The church reached a turning point in the sixteenth century. Worship had become a spectacle, the gospel was distorted, the sacraments were replaced by superstition, and ministers lived in immorality. To restore the church to the teachings of Christ, the Reformers cried out for a return to God’s authoritative Word. In this classic treatise, John Calvin presents four areas of the church’s life and doctrine that must be carefully guarded and guided by Scripture. This timeless call for biblica...

Rollock’s commentary on Ephesians earned him the praise not only of Theodore Beza but of the wider world of Reformed communities. This commentary was his first link to Geneva and thereby the broader international Reformed literature. Beza’s praise is well known: “I pray you, taken it to be spoken without flattery or partiality, that I never read or met with anything in this kind of interpretation more pithily, more elegantly, and so judiciously written: so as I could not contain myself, bu...

The texts in this volume begin and end with this same point. Composed under different circumstances by giants of the Reformed tradition—Theodore Beza (1519–1605), Amandus Polanus (1561–1610), and Francis Turretin (1623–87)—they represent genres of classical treatments of the same doctrine. Beza’s Defense of Justification by Faith Alone is polemical and in response to ecclesiastical controversy. Polanus’ Free Justification of Man the Sinner before God is systematic and the fruit of logical ...

Olevianus’s Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed is a collection of sermons he preached on the basic articles of the Christian faith. It serves as a reminder that the Reformed tradition did not see itself as separate from the universal church, though it was principally opposed to Rome. Rather, Olevianus and his tradition argue for a Reformed catholicity rooted in the ancient confession of the church.This translation by Lyle D. Bierma, along with R. Scott Clark’s historical ...

The church reached a turning point in the sixteenth century. Worship had become a spectacle, the gospel was distorted, the sacraments were replaced by superstition, and ministers lived in immorality. To restore the church to the teachings of Christ, the Reformers cried out for a return to God’s authoritative Word. In this classic treatise, John Calvin presents four areas of the church’s life and doctrine that must be carefully guarded and guided by Scripture. This timeless call for biblica...