Portrait of Calvin - T. H. L. Parker

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PORTRAIT OF CALVIN
Portrait of Calvin
Copyright © 1954 by T. H. L. Parker
Published by Desiring God
P. O. Box 2901
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.
Cover design and illustration by: Cory Godbey and Matt Mantooth at Portland Studios, Inc.
First Published and Printed, 1954, in Great Britain
by S.C.M Press, Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Parts of the original paragraphing have been altered to facilitate the book’s easier reading ifty years
later. Editorial additions by Desiring God have been bracketed.
Portrait of Calvin
by
T.H.L. PARKER
to the two Maries
MARy Angwin,
March 1, 1936
and
MARy PARKER,
June 14, 1940
Love’s not Time’s fool
foreword
An Appreciation for Calvin and His
Portrait
JoHn PiPER
Desiring God is publishing T. H. L Parker’s
Portrait of Calvin
out of theo-
logically and historically informed nostalgia—and a sense of mission. The
mission is to make much of the majesty of God. And the nostalgia is that
this book was my irst serious exposure to Calvin. I paid ifty cents for the
book in a used rack. That was four decades ago.
Parker’s
Portrait
was irst published in 1954. But it’s not the kind of
book that goes out of date, because it’s only trying to be current with the
sixteenth century. If you get it right, it stays right. When I saw the 500th
anniversary of Calvin’s birth coming (July 10, 2009), I thought that maybe
others would enjoy the same introduction to Calvin I enjoyed.
It may sound strange, but the main function Calvin has played in
my life has been inspiration, not formation. My theology, which is Calvin-
istic, was formed along other lines, mainly in exegetical classes on Paul,
then shaped by the depths and heights of John Owen and Jonathan Ed-
wards. Doing exegesis forced me to take the text seriously. Owen wove the
textual threads into rich tapestries. Edwards hung them on banners and
rode them into the heavens.
Only later came a serious engagement with John Calvin. The
brightness and magnitude of his vision of God was magnetic. Different
from Edwards, Calvin is everywhere exegetical. Edwards is tethered to the
text, but his cord is at times very long. Calvin did what Edwards never
did: He wrote commentaries and preached hundreds of sermons covering
whole books of the Bible.
So for me, Calvin became a great inspiration as a preacher. Unlike
so many today, he really believed that preaching and exegesis and coherent
theology go together. “Such preaching as this,” Parker says, “pursued so
regularly and applied so stringently to the people, was the central explosive
point of the Church’s work in Geneva” (95).
I am eager for people to know Calvin not because he was without
laws, or because he was the most inluential theologian of the last 500
years (which he was), or because he shaped Western culture (which he did),
but because he took the Bible so seriously, and because what he saw on
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