July 16, 2024 Show with Dr. Tim Harmon on “Calvin’s Institutes: An In-Depth Analysis of Its Structure” (Part 1 of 2)

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Introduction of Dr. Tim Harmon and Calvin’s Institutes

It's one of those rare occasions on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio where we do a two-day program back to back, and that is because I believe the theme is so deep it requires a two-day program. We have joining us for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Tim Harmon, the Vice President of Academics and Chief Administrative Officer, Provost and Fellow of Theology at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and we are addressing today for two days in a row, Calvin's Institutes, an in-depth analysis of its structure, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Tim Harmon.

Well, Chris, great to be here with you.

And it's a joy to me as well, and I'm sure a lot of people who are listening. Well, before we go into our theme, there's a couple of things we have to do. First of all, let our listeners know something about New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.

Yeah, New St. Andrews College is a classical Christian college in North Idaho. Our approach to education is one that draws upon the classical liberal arts and humanities. The college started in 1994. Originally, it involves students meeting in professors' homes and has grown over time.

We now have enrollment of 350 students, and the college just continues to grow each year. We offer one undergraduate degree, a degree in liberal arts and culture. So all our undergraduate students, we don't have majors, but really what we're trying to do in that program is to equip students to be generalists, to succeed in whatever vocation God has for them by giving them the skills that they need to be leaders and shapers of culture.

And then we have currently three graduate programs as well.

Well, if anybody wants more details, you can go to their website at newst .andrewscollege .nsa .edu. NSA for New St. Andrews dot edu. And God willing, we will be repeating that toward the end of the program.

Well, the other thing we have to take care of before entering into this very deep topic of Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion is to get your personal testimony of salvation. As I mentioned to you before the broadcast, whenever we have a first-time guest on Iron Sharp and Zion Radio, we always have that guest provide for our listeners a summary of their salvation testimony that would include the religious atmosphere, if any, in which they were raised, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And so I'd love to hear a summary of your story.

Tim Harmon’s Testimony and Call to Ministry

Yeah, well, Chris, I was raised in a Christian home in the Seattle, Washington area. My dad was a pastor, at least early on in my life. My mother had, before getting married, been a missionary to Japan.

And so I was raised in a Christian home. And yet, as I entered into young adulthood, I found more and more that my chief desire was not to do the will of God, but rather to follow my own desires. And I ended up being a fairly rebellious teenager.

And I kind of look back upon that now with a lot of regret and heartache. But that was the fact at the time. And so when I graduated from high school, I followed a path that just led me further and further away from how my parents had raised me.

And this continued into my early 30s. But the further I continued in that direction, the more dissatisfied I became with my life. I was married at the time. My wife and I had two young boys. We didn't attend church.

Perhaps in a nominal sense, we would have thought of ourselves as Christian, but we weren't following God's word. We weren't part of any Christian fellowship. But one week, my wife had been raised in a Christian home as well.

One week, my wife's father asked if she could come along with him to hear a well-known pastor, Alistair Begg, who was a visiting speaker in a nearby church. My wife agreed to attend. And when she came home from that, she asked me, would you be willing to attend this church with me?

And for some reason, I agreed. I think at the time, my thinking was, you know, I've been raised in the church. It might be a good thing for my kids to go to church. And so I attended for about a year with really no change in my heart, no change in my life at all.

But one week after about a year, and in fact, I remember the date was October 31st. It was Halloween. God brought the word down upon me of all that I'd been hearing in sitting under the preaching of his word.

And I reached out to a leader in the church. She came over to my house, and we prayed together. I repented of my sins, felt godly sorrow for my sins, and I confessed my faith in Christ. I was subsequently baptized, and really everything in our lives was just transformed.

I had new appetites, new desires. One of the things that I was very excited about was reading my Bible. And as I continued to read my Bible, this generated a desire to attend seminary because I wanted to understand my Bible better.

I didn't have in mind vocational ministry. I wanted to go to seminary to understand the Bible better, and I eventually did. And while there, I got a lot of encouragement by my professors to continue in academics.

So I ended up doing two master's degrees and then eventually pursued a PhD. And then for a while, worked in the Portland area. I worked both in instructional and administrative roles at Western Seminary in Portland.

I pastored a church for a number of years. And then our family, which had grown to seven, three boys and two girls, we ended up moving to Moscow, Idaho because I'd been hired to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in theology at St. Andrews College.

And this is now my seventh year at NSA. I currently continue to while, as you mentioned, serving as the college's chief academic officer. And when I look back on this, it's just continually amazing for me to see God's providential hand at work.

And I can see how he was arranging situations, circumstances, the people that he brought into my life to direct me. And I'm so thankful that he allowed me to see the futility of trying to live on my own terms, and that he's directed my life in the way that he has.

