew in every genera-

14The phrase sovereign joy is unfolded in John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006).

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Constancy in Expounding the Word of God 51

tion by glowing, God-besotted preaching—the preaching

of the “divine majesty of this word.” May God grant every

preacher of the Word such a “taste” of sovereign joy in God

and such an “intense desire” for him that expository exulta-

tion would flame up in every church.

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a P P e n d i X

Calvin’s barbariC world:

the Case of

MiChael servetUs

The Europe that John Calvin was born into on July 10,

1509, was a harsh and immoral and even barbaric

place to live. There was no sewer system or piped water

supply or central heating or refrigeration or antibiotics or

penicillin or aspirin or surgery for appendicitis or Novocain

(for tooth extraction) or electric lights (for studying at

night) or water heaters or washers or dryers or stoves or

ballpoint pens or typewriters or computers or motors of any

kind. Life was harsh.

Barbaric Times

Not only were the times harsh and immoral, they were

often barbaric. This is important to see, because Calvin

did not escape the influence of his times. He described in

a letter the cruelty common in Geneva: “A conspiracy of

men and women has lately been discovered who, for the

space of three years, had [intentionally] spread the plague

through the city, by what mischievous device I know not.”

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54 Appendix

The upshot of this was that fifteen women were burned at

the stake. “Some men,” he said, “have even been punished

more severely; some have committed suicide in prison, and

while twenty-five are still kept prisoners, the conspirators

do not cease . . . to smear the door-locks of the dwelling-

houses with their poisonous ointment.”1

This sort of punishment loomed on the horizon not just

for criminals, but for all the Reformers. Calvin was driven

out of his homeland of France under threat of death. For

the next twenty years, he agonized over the martyrs there

and corresponded with many of them. In 1552, five young

pastors, who had been trained in Switzerland, returned as

missionaries to France and were arrested. Calvin wrote to

them through their trial. They were condemned to death

by burning. “We pray,” he wrote, “that [God] would glo-

rify Himself more and more by your constancy, and that

He may, by the comfort of His Spirit, sweeten and endear

all that is bitter to the flesh, and so absorb your spirits in

Himself, that in contemplating that heavenly crown, you

may be ready without regret to leave all that belongs to this

world.”2

In a letter to Melanchthon on November 19, 1558,

Calvin wrote that war was imminent in the region and that

enemy troops could reach Geneva within half-an-hour.

“Whence you may conclude,” he said, “that we have not

only exile to fear, but that all the most cruel varieties of

death are impending over us, for in the cause of religion

1Henry F. Henderson, Calvin in His Letters (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 63.

2T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 120.

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Appendix 55

they will set no bounds to their barbarity.”3 So Calvin lived

in a time of incredible cruelty and almost daily vulnerability

to death by agonizing disease or agonizing torture—and

that without any hope of pain-relievers. It was a harsh and

immoral and barbaric time.

The Best and Worst of Calvin

The atmosphere of the time gave rise to the greatest and the

worst achievement of Calvin. The greatest was the writing

of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, and the worst

was his joining in the condemnation of the heretic Michael

Servetus to burn at the stake in Geneva.

The Institutes was first published in March 1536, when

Calvin was twenty-six years old. It went through five edi-

tions and enlargements until it reached its present form in

the 1559 edition. If this is all Calvin had written—and not

forty-eight volumes of other works—it would have estab-

lished him as the foremost theologian of the Reformation.

But it did not arise for merely academic reasons. Here’s why

he wrote it, soon after he had been driven from France and

was safely hiding in Basel:

But lo! whilst I lay hidden at Basel, and known only to few

people, many faithful and holy persons were burnt alive in

France. . . . It appeared to me, that unless I opposed them

[the perpetrators] to the utmost of my ability, my silence

could not be vindicated from the charge of cowardice and

treachery. This was the consideration which induced me to

3John Dillenberger, John Calvin, Selections from His Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 71.

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56 Appendix

publish my Institutes of the Christian Religion. . . . It was

published with no other design than that men might know

what was the faith held by those whom I saw basely and

wickedly defamed.4

So it was the very barbarity of the times against the faithful

in France that stirred up Calvin to write the first edition of

the Institutes.

But it was this same barbarity from which he could not

disentangle himself. Michael Servetus was a Spaniard, a

medical doctor, a lawyer, and a theologian. His doctrine of

the Trinity was unorthodox—so much so as to shock both

Catholic and Protestant in his day. In 1553, he published his

views and was arrested by the Catholics in France. But, alas,

he escaped to Geneva. He was arrested there, and Calvin

argued the case against him. He was sentenced to death.

Calvin called for a swift execution, but he was burned at

the stake on October 27, 1553.5

This has tarnished Calvin’s name so severely that many

cannot give his teaching a hearing. But it is not clear that most

of us, given that milieu, would not have gone along under the

circumstances.6 Melanchthon was the gentle, soft-spoken

associate of Martin Luther whom Calvin had met and loved.

He wrote to Calvin on the Servetus affair, “I am wholly of

your opinion and declare also that your magistrates acted

quite justly in condemning the blasphemer to death.”7 Calvin

4Ibid., 27.

5Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 102.

6Parker describes some of those circumstances in Portrait of Calvin, 102.

7Henderson, Calvin in His Letters, 196.

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Appendix 57

never held civil office in Geneva8 but exerted all his influence

as a pastor. Yet, in this execution, his hands are as stained with

Servetus’s blood as David’s were with Uriah’s.9

Under the Banner of God’s Mercy

The Servetus incident makes the confessions of Calvin near

the end of his life all the more important. On April 25,

1564, a month before his death, he called the magistrates

of the city to his room and spoke these words:

With my whole soul I embrace the mercy which [God] has

exercised towards me through Jesus Christ, atoning for my

8Benjamin Warfield, Calvin and Augustine (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), 16.

9J. I. Packer tries to set the Servetus affair in the light of its time. “The anti-Trinitarian campaigner Servetus was burned at Geneva in 1553, and this is often seen as a blot on Calvin’s reputation. But weigh these facts:

1) The belief that denial of the Trinity and/or Incarnation should be viewed as a

capital crime in a Christian state was part of Calvin’s and Geneva’s medieval inheritance; Calvin did not invent it.

2) Anti-Trinitarian heretics were burned in other places besides Geneva in Calvin’s

time, and indeed later—two in England, for instance, as late as 1612.

3) The Roman Inquisition had already set a price on Servetus’ head.

4) The decision to burn Servetus as a heretic was taken not only by Calvin person-

ally but by Geneva’s Little Council of twenty-five, acting on unanimous advice from the pastors of several neighboring Reformed churches whom they had consulted.

5) Calvin, whose role in Servetus’ trial had been that of expert witness managing the prosecution, wanted Servetus not to die but to recant, and spent hours with him during and after the trial seeking to change his views.

6) When Servetus was sentenced to be burned alive, Calvin asked for beheading as

a less painful alternative, but his request was denied.

7) The chief Reformers outside Geneva, including Bucer and the gentle Melanchthon,

fully approved the execution.

The burning should thus be seen as the fault of a culture and an age rather than

of one particular child of that culture and age. Calvin, for the record, showed more

pastoral concern for Servetus than anyone else connected with the episode. As regards the rights and wrongs of what was done, the root question concerns the propriety of

political paternalism in Christianity (that is, whether the Christian state, as distinct from the Christian church, should outlaw heresy or tolerate it), and it was Calvin’s insistence that God alone is Lord of the conscience that was to begin displacing the medieval by the modern mind-set on this question soon after Servetus’s death. The preceding is from Packer’s essay “John Calvin and Reformed Europe,” reprinted in Honouring the People of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer, vol. 4 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), 18–19.

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58 Appendix

sins with the merits of his death and passion, that in this

way he might satisfy for all my crimes and faults, and blot

them from his remembrance. . . . I confess I have failed

innumerable times to execute my office properly, and had

not He, of His boundless goodness, assisted me, all that

zeal had been fleeting and vain. . . . For all these reasons, I

testify and declare that I trust to no other security for my

salvation than this, and this only, viz., that as God is the

Father of mercy, he will show himself such a Father to me,

who acknowledge myself to be a miserable sinner.10

T. H. L. Parker wrote that Calvin “should never have

fought the battle of faith with the world’s weapons.”11

Whether Calvin came to that conclusion before he died, we

don’t know. But what we know is that Calvin knew himself

“a miserable sinner” whose only hope in view of “all [his]

crimes” was the mercy of God and the blood of Jesus.

So the times were harsh and immoral and barbaric and

had a contaminating effect on everyone, just as we are all

contaminated today by the evils of our time. Their blind

spots and evils may be different from ours. And it may be

that the very things they saw clearly are the things we are

blind to. It would be foolhardy to say that we would have

never done what they did under their circumstances, and

thus draw the conclusion that they have nothing to teach

us. In fact, what we probably need to say is that some of our

evils are such that we are blind to them, just as they were

blind to many of theirs, and the virtues they manifested in

10Dillenberger, John Calvin, 35; emphasis added.

11Parker, Portrait of Calvin, 103.

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Appendix 59

those times are the very ones that we probably need in ours.

There was in the life and ministry of John Calvin a grand

God-centeredness, Bible-allegiance, and iron constancy.

Under the banner of God’s mercy to miserable sinners, we

would do well to listen and learn.

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Document Outline

- Contents

- Foreword

- Chapter 1: God Is Who He Is

- Chapter 2: A Passion for the Glory of God in Christ

- Chapter 3: Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God

- Chapter 4: Ministry Made by the Majesty of the Word

- Chapter 5: Marriage to Idelette

- Chapter 6: Constant Trials

- Chapter 7: Constancy in Expounding the Word of God

- Appendix: Calvin’s Barbaric World: The Case of Michael Servetus

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: God Is Who He Is

Chapter 2: A Passion for the Glory of God in Christ

Chapter 3: Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God

Chapter 4: Ministry Made by the Majesty of the Word

Chapter 5: Marriage to Idelette

Chapter 6: Constant Trials

Chapter 7: Constancy in Expounding the Word of God

Appendix: Calvin’s Barbaric World: The Case of Michael Servetus