Institutes of the Christian Religion: Book 1

2. What It Means to Know God

1. Knowing God as the Source of All Good

By knowledge of God, I mean more than recognizing that some God exists. I mean also understanding what we ought to know about him for our own benefit and for his glory. Strictly speaking, we cannot say that God is known where there is no religion or piety.

I am not now referring to the knowledge by which people, lost and under a curse in themselves, recognize God as their Redeemer in Christ the Mediator. I speak only of the simple, original knowledge to which the course of nature alone would have led us if Adam had remained upright. In the present ruined condition of the human race, no one will perceive God as a Father, as the source of salvation, or as favorable to us in any respect until Christ intervenes to make our peace. Even so, it is one thing to recognize that God our Maker supports us by his power, governs us by his providence, cares for us in his goodness, and showers us with every kind of blessing. It is another to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ.

Both in the creation of the world and in the general teaching of Scripture, the Lord first appears simply as Creator, and afterward as Redeemer in Christ. A twofold knowledge of him therefore arises. We must now consider the first; the second will follow later in its proper order.

Our minds cannot conceive of God without offering him some worship. Yet it is not enough merely to hold that he alone is the being everyone ought to worship and adore. We must also be convinced that he is the source of all goodness, and that we must seek everything in him alone.

Here is what I mean. We must be convinced that, just as he once formed the world, he sustains it by his boundless power, governs it by his wisdom, and preserves it by his goodness. In particular, he rules the human race with justice and judgment, bears with us in mercy, and shields us by his protection. We must also be convinced that nowhere can a particle of light, wisdom, justice, power, uprightness, or genuine truth be found that does not flow from him and have him as its cause. In this way we must learn to expect and ask everything from him, and thankfully credit him with everything we receive.

This awareness of God’s perfections is the proper teacher of piety, from which religion springs. By piety I mean the union of reverence and love for God inspired by knowledge of his benefits. People must recognize that they owe everything to God, that his fatherly care cherishes them, and that he is the source of all their blessings, so that nothing is to be sought apart from him. Until they recognize this, they will never submit to him in willing obedience. Indeed, unless they place all their happiness in him, they will never give themselves wholly to him in truth and sincerity.

2. Reverence, Trust, and Willing Obedience

Those who propose to investigate God’s essence when considering this question only mislead us with lifeless speculation. We have much greater reason to know what kind of being God is and what agrees with his nature. What use is it to join Epicurus in acknowledging a God who has abandoned the care of the world and merely enjoys his own ease? What good, in short, is knowing a God with whom we have nothing to do?

Our knowledge should instead have two effects. First, it should teach us reverence and fear. Second, it should guide and teach us to ask him for every good thing and credit him with it when we receive it.

How can the thought of God enter your mind without immediately reminding you that you are his workmanship? By the very law of creation, you are bound to submit to his authority. You owe your life to him, and everything you do should be directed toward him. It undoubtedly follows that your life is badly corrupted if it is not shaped by obedience to him, since his will ought to be the law of our lives.

On the other hand, your understanding of his nature is unclear unless you acknowledge him as the origin and source of all goodness. This would give rise both to confidence in him and to a desire to cling to him, if the depravity of the human mind did not lead it away from the proper course of inquiry.

First of all, the godly mind does not invent a God for itself, but looks only to the one true God. It does not give him whatever character it pleases, but is content to know him as he reveals himself. It always takes the greatest care to avoid violating his will or wandering presumptuously from the right path.

Anyone who knows God in this way sees how he governs all things, trusts him as guardian and protector, and relies entirely on his faithfulness. Recognizing him as the source of every blessing, such a person immediately turns to his protection and trusts his help whenever trouble or need arises. Convinced that God is good and merciful, he rests on him with assured confidence, never doubting that divine mercy will provide a remedy whenever he needs one.

Acknowledging God as his Father and Lord, he regards himself as bound to respect God’s authority in everything, revere his majesty, seek the advancement of his glory, and obey his commands. He sees God as a just judge, armed with severity to punish crimes, and keeps the judgment seat always before his eyes. In awe of it, he restrains himself and fears to provoke God’s anger.

