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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...

ecclesial service and spiritual accessibility of its ancient counterpart (4.13.10).9 On both counts, then, Calvin’s fundamental concern is to reject what he calls “double Christianity,” conceived either as two separate camps side by side or as two separate ranks in a hierarchy of discipleship. By setting up a “private altar,” he argues, sixteenth-century monastic communities “have both excommunicated themselves from the whole body of the church and despised the ordinary ministry,” thus creating two
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