Saturday, 27 December 2008

John Calvin at 500

2009 will see the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin (and the 450th anniversary of the final edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion), and the world – or at least a small portion of it – will, for a while, go Calvin mad.

The Calvin 500 Blog is already up and running, including material by Calvin as well as on him.

The Calvin-friendly gentlemen over at Reformation21 will be ‘Blogging the Institutes’ during 2009, and have invited others to e-mail them (at r21@alliancenet.org) for a reading schedule.

The Foundation for Reformed Theology also provides a suggested reading schedule based on John Calvin, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. from the 1559 Latin edition by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., in ‘Library of Christian Classics’ (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), cited by book, chapter, and section (including volume and page numbers in parentheses).

A version of the Institutes can be read online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, where a large (614pp., 27.2MB) pdf version can also be downloaded.

I read a lot of the Institutes at college for a module on Calvin, but have never read them all the way through, and may use the anniversary (and the attention that Calvin will receive more generally) as a reason to do so – though, if it comes to it, reading Scripture all the way through will win out over reading the Institutes all the way through… even for me.

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