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The year 2009 marks two important anniversaries in the history of the Christian church: the birth of John Calvin at Noyon in France in 1509, and the birth of the modern Baptist movement at Amsterdam in 1609. Both events are being celebrated with numerous symposia, publications, and conferences, but few people are asking what these two events, separated by the century of the Reformation, have in common. Baptists are fiercely independent and refuse to recognize any human figure as a standard of faith. Today's Baptists would agree with what the nonconformist Samuel Hieron said in the 17th century:

We do not hang on Calvin's sleeve
Nor yet on Zwingli's we believe:
And Puritans we do defy,
If right the name you do apply.

Are Baptists Calvinists? If a Calvinist is a person who follows strictly the teachings of John Calvin, then in three important respects Baptists are not, and have never been, Calvinists. Calvin was a pedobaptist (practicing infant baptism); Baptists are credobaptists (believers' baptism only). Calvin believed in a presbyterian form of church government; Baptists are congregationalists. Calvin believed that the civil magistrate should enforce both tables of the law (moral responsibilities towards God and towards one's neighbor), suppressing heresy and blasphemy by force if necessary. Baptists believe in religious liberty for all persons.

For all that, Calvin remains the most formative theological influence in the development of the Baptist tradition. Unfortunately, many Baptists today know only the ungenerous stereotype of Calvin that depicts him as "the dictator of Geneva wielding the whip of logic and driving a chariot named the sovereignty of God harnessed to mean-spirited steeds called predestination and total depravity" (Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin, 14). It is said that on occasion so-called liberal Christians stand before the famous statue of Calvin in Geneva and hurl eggs at the dour likeness looking down at them!

2009 is a good time to look again at Calvin's theology and its relationship to the Baptist movement. Here are five theological principles Baptists can learn from Calvin.

Unlike the Augsburg Confession, which began with an article on the doctrine of God, Reformed statements of faith usually begin by affirming the authority and sufficiency of Holy Scripture. Baptist confessions of faith do the same. Calvin was a biblical theologian. He believed that God had revealed his will to human beings through his mighty acts of salvation recorded in the words of the Bible. Calvin's official title in the Church at Geneva was "Minister of the Divine Word." (Calvin's famous Institutes of the Christian Religion is a masterful summary of Protestant theology, but in order to get a complete understanding of Calvin you must read his Old and New Testament commentaries.) Yet he did not understand the Bible as a mere depository of information about sacred things. Rather, Scripture conveyed the reality of the living Christ through the witness of the Holy Spirit.

In their recent "battles" over the Bible, Baptists have much to learn from Calvin's engagement with Scripture. He would agree without hesitation that the Bible is totally truthful in all that it affirms, but he also recognized that this insight, as well as the Christological meaning of Scripture, was not achieved by systematic logic or empirical investigation. Inspiration and illumination are both the work of God's Spirit, the Spirit of truth who invariably draws us to Christ who is the Truth as well as the Way and the Life (John 14:6).

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