Happy Birthday, John Calvin
July 10, 2008 10:48 pm
Props to Seita for alerting me to John Calvin’s 499th birthday today. I would hate to have missed it: we are heavily indebted to this great theologian. I’m getting to know him through his massive book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, and here is a quote I like:
“For who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.” Institutes, I.xiii
Get it? Here’s my paraphrase:
“Even a dummy knows that God is so great that unless he uses babytalk to get down to our level, we’ll never understand anything about him.”
Bonus: the dude has a great goatee.
UPDATE: Don’t miss John Piper’s comments on the occasion.
One Response to “Happy Birthday, John Calvin”
What I really appreciate about reading what John Calvin has written is his obvious humility. Although arguably one of the smartest men ever to walk the earth, he is so quick to proclaim his complete inability to understand anything about God that is not in the Bible.
And Steve, based on our progress in Calvin’s Institutes, I think that we should plan on reading the last pages in it on his 500th birthday next year.
Care to comment?