The Life and Times of John Calvin

T. H. L. Parker

As Shakespeare wrote, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” John Calvin was certainly not born great.

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.

A Change in Plans

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.

Conversion

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.

Plainly, for Calvin himself, the important thing was not when it happened or how it happened, but the change itself and the results of the change.

He became marked out as a “Lutheran,” and, when persecution arose in Paris where he had returned to teach in one of the colleges, he was forced into hiding now here, now there, in France. At last, he had to leave the country altogether. He sought refuge in Basel.

In that city, 450 years ago, he published the book with which his name was always to be associated—“Calvin’s Institutes.” The word “Institutes,” however, does not convey much to us. It would be better to translate the title as “Principles of the Christian Faith” or “Instruction in the Christian Faith.” The book was intended as an elementary manual for general readers who wanted to know something about the evangelical faith. The first part of the title expressed this aim: “The Principles of the Christian Faith, containing almost the whole sum of godliness and whatever it is necessary to know about saving doctrine.” Calvin later wrote that, when he undertook the work, “all I had in mind was to hand on some elementary teaching by which anyone who had been touched by an interest in religion might be formed to true godliness. I labored at the task especially for our own Frenchmen, for I saw that many were hungering and thirsting after Christ and yet that only a very few had any real knowledge of him.”

The first three chapters take up 81 pages, in the edition of 1536. They form the heart of the book. But the situation in Western Christendom demanded that more should be said. Between the Roman Catholics and the Reformers, there were three major disagreements—on the Church, the Sacraments, and Justification. The last had already been fully explained, and the first was kept for the final chapter. Two chapters were given to discussion of the Sacraments of the Roman Church not recognized by the Reformers. These two chapters, with 106 pages, are longer because the subject was so important. In to the final chapter are packed three topics: Christian liberty, the authority of the Church, and political government.

The fact that the length of the last three chapters is double that of the first three indicates a second purpose of the book. This was to make clear to non-evangelicals, whether strong Roman Catholics or Renaissance “humanists,” where the Reformation stood doctrinally. Ridiculous ideas were current, identifying the Reformers with various ancient heresies, with extreme and anarchistic Anabaptists, and with moral permissiveness. Calvin, therefore, wrote the Institutio as a confession of the faith of evangelicals, showing their orthodoxy to the great creeds, their loyalty to established political order, and their acceptance of the moral demands of God’s law. There should have been no need after this for anyone who could understand Latin to plead ignorance of the Reformation faith.

What If?

History is full of “ifs.” If there had not been troop movements and skirmishes blocking the route to Strasbourg, if they had reached Strasbourg in a day or two, and if Calvin had settled there for life, the history of Europe, England, and America would have been vastly different.

With his brother and sister and one or two friends, he directed his steps toward the free city of Strasbourg. As it was, the little company had to go round two sides of a triangle, into what we now call Switzerland, and then approach Strasbourg from the south. They got to Geneva, a safe town for them, since it had declared for the Reformation a month or two earlier. Here they put up at an inn for the night, intending to resume their journey in the morning.

Before the evening was out, it had come to the ears of the church leader, William Farel, that the author of the Institutio was in the city. Farel, poor man, was beside himself with work and worry, as he strove to organize and establish a newly formed church. Organizing was not his strong point, and he had few helpers. Now there had been given him a man who would prove an ideal assistant. Straight to the inn went Farel, not dreaming that his offer would be welcomed. Calvin, however, was obdurate. He was a scholar, a writer, not a pastor or administrator. Farel would have to find someone else. Calvin was headed for Strasbourg in the morning.

Terror-Stricken to Stay

At last Farel, baffled and frustrated, swore a great oath that God would curse all Calvin’s studies unless he stayed in Geneva. Calvin had always had a tender conscience, and now, “I felt as if God from heaven had laid his mighty hand upon me to stop me in my course… and I was so terror stricken that I did not continue my journey.”

Through all that followed, this belief that God had called him to work here, and not somewhere else, never wavered. This belief was challenged only once, when he and Farel were banished from Geneva eighteen months later. He thought that God had mercifully released him. But, after three years of freedom, he submitted to renewed imprecations from Farel and returned to Geneva. In the long struggles which followed, his human desires were for freedom; but he was a soldier placed in a field of battle by his Captain. In that battle he must stay, until his Captain ordered otherwise. New orders finally arrived in May, 1564, with his death.

His return to Geneva from Strasbourg in 1541 was a different matter from his first entering the city. Then he had been a mere passer-by. Now he was an important and influential personage, close friend of leading Reformers like Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon, and the author of three more books.

The Institutio was rewritten. Since 1536, Calvin had been doing some hard reading, especially in the Church fathers. He had also been doing some hard theological thinking and had the benefit of stimulating discussions with other theologians. He realized the Institutio needed more breadth.

He now put it out with the unashamed claim of presenting a comprehensive statement of “well-nigh the whole sum of our wisdom, worth calling true and solid wisdom.” This was not so much a revision as a rewriting, though with much of the earlier material incorporated into it. The six chapters swelled to seventeen. The catechism form was abandoned, in favor of a broader treatment centering loosely round the concept of wisdom, with its two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.