Well, praise God. Can you tell us when your introduction to Reformed Theology came about, and approximately how long after that did you actually come to embrace it and fall in love with.

It? So the church that we ended up attending after my wife asked me, would you go to church with me, was a church that was reformed soteriologically. So it didn't embrace every tenant of historic Reformed Theology, but there was a Reformed leaning.

And so that's what began my interest in Reformed Theology. It continued into seminary. I really wasn't kind of convinced of where I landed. It really took those years in seminary for me to sort through my thinking and come to a solid conviction that the Reformed faith was the one that I found to.

Be most biblically compelling. Well, praise God for that. And if anybody has any questions of your own, our email address, by the way, is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state of residence, and country of residence. If you live outside the USA, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

An example of that might be you are becoming more and more intrigued by what has become known as Reformed Theology, Calvinism, the doctrines of grace, the doctrines of sovereign grace, the doctrines of free grace, whatever the label you have heard it being called.

And perhaps the church where you are a member right now is adamantly opposed to these teachings. And you are becoming more and more inclined to believe them, but you don't want to identify yourself publicly at this point because of the ramifications that may result in you making that news public, which obviously eventually you have to do.

But we understand we're not going to force it upon you to be public about it right now. So if you want to be anonymous, that's fine. And there may be other reasons, of course, that compel you to remain anonymous.

So we will grant you that request. But if it's a general question about history, about the scriptures in regard to the institutes of the Christian religion, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

Calvin’s Institutes: Origins, Purpose, and Historical Setting

Well, if you could, before you get into the structure, which is what your requested focus is, the structure of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, otherwise nicknamed Calvin's Institutes, please tell us something about the very documents themselves.

From what I recall, Calvin began writing the Institutes of the Christian Religion when he fled persecution from the Roman Catholic Church and was actually in hiding and began to pen these institutes. Perhaps I am sloppy in my memory of history, but you can tell us more about that.

Yeah, that's correct. And would you actually mind if I backed up a little bit?

Oh, sure.

And kind of briefly articulated the story up to that point. And I want to, even before doing that, if it's all right, kind of comment on something that you mentioned. There's a lot of opposition today to Calvin and to Calvinism.

And so Calvin is a fascinating figure because he really is a man of contradiction. So he speaks of himself as being a rather unsociable and shy person. He says that, you know, what I love is retirement, meaning not having a job, but being left to myself, able to study the scriptures.

He says he's always inclined to peace. He says that he aims to live in private without being known. So what we have here is a man who isn't seeking the spotlight.

That's when Pharaoh called curses upon him for wanting to remain that way.

That's right. And so it's just interesting, I mean, one contradiction that he becomes this figure where, you know, other than Luther, no Protestants more well known today. I mean, another thing that most people don't know about Calvin is that he is a mediating figure.

He's always trying to serve as a peacemaker, and he's trying to do all that he can in his power to avoid schisms within the church. So with Martin Luther, he tries to foster dialogue between Protestants and Catholics looking for a resolution.

He mediates between Luther and Zwingli on the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. His theology, some have spoken of it as in his theology, desiring to find the middle way, navigating between the extremes of Rome on the hand and the radical reformers on the other.

And then you just look, you know, the first edition of his Institute is addressed to the King of France, and I'll talk about that a little more in a second, but he's trying to ease tensions within France between the King and French Protestants.

And so I just think it's so interesting that in his day, he's a mediating figure and yet people look at him today as a polarizing one. So that just came to mind as you were pointing that out. And so I think a lot of the opposition toward Calvin is just a misunderstanding, a caricature of Calvin is not true.

It's also interesting, I think, that he produces one of Christian history's most sophisticated and learned articulations of the Christian faith, and yet here's a man who never received any formal theological training.

He, of course, has a vast knowledge of the scriptures and of church history, but he's self-taught. And a big part of his motive over time in teaching himself is he wants to be able to help the ordinary Christian read the Bible better.

And as we'll talk about, that's one of the main motivations for the writing of the Institute is the Institute is to be a volume that's alongside scripture, not over top of scripture, but as an aid to the ordinary Christian as they're reading through the Bible.

Now, would you think it's an overstatement to say that John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion is the most important Christian document ever written in history.

Outside of the God-breathed scriptures? I think that I'd struggle with saying most important, because what I think is true is that God is active in every era, and even in times where there are many who are turning from God, there's always a remnant that remains.

God is always active in leading his people into the truth, and so I think we have signposts along the way throughout church history of the fact that there is continuity. And one of Calvin's biggest arguments in the Institute is, I'm not saying anything new.

