Bruce Gordon on the multiple lives of Calvin’s ‘Institutes’

“When the Protestant Reformer John Calvin published his book Institutes of the Christian Religion in the 1500s, he couldn’t have anticipated the incredibly different purposes his book would come to serve long after he died and was buried somewhere in an unmarked grave by his own request.”

So writes the Maxwell Institute in its introduction to its recent podcast interview with Bruce Gordon, the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School and author, most recently, of John Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion”: A Biography (Princeton University Press 2016).

Gordon, in his 2009 Calvin biography, argues that the man himself was significantly different from the image conjured by Calvinism today. In his new Maxwell interview, Gordon elaborates on Calvin and what Gordon terms the “multiple lives” of Calvin’s masterwork in the centuries since its publication. 

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Listen to Gordon’s Maxwell interview  here or read the transcript here.

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Here are more articles about Gordon’s scholarly and teaching endeavors:

Bruce Gordon: “We have to be humble in our approach to the past,” Yale Divinity School interview, September 2015

“John Calvin’s ‘Institutes of the Christian Religion,’” Reading Religion (American Academy of Religion), August 30, 2016

“Calvin, Calvinism, and the Institutes,” Patheos.com, May 16, 2015

“Calvin vs. Calvinism,” Washington Free Beacon, June 12, 2016

“Why John Calvin is still relevant,” MacLean’s, June 25, 2016

“A Journey through Western Christianity,” video preview of Prof. Gordon’s upcoming online course, August 25, 2016

August 15, 2016