John Calvin (July 10, 1509 – May 27, 1564) was a French Protestant theologian during the Protestant Reformation and was a central developer of the system of Christian theology called Calvinism or Reformed theology. In
Geneva, he rejected Papal authority, established a new scheme of
civic and ecclesiastical governance, and created a
central hub from which Reformed theology was propagated. He is renowned for his teachings and writings, in particular for his
Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Biography
Calvin was born with the name Jean Chauvin (or Cauvin, in Latin Calvinus) in
Noyon, Picardie, France, to
Gérard Cauvin and Jeanne Lefranc. In 1523, Calvin's father,
an attorney, sent his fourteen-year-old son to the University of Paris to study humanities and law. By
1532, he had attained a Doctor of Laws degree at
Orléans. Nicholas Cop, Calvin's close friend, found it necessary to flee Paris after giving a
customary discourse in the Church of the Mathurins. The speech has long been rumoured to be the work of Calvin himself. Calvin
took flight within a few days after Cop. Calvin sheltered at Angouleme with a friend, Louis du
Tillet. After 1534, he became firmly entrenched within a Reformist belief, beyond that of humanist thought.
In 1536, as he was forced to choose an alternate route in the face of imperial and French
forces, he passed by Geneva. Guillaume Farel begged with Calvin to stay in Geneva and help
the city. Despite a desire to continue his journey, he settled in Geneva. After being expelled
from the city, he served as a pastor in Strasbourg from 1538 until 1541, before returning to
Geneva, where he lived until his death in 1564.
After attaining his degree, John Calvin sought a wife in affirmation of his approval of marriage over clerical celibacy. In 1539, he married Idelette de Bure, a widow, who had a son and daughter from her previous marriage to an Anabaptist in Strasbourg. Calvin and Idelette had a son who died after only two weeks. Idelette Calvin died
in 1549. Calvin wrote that she was a helper in ministry, never stood in his way, never troubled him
about her children, and had a greatness of spirit.
Calvin's health began to fail when he suffered migraines, lung
hemorrhages, gout and kidney
stones, and at times he had to be carried to the pulpit to preach and sometimes gave lectures from his bed.[1] According to his successor,
influential Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza, Calvin took only one meal a day for a
decade, but on the advice of his physician, he ate an egg
and drank a glass of wine at noon. His recreation and exercise consisted mainly of a walk after
meals. Towards the end, Calvin said to those friends who were worried about his daily regimen of work amidst all his ailments,
"What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when He comes?"[1]
John Calvin died in Geneva on May 27, 1564. He was buried in the
Cimetière des Rois under a tombstone marked simply with the initials "J.C.",[2] partially honoring his request that he be buried in an unknown
place, without witnesses or ceremony. He is commemorated as a renewer of the church by the Lutheran
Church on May 27.
Thought
- See also: Calvin's view of
Scripture
Calvin was trained to be a lawyer. He studied under some of the best legal minds of the Renaissance in France. Part of that training involved the newer humanistic
methods of exegesis, which dealt with a text directly via historical and grammatical analysis,
as opposed to indirectly via layers of commentators. His legal and exegetical training was important for Calvin because, once
convinced of the growing Protestant faith, he applied these exegetical methods to the Scripture. He self-consciously tried to mold his thinking along biblical lines, and he labored to preach
and teach what he believed the Bible taught.
While Reformers such as John Huss and Martin Luther
may be seen as somewhat original thinkers that began a movement, Calvin was a great logician and systematizer of that movement,
but not an innovator in doctrine. Unlike Luther and Melanchthon, who underwent many
doctrinal changes and sometimes contradicted their previous views, Calvin held essentially the same theology from his youth to
his death.[3] He was very familiar with the
writings of the early Church Fathers and the great Medieval schoolmen, and he was also in
debt to earlier Reformers. Calvin did not reject the Scholastics of the Middle Ages outright but rather made use of them and reformed their thoughts in accordance with his
understanding of the Bible. For example, using Anselm of Canterbury's
satisfaction view of the atonement, Calvin developed and formalized the
doctrine of penal substitution where Christ receives the punishment earned by the
elect in their stead.
