Institutes of the Christian Religion
Institutes of the Christian Religion (Latin: Institutio Christianae Religionis) is John Calvin's seminal work of systematic theology.
Regarded as one of the most influential works of Protestant theology,[1] it was published in Latin in 1536 at the same time as Henry VIII of England's Dissolution of the Monasteries and in his native French language in 1541.
Around 1533 he became involved in religious controversies and converted to Protestantism, a new Christian reform movement which was persecuted by the Catholic Church in France, forcing him to go into hiding.
[3] His Catholic opponents sought to tie him and his associates (known as Huguenots in France) to groups of radical Anabaptists, some of which had been put down by persecution.
He decided to adapt the work he had been writing to the purpose of defending Protestants suffering from persecution from false accusations that they were espousing radical and heretical doctrines.
The work, written in Latin, was published in Basel in March 1536 with a preface addressed to King Francis I of France, entreating him to give the Protestants a hearing rather than continue to persecute them.
The title of Desiderius Erasmus's Institutio principis Christiani (1516), with which Calvin would have been familiar, is usually translated The Education of a Christian Prince.
[10] The full title of this edition may be translated The Institute of the Christian Religion, Containing almost the Whole Sum of Piety and Whatever It is Necessary to Know in the Doctrine of Salvation.
[11] In the 1539 edition, the title is Institutio Christianae Religionis, possibly to emphasize the fact that this is a new, considerably expanded work.
As this letter shows, Institutes was composed, or at least completed, to meet a present necessity, to correct an aspersion on Calvin's fellow reformers.
"My reasons for publishing the Institutes," Calvin wrote in 1557, "were first that I might vindicate from unjust affront my brethren whose death was precious in the sight of the Lord, and next that some sorrow and anxiety should move foreign people, since the same sufferings threaten many."
"The hinges on which our controversy turns," says Calvin in his letter to the king, "are that the Church may exist without any apparent form" and that its marks are "pure preaching of the word of God and rightful administration of the sacraments."
Above all, the book concerns the knowledge of God the Creator, but "as it is in the creation of man that the divine perfections are best displayed", there is also an examination of what can be known about mankind.
And finally, the fourth section speaks of the Christian church, and how it is to live out the truths of God and Scriptures, particularly through the sacraments.
This section also describes the functions and ministries of the church, how civil government relates to religious matters, and includes a lengthy discussion of the deficiencies of the papacy.
They follow the expansion and development of the Latin editions, but they are not strictly translations, instead being adapted for use by a lay readership, though retaining the same doctrine.
First, from Calvin's 1560 French edition, Institution, III, 7: Nous ne sommes point nôtres: que donc notre raison et volonté ne dominent point en nos conseils et en ce que nous avons à faire.
The Institutes overshadowed the earlier Protestant theologies such as Melanchthon's Loci Communes and Zwingli's Commentary on the True and False Religion.
According to historian Philip Schaff, it is a classic of theology at the level of Origen's On First Principles, Augustine's The City of God, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, and Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith.
