http://www.reformation21.org/calvin/

The main blog is a good read too:

http://www.reformation21.org/blog

I guess after reading a few John Owen books, Battles’ translation sounds completely contemporary!

My complaints were:

Paragraph length.
The paragraph doesn’t have to be the same length as the entire chapter. It just doesn’t.
Sentence length.
I know that in the 16th century, it was common to phrase complete paragraphs as single sentences, a custom which is rarely practiced nowadays, though completely possible, and it seems to me that it would be permissible to convert the longer, 16th century style sentences into shorter, 20th or 21st century sentences without any loss or change in meaning, and that furthermore, such shorter sentencing could actually enhance the clarity of otherwise condensed and tedious reasoning.
Word choice.
It seems really common for a translator, especially when he’s translating an older document, to use older words that have really expired in the common vernacular - even when there are more modern words that are completely synonymous. The result is that the entire tome feels dusty, and it’s difficult to read because your mind has to translate the translation.

I’ve read a third of the Institutes (twice!) but never finished it. I’m following the Reformation21 Blog Institutes reading schedule, which I hope will keep me interested. I’m hoping their accompanying blog posts would be helpful too.

John Owen is never the easiest to understand. But, few writers can match his insight and understanding. It’s hard work, but worth the effort to understand what he is saying.

I have an old friend who once related this story of his prep school days.

This was a church school, and consequently at the appropriate age all the children had to take confirmation classes.
These classes where taught by the chaplain of the school, a Church of England minister. Until the children had been Confirmed they were not permitted to take bread and wine of communion during church.

The young boys, being at school, as you imagine may have been a little disinterested in all the religious ballyhoo. However these where processes to be done, and being a fee paying school it was important that the school continued to churn out the sort of child the parents expected.

Finally the main event arrives, the youngsters all troop off to the school chapel for the special Service of Confirmation. This is presided over by the local Bishop. It is the Bishop’s job during the service to lay hands on each boy for him to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now despite the general disinterest from the boys in the academics of being sufficiently well taught to merit communion, somethings had gone home.
They had been taught that when the Bishop (the man with the funny hat) laid hands on them they would all be filled with the Holy Spirit just like Pentecost.
If nothing else, my friend and his buddy had taken this part in. They, in their childish hearts, actually had an expectation of something from God.

At the appropriate point of the service the boys went down in pairs to kneel before the Bishop, for him to lay his two hands upon them. My two friends followed in at their turn and knelt with some anticipation. As he laid hands on them, suddenly they were filled with the Spirit of God and speaking with other tongues.

The reaction to this was an outraged horror from the Bishop and the Chaplain, who rounded on the two, yelling at them to stop this “develish babble”. The two boys not knowing what had hit them suddenly had their joy quenched by the full weight of ecclesiastical wisdom, who of course knew that the actual gifts of the Holy Spirit had ceased with the death of the apostles. This terrible babble could only therefore come from Satan himself.

The children’s foolishness in believing what had been taught was their undoing.

For my friend, it was well over twenty years, and plumbing the depths of alcoholism, and a destroyed marriage before he had anyone bring to him the reality of God in his life again. He once again found the One he had met before, and was healed, restored, filled with the Spirit, and speaking in tongues!

It is abundantly clear that the ministers of the church had less faith in the truths they taught than their hearers. It is God who convicts, even a child, of the validity of what is said. However it also shows how the messenger can also intrude into the message and pervert it.