Written by Patrick J. O’Banion |
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Works like Calvin’s masterpiece don’t belong to a small subset of trained pastors and theologians, much less to the secular academy. They belong to the church. And reading them ties the church of this century to all of those that have come before.

In his recent book Breaking Bread with the Dead [read TGC’s review], Alan Jacobs offers advice for achieving a “more tranquil mind”—a thing devoutly to be wished. At the heart of the book is the following insight: the more substantially we’re in touch with the past, the more effectively we’ll avoid being “trapped” in the “social structure and life patterns” all around us (14).
Like C. S. Lewis, who famously urged us to “keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds” by reading old books, Jacobs argues that “you can’t understand the place and time you’re in by immersion” unless you regularly step away from it (23). For Christians, this means attentively reading (and rereading) the great works of the church’s history.
But, let’s face it, reading Augustine’s City of God, Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Milton’s Paradise Lost can be hard work. Helpful resources exist for potential readers, of course. You’re more likely to hang in there with the great, big books if those who have gone before us can reduce the friction (as it were) by telling you what to expect.
In that spirit, I’d like to point out some landmarks from a recent reading of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), one of those great works of the Christian past and a daunting tome to encounter. Think of the following as lessons learned—things I wish someone had told me before I took the plunge.
1. Calvin had a vast knowledge of Scripture.
Calvin often used the Institutes to address issues that didn’t fit into his sermons or commentaries. Scholars suggest interacting with all three genres—Institutes, commentaries, and sermons—to get the full picture. No doubt they’re correct, but Calvin’s interaction with the Bible bleeds over from his exegetical labors into the Institutes. Watch for his wide and deep knowledge of Scripture. Seeing it operate in a work of this scale is marvelous to behold.
2. Calvin engaged church history deeply.
Calvin understood that being a Christian meant being connected to all Christians who had gone before. In addition to theologians of his own day, Calvin read (widely) among the church fathers and (not quite as widely) among the medievals.
This allowed him to bring the debates of the past into conversation with the controversies of the present and, by considering how the church and her theologians had previously engaged those issues, to move his readers through confusion toward conclusions.
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Written by Patrick J. O’Banion |
Monday, September 20, 2021
Vermigli was an influential theologian, preacher, and abbot in Roman Catholic Italy. He came to embrace Protestant theology in the 1530s and began a reformation in the northern Italian city of Lucca. In 1542, finding himself too well known, Vermigli evaded arrest and inquisitorial trial by fleeing to the relative safety of the Protestant north. He spent the rest of his life as a trailblazing Reformed theologian and churchman who profoundly impacted three regions of Protestant Europe: the Holy Roman Empire (from Strasbourg), the Swiss Confederacy (from Zurich), and the Kingdom of England (from Oxford).

How we understand the church’s missionary past has everything to do with how we will proclaim Christ to the nations right now. If the great theologians and practitioners of our ecclesiastical tradition—whoever they are—taught that our Lord had commissioned his church to share the gospel with all people, then we who live downstream of them are likely to embrace that mission. The reverse, of course, is also true.
The Missiological Legacy of the Reformation
One of the stories told about the Reformation in missiological circles is that the reformers weren’t interested in seeing the gospel go to the ends of the earth. Those who make this claim propose a variety of reasons for the failure. Perhaps the Reformers’ horizons were limited to Christian Europe or they were too busy arguing amongst themselves about minute points of doctrine to worry about the millions perishing abroad. Maybe their exegetical method caused them to limit the Great Commission to the apostolic era. Or maybe something inherent in Reformation theology works at cross purposes with global evangelism.
Whatever the rationale alleged, one important source of the claim that Protestants were missionary failures is the founding father of academic missiology, Gustav Warneck (1834-1910), who took the Reformers to task. Warneck concluded that Luther’s “view of the missionary task of the church was essentially defective” and Calvin’s comments on the Great Commission (Mt. 28:18-20) had “not a word to say of a continuous missionary obligation of the church,” but instead used the text as a launching pad for an attack (yet another!) upon the papacy. [1]  Even in its second edition, Ruth Tucker’s popular biographical history of missions implicitly follows Warneck’s interpretation of the Reformation, and a recent missiology textbook claims that “the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation did not produce any missionaries.”
To state the obvious, the theological vision of Protestants draws heavily upon the reformers. If Warneck is right that they didn’t have time for missions, will those of us who locate our confessional roots in the Reformation find that they don’t nourish and support an effort to take the gospel to the nations?
Now, in their kinder moments, Warneck and his many followers concede that Luther, Calvin, and their fellows simply couldn’t do everything. They had their hands full with reforming the church and avoiding arrest and execution. To expect them also to have focused their limited energy on reaching the ends of the earth, which admittedly felt much further away in the sixteenth century than they do today, is presumptuous and a bit unfair.
But as more and more scholars reexamine the data, the story of a Reformation that wholly ignored mission is being replaced by one in which the “Reformation as a whole was mission,” to borrow historian Scott Hendrix’s lapidary phrase. [3]
Vermigli and the Psalms: Reformation Meets Great Commission
By way of example, consider Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), for whom the notion that the Reformers didn’t care about the global spread of the gospel would have come as something of a surprise. In his earlier days, Vermigli was an influential theologian, preacher, and abbot in Roman Catholic Italy. He came to embrace Protestant theology in the 1530s and began a reformation in the northern Italian city of Lucca. In 1542, finding himself too well known, Vermigli evaded arrest and inquisitorial trial by fleeing to the relative safety of the Protestant north. He spent the rest of his life as a trailblazing Reformed theologian and churchman who profoundly impacted three regions of Protestant Europe: the Holy Roman Empire (from Strasbourg), the Swiss Confederacy (from Zurich), and the Kingdom of England (from Oxford).
One of Vermigli’s most popular works is his Sacred Prayers from the Psalms of David, which provide a unique window into his theological heart.
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