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John Calvin and his passion for the Majesty of GodWeight of gloryJOHN CALVIN From the helpful pen of John Piper we have a brief and accessible ‘primer’ on the life and spiritual heartbeat of John Calvin. Piper’s offering is aimed at promoting the Majesty of God, by displaying in a most readable little book the God-saturated life, mind, and heart of the Reformer here in the 500th year of John Calvin’s birth. For many of us, John Calvin’s life and theology have been little appreciated and even less explored. Many have thought his thinking inaccessible, or have halted our discoveries of the man and his radiant heart at the first protest of our unlearned colleagues: ‘Calvin! Wasn’t he the one who was into predestination?’ What Piper highlights is that Calvin was into God-centredness. The book serves to whet the appetite not only, or so much, for the study of John Calvin and Reformed doctrine, as for the pursuit of the Majesty of our great Lord and God in our lives, and in our theology and ministry today. Of great value to the reader is the book’s simplicity of both style and format. The comparatively unread layman will find here a volume he can understand. Perhaps his first try at Calvin. The well-read theologian, perhaps weary from trawling through great tomes, will find here a volume he can feed his mind and soul upon — perhaps with his feet up and his heart open. Chapters are brief and each can be read and digested in a sitting: ‘God is who He is’; ‘A Passion for the Glory of God in Christ’; ‘Mastered by the Majesty and Word of God’; ‘Ministry made by the Majesty of the Word of God’; ‘Marriage to Idelette’; ‘Constant Trials’; ‘Constancy in Expounding the Word of God’; and an Appendix: ‘Calvin’s Barbaric World: The Case of Michael Servetus’. It is my hope that this book will serve to reignite a needed interest in not only the man, John Calvin, but, far more importantly, an interest and heart desire for such God-saturated ministry and living by us in our day. The book has encouraged me to seek God for a freshness in my life with, and ministry of, Jesus Christ. That is, I am sure, what it was intended to do. John Gillespie, © Evangelicals Now - June 2009 |