Yet fear of judgment does not terrify him into wishing he could escape, even if a way of escape lay open. He embraces God as the avenger of wickedness no less than as the rewarder of the righteous. He recognizes that reserving punishment for the one and eternal life for the other belongs equally to God’s glory. Nor is the mere fear of punishment what restrains him from sin. Loving and revering God as his Father, honoring and obeying him as his Master, he would recoil from the very thought of offending him even if there were no hell.

Such is pure and genuine religion: confidence in God joined with earnest fear. This fear includes willing reverence and brings with it the proper worship prescribed by the law. We ought to give greater attention to this distinction: everyone indiscriminately pays homage to God, but very few truly revere him. Showy ceremonies abound everywhere; sincerity of heart is rare.

3. Our Innate Knowledge of God

1. A Sense of God in Every Heart

We regard it as beyond dispute that the human mind has some sense of God by natural instinct. God himself has given everyone some awareness of his divinity to prevent anyone from pleading ignorance. He constantly renews this awareness and sometimes deepens it. Thus everyone knows that there is a God and that he is their Maker. Their own consciences can therefore condemn them when they neither worship him nor devote their lives to his service.

If there is any place where we might suppose God to be unknown, the likeliest would be among the least perceptive tribes furthest removed from civilization. Yet, as the pagan Cicero tells us, there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God. Even those who seem in other respects to differ least from the lower animals always retain some sense of religion. So thoroughly has this common conviction taken hold of the mind, and so firmly is it stamped on every heart.

From the very beginning, there has never been any region of the world, any city, or even any household without religion. This amounts to an unspoken confession that a sense of God is inscribed on every heart. Even idolatry provides ample evidence. We know how reluctant people are to lower themselves by placing other creatures above them. When someone chooses to worship wood and stone rather than be thought to have no God, it shows how strong this impression of divinity must be. It is harder to erase it from the human mind than to break down our natural feelings. Those feelings certainly are broken down when, against our natural pride, we willingly humble ourselves before the lowest object as an act of reverence to God.

2. Denial Cannot Silence Conscience

It is therefore utterly absurd to maintain, as some do, that a few cunning and crafty people invented religion to keep the population in proper subjection. On this account, those very people taught others to worship God while they themselves did not believe that God existed.

I readily acknowledge that scheming people have introduced a vast number of fictions into religion. They sought to inspire the people with reverence or strike them with terror, making them more submissive. But they could never have succeeded if people’s minds had not already possessed that universal belief in God from which the religious inclination springs, as from a seed. It is also entirely unbelievable that those who cunningly deceived their less cultivated neighbors in matters of religion had no knowledge of God themselves.

Some people in earlier times denied God’s existence, and there are more than a few today. Yet, whether they wish it or not, they sometimes feel the truth they want not to know. We read of no one who displayed more unrestrained and audacious contempt for God than Caligula. Yet no one showed greater dread when any sign of divine wrath appeared. However unwillingly, he trembled in terror before the God he deliberately sought to despise.

You can see the same thing every day among his modern imitators. The boldest despiser of God is most easily alarmed, trembling at the sound of a falling leaf. How can this be explained except as a vindication of divine majesty? It strikes their consciences all the more strongly the harder they try to flee from it.

They all seek hiding places where they can conceal themselves from the Lord’s presence and again erase it from their minds. But after all their efforts they remain caught in the net. Although the conviction may seem to disappear for a moment, it immediately returns and rushes in with renewed force. Any respite from the gnawing of conscience resembles the sleep of the drunken or insane, who find no peaceful rest but are constantly haunted by dreadful dreams. Even the wicked themselves therefore demonstrate that some idea of God always exists in every human mind.

3. The Knowledge We Cannot Erase

Everyone of sound judgment will therefore hold that a sense of God is indelibly engraved on the human heart. The stubbornness of the wicked strikingly confirms that this belief arises naturally in everyone and is fixed, as it were, in our very bones. Though they struggle furiously, they cannot free themselves from the fear of God.

Diagoras and others like him may mock whatever has been believed about religion in every age, and Dionysius may scoff at heaven’s judgment. But theirs is only a bitter grin. The worm of conscience, sharper than burning steel, gnaws at them within.

