#John Calvin

[andthentheywilleatthestars]

You go back in time to kill John Calvin and just as you're about to make the final blow he smiles. "Oh, so you're punishing me for something I haven't done yet? Something that's, let us say, predetermined? Kill me if you want but I've already won." You pause just long enough for him to tackle you and grab your gun. God fucking damn it, not again

[reformedfaith]

My heart I give you, Lord, eagerly and entirely.

John Calvin

[eternal-echoes]

“The ideas of Saint John of Damascus and his supporters later permitted us the luxury of the beautiful Madonnas of Raphael, the Pietà of Michelangelo, and countless other works of passion and genius, not to mention the great cathedral façades (which often depicted Christ, the apostles, and the saints) of the High Middle Ages. This favorable view of representational religious art cannot simply be taken for granted as something natural and inevitable; Islam, after all, has never abandoned its insistence on aniconic (non-image) art. Rehabilitating the iconoclast heresy in the sixteenth century, Protestants went on a rampage of smashing statues, altarpieces, stained-glass windows, and other great treasures of Western art. John Calvin, arguably the most significant Protestant thinker of all, favored visually barren settings for his worship services, and even prohibited the use of musical instruments. Nothing could have been further removed from the Catholic Church's respect for the natural world, inspired by the Incarnation, and its belief that human beings, composed of body (matter) and soul, can be aided in their ascent to God with the aid of material things.”

- Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D., “Art, Architecture, and the Church,” How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

[dailyhistoryposts]

On This Day In History

May 27th, 1564: French theologian and head of the Calvinists, John Calvin (Jean Cauvin) dies. So many followers came to see his body as it was laid in state that the religious authorities were scared of people forming a saints’ cult, so he was hurriedly buried.

[victusinveritas]

[progressofthepilgrim]

"Faith is like an empty, open hand stretched out toward God, with nothing to offer and everything to receive."

John Calvin

[churchblogmatics-blog]

A DEFINITIVE but nonexhaustive list of theologians/Christian thinkers and associated brat status

Athanasius - literally impossible to imagine Christianity without his contributions, unquestionably brat

Augustine - smarter than all hell, the confessions is essential reading, his corpus is a succinct compendium of theological orthodoxy, you know he's brat

Anselm of Canterbury - satisfaction theory is actually more plausible to me than penal substitution, the ontological argument is pure lunacy but is the kind of magical thinking that I'm sad to see disappear once people started systematizing "logic" and "reason" after the enlightenment. Brat.

Thomas Aquinas - I'm kind of more inclined to platonism than aristotlianism but he's brat for this excerpt of the summa alone: “If some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterward of a man.” In this case, the offspring would be fully human, “so that the person born is not the child of a demon but of a man” (ST I:51:3 ad 6)." Like c'mon that's so funny but also probably saved some childrens' lives if their parents didn't want to 'fess up to having an affair.

Thomas Á Kempis - I wish I could cultivate the humility of spirit he writes about in The Imitation of Christ! This guy knows what's up! Brat!

Martin Luther - Do you know how antisemitic you have to be in order to be remembered as antisemitic even if graded on a curve relative to his cultural context? Even his principled refusal to lean into double predestination despite it's logical coherence & consubstantiative view of the sacrament of the Eucharist won't save him from being pronounced decidedly un-brat.

John Calvin - way better than his devotees, more legitimate human compassionate distress at double predestination than the vastly inferior ulrich zwingli - brat.

Ulrich Zwingli - goes without saying - un-brat.

John Woolman - went hard in the paint to fight the transatlantic slave trade his whole life. Y'all could only DREAM of walking in humble submission before God in service of your fellow man like this. Brat.

Friedrich Schleiermacher - oh so Christianity is all about absolute dependence? That's what it is? Conjuring up feelings of absolute dependence? Get real! Not brat.

Soren Kierkegaard - Absolutely goated. Love to read a guy excoriating Christian nationalism. He's so brat for that.

Karl Barth - this page is called the Church Blogmatics so you already know what I'm thinking on this one. His doctrine of election makes me able to sleep at night and his understanding of theology as a living, breathing science makes me want to engage with it. Brat.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - the absolute height of liberal theology and redeems it as something potentially profitable imo - brat.

[forever70s]

John Calvin and Tanya Roberts in a promo pic for "California Dreaming" (1979)

[julierogers]

Tanya Roberts in California Dreaming (1979)

[fuckyeah-pavement]

 Presbyterian is a really popular church in America. There’s a lot of members dude.

-Stephen Malkmus

[paintbrushfreckles]

My sister was telling me about her reformation history class, and via game of telephone, I have put my impression of several plot beats together in meme format. The idea of theology interacting with historical political drama cracks me up. And so does the idea of Calvin gentle parenting Knox.

Fun fact! I named my first car J. Cal, and then it got totaled. My car now is J. Knox because someone decided to build a parking garage over his grave. Such is the common dilemma of dying in Europe pre-industrial revolution, I suppose.

And finally, shout out to our boi P. Hammy, one of the coolest martyrs to ever go out...in a blaze...of glory... He also had an epic beard.

[reformedfaith]

A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.

John Calvin

[thatcakelovingwitch]

Studying theology is fun until you are blessed with the cursed knowledge of who EXACTLY Calvin and Hobbes are based on

[craigtowens]

Links & Quotes

Some links and quotes that caught my eye this week.

Psalm 133 tells us that in order for us to sharpen others—and for us to be sharpened by them—we have to be around other them. Christian saints put a high priority on spending time with others. I have lots of new content every week, which you can check out on my YouTube channel. From Desiring God’s Here We Stand series comes this great snippet from the history of the Reformation: “[John] Calvin…

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

I gave up all for Christ, and what have I found? Everything in Christ.

John Calvin

[reformedontheweb]

"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, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges . . ."

John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, Book 1:3:1.