Consistency

Reid comments that Calvin’s consistency is “based not on poverty of ideas but on remarkable systematization of thought.”

Calvin: Theological Treatises Library of Christian Classics Volume XXII, Translated with Introduction and Notes by J. K. S. Reid (London, SCM Press, 1954) p13

Despite all the revisions and expansions of the Institutes, there were few significant changes of substance.

The variety in Calvin’s great output comes because of the different forms and the responses and applications to different needs and situations. Calvin was always a theologian, but by turns he was also Reformer, pastor, letter-writer, preacher, administrator, controversialist, and more.

Reid says: “… Calvin, … the theologian becomes occupied, though never preoccupied, with the diverse work of the administrator.” (p15)

Doumergue says:

Calvin was the great systematic thinker of the Reformation, and … in no system has practice been so closely and intimately united with theory…. his theological thought predetermined his views in civil as well as ecclesiastical government.

(p476, quoted in Reid, p14)