It was, then, this established theologian who was invited back to Geneva. He could make his own terms and was obviously in a position of great moral advantage. It is to his credit that he strove to curb his temper and his self-will (both too evident in his first period in Geneva) and to be patient with opposition.

Reorganizing the Church

His commission was to reorganize the Church in Geneva. For him, the Church in any place must faithfully mirror the principles laid down in the Holy Scripture. In the New Testament, he found four permanent orders of ministry, and around these he constructed his organization. He prepared a draft document, “Ecclesiastical Ordinances,” which was discussed in committee, somewhat modified, and passed for approval by the City Councils.

In this fourfold ministry, the whole life of the Church was covered, its worship, education, soundness and purity, and its works of love and mercy.

To the pastors was committed the ministry of the Word and Sacraments. They conducted the services, preached, administered the Sacraments, and generally cared for the spiritual welfare of the parishioners. In each of the three parish churches, two services were held on Sundays and the catechism class for children. During the week a service was held every other day—later on, every day. The Lord’s Supper was to be celebrated quarterly, not once a week as Calvin wished.

The doctors, or teachers, had the responsibility for education, both for adults and for children. Lectures on the Old and New Testaments were usually held on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. These were more academic than the sermons and were conducted in Latin. The audience consisted of the older schoolboys, ministers, and anyone else who wished to attend. The education of children was also to be provided; but here great difficulties were encountered, owing to scarcity of suitable teachers and lack of money. The problem was gradually overcome, and the establishment of the Academy, in 1559, placed education in Geneva on a stable footing.

The third order was that of elders. In every district of the city, there were one or two elders who would keep an eye on spiritual affairs. If they saw, for example, that so-and-so was frequently the worse for drink, or that Mr. X beat up his wife, or that Mr. Y and Mrs. Z were seeing rather a lot of each other, they were to admonish them in a brotherly manner. If the response was unsatisfactory, they were to report the matter to the Consistory, who would summon the offender, remonstrate with him or her. If this failed, they would, as a last resort, pronounce excommunication, which would remain in force until he repented.

Finally, the social welfare work was the charge of the deacons. They were the hospital management board, the social security executives, and the alms-house supervisors. It was a proud boast that there were no beggars in Geneva.

A Heavy Work Load

Calvin not only organized the form of the church, he also played his full part in the day-to-day work. He preached twice every Sunday and every day of alternate weeks. In the weeks when he was not preaching, he lectured three times (he was the Old Testament professor). He took his place regularly on the Consistory, which met every Thursday. And he was either on committees or incessantly being asked for advice about matters relating to the deacons.

It should not be thought that he was in any way the ruler or dictator of Geneva. He was appointed by the City Council and paid by them. He could at any time have been dismissed by them (as he had been in 1538). He was a foreigner in Geneva, not even a naturalized citizen, until near the end of his life. His great authority was a moral authority, stemming from his belief that, because he proclaimed the message of the Bible, he was God’s ambassador, with the divine authority and power behind him. That he was involved in so much that went on in Geneva, from the City constitution down to drains and heating appliances, was simply due to his outstanding abilities and sense of duty. He made good his offer of himself in 1541 as “the servant of Geneva.”

Poor Health

The burden of work and responsibilities was turned into crushing labor by his continual poor health. Overwork in his law-student days had impaired his digestion. This in turn, increased by his excitable and nervous disposition, brought on migraines. Later his lungs became affected, perhaps through too much preaching and talking, and he was incapacitated by lung hemorrhages. As if all this were not enough, he was tortured by bladder stones and the gout.

And yet he drove his body beyond its limits. When he could not walk the couple of hundred yards to church, he was carried in a chair to preach. When the doctor forbade him to go out in the winter air to the lecture room, he crowded the audience into his bedroom and gave the remaining lectures on Malachi there. To those who would urge him to rest, he had the wondering question, “What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when he comes?”

The afflictions and pressures he endured were intensified by the opposition he faced. It was not reasoned opposition raised in the course of debate. This opposition took the form of actual physical intimidation, of men setting their dogs on him, of the firing of guns outside the church during the service, of people trying to drown his voice or put him off by loud coughing while he preached, even of anonymous threats against his life.

Disaffection grew. Calvin, for his part, stuck to his guns admirably. At first he was patient, but gradually his patience was worn away. Even in his patience, he was too unsympathetic. He may have remained always morally superior to his opponents, but he showed little understanding, little kindness, and certainly little sense of humor. On the other hand, we have to ask ourselves how much Calvin would have achieved in Geneva and in the world, if he had been an amenable sort of man. His sympathy was for the needs of the Gospel; his kindness was for the Kingdom of God; in the situation he saw no comedy, only tragedy.

We must remember that during all this turmoil, Calvin had not relinquished his many other responsibilities. He continued preaching and lecturing, commentaries and other books were written, many hundreds of letters were dispatched to every part of the civilized world, and he had worked away at the Institutio

Never satisfied, Calvin made his greatest and final revision in the winter of 1558, when severe illness gave him leisure from ordinary tasks. The work was greatly increased in bulk, the 21 chapters of 1550 now became 80. These 80 were completely recast into four “books,” corresponding to the four parts of the Apostles’ Creed on God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and the Church.

