John Calvin

• 1. Introduction

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  John Calvin once described God's predestination as a decree dreadful indeed, writing in Latin, "Decretum quidem horribile, fateor." This was a man who could confess that his own central teaching frightened him. Born Jehan Cauvin on the 10th of July 1509, in Noyon, a town in Picardy, he trained first as a humanist lawyer and seemed destined for a quiet legal career. Instead he became the principal figure behind the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. He fled France, was expelled from Geneva, then was begged to return and rule its church. Along the way he watched a man burn at the stake. How does a notary's son from a French cathedral town end up at the center of a movement that would reach North America, South Africa, and Korea? What kind of conviction lets someone call his own doctrine horrible and preach it anyway? And what did it cost the people of Geneva to live under his ordinances?

• 2. A Lawyer's Education

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  By age 12, the young Calvin was already employed by the bishop as a clerk and received the tonsure, his hair cut to mark his dedication to the Church. His father Gérard Cauvin, the cathedral notary and registrar to the ecclesiastical court, intended all three surviving sons for the priesthood. The patronage of an influential family, the Montmors, opened the door to the Collège de la Marche in Paris, where Calvin learned Latin under Mathurin Cordier.

  In 1525 or 1526, Gérard reversed course and withdrew his son from the Collège de Montaigu, enrolling him at the University of Orléans to study law. According to the biographers Theodore Beza and Nicolas Colladon, the reason was money: a lawyer would earn more than a priest. Calvin later moved to the University of Bourges in 1529, drawn by the humanist lawyer Andreas Alciati. Humanism, a European intellectual movement, stressed classical studies, and during his 18-month stay Calvin learned Koine Greek, the language needed to read the New Testament.

  By 1532 he held his licentiate in law and published his first book at his own expense, a commentary on Seneca the Younger's De Clementia. The work showed a humanist in the tradition of Erasmus, fluent in classical scholarship. The next turn in his life would not come from a courtroom but from a single university address delivered on the 1st of November 1533.

• 3. A Sudden Conversion

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  Calvin gave two accounts of how he turned from the Roman Catholic Church, and they could hardly seem more different. In one, found in his Commentary on the Book of Psalms, he described God subduing his mind by a sudden conversion, bringing it to a teachable frame though it was more hardened than expected for one so young. In the other, he wrote of inner turmoil, of being alarmed at the misery into which he had fallen, condemning his past life with groans and tears.

  Scholars have argued over which version is true. The biographer Bruce Gordon has insisted the two accounts are not antithetical but rather two different ways of expressing the same reality. T. H. L. Parker places the likely conversion in late 1529 or early 1530, earlier than the older estimate of around 1533. What scholars agree on is that the change corresponded with his break from Rome.

  The rupture became dangerous when Nicolas Cop, rector of the university and a close friend of Calvin, used his inaugural address to call for reform in the Church. The faculty denounced it as heretical, and Cop fled to Basel. Calvin was implicated and forced into hiding, sheltering with his friend Louis du Tillet in Angoulême. The Affair of the Placards in mid-October 1534 finally drove him out of France entirely, after unknown reformers posted notices attacking the Roman Catholic mass and adherents answered with violence.

• 4. Seized For Geneva

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  In March 1536, from the safety of Basel, Calvin published the first edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. He meant it as a defence of his faith and an elementary instruction book for anyone curious about Christianity. That first version held only six chapters, and he would revise it for the rest of his life.

  Calvin never intended to settle in Geneva at all. Bound for Strasbourg in August 1536, he was forced by the military movements of imperial and French armies to detour south, which brought him to the city for what he expected to be a single night. William Farel, a fellow French reformer living there, implored him to stay and help reform the church. Calvin accepted without conditions, eventually receiving the title of reader, which likely meant giving expository lectures on the Bible.

  The partnership soon soured with the city council. On the 16th of January 1537, Farel and Calvin presented their Articles on the Organisation of the Church and its Worship at Geneva, covering excommunication, congregational singing, and revised marriage laws. The council accepted it that same day, but enthusiasm faded. When the city of Bern pushed to use unleavened bread for the Eucharist, the two ministers refused to comply and would not administer communion during the Easter service. A riot broke out, and the next day the council ordered both men to leave Geneva.

• 5. Strasbourg Interlude

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  Martin Bucer rescued Calvin's exile with an invitation to lead a church of French refugees in Strasbourg, a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. Calvin first refused because Farel was left out, then relented when Bucer appealed to him. By September 1538 he had taken the post, applied for citizenship, and ministered to between 400 and 500 members, preaching or lecturing every day with two sermons on Sunday.

  His writing deepened in these years. For the second edition of the Institutes in 1539, he abandoned the catechism format and reorganized the book around the main doctrines of the Bible, growing it from six chapters to seventeen. His Commentary on Romans, published in March 1540, became the model for everything that followed, pairing his own Latin translation from the Greek with exegesis and exposition.

