Between 1550 and his death in 1564, John Calvin’s output of published words was never less than a 100,000 per year.
And supreme among all of these published words were those of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which led the German Lutheran Philip Melanchthon to dub Calvin ‘the theologian’.
Editions of Calvin’s Institutes
The first edition of the Institutes had been published in Basle in 1536. Three years later Calvin brought out a second edition, printed in Strasbourg, that was three times as large as the first. Further editions appeared in 1543 and 1550 and then, finally, the even larger fifth edition was issued in 1559 in Geneva.
In 1541, Calvin translated the 1539 edition of the Institutes from Latin into French and then supervised three later French translations, the last one appearing in 1560. These French translations of Calvin’s Institutes helped to shape the French language for generations, not unlike the influence of the King James Version on the English language.
It is noteworthy that the year after the first French edition, the French Government formally banned the book in the summer of 1542, and ordered all booksellers to surrender their copies within three days. In 1559, after the final edition of the Institutes appeared, Pope Paul IV placed it on the papal Index of condemned works – it remained there until the Index was discarded in 1966.
The final Latin edition of the Institutes is approximately five times the length of the first edition. The significant growth of this key work betrays an essential characteristic of Calvin the theologian: teachability. But it would be a mistake to suppose that one can grasp the totality of Calvin’s theology by simply absorbing the 1559 edition of the Institutes. His commentaries, sermons, treatises, catechisms and correspondence reveal other aspects and nuances of his theology that must be taken into account in any reflection on his theology as a whole.
The title of the Institutes
The English translation of the title of Calvin’s work is The Institutes of the Christian Religion or simply Calvin’s Institutes. This title, however, may not be the best translation from the original Latin, Institutio Christianae Religionis.
The Latin word religio in Calvin’s day did not have its modern definition as ‘religion’. The word religio comes from the Latin verb religare, ‘to bind’, and used in a theological sense would be a reference to the bond that unites humans to God, as exemplified in the late medieval period by the monastic vow. The phrase Christianae religionis would then indicate the ‘Christian bond’ to God, or what came to be called Christian piety or even the Christian life.
The Latin word institutio can mean ‘arrangement, custom, introduction, or education’. A more accurate English title might then be ‘An Introduction to Christian Piety’. But the current English title is quite well established and unlikely to be replaced.
The purpose of the Institutes
This reflection on the meaning of the title is important to understand what Calvin is doing in the book. He is not presenting a merely intellectual discussion of the doctrines of true Christianity. He is not even beginning with a first principle like the sovereignty of God and building a theological edifice upon this founding principle. Rather, as one author, Jean-Daniel Benoit, has put it: ‘the Institutes is … a book of piety more than a dogmatic treatise’.
And yet the work is not simply a discussion of Christian spirituality. Rather, it describes how a person, brought face to face with the living God in the Scriptures, is to think about this God and himself/herself. It is experiential theology at its very best.
