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Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology is unavailable, but you can change that!

Readers of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion often regard this masterwork of doctrine as a cold, sterile, and merely intellectual project. But Matthew Myer Boulton reads it very differently, arguing that for Calvin, Christian doctrine is properly conceived and articulated primarily for the sake of practical Christian formation—the immersive, restorative training for wholeness and...

not only his views on the cloister, but also his overall vision of Christian discipleship as an immersive path of practical formation. For Calvin, monastics are mistaken only insofar as they make elite, difficult, and rare what should be ordinary, accessible, and common in Christian communities: namely, whole human lives formed in and through the church’s distinctive repertoire of disciplines, from singing psalms to daily prayer to communing with Christ at the sacred supper. Thus Calvin positions
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