Who Was John Calvin?

A visit to modern Geneva in Switzerland might include a trip to see the International Monument to the Reformation on the grounds of the University of Geneva. The wall is over one hundred meters long, and at its center are sixteen-foot carved figures of four men: William Farel (1489–1565), Theodore Beza (1519–1605), John Knox (c.1514–1572), and, standing between Farel and Beza, John Calvin (1509–1564). Tourists probably snap a photograph without any knowledge of who these men were or their importance to the Reformation and its effect upon the shape and development of modern Europe. R.C. Sproul, in an afterword to a volume of scholarly essays on John Calvin, wrote:

John Calvin was a Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians, a titan in the midst of dwarfs. He stands head and shoulders above the rank and file of theologians, scholars, and biblical experts down through the ages. He abides in the elite company of men like Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards. As Aristotle received the epithet “the philosopher,” so Calvin received a similar sobriquet from Philipp Melanchthon, who referred to Calvin simply as “the theologian.”

Background

Born in 1509, in Noyon, Picardy in northeastern France, Calvin as a boy was set on a course of education that would lead him to become a priest. Those plans were disrupted for a season after his father ran into trouble with the cathedral authorities, for whom he worked as a financial administrator, and was subsequently excommunicated. The young Calvin was advised to leave his plans for the priesthood and become a lawyer, studying at Orleans and Bourges. One of his tutors at Bourges was a man called Melchior Wolmar, a man with evangelical sympathies who taught him Greek, employing the New Testament as a source.

Following his father’s death, Calvin, now back in Paris, published what we might think of as his doctoral work, a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia. The importance of this publication lies in something that deeply affected Calvin for the rest of his life. He was a “Renaissance man,” with its stress on ad fontes, “back to the sources.”

Conversion

The date of Calvin’s conversion is, according to one author, “among the most disputed topics of Reformation scholarship.” Some have dated his conversion as early as 1529 and others as late as 1533. Although there were human instruments to account for his acceptance of a Reformation understanding of salvation, he gave all the credit to God. Writing two years before his death, in a profound treatise on election, Calvin could say, “It is not within our power to convert ourselves from our evil life, unless God changes and cleanses us by his Holy Spirit.”

Ministry

John Calvin the Reformer came to prominence after his conversion, having to flee Paris for fear of capture and probable execution. Sometime in 1536, Calvin wrote and later published the first edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven when he wrote it. It was a quarter of the size of the final edition in 1559 and remains one of the most important theological books in history to this day.

The Institutes got the attention of Geneva, which had recently declared itself on the side of the Reformation, passing an edict of the Reformation in 1535, which included the abolition of the Mass, a symbolic break from Roman Catholicism. By May of 1536, Genevan authorities approved the adoption of the Reformation. Whatever the political intent (not paying taxes to the Holy Roman Empire would have been one of them), the city could make no headway without a preacher. So it was that in 1536, John Calvin, with the aid of friend, William Farel, was asked to preach at the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre Genève. Apart from a brief exile in Strasbourg when Calvin’s reforms went too far for some of Geneva’s politicians and bureaucrats, Calvin remained as pastor of the church until his death in 1564.

If we were to summarize almost thirty years of Calvin’s ministry in Geneva and beyond, it would include the following emphases:

Calvin was a preacher.

Preaching twice on Sunday and during lunchtime Monday through Friday (weekday preaching varied from time to time), Calvin preached an average of nine sermons every two weeks. Some have estimated that he preached around four thousand sermons in Geneva. Around 2,300 survive in some form or another to this day. Many have been translated from French into English, some during his lifetime and others more recently.

Calvin’s sermons were committed to exposition of the biblical text, going through the New Testament and Psalms on Sundays and the Old Testament during the week. His French was simple, with no citations other than what he could recall from memory since he preached out of the Greek and Hebrew text. He adopted the lectio continua method, going through biblical books a few verses at a time and restarting where he left off. One example of his method is the 159 sermons on the book of Job, preached on weekdays from February 1554 to April 1555.

Calvin was a pastor.

It is easy to forget this aspect of Calvin’s life, given that we know him as “the theologian.” Calvin showed a deep concern for the souls of men and women; he also catechized children on Sunday afternoons. His sermons demonstrate a deep love for people and a concern for the trials and difficulties that ordinary people experienced in their daily lives.

One of these issues was death and the need to be certain of salvation. Infant mortality was high in the sixteenth century. Calvin and his wife, Idelette Stordeur de Bure, lost their son shortly after his birth. After a lengthy illness, Idelette died in 1549. Calvin, in a letter to the Reformer Pierre Viret, wrote, “I have been bereaved of the best companion of my life, of one who, had it been so ordered, would not only have been the willing sharer of my indigence, but even of my death. During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry.”

Calvin was “the theologian of the Holy Spirit.”

It was the nineteenth-century Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield who called Calvin “the theologian of the Holy Spirit.” According to Warfield, Calvin gave a systematic and comprehensive exposition of the work of the Holy Spirit in the salvation of the individual, making his exposition of the Holy Sprit the “assured possession of the church” and his greatest gift to us.

Calvin’s life was marked by a quiet sense of humility.

He was the most powerful theologian of his time, influencing thousands, but he was always aware of his own fragility before an incomprehensible God. Following his death on May 27, 1564, at his own request, Calvin was buried in an unmarked grave. His motto, Cor meum tibi offero, Domine, prompte et sincere (“My heart I offer to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely”) captures his spirit of self-denial and Christlike tenderness.

Calvin’s goal was doxology.

Fifth, as his sermons and writings demonstrate, his goal was doxology. In everything he did, he purposed to give all the glory to God. Calvin’s aim was not to spar over theological points for the sake of it but to draw his listeners and readers to bow their knees and worship the one true and living God. The opening sentence of his Institutes captures it perfectly: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”