Calvin had a great commitment to the absolute sovereignty and holiness of God. Because of this, he is often associated with
the doctrines of predestination and election, but it
should be noted that he differed very little with the other magisterial Reformers regarding these
difficult doctrines. Additionally, while the five points of Calvinism bear his
name and are a reflection of his thinking, they were not articulated by him, and were actually a product of the Synod of Dort, which issued its judgments in response to five specific objections that arose after
Calvin's time.
While Calvin's theological contributions have had a wide influence, his legacy can also be seen in other areas. For example,
he placed a high premium on education of the youth of Geneva, and in 1559 he founded the Academy of Geneva, which was a model for other academies around the world and which would eventually
become the University of Geneva. Calvin's thought in the area of church polity was seminal as well, giving rise to various Reformed and Presbyterian systems of church government. The
Consistory of Geneva, with Calvin at its helm, was influential in sending out scores of missionaries, not only to France, but also to countries as far off as Brazil.
Finally, Calvin, knowing the benefits of business, was instrumental in founding and developing the silk industry in Geneva, by which many Genevans reaped monetary benefits.
Writings
Although nearly all of Calvin's adult life was spent in Geneva (1536-38 and 1541-64), his publications spread his ideas of a
properly reformed church to many parts of Europe and from there to the rest of the world. It is
especially on account of his voluminous publications that he exerts such a lasting influence over Christianity and Western
history.
Calvin's first published work was an edition of the Roman philosopher Seneca's
De Clementia, accompanied by a commentary demonstrating a thorough knowledge of antiquity. His first theological work, the
Psychopannychia, attempted to refute the doctrine of soul sleep as promulgated by
Christians whom Calvin called "Anabaptists." He finished it in 1534 but, on the advice of friends, didn't publish it until 1542.
The work demonstrates that since his conversion, Calvin had undertaken serious study and now showed a mastery of the
Bible, and he had become, using Barth's words, a "theological
Humanist" and a "biblicist" — that is, "[n]o matter how true a teaching might be, he was not ready to lend an ear to it apart
from the Word of God."[4]
At the age of twenty-six, Calvin published several revisions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, a seminal work in Christian theology that
altered the course of Western history as much as any other book[1] and that is still read by theological students today. It was published in Latin in
1536 and in his native French in 1541, with the definitive editions
appearing in 1559 (Latin) and in 1560 (French). The book was written
as an introductory textbook on the Protestant faith for those with some learning already and covered a broad range of theological
topics from the doctrines of church and sacraments to
justification by faith alone and Christian
liberty, and it vigorously attacked the teachings of those Calvin considered unorthodox, particularly Roman Catholicism to which Calvin says
he had been "strongly devoted" before his conversion to Protestantism. The over-arching theme of the book – and Calvin's greatest
theological legacy – is the idea of God's total sovereignty, particularly in salvation and election.[1]
Calvin's magnum opus, penned so early in his life, "came like Minerva in full panoply out of the head of Jupiter," and
even through its enlargements and revisions, it remained basically the same in its content.[3] It overshadowed the earlier Protestant theologies such as Melanchthon's
Loci and Zwingli's Commentary on the True and False Religion, and
according to historian Philip Schaff, it is a classic of theology at the level of
Origen's On First Principles, Augustine's
The City of God, Thomas Aquinas's
Summa Theologica, and Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith.[3]
Calvin also produced many volumes of commentary on most of the books of the Bible. For the Old
Testament, he published commentaries for all books except the histories after Joshua (though he did publish his sermons on First Samuel) and the Wisdom literature other than the Book of Psalms.
For the New Testament, he omitted only the brief second and third epistles of John and the Book of Revelation. (Some have suggested
that Calvin questioned the canonicity of the Book of Revelation, but his citation of it
as authoritative in his other writings casts doubt on that theory.) These commentaries, too, have proved to be of lasting value
to students of the Bible, and they are still in print after over 400 years.
