One of the most fascinating things about Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is the history of its slow accretion of content from a simple four part booklet to a voluminous tome. One aspect of the Institutes that remained the same through these evolutions, however, was the introductory dedication to King Francis I. The irony of this dedication is that Francis was the instigator of bloody persecution of Calvin’s own religious compatriots, a persecution that resulted among other things in Calvin’s own life of exile from France.

I plan to blog through the Institutes this year, in honor of Calvin’s 500th. But the work is so extensive, so complicated in the influences that wrought it and the effects it wrought upon posterity, that I need a compass to find my way through the wilderness of its pages. I have chosen to make the circumstances of the book’s original composition and also the dedication to Francis my compass.

What do I mean?

I mean that the reflections I post here and the strains of text that I will sniff out will relate to a thesis I have about the emphases of Calvin’s theology. Every theology, as a man-made body of reflection upon God as he reveals himself through Christ and infiltrates the smallest corners of our lives, must be flavored by the context of the theologian. This puts to rest the fantasy of a final or complete theology, and raises the process of theology to its appropriate place as an intellectual expression of piety. The piety of John Calvin, as we have it in the Institutes, is flavored above all by a dual polemic: first, against the Roman church and, second, against the political power that aided the Roman church in opposing the Protestant revolution. The key to Calvin’s rhetoric (in the sense of the broad purposes for which he marshaled particular ideas in particular ways) is in many ways summed up, I think, in the couplet that heads this post.

The Institutes originated as a plea, a plea for the cause of his fellow religious revolutionaries. The Institutes continued as a textbook, until Calvin could claim the following about its final form:

“… I believe I have so embraced the sum of religion in all its parts, and have arranged it in such an order that if anyone rightly grasps it, it will not be difficult for him to determine what he ought especially to seek in Scripture, and to what end he ought to relate its contents.”

In other words, Calvin believed that one of the chief functions of the Institutes in their final form would be to introduce readers to a framework that would help them better turn to and understand Scripture.

But even as the Institutes became pedagogical in this way, it remained a plea. The specter of subjugation, by the illusions of heresy or the arguments of power, remains in the background of Calvin’s text. Although one of the chiefly noted aspects of his political views, as detailed in the final section of the Institutes, is a commitment to patience under governance, in other ways the book is one gigantic protest against the ideologies of the Roman church and its political allies. Calvin argues that true power belongs to God alone, and that this knowledge enables those who love and serve him and whom he loves to persevere as citizens of the kingdom of God.

This compass, the dual nature of the Institutes as plea and pedagogy, will guide my reflections as I work my way through the book, touching down to blog about passages that are landmarks on the path that this compass marks out.