How to Celebrate John Calvin’s 501st Birthday

John Calvin is one of the church’s greatest theologians, and Calvinism one of the Western world’s most influential intellectual movements. Calvin was a theologian, pastor, biblical exegete, and tireless apologist for Reformed Christianity. His theological works, biblical commentaries, tracts, treatises, and letters helped establish the Reformation as a legitimate and thriving religious movement throughout Europe and the world.

No theologian has been acclaimed or assailed as much as Calvin. Calvinism has spawned movements and sparked controversy throughout the centuries. Wars have been fought both to defend and destroy it, and its later proponents began political and theological revolutions in Western Europe and America. The breadth and depth of the engagement with Calvin’s works since they first appeared four centuries ago—and their continuous publication since then—testifies to Calvin’s importance and lasting value for the church today. Thinking Christians from the twenty-first century who ignore Calvin’s writings do so at their own peril.

To celebrate Calvin’s birthday and his importance for the church today, we launched the Calvin 500 Collection—a massive project to convert 108 books by or about Calvin to our format. The Calvin 500 Collection includes:

• 3 English translations of Calvin’s Institutes—including the rare Thomas Norton translation
• Latin and French editions of Calvin’s Institutes
• Complete set of Calvin’s commentaries
• Four volumes of Calvin’s letters and correspondence
• Dozens of tracts and theological treatises written by Calvin
• Ten biographies of Calvin’s life and work
• 31 volumes of secondary literature on the history and influence of Calvinism

We hoped to complete the project during 2009 (before Calvin turned 501), but it didn’t happen. Some of the texts, like the Norton translation of the Institutes—the first in the English language—took longer than we planned. We also ran into some problems with the commentaries which needed some special attention.

But the biggest delay happened when we launched Logos 4 in November. In the weeks before the launch, all efforts were devoted to making sure it happened as smoothly as possible—finishing all new books for the expanded Logos 4 base packages, working with our beta testers, building the new Logos iPhone app, training our customer service department and sales teams, and hundreds (thousands?) of other behind-the-scenes projects.

We’ve been busy since the release, too. We’ve been reading the emails you’ve sent us, talking to you on the phone, closely watching the Community Forums, listening to customer feedback, creating training videos and support pages, and doing everything we can to make Logos 4 even better. Since the launch, we’ve released a major update to Logos 4, with tons of new features. We’ve been updating the Mac version just about every week. And we just came out with a brand new update to the Logos iPhone app which now allows offline reading on your iPod Touch or on the iPhone when you’re in an airplane. Oh, and did we mention there are 1,000 more books available for reading on your iPhone than there were a month ago? These are just a handful of great reasons to upgrade today—and until the end of next week, you can still get 25% off when you upgrade to Logos 4.

So you can see why the Calvin 500 Collection wasn’t finished by the end of 2009.

Fortunately, even though it’s 2010 now, John Calvin is still 500 years old. He doesn’t turn 501 years old until July 10, 2010, and by then, you’ll be using Logos Bible Software to read all of Calvin’s commentaries, books, and theological works.

In fact, you’ll be reading the new Calvin books much sooner than July. We are very, very close to finishing the project. Although we are not quite ready to project a ship date, we can promise that it will be soon.

One last thing, the Pre-Pub price for the Calvin 500 Collection will go up on Friday, which means you still have four more days to lock your order in the current price. If you’re thinking of pre-ordering, do it now before the price goes up.