John Calvin

John Calvin was born Jean Cauvin on July 10, 1509, at Noyon in Picardy, northern France. His father worked for the cathedral chapter and set him toward the priesthood, then changed his mind and sent him to law instead. Calvin studied at Paris, Orléans, and Bourges, took his law degree, and published his first book at twenty-two — a commentary on Seneca's *On Clemency*, the work of a promising young humanist. He never wrote much about his conversion. In one late preface he says only that God subdued and turned his stubborn heart by a sudden conversion, and that afterward he burned with a desire to go further. In 1533 Paris turned dangerous for evangelicals and Calvin fled. In 1535, at Basel, aged twenty-six, he finished the first edition of the *Institutes of the Christian Religion* — a short handbook meant to teach ordinary readers the faith, and to tell the King of France that the people he was burning were not anarchists. Calvin kept enlarging it for the rest of his life; the final 1559 edition runs to four books, and the plan never changed: know God, know yourself, know Christ, know the church. He meant to live quietly and write. In July 1536, detouring through Geneva because troop movements had closed the direct road, he was recognized by Guillaume Farel, who had just helped the city break with Rome. Farel demanded that he stay and told him God would curse his studies if he refused. Calvin, by his own account terrified, stayed. Geneva threw him and Farel out in 1538 over a fight about the church's right to fence the Lord's Table. Calvin went to Strasbourg for three years — the happiest of his life, he said — pastoring a French refugee congregation, lecturing, writing his commentary on Romans, and marrying Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children. Their only son died in infancy. Idelette died in 1549, and he did not remarry. Geneva called him back in 1541. He returned unwillingly and stayed twenty-three years. He preached constantly — often daily, straight through book after book of the Bible — trained pastors, wrote commentaries on nearly the whole Bible, drafted church orders and a catechism, corresponded across Europe, and did most of it while ill. He did not run Geneva. He was not even a citizen until 1559 and had no vote; the city council could and did overrule him. But he shaped it, and the shaping had a dark hour. In 1553 Michael Servetus, who denied the Trinity and had already been condemned by the Catholic authorities in France, came to Geneva. Calvin testified against him, the council condemned him, and he was burned alive. Calvin had asked for beheading instead. Nearly every Protestant authority of that day approved the execution. It remains the thing his critics name first, and honestly so. In 1559 he founded the Academy of Geneva, which trained the men who carried the Reformed faith into France, Scotland, the Netherlands, and beyond. John Knox, who had sheltered there, called the city the most perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles. He preached his last sermon in February 1564 and died on May 27, worn out at fifty-four. At his own instruction he was buried in an unmarked grave, so that no one could make a shrine of it. Nobody knows where it is. Sources: John Calvin, *Institutes of the Christian Religion* and the preface to his *Commentary on the Psalms*; Theodore Beza, *The Life of John Calvin*; Bruce Gordon, *Calvin*; Philip Schaff, *History of the Christian Church*, vol. 8.

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