In the controversial matter of interpreting prophecy such as that in the Book of Daniel, Calvin was a preterist, which is to say that he
believed most prophecies had already been fulfilled in history. In this view he was essentially in line with the early church and the Reformers who came before him, but he is in distinction to many of his immediate
successors who took a historicist view and to many today who look a
future fulfillment.[5]
Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, after whom
the anti-Calvinistic movement Arminianism was named, says with regard to the value of
Calvin's writings:[6]
- Next to the study of the Scriptures which I earnestly inculcate, I exhort my pupils to peruse Calvin’s Commentaries, which I
extol in loftier terms than Helmich himself (a Dutch divine, 1551–1608); for I affirm that he excels beyond comparison in the
interpretation of Scripture, and that his commentaries ought to be more highly valued than all that is handed down to us by the
library of the fathers; so that I acknowledge him to have possessed above most others, or
rather above all other men, what may be called an eminent spirit of prophecy. His
Institutes ought to be studied after the (Heidelberg) Catechism, as containing a fuller
explanation, but with discrimination, like the writings of all men.
Letters
Calvin's body of letters has not received the wide readership of the Institutes and bible commentaries since his
correspondence obviously addressed the particular needs and occasions of his day. Even so, the scale of his letter writing was
just as prodigious as his better-known works: his letters number some 4,000, and fill eleven of Calvin's fifty-nine volumes in
the Corpus Reformatorum. B. B. Warfield even calls Calvin "the
great letter-writer of the Reformation age."[7]
His letters, often written under the pseudonym Charles Despeville,[8] concern issues ranging from disputes about local theater[9] to raising support for fledgling churches[10] to choosing sides in a political alliance.[11] They also reveal personal qualities that are not evident in his exegetical
prose. One example came after the massacre of the Waldensians of Provence in 1545 where 3,600 were slaughtered. Calvin was so dismayed that in a space of twenty-one days he
visited Berne, Aurich, Schaffhausen, Basle, and Strasbourg, before addressing the deputies of the Cantons at the Diet of Arau,
pleading everywhere for an intercession on behalf of those who survived.[11] He wrote of his grief to William Farel:
- Such was the savage cruelty of the persecutors, that neither young girls, nor pregnant women, nor infants were spared. So
great is the atrocious cruelty of this proceeding, that I grow bewildered when I reflect upon it. How, then, shall I express it
in words? ... I write, worn out with sadness, and not without tears, which so burst forth, that every now and then they
interrupt my words.[11]
One of Calvin's better known letters was his reply to Jacopo Sadoleto's "Letter to
the Genevans,"[12] and this "Reformation Debate" remains in
print today.
Reformed Geneva
John Calvin had been exiled from Geneva because he and his colleagues, namely William Farel and Antoine Froment, were accused of wanting to create a "new papacy." Thus, he went to Strasbourg during
the time of the Ottoman wars and passed through the Cantons of Switzerland. While in Geneva, William Farel asked Calvin to help him with the cause of
the Church. Calvin wrote of Farel's request, "I felt as if God from heaven had laid his mighty hand upon me to stop me in my
course." Together with Farel, Calvin attempted to institute a number of changes to the city's governance and religious life. They
drew up a catechism and a confession of faith, which they insisted all citizens must affirm. The city council refused to adopt
Calvin and Farel's creed, and in January 1538 denied them the power to excommunicate, a
power they saw as critical to their work. The pair responded with a blanket denial of the Lord's
Supper to all Genevans at Easter services. For this the city council expelled them from
the city. Farel travelled to Neuchâtel, Calvin to Strasbourg.
For three years Calvin served as a lecturer and pastor to a church of French Huguenots in
Strasbourg. It was during his exile that Calvin married Idelette de Bure. He also came under the influence of Martin Bucer, who advocated a system of political and ecclesiastical structure along New Testament lines.
He continued to follow developments in Geneva, and when Jacopo Sadoleto, a Catholic
cardinal, penned an open letter to the city council inviting Geneva to return to the mother church, Calvin's response on behalf
of embattled Genevan Protestants helped him to regain the respect he had lost. After a number of Calvin's supporters won election
to the Geneva city council, he was invited back to the city in 1540, and having negotiated concessions such as the formation of
the Consistory, he returned in 1541.
Upon his return, armed with the authority to craft the institutional form of the church, Calvin began his program of reform.
He established four categories of offices based on biblical injunctions:
- Ministers of the Word were to preach, to administer the sacraments, and to exercise pastoral discipline, teaching and
admonishing the people.
- Doctors held an office of theological scholarship and teaching for the edification of the people and the training of
other ministers.
