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184 How Can We Know the Christian Scriptures Are True?
How did God bring Calvin to faith? Calvin mentions two key things.
One was the inbreaking of light: “I at length perceived, as if light had
broken in upon me, in what a sty of error I had wallowed.” The other
was the creation of humility: “God, by a sudden conversion subdued
and brought my mind to a teachable frame.” By this Spirit-wrought illumination
and humiliation God created in Calvin a profound confidence
in God and his word.
How this happened is extremely important, and we need to let Calvin
himself describe it in his most famous work, the Institutes, especially
book 1, chapters 7 and 8. Here he wrestles with how we can come to
a saving knowledge of God through the Scriptures. His answer is the
famous phrase “the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit.”
The Internal Testimony of the Spirit,
Not the Testimony of the Church
This was Calvin’s answer to the claim of the Roman Catholic Church
that ordinary Christians were dependent on the church to decide for
them concerning the authority of the church:
A most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so
much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As
if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision
of men! . . . Yet, if this is so, what will happen to miserable
consciences seeking firm assurance of eternal life if all promises of it
consist in and depend solely upon the judgment of men? 5
In the place of the church, Calvin saw the majesty of God’s word itself,
which carries its own self-authenticating brightness and sweetness:
How can we be assured that this has sprung from God unless we
have recourse to the decree of the church? It is as if someone asked:
Whence will we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from
black, sweet from bitter? Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear
evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color,
or sweet and bitter things do of their taste. (Institutes, I, vvii, 2) 6
5
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. F. L. Battles, ed. J. T. McNeill (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1960), 1.7.1.
6
A hundred years after Calvin, the Reformed scholastic Francis Turretin echoed Calvin’s insight: “Light
is immediately most certainly known to us by its own brightness; food by its peculiar sweetness; an odor