I am simply restating what Christians have always believed in language that is for the people of today. And so in terms of at a critical moment in church history, restating what Christians throughout time, the fundamentals of what they have believed, I think it probably for our era is the most important, because we today kind of buy into, or many, I would say today, kind of buy into the idea that Roman Catholicism is the one, kind of the Christian tradition, you might say, that claims for itself kind of the inheritance of the patristics and the medievals.

And I think that the Institute, perhaps better than any work that I'm aware of, refutes that claim. He demonstrates that the Protestants are the ones holding the main line of Christian thought throughout church history.

And the Institutes of Christian Religion, just to give our listeners some context with a timeline, these even predate the Book of Concord, which comes about in existence about 35 years later, and of course over a century prior to the Three Forms of Unity, or less than a century, but almost a century before the Three Forms of Unity and also the Westminster Standards.

Correct. And I do think the Institutes represent the mature and definitive articulation of Protestant theology, and Protestant theology comes on the scene in the early modern era, and I would say, in one way or another, we're all still modern.

So for our day and age, it does represent the definitive articulation of what I think is the main line of Christian thought throughout church history. Well, we're going to go to our first commercial.

Break, and once again, if anybody wants to join us with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least city and state, and country of residence.

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So go to RoyalDiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. And we're now back with Dr. Tim Harmon, and we are discussing Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. If you have any question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

And just to recap, we've already brought to light that the Institutes of Christian Religion first were published in the 16th century, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1536, and this came into being while John Calvin was in exile and hiding from the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church.

And anything else you want to bring up to recap and then move on to your next point would be great. Yeah, so just to kind of.

Briefly give a bit of the history of how the Institute comes about. Calvin's born in 1509. His mother dies young. His father was an attorney and a clerk and bishop, and his father sends him to a local cathedral school, hoping he'd become a priest.

And he then goes to the University of Paris, which I think is very significant. I mean, this is the same place that a couple hundred years before, or a few hundred years, we have figures such as Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, and there are many kind of scholarly treatments of how much did Calvin know of these figures.

But we do know that he did study at the University of Paris, and he received a humanist education. And humanism is a movement oftentimes characterized with the slogan ad fontes, back to the sources. And so the humanists are very much interested in recovering ancient Greek and Latin literature, and that leads, kind of that humanist impulse to go back to the sources, it leads for people like Luther and Calvin, an interest in not just paying attention to what others have said about the Bible, but actually going back to the source itself and reading the Bible.

He then is encouraged by his father to study law rather than theology, which he does at two leading colleges in France. He returns to Paris for about a year. And while he's there, he completes a commentary on Seneca's on clemency, which I think is significant, because as a young lawyer, Calvin is promoting kind of a middle way between tyranny and revolt.

And so it kind of informs the introduction to the Institutes that Calvin addresses the Institutes to Francis. And so I think we see some seeds of that kind of impulse, again, to find a way, if at all possible, to bring about disparate parties.

Further during this time, he undergoes an evangelical conversion. Now, I think one of the things that's interesting about Calvin versus Luther is that Calvin is very private about his personal life. So we don't have many details about his conversion story, but he does talk about going through an evangelical conversion.

And so he converts to the Protestant faith, but he's soon forced to leave Paris. He has this friend, Nicholas Copp, who gives an address at the University of Paris where he's citing Luther. And that leads the king to call for the arrest of all Lutherans.

And because Calvin's closely associated with Copp, he flees to a small city in southwest France. And I think one thing that's very significant for understanding Calvin's purpose in the Institutes is that it's just after that, that a pair of placards takes place in France, which is where you have Protestant protesters putting up posters in public places around Paris.

And what this leads to is a disposition on the part of King Francis of hostility and non-tolerance toward the Protestants. And so there's great persecution of Calvin's Frenchmen, Calvin's people in France, who have adopted the Protestant position.

And so it's just after that that Calvin completes the first edition. He's on the run, and there is some scholarly dispute as to exactly where he completes that. But what we do know is that it's published, as you said, in 1536.

Protestant Writings Before and After Calvin

Now, other than the ancient creeds of the Christian faith, was there anything even close to comparable that was in existence by those that were protesting or departing from, either voluntarily or otherwise, from the Roman Catholic Church?

Was there any kind of documents, confessions, creeds that predated the Institutes, other than the ancient.

Ones? In terms of Protestants? Yes. So the original form of Calvin's Institute, he's basically just copying kind of what Luther was doing in writing catechism, because his original purpose in writing the Institutes, the purpose he had in his mind was, I want to provide a catechism like Luther did to help the ordinary Christian to better understand the Bible.

And Luther,.

