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John Piper fires listeners' passion for the centrality and supremacy of God by unfolding Calvin's exemplary zeal for the glory of God. God rests all too lightly on the church's mind in our time. Consequently, the self-saturation of his people has made God and his glory auxiliary, and his majesty has all but disappeared from the modern evangelical world. John Calvin saw a similar thing in his day, and it was at the root of his quarrel with Rome. Nothing mattered more to Calvin than the centrality, supremacy, and majesty of the glory of God. His aim, he wrote, was to 'set before [man], as the prime motive of his existence, zeal to illustrate the glory of God,' a fitting banner over all of the great Reformer's life and work. 'The essential meaning of Calvin's life and preaching,' writes John Piper, 'is that he recovered and embodied a passion for the absolute reality and majesty of God. Such is the aim and burden of this book as well.' As Piper concisely unfolds this predominant theme in Calvin's life, he seeks to fire every Christian's passion for the centrality and supremacy of God, so that God's self-identification in Exodus 3 as 'I am who I am' becomes the sun in our solar system, too.… (more)
User reviews
The book starts with practical application to our own life, and ends with the essential details of Calvin's life. The book is exceptionally well written, and is tight and crisp. This is a great way to be introduced to a man that today affects your life in ways that you do not even realize, and to whet your appetite to read more about him, and to grow in the truth of his own writings about God.
If you don’t hold a high view of Calvin, you probably don’t know him. If you don’t know Calvin, you need to meet him yourself. This work is a great introduction to a man who walked closely with the Holy Spirit, and who’s teaching holds extremely closely to the very word of God, and a man that was one of the key laborers that reformed an accurate view of both God and man in this world.
I particularly appreciated the appendix, which looked at the Servetus Affair and made an honest effort to answer the claims of detractors that John Calvin is a murderer.
I would recommend