"Voltaire", 1778, by Jean-Antoine Houdon
This post is part of my year long study of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. To facilitate this course of study, I am following along with Princeton University's "A Year with the Institutes", which also includes an audio reading of the text. Also blogging yearlong on this text is the reformation21 site.
Calvin's Institutes - 1.5.4-5
John 18:37 - "...For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
In these two sections, John Calvin takes a sidebar to castigate those "monster minds" who would suppress the name of God: "But herein appears the shameful ingratitude of men. Though they have in their own persons a factory where innumerable operations of God are carried on, and a magazine stored with treasures of inestimable value—instead of bursting forth in his praise, as they are bound to do, they, on the contrary, are the more inflated and swelled with pride. They feel how wonderfully God is working in them, and their own experience tells them of the vast variety of gifts which they owe to his liberality. Whether they will or not, they cannot but know that these are proofs of his Godhead, and yet they inwardly suppress them. They have no occasion to go farther than themselves, provided they do not, by appropriating as their own that which has been given them from heaven, put out the light intended to exhibit God clearly to their minds. At this day, however, the earth sustains on her bosom many monster minds—minds which are not afraid to employ the seed of Deity deposited in human nature as a means of suppressing the name of God. Can any thing be more detestable than this madness in man, who, finding God a hundred times both in his body and his soul, makes his excellence in this respect a pretext for denying that there is a God?"
Calvin would have likely put Voltaire in the camp of "monster minds". A great intellect, but a Deist (belief in a god, but one who does not intervene), and specifically a pantheist (god is all - all is god). Voltaire also held that the Bible was metaphor invented my man.
Our world is full of brilliant, and persuasive men/women who, while full of themselves, spew philosophies in direct contrast to the word of God. We must be on our guard, and familiarized ourselves with God's holy word.
Romans 1:25 - "because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen."
For me, and any true Christian, truth lies solely in Jesus, the Christ.
