Calvin @ 500
Preacher for the Ages

July 10, 2009, will be the 500th birthday of John Calvin. No one has had more influence on the church in the last 500 years. And, it is not waning. Did you notice that the 3rd of the 10 ideas Time says is changing the world today is the “new Calvinism”? John Calvin was one interested in education. He entered the university at 14 to study theology. He received a classical education that included Latin, logic and philosophy. He studied law at the University of Orléans and Greek at the University of Bourges. He was a humanist scholar his first book being a secular treatment of Seneca the Younger’s De Clementia. Before he became the pastor at St. Pierre’s in Geneva he became Professor of Sacred Scripture at the university there. He believed in education and the necessity of an educated pastorate.

He was a prolific writer and Biblical commentator. His Institutes still stand today as the most concise and informative explanation of the Biblical basis of the Reformed faith. Yet, by far his greatest influence was as a preacher of the Word of God. He was an expositional preacher moving verse by verse through books of the Bible. He preached without notes or manuscript and as a result we only have around 1500 of the over 4000 sermons he preached at Geneva and Strasbourg. He did not believe that preaching was a human invention but an accommodation by God to sinful man who could not hear directly the voice of God Himself without their destruction.

By preaching in an expositional manner, there could be no escaping difficult doctrines or avoiding difficult passages in God’s Word. Thus, the hearers received the whole counsel of God. The leading Calvin biographer T.H.L. Parker says this about Calvin’s methodology:

Sunday after Sunday, day after day, Calvin climbed up the steps into the pulpit. There he patiently led his congregation verse by verse through book after book of the Bible…In his mature years, Calvin preached on a NT book on Sunday mornings and afternoons [although for a period on the Psalms in the afternoon] and on an OT book on weekday mornings.

Through his thorough Biblical preaching and the Institutes, Calvin became the architect of Reformation theology and practice.

Calvin became the preacher for the ages. His preaching was fashioned by belief in the authority of Scripture. He truly believed Scripture was verbum Dei, the Word of God. In the Institutes he penned:

Their [ministers] whole task is limited to the ministry of God’s Word; their whole wisdom to the knowledge of His Word; their whole eloquence, to its proclamation.

Reformed scholar J.H. Merle D’Aubigné said this about Calvin’s relation of preaching to God’s Word:

In Calvin’s view, everything that had not for its foundation the Word of God was futile and ephemeral boast; and the man who did not lean on Scripture ought to b deprived of his title of honor.

Parker says that Calvin never entered the pulpit with his own dreams or fancies to relay to the congregation. Instead:

For Calvin the message of Scripture is sovereign, sovereign over the congregation and sovereign over the preacher. His humility is shown by submitting to this authority.

What a refreshing departure from what passes as preaching today. This is a far cry from meeting the “felt needs” of the pampered, unchallenged, self-centered congregations of today. The story is told that when Calvin returned from his exile from Geneva three years later, he picked up preaching on the next verse after that last verses he preached on three years earlier! He did not return with “lessons learned” from his interregnum, for himself or the Genevans. No, he returned to preaching God’s Word, verse by verse, precept by precept, book by book of Scripture.

Preaching, above all other things, was Calvin’s priority. For Calvin, it was the centerpiece of worship and a mark of the true church of God. Calvin lead to the removing of the communion table from the center to the pulpit and the Bible thereon being central to corporate worship. Calvin had a very high view of preaching based on three premises: a high view of God; a high view of God’s Word and an accurate view of man. Calvin believed:

Preaching is the living voice of God in His Church [Commentary Pentateuch of Moses]; God begets and multiplies his church only by means of His Word…It is by the preaching of the grace of God alone that the church is kept from perishing [Commentary The Psalms] and the subject to be taught was the Word of God…best done by the steady and methodical exposition, book after book [Commentary Ephesians].

As you contemplate Calvin’s influence in the world and church, which will be discussed at length over the next months, keep in mind his view of preaching God’s Word as what he believed his primary call in his life was. He believed he was God’s oracle, proclaiming His Word to be applied by the Holy Spirit to the lives of hearers to effect change in their minds, hearts and behavior. May there be raised up a new generation of Bible expositors in the contemporary church who proclaim the whole counsel of God that changes lives through the application of God’s Word by and through the Holy Spirit. That would be a fitting tribute to John Calvin, the Preacher for the Ages.