You will not agree with every line, and Calvin would not have wanted you to take his word over Scripture’s. But you will rarely find a guide this wise and this warm, one so convinced that God is worth knowing.

John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509. Five centuries have passed and this great work still sits on more Reformed shelves than it has readers. People buy the Institutes of the Christian Religion the way some of us buy an LA Fitness membership in January, full of resolve and a little afraid of the time commitment. The four volumes look more like homework than a gift.

I almost did the same. I’d heard R.C. Sproul talk about the Institutes so often that I finally saved up, bought the two-volume Battles, and spent a summer waking at four in the morning on my days off to read it before work. I expected dry. What I found was closer to binge-worthy; I’d reach the end of a chapter and find it almost impossible not to begin the next. Six months later I had worked through the whole thing slowly enough to underline the key points, which turned out to be more than half the book.

If you’re standing where I stood, eyeing the spine and stalling, no shame in it. The Institutes have a reputation for being long, technical, and forbidding, and reputations like that keep good books closed. Most of that reputation is built on things that are not true. Here are five myths that keep the book shut, and the truth that should get you to open it.

1. “It’s too long to finish.”

Four volumes is a real number, and nobody is asking you to inhale them in a weekend. But the Institutes were never built to be swallowed whole. Calvin wrote the book in short chapters and sections, made to be read a piece at a time. Start with one chapter a day and the wall begins to look like a staircase. You finish a book this size the way you finish anything large, one honest step after another.

2. “It’s too hard for a normal Christian.”

Calvin wrote to teach the church, and he wrote with a clarity that survives translation. The man could turn a doctrine into a picture you don’t forget. Writing on idolatry, he says:

Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.¹
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.11.8

That is the work of a pastor who knows exactly how the human heart works. You’ll find that kind of line on nearly every page, and it reads more plainly than a book this size has any right to.

3. “It’s dry doctrine.”

Somewhere the rumor started that Calvin is cold. Read him and that rumor dies. What he is after is worship; he wants you to know God in a way that bends the knee. “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Calvin takes that knowledge as the whole point.

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