Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536 Edition

John Calvin was just twenty-seven years old when the first edition of his Institutes was published in Basel in 1536. Building on the work of Erasmus and Luther, Calvin wrote with brilliance and passion of the many ways the church and its theology had been "deformed," and he presented a case for restoring the church and theology to its pristine purity. Calvin's "little book" — as he affectionately called it — grew in size through the rest of his life; eventually, this early, shorter version...