John Calvin

John Calvin was a French theologian and pastor who became the leading figure of the second generation of the Protestant Reformation. From Geneva, the small city-republic where he worked for most of his adult life, he set out a systematic Protestant theology in his Institutes of the Christian Religion and built a model church that was copied across Europe. The Reformed and Presbyterian churches of Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Scotland, England and North America all descend in large part from his teaching.

He was born Jehan Cauvin on 10 July 1509 at Noyon in Picardy, in northern France. His father was a lawyer who served the local bishop and cathedral chapter, and he intended his son for the Church. As a boy Calvin was sent to Paris, where he studied at the Collège de la Marche and then the strict Collège de Montaigu. Around 1525 his father, by then in dispute with the cathedral clergy, redirected him to law, which he studied at the universities of Orléans and Bourges.

Like many educated young men of his day, Calvin was drawn to the humanist movement, with its call to return to ancient texts in their original languages, associated above all with Erasmus. He learned Greek, and in 1532 published his first book, a learned commentary on Seneca's treatise On Clemency, which showed the classical training that would mark all his later writing. His humanist method of close reading, applied to the Bible, became central to his theology, and the wider intellectual world he came from is described on the Renaissance philosophy page.

At some point around 1533 Calvin underwent what he later called a sudden conversion, abandoning his loyalty to the papacy and embracing the evangelical ideas spreading from Germany since Martin Luther broke with Rome. In November 1533 his friend Nicolas Cop, rector of the University of Paris, gave a lecture with evangelical overtones, and both men had to leave the city. A year later, in October 1534, anti-Catholic posters attacking the Mass appeared in Paris and even at the royal residence, the Affair of the Placards, and King Francis I turned decisively against the reformers. Calvin left the Kingdom of France and settled in Basel.

There, in 1536, he published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a compact Latin summary of Protestant belief dedicated to Francis I in defence of the persecuted French evangelicals. Calvin revised and expanded it for the rest of his life. A French version of 1541 became one of the founding works of French prose, and the final Latin edition of 1559 was about five times the length of the first.

In the summer of 1536 Calvin passed through Geneva, which had just thrown off the rule of its bishop and the Duke of Savoy and voted to adopt the Reformation. The fiery preacher Guillaume Farel persuaded him to stay and help organise the new church. The two men pressed the city council hard, demanding a confession of faith from every citizen and the right to exclude unworthy people from communion, and in 1538 the council expelled them.

Calvin spent the next three years in Strasbourg, then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, as pastor to a congregation of French refugees. He worked closely with the reformer Martin Bucer, whose ideas on church order influenced him, attended religious conferences between Protestants and Catholics in Germany, and in 1540 married Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children. Their only son died in infancy, and Idelette died in 1549.

In 1541 Geneva's leaders, facing disorder after his departure, invited Calvin back, and he returned in September. He drew up Ecclesiastical Ordinances that organised the church around four offices: pastors to preach, doctors to teach, elders to oversee the moral life of the community, and deacons to care for the poor and sick. Pastors and elders sat together in the Consistory, a church court that summoned people for offences ranging from quarrels and drunkenness to dancing, superstition and absence from sermons. Its sanctions were mostly admonition and exclusion from communion, while serious cases went to the city council.

Calvin never held political office and became a citizen of Geneva only in 1559, but his influence was enormous. He preached several times a week, lectured on the Bible and wrote commentaries on most of its books. His authority was contested for years by leading Genevan families, called the Libertines or Perrinists after their leader Ami Perrin, who resented the Consistory and the many French refugees settling in the city. In 1553 the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, who denied the Trinity, was arrested in Geneva, condemned by the council with Calvin's support and burned at the stake. Other Protestant cities approved the verdict, but it has been one of the most criticised acts of the Reformation ever since. Calvin's opponents were defeated in 1555, and from then until his death his position was secure.

At the heart of Calvin's teaching was the absolute sovereignty of God and the dependence of human beings on divine grace. Like Luther, he held that people are saved by grace through faith, not by their own merit, and that scripture is the final authority above church tradition. He is best known for his doctrine of predestination, the belief that God has chosen from eternity those who will be saved and those who will not, a teaching he did not invent but stated with unusual firmness. On the Lord's Supper he took a middle path between Luther, who insisted on the bodily presence of Christ in the bread and wine, and the Zürich reformer Huldrych Zwingli, who saw it as a memorial; in 1549 he reached an agreement on the subject with Zwingli's successor Heinrich Bullinger of Zürich. He held that the church should be governed by its own officers and discipline, independent of the state, though working alongside it.

In 1559 Calvin founded the Geneva Academy, led by his colleague and later successor Theodore Beza, to train ministers. Hundreds of pastors were sent from Geneva into France, where Reformed Protestants, later called Huguenots, became a large and persecuted minority. Worn out by illness, Calvin died in Geneva on 27 May 1564 and, at his own request, was buried in an unmarked grave.

The churches shaped by his ideas spread widely. John Knox, who had lived in Geneva, carried them to the Kingdom of Scotland, founding Scottish Presbyterianism. The Dutch Reformed Church of the Netherlands, English Puritans and the settlers of New England all drew on him, as did the Reformed churches of Hungary and Transylvania. In 1905 the German sociologist Max Weber argued that the Calvinist ethic of disciplined work helped create the spirit of modern capitalism, a thesis still debated. Calvin has been admired as a clear and rigorous thinker and condemned as a stern moralist and persecutor, and both views find support in the record of his life.