PREFACE TO OLIVÉTAN'S NEW TESTAMENT

Here is a remarkable preface written by John Calvin just one year after his conversion: PREFACE TO OLIVÉTAN'S NEW TESTAMENT. It is basically an overview history of redemption, or overview of the Bible and of salvation and just a general overview perspective on the faith). You can see that he learned quickly and obviously had some good teachers available to him.

The preface is worth reading because it is the kind of 'seeing of the whole' that enables one to get understanding of theology. The Reformers had this vision of the faith. Obviously there were teachers around that were able to present this perspective if Calvin was able to have it so quickly (though he'd been studying theology since a child, but it wasn't the 'pure theology', to use his term). It's actually a crime that there are so many teachers and so many books and no one is giving this kind of overview of the entire subject as Calvin gives in this preface. I started seeing it on my own, but the effort and time it takes when you are doing it on your own is way more than the average person can put in. Calvin, at least in the beginning of the preface, is basically describing covenant theology.

By the way: the more I read of Calvin's actual writings the more he impresses one with Work understanding. I can actually even see what he describes of his own experience fighting doctrinal battles in Geneva in what one has to do regarding elucidating and defending Work ideas, practices, and goals. The same forces at work, obviously different scale in Calvin's case, it goes without saying... His AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH FROM THE DEDICATION OF THE COMMENTARY ON THE PSALMS goes into all that.

Calvin was known as the 'theologian of the Holy Spirit'. I didn't know that until recently, but I've been seeing it recently in his own writings. In the general introduction to this recent book I'm reading - Calvin: Commentaries (ISBN: 0664241603) - which is reproduced in full in those links above (just click on 'contents' in any of those two pages linked above), which is very well-written and insightful, you can see that Calvin was a person who saw the whole of the faith and was not an average Christian. There are descriptions of his experience in that general intro that remind one of what a person who takes the Work to the limit experiences. "Calvin knew no antidote to defeat and ruin except to raise our minds to heaven. He spoke with obvious passion against attachment to this world..." This little snippet doesn't convey the full meaning of the passage, but you can get a sense reading the entire thing that Calvin was knocked down pretty good in life, and knew of all those experiences one has when truly separated out from the world. There is even a passage in the general intro where there is reproduced some of Calvin's writings where he's talking about how we inevitably get pretty beat up and knocked down here in the flesh in the world, but one has to not allow it to color one's understanding of heaven and glory, a point I've found myself hitting on.

Because Calvin understood that the real power was in and with the Word and the Spirit he had a similar guidance of the Spirit that one has when they are able to understand the practical level of the faith... I've come to these understandings on my own, and really only learned Calvinism from secondary sources, but the more I now read his actual writings the more I can see why I discerned the 'pure theology' in Calvinism, and also why one can discern the necessary foundation of the Work ideas, practices, and goals in the pure doctrine of the Bible.