What happened to the Institutio in its course from the six chapters based on the catechism to the four books on the creed? Did it lose its contact with those who are “hungering and thirsting for Christ”? Did it cease to be evangelistic and become purely theoretical theology? Above all, did it drift away from the teaching of Holy Scripture? Not at all.

The 1559 edition begins with the same sentence as it did in 1539, which was nearly the same as in 1536: “Our true and genuine wisdom can be summed up as the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.” By “God,” Calvin means the God who has revealed himself through Holy Scripture, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By “the knowledge of God,” Calvin means the relationship of child and Father created by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Institutio remains what it always was, an evangelistic and pastoral work, a continual exposition of Holy Scripture.

Only five years remained to him after 1559. They were years of increasing sickness and weakness—years, nevertheless, of unremitting toil. He again translated the Institutio into French. He wrote the large commentary on the Pentateuch and translated that also. He continued to preach, lecture, and perform his ordinary duties until February of 1564. After this he quickly declined and died three months later.

Dr. T.H.L. Parker is former professor at the University of Durham in England and author of the biographical work John Calvin, published by Lion.

- More from T. H. L. Parker

History

John Calvin: A Gallery of Calvin’s Supporters and Opponents

Olivetan [1503–1538]

Olivetan, which means “Midnight Oil,” was a nickname acquired because of his habit of studying late into the night. His real name was Pierre Robert, and he was Calvin’s cousin. According to Beza, Olivetan was the one who set the evangelical fires burning in Calvin’s heart. Although they knew each other in Calvin’s hometown of Noyon, the cousins became more intimately acquainted while studying in Paris and Orleans. Already a Protestant, Olivetan aroused the suspicions of the authorities, and he was forced to flee to Bucer’s Strasbourg in 1528. In 1532, the Waldensian Christians of Italy’s Piedmont area decided to join the Reformation. Olivetan visited the Waldensians and was commissioned to translate the Bible into French. When Calvin fled France and arrived in Basel in 1535, Olivetan was there placing the finishing touches on this pioneering work. Calvin may have assisted his cousin in the final phase of translating the New Testament. He did write a Latin and a French preface to the pioneering work, which clearly reflected, for the first time, his evangelical convictions. From 1533 to 1535, Olivetan helped to win Geneva to the Reformation, that city where his younger cousin would spend the greater part of his life. Olivetan returned to Italy and the Waldensians where he died at the early age of 32. The cousins seem to have been rather close, for Olivetan left his library to Calvin.

Lefevre D’Etaples [ca. 1455–1536]

In his formative years, Calvin became aware of the native French reform movement, spearheaded by the great biblical scholar, Lefevre D’Etaples. Lefevre began an intensive study of the Bible and came to the conclusion that the Scriptures must be the sole source of authority. He advocated what he called the “literal-spiritual” interpretation of Scripture. Lefevre argued that the only proper meaning of Scripture is that intended by the Holy Spirit. Luther was profoundly influenced by Lefevre’s “literal-spiritual” interpretation of Scripture.

Drawing heavily on Paul’s epistles, Lefevre also came to understand that man was saved only by God’s mercy and grace, which are received by faith alone. Neither good works nor human merit contribute to salvation. He advocated a rigorous doctrine of predestination, and his view of justification by faith alone anticipated Luther’s.

As he examined the Scriptures, he was amazed that he could find no mention of the pope, indulgences, purgatory, seven sacraments, priestly celibacy, or worship of Mary. Not surprisingly, he was charged with heresy by the Sorbonne in 1521. Lefevre then joined his pupil, Bishop Briconnet, to assist in reforming the diocese at Meux. Also at Meux was Guillaume Farel, who was later to become so important to Calvin and Geneva. In 1525, hostility to his reforms became so intense that Lefevre was again forced to Strasbourg for a time. When he returned, he lived out the remainder of his life at Nerac, under the protection of the King’s sister, Marguerite d’Angouleme.

A fugitive from the Roman Catholic authorities, young Calvin proceeded to Nerac where he met the aging Lefevre in the Spring of 1534. It was reported that Lefevre said that Calvin would be “an instrument in the establishing of the Kingdom of God in France.” Apparently, Calvin came away from his meeting with the elder Lefevre convinced that reform would not come about by remaining within the Roman Church. Shortly thereafter, Calvin resigned his benefices and thus broke decisively with Rome.

Francis I [1515–1547]

Francis I was the King of France during Calvin’s early career as a Reformer. During most of his reign he was entangled in several wars with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and therefore could not devote his attention to religious matters. Initially, Francis was reasonably tolerant of the French Reformers, due primarily to the influence of his sister Marguerite d’Angouleme. He even maintained cordial relations with the pioneer of the reform movement in France, Lefevre D’Etaples. But all that changed in October, 1534. It was to Francis I that Calvin wrote his famous letter which was prefaced to the first edition of the Institutes. The King had become incensed by the protest of French Protestants known as the “Affair of the Placards.” In the early morning hours of October 18, 1534, Protestants distributed throughout Paris leaflets denouncing the Roman mass. One was even placed on the King’s bedroom door. Francis dramatized his anger by accompanying a solemn religious procession to the Cathedral of Notre Dame to symbolically purify Paris from the abomination. His anger did not stop with ceremonies. A policy of persecuting Protestants was inaugurated and would remain in effect until the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Hundreds of Protestants were imprisoned by Francis and 35 were burned at the stake, including several close friends of Calvin. The Institutes were written with the French martyrs on his mind. His book, as he writes to Francis in the prefatory letter, was to “vindicate… my brethren whose death was precious in the sight of the Lord.” Francis also played an interesting role in Calvin’s arrival in Geneva. Because Francis was at war with the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V, Calvin was unable to take a direct route to Strasbourg as he intended, and was forced to take the momentous detour to Geneva.

