The Institutes (1559)
Institutio Christianae Religionis, the final edition (Geneva, 1559)
John Calvin, after twenty-three years of revising it
The same book he published at twenty-six, rewritten five times over twenty-three years until it was a different one.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 372
- Stat total
- 368
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Four books, eighty chapters, arranged on the shape of the Apostles’ Creed. There is more of it than of anything else you can carry.
It answers Rome, the radicals, the Anabaptists, Servetus and Osiander in turn, and it does not raise its voice once.
Twenty-three years of a careful man rereading his own argument for holes. Almost nothing has been left where it can be got at.
Long, Latin, and demanding. It goes everywhere in the end and it never goes anywhere fast.
Cited for this book
Five editions across twenty-three years, ending with four books and eighty chapters laid out on the frame of the Apostles’ Creed: God the Creator, God the Redeemer, the way we receive Christ’s grace, and the outward means — the church. Book IV is where the Reformation says what a church actually is, and it does not answer the question by producing a list of bishops.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Some Sense of Deity | Natural Theology | Argument | 80 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 44 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 45 | A Seed of Religion | Anthropology | Argument | 76 | 100% | 15 |
| 48 | Imputed Righteousness | Soteriology | Argument | 95 | 100% | 10 |
| 49 | The Secret Testimony | Presupposition | Argument | 88 | 100% | 10 |
| 52 | Where the Word Is Preached | Ecclesiology | Argument | 93 | 100% | 5 |
| 54 | Doctrine Before Miracles | Rationality | Argument | 88 | 100% | 5 |
| 56 | Six Hundred Students | Ethics | Argument | 84 | 100% | 10 |
Read it: Where the Word Is Preached
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in Latin.
“That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead…”
Calvin, Institutes I.3.1 (trans. Beveridge, 1845), public domain, elided.
“But though experience testifies that a seed of religion is divinely sown in all, scarcely one in a hundred is found who cherishes it in his heart, and not one in whom it grows to maturity so far is it from yielding fruit in its season.”
Calvin, Institutes I.4.1 (trans. Beveridge, 1845), public domain.
“…our conviction of the truth of Scripture must be derived from a higher source than human conjectures, Judgments, or reasons; namely, the secret testimony of the Spirit.”
Calvin, Institutes I.7.4 (trans. Beveridge, 1845), public domain, elided.
“Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail.”
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.1.9 (trans. Beveridge, 1845), public domain.
Five editions across twenty-three years, ending with four books and eighty chapters laid out on the frame of the Apostles’ Creed. Calvin said in the last preface that he had never been satisfied until it was arranged as it now stood.
The sense of Deity is in everyone; the seed of religion grows to maturity in almost no one. Calvin holds both halves at once, and it is the second half that makes the first one useless on its own.
Book IV, chapter 1, section 9 is where the Reformation says what a church is. It does not answer by producing a list of bishops. The Word preached, the sacraments rightly administered — that is the mark, and nothing else is.