The Counterintuitive Calvin Tim Keller TGC Blog | November 14, 2012 http://thegospelcoalition.org/mobile/article/tgc/the-counterintuitive-calvin So what did I do last summer vacation? I continued to do something that I started January 1 of this year. Late last fall I came upon a plan for reading through all of John Calvin's Institutes --- his four-volume, 1,500-or-so-page systematic exposition of the teachings of the Christian faith---in one year. Calvin and Martin Luther together were the two leading lights of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Today, however, Calvin has a dismal reputation as a pinched, narrow-minded, cold, and cerebral dogmatician. I knew much of this image was caricature, and, while over the years I had read a good deal of the Institutes, I treated the books like an encyclopedia or dictionary that one dipped into to learn about specific topics. I had never read it straight through, consecutively, unt...