Guillaume Farel [1489–1565]

It was Farel who persuaded a young, timid, and unwilling John Calvin to serve the cause of the Reformation in Geneva. Intending merely to pass through Geneva, spending a single night, Calvin was detained by Farel, “not so much by counsel and exhortation,” he later wrote, “as by a dreadful curse, which I felt to be as if God had from heaven laid his mighty hand upon me to arrest me.” A fiery redhead, Farel was involved in the native reform movement in France, led by Lefevre D’Etaples. When persecution forced him to flee in 1523, he became a leader of a band of evangelists, preaching mainly in French speaking Switzerland. He was also at the center of evangelistic efforts which brought the cities of Bern and Geneva into the Protestant fold. After Farel persuaded Calvin to remain in Geneva, the two Frenchmen proceeded to institute many reforms in the city. Farel probably was Calvin’s closest and dearest friend through the years. They endured much together. They were both expelled from Geneva in 1538, and it was again the persuasions of Farel that prompted Calvin to return in 1541. Farel had since gone to Neuchatel, where he continued to work in close harmony with Calvin in Geneva. A rift occurred between the two friends in 1558, when 69 year-old Farel married a young girl. Calvin refused to attend the wedding. But their friendship survived. It was to Farel that Calvin wrote one of his last letters and, in a touching gesture, asked Farel to “remember our friendship.” Though aged and infirm, Farel felt it his duty to attend his dear friend on his death-bed in 1564. The following year, Farel followed Calvin in death.

Pierre Viret [1511–1571]

With Farel and Calvin, Pierre Viret formed the triumvirate which founded the Reformed Church in French Switzerland. From Protestant Bern, Viret and Farel made a missionary journey to Geneva. In June, 1535, Viret and Farel routed the Catholic defenders in a marathon debate. Shortly thereafter the mass was suspended and the Catholic clergy abandoned Geneva to the Protestants. Enemies tried to poison the reformers. Only Viret ate the poisoned meal. Although he recovered, his health was permanently damaged. Geneva officially declared itself in the Protestant camp in May, 1536. Just a short time later, Farel prevailed upon a young John Calvin to remain in Geneva to assist in the reform of the city. After Farel, Viret was one of Calvin’s closest friends. Their paths had crossed earlier in Basel, after Francis I initiated persecution of Protestants in the wake of the placard affair. Viret was at Calvin’s side at the Lausanne disputation in 1536, he smoothed the way for Calvin before his return to Geneva after his banishment in 1542, and labored side by side with Calvin in Geneva from 1559 to 1561. It was said that his sermons were more popular than Calvin’s. Viret is chiefly known as the Reformer of Lausanne. Not long after Geneva was won to the Protestant cause, he and Farel introduced Protestantism to the city of Lausanne. Viret remained in that city for 22 years, maintaining a close association with Calvin’s Geneva. In the face of the strong opposition of the city of Bern, Viret was deposed in 1559, after which he went to Geneva. Under the auspices of the Genevan church, Viret served as an active evangelist in France and presided over the Reformed Synod of Lyon in 1563.

Martin Bucer [1491–1551]

In many ways, Bucer was Calvin’s teacher and mentor. During his exile from Geneva, Calvin came under the influence of Bucer in Strasbourg. Calvin accepted a call from the French-speaking congregation in Strasbourg, and the two reformers developed a keen friendship. In three formative years [1538–1541], Calvin sat at Bucer’s feet, absorbing Bucer’s views of predestination, church organization, and ecumenism. Bucer had been converted to Protestantism when he heard Martin Luther’s defense at the Heidelberg Disputation in 1518. Shortly thereafter, he, along with Matthew Zell, Wolfgang Capito, and Casper Hedio, assumed the leadership in the reformation of Strasbourg. Bucer is best known for his efforts to reconcile Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther on the matter of the Lord’s Supper. Although Bucer failed, he continued in his efforts to unite the Lutheran and Reformed branches of Protestantism. He was exiled from Strasbourg during the Augsburg Interim of 1548 and sailed for England to assist Archbishop Cranmer with the English Reformation. Bucer was appointed Regius professor at Cambridge and influenced the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. His influence was cut short when he died in England in 1551.