I do not say with Cicero that errors wear away with age and that religion increases and grows better day by day. As we will shortly see, the world does all it can to shake off all knowledge of God and corrupts his worship in countless ways. I say only this: the wicked eagerly seek an unthinking hardness of heart as a means of despising God. But when that hardness weakens, the sense of God, which they wished above all to extinguish, remains vigorous and breaks out from time to time.

We infer that this is no doctrine first learned at school. Rather, everyone is his own teacher in it from the womb. Nature herself allows no one to forget it, although many strive with all their strength to do so.

Moreover, everyone is born and lives for the express purpose of learning to know God. Knowledge of God that fails to achieve this purpose is fleeting and empty. It is therefore clear that all who fail to direct the whole of their thoughts and actions toward this end fail to fulfill the law of their existence.

Even philosophers noticed this. It is precisely what Plato meant when, as he often did, he taught that the soul’s highest good consists in resemblance to God: that is, when through knowing him the soul is wholly transformed into him. Likewise, Gryllus in Plutarch reasons most skillfully when he affirms that, once religion is banished from human lives, people not only fail to surpass the beasts in any respect, but are in many respects far more miserable. Exposed to so many kinds of evil, they continually drag out a troubled and restless existence. The only thing that makes them superior, therefore, is the worship of God, through which alone they aspire to immortality.

4. How Our Knowledge of God Is Corrupted

1. Pride Turns Knowledge into Superstition

Experience shows that God has sown a seed of religion in everyone. Yet scarcely one person in a hundred cherishes it in the heart, and in no one does it grow to maturity, much less bear fruit in its season. Some lose themselves in superstitious observances; others deliberately and wickedly rebel against God. The result is that everyone has so degenerated in the true knowledge of him that genuine godliness can be found nowhere in the world.

When I say that some fall into superstition, I do not mean that their extreme foolishness frees them from guilt. Their blindness is almost always accompanied by empty pride and stubbornness. This mixture of vanity and pride appears when wretched people do seek God. Instead of rising above themselves as they ought, they measure him by their own fleshly stupidity. They neglect serious inquiry and rush off to indulge their curiosity in empty speculation. They therefore do not conceive of him as he reveals himself, but imagine him to be whatever their own recklessness has devised.

With this abyss open before them, they cannot take a single step without plunging headlong into destruction. With such a notion of God, nothing they try to offer in worship or obedience can have any value in his sight. They are not worshiping him, but the dream and invention of their own hearts in his place.

Paul describes this corrupt course admirably when he says that “thinking to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:22). He had previously said that “they became vain in their imaginations.” But to prevent anyone from supposing them blameless, he afterward adds that their blindness was deserved. They were not content with sober inquiry, but claimed more for themselves than they had any right to claim. They willingly sought darkness, indeed, bewitched themselves with perverse, empty appearances. Their folly is therefore inexcusable. It results not only from idle curiosity, but also from unrestrained desire and excessive confidence in pursuing forbidden knowledge.

2. Denying God’s Justice and Providence

David’s statement, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Ps 14:1; Ps 53:1), applies primarily to people who stifle the light of nature and deliberately dull their minds. This will become clearer shortly. We see many people who, after becoming hardened in a reckless course of sin, madly banish all remembrance of God, although their natural sense spontaneously brings it to mind from within.

To show how detestable this madness is, the psalmist presents them as explicitly denying God’s existence. Although they do not reject his being, they rob him of his justice and providence, representing him as sitting idly in heaven. Nothing agrees less with God’s nature than abandoning the government of the world and leaving it to chance, or overlooking human crimes so that people may freely indulge in evil without punishment. It follows that everyone who lives in complacent security after extinguishing all fear of divine judgment virtually denies that there is a God.

As a just punishment of the wicked, once they have closed their own eyes, God makes their hearts dull and unresponsive. Thus, though they see, they do not see. David is indeed the best interpreter of his own meaning when he says elsewhere that the wicked person has “no fear of God before his eyes” (Ps 36:1). Again, he says, “He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten; he hideth his face; he will never see it.”

Although these people are forced to acknowledge some God, they rob him of his glory by denying his power. Paul declares, “If we believe not, he abideth faithful, he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim 2:13). Likewise, those who imagine a dead and speechless idol for themselves are rightly said to deny God.

