Theology of John Calvin
John Calvin developed his theology in his biblical commentaries as well as his sermons and treatises, but the most concise expression of his views is found in his magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion.
[1] The various editions of that work span nearly his entire career as a reformer, and the successive revisions of the book show that his theology changed very little from his youth to his death.
The second edition, published in 1539, was three times as long because he added chapters on subjects that appear in Melanchthon's Loci Communes.
"[9] The second book of the Institutes includes several essays on the original sin and the fall of man, which directly refer to Augustine, who developed these doctrines.
But before Calvin expounded on this doctrine, he described the special situation of the Jews who lived during the time of the Old Testament.
[19] According to Alister McGrath, Calvin provided a solution to the Reformation problem of how justification relates to sanctification.
"[23] The doctrine of predestination "does not stand at the beginning of the dogmatic system as it does in Zwingli or Beza", but, according to Fahlbusch, it "does tend to burst through the soteriological-Christological framework.
Chapter 21 of Book III of the Institutes is called "Of the eternal election, by which God has predestinated some to salvation, and others to destruction".
"[26] The ministers of the Church are described from a passage from Ephesians, and they consisted of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and doctors.
Although Calvin respected the work of the ecumenical councils, he considered them to be subject to God's Word found in scripture.
Rather than holding a purely symbolic view, Calvin noted that with the participation of the Holy Spirit, faith was nourished and strengthened by the sacrament.
"[28] Keith Mathison coined the word "suprasubstantiation" (in distinction to transubstantiation or consubstantiation) to describe Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper.
Robert L. Dabney, for example, called it “not only incomprehensible but impossible.”[33] Calvin had a positive view of Mary, but rejected the Roman Catholic veneration of her.
Pierre Caroli, a Protestant minister in Lausanne accused Calvin, as well as Viret and Farel, of Arianism in 1536.
[34] In 1551 Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, a physician in Geneva, attacked Calvin's doctrine of predestination and accused him of making God the author of sin.
[35] In the following year, Joachim Westphal, a Gnesio-Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, condemned Calvin and Zwingli as heretics in denying the eucharistic doctrine of the union of Christ's body with the elements.
Calvin's Defensio sanae et orthodoxae doctrinae de sacramentis (A Defense of the Sober and Orthodox Doctrine of the Sacrament) was his response in 1555.
Following the execution of Servetus, a close associate of Calvin, Sebastian Castellio, broke with him on the issue of the treatment of heretics.
In Castellio's Treatise on Heretics (1554), he argued for a focus on Christ's moral teachings in place of the vanity of theology,[37] and he afterward developed a theory of tolerance based on biblical principles.
He stated, "all the children of the promise, reborn of God, who have obeyed the commands by faith working through love, have belonged to the New Covenant since the world began.
In the doctrine of predestination; in his simple, eschatologically grounded distinction between an immanent and a transcendent eternal work of salvation, resting on Christology and the sacraments; and in his emphasis upon the work of the Holy Spirit in producing the obedience of faith in the regenerate (the tertius usus legis, or so-called third use of the law), he elaborated the orthodoxy that would have a lasting impact on Reformed theology.
