Calvin, John (1509–1564)

Life and Works

Calvin was born in Noyon, Picardy, in France. He studied arts in Paris from 1521 to 1526; there he was introduced to humanistic scholarship and appeals to reform the church. On his father's insistence, he transferred into the University of Orléans in 1528 to study civil law. At the University of Orléans he became more familiar with the ideas of Humanism and of the Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546). Upon the death of his father in 1531, Calvin went back to Paris and returned to his first love—classics and theology.

Forced to flee France in 1535 because of his support for the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, he went to Basel, Switzerland, where he composed the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), in which he set down his reformed belief and defended the cause of the persecuted French Protestants, or Huguenots. The book provided a massive account of Protestant doctrine and soon became the most important theological text of the Protestant Reformation. It was the Reformation's only genuine systematic theology and for that reason exerted extraordinary influence on future generations of theologians.

A Renaissance portrait of John Calvin, French reformer and founder of Calvinism.

Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis; used with permission.

In 1536, while passing through the city of Geneva, [Page 114]Calvin was persuaded by the minister Guillaume Farel (1489–1565) to assist in organizing the reformation in that city. Strong opposition from civil authorities led to his departure in 1538. He went to Strasbourg, staying there for three years, continuously revising his Institutes.

In 1541, Calvin was invited back to Geneva and during the next years devoted himself to establishing a theocratic regime there. The city adopted his ecclesiastical ordinances, which dealt with the form of church government, and accepted his view that ecclesiastical discipline should be placed in the hand of a consistory. This church-run moral and religious judiciary, a type of morals court with the power to impose spiritual penalties, was established in order to control the behavior of the entire population and to see that everyone accepted the Reformed doctrine and behaved in a godly, Christian way. By these means and others, Calvin transformed Geneva into Protestant Rome. In 1559, with the founding of the Genevan Academy for the education of theologians, the city became the center of international Protestantism.