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 Theological Seminary's "A Year with the Institutes", which also includes an audio reading of the text.
Calvin's Institutes: 1.14.1-2
A transition, in the first book of Calvin's treatise, is now upon us. Calvin now intends to shift from the Creator, to the creation.
John Calvin is going to spend a good deal of this chapter giving instruction on angels, and demons.
First off, however, he intends to point out that not only is God clearly evident in the creation, but God specially tells us how he accomplished the creation, so that we won't stray in our thinking:
"Hence God was pleased that a history of the creation should exist—a
history on which the faith of the Church might lean without seeking any
other God than Him whom Moses sets forth as the Creator and Architect
of the world. First, in that history, the period of time is marked so
as to enable the faithful to ascend by an unbroken succession of
years to the first origin of their race and of all things. This
knowledge is of the highest use not only as an antidote to the
monstrous fables which anciently prevailed both in Egypt and the other
regions of the world, but also as a means of giving a clearer
manifestation of the eternity of God as contrasted with the birth of
creation, and thereby inspiring us with higher admiration."
Furthermore Calvin wants us to understand that this history is given also as a restraint to our wondering minds:
"In their cupidity they affect to go beyond the world, as if the ample
circumference of heaven and
earth did not contain objects numerous and resplendent enough to absorb
all our senses; as if, in the period of six thousand years, God had not
furnished facts enough to exercise our minds in ceaseless meditation.
Therefore, let us willingly remain hedged in by those boundaries within
which God has been pleased to confine our persons, and, as it were,
enclose our minds, so as to prevent them from losing themselves by
wandering unrestrained."
Did you also notice that Calvin dropped in his bidding of a "young earth"?
Calvin reminds us of the lament of Isaiah 40:21-22a: "Do you not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,..."
So, God is, God is one essence, with three persons, God created the world, did it in six days, and the world is somewhere around 6,000 - 10,000 years old.
That previous statement destroys most of the world's "monstrous fiction" as it pertains to God.
Got it? Agree? Do you not know? Do you not hear?