Jacopo Sadeleto [1477–1547]

Sadeleto, Archbishop of Carpentras and Bishop, was one of the ablest of the Roman Catholic theologians during Calvin’s life. His encounter with Calvin was the first notable challenge of the Counter-Reformation to recover lost territory. Calvin and Farel had been banished from Geneva in 1538. Calvin had accepted the invitation of Bucer to come to Strasbourg. Farel ended up in Neuchatel. Calvin would have remained contented with his ministry in Strasbourg had it not been for Cardinal Sadeleto. Having observed the banishment of the Protestants in Geneva, Sadeleto seized the opportunity to try to lure the city back into the Roman fold. He addressed an enticing letter to the city’s leadership. However, Geneva was not about to return to the shackles of Rome. Calvin was asked to answer Sadeleto on their behalf. Calvin’s reply to Sadeleto was written in six days. With devastating eloquence, Calvin effectively countered Sadeleto’s argument. It was a religious and literary masterpiece. Calvin skillfully defended the Evangelicals against charges of heresy and schism. Calvin even challenged Cardinal Sadeleto himself to return to the true faith of the church Fathers. As he made clear in his reply, Calvin did not believe that he or the other Protestant leaders were innovators in religion. Indeed, the reason that the religious movement of the sixteenth century was called the “reformation,” rather than the “revolution,” was because Protestants were seeking to “re-establish” and “re-form” the true church, which had declined under the ever increasing political aspirations of the Renaissance Popes. The Genevans were profoundly affected by his impassioned reply to Sadeleto. Soon after, an invitation was sent to Calvin requesting him to return to his pastoral duties in Geneva.

Sebastian Castellio [1515–1563]

Once a friend and colleague, Sebastian Castellio became one of Calvin’s severest critics. They met during Calvin’s exile in Strasbourg. When Calvin returned to Geneva in 1541, he invited Castellio to return with him as the rector of the Latin school. After Geneva was ravaged by the plague, both Castellio and Calvin offered to serve as pastor to the hospital treating the plague victims. But when church officials asked Castellio to go, he refused. Calvin offered to take his place but the Genevan Senate prevented it. The friendship was never the same again. Castellio took offense at some of Calvin’s theological positions. In particular, he felt the Song of Songs was obscene and should be expunged from the canon of Scripture. When he sought ordination in Geneva, Calvin opposed him. Castellio decided to leave Geneva for greener pastures and Calvin graciously consented to write a letter of recommendation on his behalf. After a brief sojourn in Lausanne with Pierre Virat, Castellio returned to Geneva. A short time later, he publicly denounced the ministers of Geneva, charging them with drunkenness, impurity, and intolerance. The outburst resulted in banishment from Geneva. Castellio went to Basel, a city known for its tolerance. There he translated some of Bernard Ochino’s writings, which favored Unitarianism and polygamy. After several years of poverty, he was finally made a professor of Greek at the university. Anonymous tracts against Calvin appeared and Castellio was strongly suspected of being the author. When he died in December, 1563, Theodore Beza saw it as the judgment of God. Castellio was nowhere more eloquent in his opposition to Calvin than during the Servetus affair. His famous book, Concerning Heretics was a plea for religious toleration, directed mainly at Calvin. Castellio wrote: “To burn a heretic is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.” Castellio was the greatest liberal of his age and one of the few advocates of religious toleration in a time when the penalty for heresy was death. As one of the most vocal opponents of Calvinism, he exerted considerable influence on the development of Arminianism and Socinianism.

Theodore Beza [1519–1605]

A Frenchman and a lawyer like Calvin, he was Calvin’s successor at Geneva. Beza became a Protestant after a severe illness in 1548. He visited Geneva and then was appointed professor of Greek at the Academy in Lausanne, where he remained for a decade. During this time at Lausanne, Beza proved to be an ardent supporter of Calvin. He sided with Calvin against Bolsec in the controversy over predestination and came to Calvin’s defense after the execution of Servetus. One of Calvin’s crowning achievements in Geneva was the founding of the Academy. Although not well known at the time, Beza was chosen as professor of Greek and rector of the Genevan Academy in 1559. A deep and abiding friendship grew between Calvin and Beza. After arriving in Geneva, Beza ably represented the cause of Protestantism at the famous Colloquy of Poissy with Catherine d’Medici and advised the French Huguenots in the wars of Religion in France. Upon Calvin’s death, he assumed Calvin’s mantle, taking full leadership of the Academy, while also serving as moderator of the Venerable Company of Pastors. Of Calvin, he said: “I have been a witness of him for sixteen years and I think that I am fully entitled to say that in this man there was exhibited to all an example of the life and death of the Christian, such as it will not be easy to depreciate, and it will be difficult to imitate.” In 1565, he published a Greek Text of the New Testament, which came to exert enormous influence on Protestant biblical studies. After the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, Beza took a bold step and argued that an inferior magistrate could revolt against the government. Beza’s ardent and logical defense of double predestination, biblical literalism, church discipline, and other Calvinistic ideas has led many modern scholars to consider him one of the formative influences of seventeenth-century Reformed scholasticism.

Heinrich Bullinger [1504–1575]

Bullinger was a fellow Reformer in Switzerland and close friend to Calvin. After the disastrous Second War of Kappel in 1531, in which Zwingli was killed on the battlefield, Bullinger, the illegitimate son of a priest, was chosen as Zwingli’s successor. With Zwingli gone, a man was needed in Zurich who would preserve and consolidate the accomplishments of the Reformation. In Bullinger, such a man was found. The Protestant Reformation had long been divided on the matter of the Lord’s Supper even since Zwingli and Luther could not reach an agreement at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529. With the emergence of Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper, there were now three main branches: the Lutheran, Zwinglian and Calvinist. The Zwinglian and Calvinist branches finally reached an agreement, only because of the willingness of two men, Bullinger and Calvin. As early as 1547, Calvin and Bullinger began discussing the matter and finally reached an agreement in 1549, when Calvin and Farel went to Geneva and met personally with Bullinger. The result was known as the Consensus Tigurinus or the Zurich Consensus. Bullinger engaged in a multifaceted ministry of preaching and teaching, as well as carrying on an enormous amount of correspondence with many of the great men of Europe, including Calvin. He was especially influential in the English Reformation.