From what I understand, although you will probably not find too many Lutheran pastors or scholars today admitting this, but from what I understand, even though Luther was the elder of the Reformers and launched his branch of the Reformation prior to Calvin, they were still contemporaries in that their ministries overlapped and they were aware of each other.

But I have heard all my life as a Reformed Christian that Luther's teachings resembled Calvin's far more than the teachings of Lutherans today, especially in regard to anthropology, the nature of man, and the sovereignty of God involving unconditional election.

Yeah, I think that's right. Some scholars will refer to Calvin as kind of Luther's chief disciple, in that he is the one who is more consistently and faithfully carrying forward Luther's thought.

Yes, and I have heard—I don't know if you would concur with this—but I have heard that it was Melanchthon who took the direction of Lutheranism into a different direction of trying to be more accommodating to the Church of Rome after Luther's death, which is why we have such a disparity today between modern Lutherans and Calvinists.

Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think another part is that you don't have real systematic treatments of either Reformed or Lutheran theology until the 17th century. And I think one of the things that's taking place in the 17th century is they're taking, for example, things that Luther says, but he doesn't really explain exactly what he means and trying to provide a logic.

And in doing so, that takes them in a direction that's far afield from Reformed thinking, from where Calvin was at. Now, I don't think that necessarily means just because they're trying to explain the logic of Luther that they successfully do so.

And so, you know, one of the more well-known doctrines would be Luther's doctrine of the Lord's Supper. He wants to say dogmatically that when Jesus says, this is my body, this is my blood, that is in fact the case.

And it's really in the 17th century Lutheran thought that the common Lutheran explanation today that you would find is articulated. And it's an explanation that requires an account of Christology that diverges from that of Calvin, and I think an account of Christology that diverges from the main line of Christian thought.

Throughout Christian history. In what way? In other words, trying to make Christ's body omnipresent or something? What would be the contradiction?

Correct. So, in order for Christ's material body, his body and his blood, to be in with and under the sacraments, the logic goes Christ at his ascension needs to become bodily omnipresent. But Lutherans know when Jesus is walking around the Sea of Galilee, he's not bodily omnipresent.

So how do we account for Christ at one point not being bodily omnipresent later on after the ascension becoming bodily omnipresent? And the answer is canonic theology of self-emptying. And I don't need to get into all the technicalities necessarily, but the idea is that at incarnation, Christ empties himself of certain divine attributes, but then he takes them back up.

At his ascension. Okay, well, unless you have something more to say as a preface to the structure of Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion.

If you don't mind, I would like to talk a little bit about the purpose. Yeah, of course. Because it's very difficult to understand when you don't understand why it was written. And I've already alluded to the purpose, and it's a two-fold purpose.

So again, Calvin's original purpose, I want to provide a catechism for Protestants. I want to provide them with a, initially it was relatively brief, six chapters, I want to provide them with a manual of doctrine that helps them to better read their Bible.

But after the affair of placards, what develops is it takes on a second purpose, wherein it, which is an apologetic purpose, to make the argument that Protestants are not heretics, they are not invaders, their theology in no way deviates from the main line of Christian thought.

Right? We are actually recovering the main line of Christian thought contra the deviations and innovations that have crept into the Romish church. Right? So we are the standard bearers. And so that becomes the second argument.

And hence, that explains Calvin's address in the first, there are five different editions. In the first through the fifth edition, he keeps this letter to King Francis at the beginning of the work. And that, in that document, Calvin makes this claim that Protestants are the standard bearers.

They are carrying forward the main line of Christian truth. And so those two purposes are intertwined throughout the Institute. On the one hand, it does serve as a handbook to be used in the reading of Scripture.

He really does want it to be something that can be used for the ordinary Christians to help in their understanding of Scripture. That matures somewhat as in subsequent editions where he also wants it to be used in training ministers.

So you have that purpose. Again, this other purpose, this apologetic purpose, helps to explain why on almost every page, Calvin is citing recognized church authorities throughout Christian history, whether in the Patriotic or Medieval era.

And what Calvin is saying is that, I claim the authorities as.

Being in support of what Protestants teach. Go ahead. Well, I was just going to quickly say, so everything that I've learned about church history over the years is that the Roman Catholic Church, even today, is absolutely wrong that the patristic evidence strongly supports them.

I believe that it much more strongly supports the Reformation and post-Reformation Protestantism. Not that Protestants can say the church fathers were Protestant, but they certainly weren't Roman Catholic.

And therefore, the quote, the very famous quote by the 19th century apostate into Rome, John Henry Newman, who said, to be steeped in history is to cease to be Protestant. I find the reverse to be true.

I would fully agree. And that's the argument that Calvin, I think it's exactly the argument.