We must also observe that, although they struggle against their own convictions and would gladly banish God not only from their minds but also from heaven, their numbness is never complete. From time to time they are dragged before the divine tribunal. Yet no fear restrains them from rushing violently against God. As long as this blind impulse carries them along, we cannot deny that their prevailing attitude toward him is a brutish forgetfulness.

3. True Religion Must Agree with Truth

This overturns the empty excuse many use to disguise their superstition. They think it enough to have some kind of religious zeal, however absurd it may be. They fail to see that true religion must conform to God’s will as its unfailing standard. He can never deny himself. He is no specter or phantom to be transformed at each person’s whim.

It is easy to see how superstition, with its false interpretations, mocks God while trying to please him. It usually clings only to things he has declared worthless. At the same time, it contemptuously overlooks or openly rejects what he expressly commands or what we are assured gives him pleasure. Those who invent a form of worship merely worship and adore their own deluded fancies. They would never dare to trifle with God in this way if they had not first fashioned him according to their own childish notions.

An apostle therefore declares this vague and wandering notion of divinity to be ignorance of God: “Howbeit, then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods.” Elsewhere he declares that the Ephesians were “without God” (Eph 2:12) when they wandered without any correct knowledge of him. At least in this respect, it makes little difference whether you believe in one God or many gods. In either case, by departing from the true God, you have nothing left but a detestable idol. We must therefore conclude with Lactantius: “No religion is genuine that is not in accordance with truth.”

4. Forced Fear and False Worship

They add a second fault to the first. Whenever they do think of God, it is against their will. They never approach him without being dragged into his presence. Once there, they feel none of the willing fear that flows from reverence for divine majesty. They feel only the forced, slavish fear wrung from them by divine judgment. Unable to escape that judgment, they are compelled to dread it; but even while dreading it, they hate it. The saying of Statius properly applies to ungodliness alone: “Fear first brought gods into the world.”

Those whose inclinations oppose God’s justice know that his tribunal has been established to punish transgression. They therefore earnestly wish that tribunal would be overthrown. This feeling puts them at war with God himself, since justice is one of his essential attributes. They see that they are always within reach of his power and that resistance and escape are equally impossible. So they fear and tremble.

To avoid appearing to despise a majesty that awes everyone, they resort to some kind of religious observance. Meanwhile, they never stop defiling themselves with every kind of vice, adding crime to crime until they have broken the Lord’s holy law in every requirement and treated his whole righteousness as nothing. In any case, their semblance of fear does not keep them from luxuriating in wrongdoing and enjoying it. They prefer to indulge their fleshly inclinations rather than restrain them with the bridle of the Holy Spirit.

This shadow of religion, scarcely worthy even of the name, is false and empty. We can therefore easily see how far this confused knowledge of God differs from the piety planted in believers’ hearts, from which alone true religion springs. Yet hypocrites would gladly use their tortuous maneuvers to appear near to God at the very moment they are fleeing from him.

Their whole lives ought to be a continual course of obedience. Instead, they rebel fearlessly in almost everything they do and seek to appease him with a few paltry sacrifices. They ought to serve him with sincere hearts and holy lives. Instead, they try to gain his favor through trivial devices and worthless niceties. Indeed, they take greater liberty in their degrading indulgences because they imagine they can fulfill their duty to him through absurd acts of atonement. In short, their confidence should be fixed on him, but they set him aside and rest in themselves or in created things.

At last they lose themselves in such a maze of error that the darkness of ignorance obscures, and finally extinguishes, the sparks meant to show them God’s glory. Even so, the conviction that there is some God remains, like a plant that can never be completely uprooted. But it is so corrupt that it can produce only the worst fruit.

We have even stronger evidence for the point I am now arguing, that a sense of God is naturally engraved on the human heart: even the reprobate are forced to acknowledge it. When at ease, they can joke about God and speak flippantly and endlessly in disparagement of his power. But if despair overtakes them for any reason, it prompts them to seek him and brings urgent prayers to their lips. This proves that they were not wholly ignorant of God. Rather, they had perversely suppressed feelings that ought to have shown themselves earlier.