History

The Principle Practice of Faith

Raymond K. Anderson

How Prayer Was Calvin’s Key to Living Well.

The treatment and value given to prayer stand so dominantly at the center of Calvin’s complete life work that here the systematic theologian, the biblical scholar, the church teacher and the pastoral counselor all are speaking to us with equal force. (Udo Smidt, Das Gebet bei Calvin)

A Reshaped Life-View

One of the most remarkable renewals brought by the Reformation was a shift in the whole idea of what it meant to be worthy and do good. The very purpose of life was redirected. Preoccupation with acquired virtue and earned status was displaced by confidence in friendship freely received and permanently guaranteed by God’s unearned love.

Scriptures Alone, Grace Alone, Faith Alone

The revolution in Christian ethics, like so much else in the Reformation, may be seen as an indirect result of the return to the Scriptures. Even before the Reformers, many common people had the intuitive feeling that the medieval Church had set up its own system of hoops, which you had to jump through to merit eternal reward. The traditional approach to life, spelled out in the official canons, was removed from the joyful spontaneity that one could recover through renewed focus on the spirit of Jesus in the Gospels.

The Reformers found it tragically unchristian that the Roman Church should have contrived to manipulate people’s conscience using a kind of balance sheet of earned “merits.” The religious establishment had been less than honest in leaving lay people with the superstition that God keeps score on your pious activities: as you light a votive candle, venture forth to venerate the relics of some saint, subsidize a mass, or contribute to a building fund. One could even receive papers in connection with certain special donations (“indulgences,” they were called), which went so far as to list the amount of remission your gift would merit towards early parole from purgatory. Luther’s indignation, as a loyal churchman, over such huckstering of grace was what had sparked the Reformation in the first place. In the Scriptures there was no basis for this focus on externals.

The Reformation movement rapidly became more than a revolt against a church which had become too high and mighty. People began to rediscover how the Scriptures themselves focused on God’s living grace in Christ. Where “Scriptures alone” were taken as the final authority, Paul’s ardent trust in God’s “grace alone” began to flood back into their minds as the sole basis for a truly human life. When the Reformers began again to take Christ as their key, they regained a sense of the sovereignty of God’s grace not only as the sole basis for salvation, but also as what makes life worth living. They also began to appreciate faith in a new way. For faith, dependent trust on God himself, was the only channel through which we are touched by God’s grace. All renewal depends on this confidence that only God can give: “faith alone.”

So Relax

We find John Calvin, the greatest among the second generation of reformers, saying surprising things about the Christian life—surprising especially, if we have been thinking in terms of the later “Puritan work ethic.”

If men by their virtue could accomplish the Law, it would be said to them, get to work. But on the contrary, it is said, relax, rest, in order that God might do the job. Law then could well be impossible, indeed, so far as we are concerned; but it is possible for God to print it in our hearts and govern us by his Holy Spirit—so that it will be an easy and light yoke for us and there will be no harshness in it to trouble us.

Calvin was trained as a lawyer, not a monk or clergyman, and this, together with his rather French genius for cutting through to essentials, equipped him to discern the far-reaching implications of these theological insights for the practical business of living.

Such a shift in the grasp of God’s purpose for life required that many medieval assumptions be put to rest: all pretensions to laying siege on heaven and scaling its walls, all claims to special spirituality, all posturing on precarious ladders of personal achievement and virtue; all thought of God as a reluctant scout-master who sees our worth in a chest full of merit badges. The whole penitential system, through which the Church had managed to pull the strings of power, had to go.

We can see the Church’s paganized approach allegorized in medieval woodcuts or paintings. There is poor Everyman struggling painfully up a ladder of acquired virtues and earned merit, hanging on precariously above the yawning jaws of a fiery Hell. The Church may spur him onwards by fanning the flames, as it were, with its warnings, by arranging an occasional boost from the Saints, who have made it already, or by passing along encouragement and merit on loan from Jesus’ own winnings. But all the while, way up where the ladder reaches heaven, an impassive God the Father sits by with baleful eye and folded arms.

By contrast, the Reformers rediscovered the New Testament’s graciously active God, who showed himself eager to seek out, heal and restore even his enemies. If it is God’s very nature to contribute to need, and if he wants us to freely depend on him for everything good in our lives, then Christians must abandon all pagan conceits regarding their own shining virtues, spiritual superiority or earned merit. Goodness must be redefined as a quality of relationship, in which everything we have is a gift from God. The Calvin-influenced Heidelberg Catechism represented this insight well by simply organizing everything it had to say about Christian life under one caption: “About Thankfulness.”

