The Calvinist International
In Q/A 25 of the Geneva Catechism, commenting on the Apostles’ Creed, John Calvin strikes the note (for the children!) of the majority of the Christian tradition, given great emphasis by, e.g., Gregory of Nazianzus: God’s essence is unknowable to us and incomprehensible. We therefore know him from his works and his effects–from the ways […]
Plato, in the Phaedo, had Socrates claim that philosophy was “practice for dying and death.” It was a sentiment that was to exercise great influence down through the centuries, all the way to Heidegger’s “Being-toward-death” and beyond. (That last part works better if you say it in the voice of Buzz Lightyear.) John Calvin agreed […]
In the prefatory address of the Institutes of the Christian Religion to King Francis I, appended to the work from its first appearance in 1536 (though it undergoes expansion over time), John Calvin gives a full-throated defense of the evangelical cause in France in the tradition of Justin Martyr’s First Apology. In it, he attempts, in the […]
Continuing an exercise begun the other day… Calvin refers to the Roman poets Vergil and Lucretius exactly once in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in the same passage of 1.5.5, “The Knowledge of God Conspicuous in the Creation, and Continual Government of the World.” The passage begins with a criticism of Aristotle, to which we […]