- Elders were 12 laymen whose task was to serve as a kind of moral police force, mostly issuing warnings, but referring
offenders to the Consistory when necessary.
- Deacons oversaw institutional charity, including hospitals and anti-poverty programs.
Critics often look to the Consistory as the emblem of Calvin's theocratic rule. The
Consistory was an ecclesiastical court consisting of the elders and pastors, charged with maintaining strict order among the
church's officers and members. Offenses ranged from propounding false doctrine to moral infractions, such as wild dancing and
bawdy singing. Typical punishments were being required to attend public sermons or catechism classes. Whereas the city council
had the power to wield the sword, the church courts held the authority of the keys of heaven. Therefore, the maximum punishment
that the consistory could decree was excommunication, which was reversible upon the repentance of the offender. However, the
officers of the church were considered to be the state's spiritual advisors in moral or doctrinal matters. Protestants in the
16th century were often subjected to the Catholic charge that they were innovators in doctrine, and that such innovation did lead
inevitably to moral decay and, ultimately, the dissolution of society itself.
Calvin claimed his wish was to establish the moral legitimacy of the church reformed according to his program, but also to
promote the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Recently discovered documentation[citation needed] of Consistory proceedings shows at
least some concern for domestic life, and women in particular. For the first time men's infidelity was punished as harshly as
that of women, and the Consistory showed absolutely no tolerance for spousal abuse. The Consistory helped to transform Geneva
into the city described by Scottish reformer John Knox as "the most perfect school of Christ
that ever was on the earth since the days of the Apostles." In 1559 Calvin founded the Collège
Calvin as well as a hospital for the indigent.
Civil punishments
Some allege that Calvin was not above using the Consistory to further his own political aims and maintain his sway over civil
and religious life in Geneva, and, it is argued, he responded harshly to any challenge to his actions.[citation needed] Calvin was reluctant to ordain
Genevans, preferring to choose more qualified pastors from the stream of French immigrants pouring into the city for the express
purpose of supporting his own program of reform.[citation needed] When Pierre Ameaux complained about this practice, some contend that Calvin
took it as an attack on divinely ordained authority and persuaded the city council to require Ameaux to walk through the town
dressed in a hair shirt and begging for mercy in the public squares.[citation needed]
Jacques Gruet sided with some of the old Genevan families, who resented the power and
methods of the Consistory. He was implicated in an incident in which someone had placed a placard in one of the city's churches,
reading:
- Gross hypocrite, thou and thy companions will gain little by your pains. If you do not save yourselves by flight, nobody
shall prevent your overthrow, and you will curse the hour when you left your monkery. Warning has been already given that the
devil and his renegade priests were come hither to ruin every thing. But after people have suffered long they avenge themselves.
Take care that you are not served like Mons. Verle of Fribourg [who was killed in a fight with the Protestants, while endeavoring
to save himself by flight]. We will not have so many masters. Mark well what I say.
Gruet's views on religion were well known in Geneva, and he wrote verses about Calvin and the French immigrants that were
"more malignant than poetic" (Audin). As Gruet had been heard threatening Calvin a
few days earlier, he was arrested in connection with the anonymous placard and was tortured. He confessed to the placard and to
writing various other heretical documents that were found in his house, and he was beheaded.[13]
Calvin's acceptance of torture is rejected by modern Calvinists,[14] but in this view, he was in accord with the prevailing attitude of
that age. Few persons of any position or religious denomination were critical of the practice, though there certainly were
exceptions such as Anton Praetorius and Calvin's former friend Sebastian Castellio.
Calvin and the other reformers (as well as Catholics in middle Europe) also believed that they should not permit the practice
of witchcraft, in accord with their understanding of passages such as Exodus 22:18 and Leviticus 20:27,[15] and in 1545 twenty-three people were burned to death in Geneva
under charges of practicing witchcraft and attempting to spread the plague over a three–year
period.[16]
Calvin and Servetus
The most lasting controversy of Calvin's life involves his role in the execution of Michael
Servetus, the Spanish physician, and theologian.
Servetus first published his views in 1531 to a wide yet unreceptive audience. He denounced the Trinity, one of the cardinal doctrines that Catholics and Protestants agreed upon.[17] Calvin knew of these views in 1534, when he accepted Servetus'
invitation to a small gathering in