For he knew the dangers: If you forget that “faith alone” means faith in someone definite, then you may deceive yourself into treating your own whims or passions as if they were the inspiration received through “faith alone.” This was the “libertine” or “frenetic” trait Calvin decried among some Anabaptists. He knew it would give a black eye to the whole Reformation. Indeed, at the very beginning of his career he had been driven into exile by allegations of looseness in practical life. He fled Paris for the freer cities of Navarre and Switzerland, accused of sedition against the established order.

No one knew better than an ex-lawyer the need to clarify how the new grasp of faith would bring real order to life. This is why Calvin prefaced his great lifework, the Institutes of the Christian Religion with an open letter to the French king. He wanted to reassure the powers-that-be that a return to the early Christian sources and grace-responsive life would motivate a more orderly, loyal, and socially constructive life.

Faith and Prayer

Calvin repeatedly has been misunderstood as one who sought after a new legalism, more bitter and humorless than any canon law. But Calvin saw very clearly that it was a state of personal relationship, and not the outer form of action that was the heart of the matter for human goodness.

Two of Calvin’s favorite slogans carried particular revolutionary force for the Christian life. First, Calvin claimed that “the principal work of the Spirit” is faith. A second, closely related slogan is similar in form: “the principal exercise of faith is prayer.” Grasp all that is intended under these two statements, and we have the Reformer’s key to the entire Christian life.

If bonding free persons into his community is God’s very goal for all creation, then the trust relationship we call faith is his principal work. This is a point where the Calvinist tradition and later Anabaptist and Pietist churches could have found themselves much closer together than they actually have been in the push and shove of later history. At the very center of Calvin’s thought, piety is tied intimately to Christian behavior and social action. These two dimensions of Christian life made one seamless garment.

“Of prayer: which is the principal exercise of faith, and by which we daily receive God’s benefits” is the heading of the longest and perhaps the most important chapter regarding Christians’ behavior in Calvin’s main work (Book 3, Chapter 20 of the Institutes). “Prayer, [the] principal exercise of faith”—the words may pass us by as all too glib. Like a pat on the head: “Be good little children, now, and say your prayers.” But this was no pious chant for Calvin. Faith for him was a life and death matter, not only spiritually and psychologically, but in the political arena as well. Fighting words, they resulted from long struggle for the essentials of biblically reformed life.

The phrase contains a double meaning. Prayer first provides, as it were, a workout for faith. Prayer is the action whereby faith is strengthened and reinforced, as muscles are toned by exercise. But the other meaning of “principal exercise” or “principal practice” may surprise us. With the gusto of a revolutionary, Calvin is declaring that the whole pious enterprise of the medieval penitential system dwindles behind this simple communion. Prayer, our first line of spontaneous personal responsiveness to God, is the principal action as Christian believers. Prayer is the very substance of good action.

The sum total comes back to this: Since the Scripture teaches us that it’s a principal part of the service to God to invoke him … he values this homage we do him more than all sacrifices…

Calvin could scarcely have put it more strongly. But why this stress on prayer at the center as the “principal practice of piety”? Grasp the movement of his thought here, and we have the Reformer’s whole ethic in a nutshell.

No goodness can be accomplished by a person in isolation from God’s living community. No action, however dutiful, no virtue, however shining, can even approach actual goodness before God, unless it expresses conscious relationship with him and is imbued with a sense of gratitude for everything as his gift.

God’s whole purpose in creating us, in adorning the world with such a magnificent variety of beautiful and good things, in watching over us with such careful providence is that we might be moved continually to render praise to him.

This kind of sweeping claim has not received its full force in Calvinist history. Taken seriously, this “return of grace” is not merely one duty among others. It is the very essence of human existence and itself the prime Christian activity.

Here we can begin to grasp the true sense of “glorifying” or “honoring God” as “man’s chief end” which is at the very beginning of Calvinist catechisms. “We are born and placed in life in order that we practice God’s honor,” says Calvin. And thanksgiving, a free response to God’s own gracious giving, is the very essence of what is meant by God’s honor. We honor God if we “put all our confidence in him,” and acknowledge that all good comes from him alone, as Calvin’s Geneva Catechism has it. For this, and this alone, is the hallmark of a Christian: prayer in the context of thankful expectation.

When Life and Liturgy Meld

The whole of ethics, then, is comprised under the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. There quite simply is no ethic, no value or good to be had in life outside of the faith-relationship. Calvin took Paul at his word, where he said, “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). This means that for Christians any good deed is recognized as God’s own action—an expression of lively conversation with him.

In this perspective the call to “pray without ceasing” in I Thessalonians 5:17 had a very literal meaning for the Reformer. The entire active life melds into a liturgy of prayer. One thinks here of the little prayer caps worn by Mennonite women, which are meant to signify something similar. Day-long, one prays in everything.

Calvin sees the function of even the most demanding Old Testament laws to conduct us beyond their own formal prescriptions and throw us back into conversation with God. God’s Law has a double force. It stands not just as outer command: but, more fundamentally, it acts as sovereign promise of the inner renewal his community receives from him. In a dual way, then, the law has always pointed past itself to grace-dependent relationship and funneled into new prayer response.

Calvin had a way of showing how the Lord’s Prayer follows the same outline as the Ten Commandments. Why? Simply this, God’s commands are also his promises. In telling us our need, they teach us what to ask from him, who is the source of all that we have or are. His laws point us both directly and indirectly towards the prayer relationship.

