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Calvin came from lowly stock. His paternal grandfather was a barrel-maker and boatman, his mother’s father an innkeeper. His own father, Gerard, however, had improved his lot to become a successful lawyer, with a practice which brought him into the society of the local gentry and cathedral clergy. A side benefit from these connections fell to John, in that he was to be educated privately with the sons of the aristocratic De Montmors and was also to be given one or two chaplaincies in the cathedral, which serve as university grants.

Gerard planned a career in the church for his son. The path to this career lay through the University of Paris. There he would take the arts course and then go on to the nine years of study for the theological doctorate. After that, he would trust the De Montmors’ patronage and his own talents to reach the higher levels of preferment.

The arts course was accomplished, or nearly so, by the mid-1520s. Calvin was now an excellent scholar, a good Latinist, proficient in the philosophy taught in those days, and qualified to take up the intensive study of theology.

But suddenly all the plans fell through. Gerard changed his mind and decided that John should achieve greatness in law and not in the church. John, dutiful son that he was, acquiesced, and the next five or six years saw him at the University of Orleans, attaining some distinction in a study for which he had no love. These were years which brought him into the ideals of the Renaissance and probably into the evangelical faith as well.

The effects of the new approach to the arts and scholarship were by this time apparent all over Europe. Greek was steadily making its way as a necessity and not a mere ornament in the scholar’s equipment. Printing presses were supplying cheap editions of the Greek and Latin classics. There were already half-a-dozen editions of the Greek New Testament and as many of the Hebrew Old Testament. It was a revolution in thinking and taste, almost as great as that which has occurred in our own day, with “the divine art of printing,” as Bullinger called it, corresponding to the computer and word processor.

Calvin, too, came under this influence. He learned Greek now and, a little later, Hebrew. He developed a taste for good writing, read widely in the classics, added Plato to the Aristotle he already knew, and made his close friends from like-minded young men. Moreover, he set to work, editing and commenting on a Latin treatise by Seneca. This first book was published in 1532, when he was 22 years old.

But, during the years of studying law, a more profound influence than that of the Renaissance had overtaken him. By the mid-1520s, the most momentous period in the history of the modern church, Luther’s position was clear. In many countries Luther had a strong following and his friends were making use of the easy dissemination of ideas by printing to reach a wider audience. Most importantly for Calvin, there were also “Lutherans” in Paris and in Orleans.

We do not know the time or the circumstances of Calvin’s conversion to the evangelical faith. His own account in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms is reticent and vague. He writes:

God drew me from obscure and lowly beginnings and conferred on me that most honorable office of herald and minister of the Gospel …What happened first was that by an unexpected conversion he tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years—for I was strongly devoted to the superstitions of the Papacy that nothing less could draw me from such depths of mire. And so this mere taste of true godliness that I received set me on fire with such a desire to progress that I pursued the rest of my studies more coolly, although I did not give them up altogether. Before a year had slipped by anybody who longed for a purer doctrine kept on coming to learn from me, still a beginner and a raw recruit.

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