Motherhood Quote by John Calvin

Calvin lands the insult with artisan-level precision: your problem is not ignorance but productivity. The image is domestic and bodily - idolatry starts "from his mother's womb" - which strips away any comforting notion that bad worship is merely a cultural error you can outgrow. It is congenital, reflexive, as native as appetite. Then he twists the knife by calling us "master craftsmen". This is not a clumsy fall into superstition; it is skilled fabrication. Humans don’t just stumble into false gods, we design them, refine them, make them persuasive enough to live by.

The line sits squarely inside the Reformation’s war on spiritual middlemen and religious “props.” Calvin’s broader project dismantles the idea that the right objects, rituals, or institutions can secure God on human terms. If the human heart is an idol factory, then even our best religious instincts are suspect, because they can be redirected into self-justifying art: a God who blesses my tribe, flatters my morality, rubber-stamps my desires, or can be purchased with performance. The target is as much the self as the statue.

Subtext: control. Idols are manageable. They fit in the palm, the schedule, the political program. Calvin’s theology insists on a God who resists domestication, and this sentence explains why that resistance must be built into the system. If you assume humans will reliably craft the divine correctly, you’ve already made an idol of human competence. Calvin’s bleak anthropology is also a kind of clarity: the threat is internal, imaginative, and ceaseless - which is why, for him, grace can’t be a helpful add-on. It has to be a rescue.