  Friends pressed Calvin to marry, and he took a famously dry view, writing that if he took a wife it would only be so that, freed from worries, he could devote himself to the Lord. A planned wedding to a young noblewoman collapsed. In August 1540 he married Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children. Meanwhile Geneva was reconsidering. After Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto urged the city to return to Rome, the council turned to Calvin, whose Responsio ad Sadoletum defended the reform. He returned on the 13th of September 1541 with an official escort and a wagon for his family, horrified by the calling yet unable to refuse it.

• 6. Ordering A City

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  The Ordonnances ecclésiastiques, passed by the Geneva council on the 20th of November 1541, gave Calvin's vision its machinery. The ordinances defined four orders of ministry: pastors to preach, doctors to instruct, elders to discipline, and deacons to care for the poor. They created the Consistory, an ecclesiastical court of elders and ministers, though the city government kept the power to summon people and on the 19th of March 1543 took over all sentencing.

  Music became a deliberate instrument of worship. In 1542 Calvin adapted a Strasbourg service book into La Forme des Prières et Chants Ecclésiastiques. The poet Clément Marot, who arrived in Geneva as a refugee, contributed psalms, and Louis Bourgeois taught music in the city for sixteen years, supplying tunes including the Old Hundredth.

  The pulpit consumed Calvin. Over his ministry in Geneva he preached more than two thousand sermons, lasting over an hour each, delivered without notes. From March 1555 to July 1556 alone he gave two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy. He worked consecutively through whole books of the Bible. The personal cost was steep: his infant son Jacques, born on the 28th of July 1542, survived only briefly, and his wife Idelette died on the 29th of March 1549. He never married again, writing to Pierre Viret that he had been bereaved of the best friend of his life.

• 7. The Death Of Servetus

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  Michael Servetus, a brilliant Spanish polymath who introduced the Islamic idea of pulmonary circulation to Europe, walked into Geneva on the 13th of August 1553. He arrived as a fugitive, condemned in absentia by Catholic authorities to death by slow burning after publishing Christianismi Restitutio, which rejected the Trinity and predestination. Bruce Gordon noted that among its offenses were a denial of original sin and a hardly comprehensible view of the Trinity.

  The two men had a poisoned history. Beginning in 1546 they had exchanged letters debating doctrine, Calvin writing under the pseudonym Charles d'Espeville and Servetus as Michel de Villeneuve. Servetus sent him a copy of the Institutes covered in annotations meant to expose its errors. In a letter to Farel on the 13th of February 1546, Calvin warned that if Servetus came to Geneva, as far as his authority went, he would not let him leave alive.

  The trial dragged on partly because Calvin's enemies hoped to use it against him. On the 21st of August the council wrote to other Swiss cities to share the burden of the decision. When the replies from Zurich, Basel, Bern, and Schaffhausen were read on the 20th of October, the council condemned Servetus as a heretic. He was burnt alive on the 27th of October at the Plateau of Champel. Some scholars say Calvin and other ministers asked that he be beheaded instead, knowing burning was the only legal option, but the plea was refused. The execution turned Calvin into an acclaimed defender of Christianity, yet it also drove Sebastian Castellio, once a close associate, to break with him and argue for tolerance toward heretics.

• 8. What Survived Him

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  Calvin preached his final sermon in St. Pierre on the 6th of February 1564. Afraid he might die before finishing the Institutes, he had forced himself through its final revision, expanding it from 21 chapters to 80, into what he called nearly a new work. He made his will on the 25th of April, leaving small sums to his family and to the collège, then bade the visiting ministers a final farewell recorded in his Discours d'adieu aux ministres. He died on the 27th of May 1564, aged 54, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois, the reformers fearing his body might become a saint's cult.

  His last years had not been only about Geneva. He sheltered the Marian exiles who fled Catholic Mary Tudor's England starting in 1555, and under figures like John Knox they carried his ideas back to England and Scotland. Between 1555 and 1562, more than 100 ministers were sent into France. His collège, opened on the 5th of June 1559, grew within five years to 1,200 students in the grammar school and 300 in the advanced school, eventually becoming the Collège Calvin and the University of Geneva.

  The term Calvinism was first used by his rival Joachim Westphal in 1552, and the movement outran its founder. The Heidelberg Catechism appeared in 1563, the Belgic Confession in 1561, and in 1567 Hungarian Calvinists at Debrecen adopted the Second Helvetic Confession. Max Weber would later trace the rise of capitalism partly to a secularized strain of Calvinist thought, the idea that worldly success signaled God's grace, though that idea played only a minor role in Calvin's own thinking. He had always warned against being called an idol, and against treating Geneva as a new Jerusalem, advising his followers instead to adapt to wherever they found themselves.