Fulfillment Through Failure

But Calvin was also fond of pointing out how “God commands that which we cannot do, in order that we know what we should ask of him.” Our failures are turned, through prayer, into a deepening fulfillment. “The law commands in order that we, being pressed to keep its commandments and succumbing through our frailty, might train oursleves to implore God’s aid.” Law acts like the flywheel on a steam engine: its weight drags us through cycles of failure to return to our energy source. So God trumps our failure, as we are drawn back into the grace-dependent relationship which is the Law’s fulfillment.

Everything in life, then, is given to reinforce the grace-dependent relationship: our natural joys, through prayers of thanksgiving; our adversities, weakness, and needs, through prayers of petition; our failures and rebellions, through prayers of confession and repentance.

A Threefold Guidance System

As we live our lives in the grace-dependent relationship, Calvin envisioned us as always being able to get our bearings for every new situation by looking at the dimensions of God’s action in and for his community: past, present, and future.

Looking back at what God has promised us in Christ, we are relieved from paralyzing compulsions to do everything for ourselves. “Self denial,” he called it (using a Latin legal term which referred to transfer of the burden of ownership). We are not our own; no need to worry. Self-dispossession, then, did not mean we should repress our own feelings or deny our own worth, but quite the opposite: it meant we may feel our infinite worth as experienced in Christ’s love, as opposed to our own accomplishments. It meant we could let our limited view of self fall away, in favor of an unspeakably higher status: the full, permanent friendship of God.

Cross-Bearing

Consideration of the second aspect of God’s relation to his community, here and now, is a question of empowerment. We should be prepared for anything in the present moment. “Cross- bearing,” as Calvin calls it, is no call to long-faced “inner-worldly asceticism.” Rather, one is to live in the reassuring company of the One who has been there before us. Christ’s presence and the resurrection promise can lighten all our crosses—both the burden of sharing his love for an unlovely world, and that of our own shortcomings.

Meditation of the Future Life

The future aspect, “meditation of the future life” is no world rejection, as it has sometimes been misconstrued. Rather, it is living in the promise of world renewal. So everyone and everything we experience may be regarded in anticipation of their perfect re-creation in the Father. With such reflection, the most dismal present scene becomes luminous with hope—hope based on sovereign promise, and not just our human potential.

This three-directional tuning in on the God known through Christ gives a kind of navigational orientation for direction- taking in every new situation life brings—however uncharted the waters. Calvin found it summarized in Jesus’ words, “If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” For the Reformer this meant constant reflection on our fellowship with the one who accompanies us into every decision: as incarnate Word, giving shape for life; as Spirit, sharing, empowering, and preserving our present existence; and as eternal Father, drawing all things, finally, into coherence with his grace.

Prayer, for Calvin, is what makes a Christian. It is not just the first act of a Christian in time—though it is that—it is also the foremost thing in Christian existence.

“How is it possible to have an encounter with God?… I stand before God with my desires, my thoughts, my misery; I must live with him, for to live means nothing other than to live with God. Here I am, caught between the exigencies of life, both small and great, and the necessity of prayer. The Reformers tell us the first thing is to pray.”* [* (Karl Barth, Prayer) ]

Dr. Raymond K. Anderson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.

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History

Idelette: John Calvin’s Search for the Right Wife

William J. Petersen

You don’t look to the life of John Calvin for humor, but Calvin’s quest for a wife would make grist for a twentieth-century situation comedy.

It is hard to say when the quest began. Until he turned 29 and took the pastorate of the French refugee church in Strasbourg, he hadn’t much time to think about marriage. Besides that, he once wrote, “I shall not belong to those who are accused of attacking Rome, like the Greeks fought Troy, only to be able to take a wife.” So he was in no hurry.

But Strasbourg was a bit of a refuge for Calvin. Shortly after he had arrived in the city, he moved in with Martin and Elizabeth Bucer. Martin was the warm-hearted pastor of the church of St. Thomas in the city. Elizabeth was as hospitable as he. Their home was known as “the inn of righteousness.”

John Calvin had never seen such a happy marriage. Bucer was so pleased that he urged marriage for all his ministerial colleagues. “You ought to have a wife, Calvin,” Martin had said more than once. Philip Melanchthon once noted that John Calvin seemed uncharacteristically silent and absent-minded at the end of a day-long conference. “Well, well,” said Melanchthon, “it seems to me our theologue is thinking about a future spouse.”

By this time, Melanchthon had been married for nineteen years, and his marriage was also a happy one. Mrs. Melanchthon, who had a rollicking sense of humor, took good care of Philip in every way. His only complaint, which he undoubtedly relayed to John Calvin, was “She always thinks that I am dying of hunger unless I am stuffed like a sausage.”

Calvin, too, realized that he needed somebody to take care of him. When he moved out of the Bucer “inn,” he rented a house for himself, his brother, his stepsister and some student boarders. He found it a strain, not only on his time but also on his sanctification, to manage a boarding house and serve as a pastor of a growing church. It was another reason for needing a wife. So he told his associates that he was now in the market for a wife and that he was open to any suggestions.

Of course, as usual, he knew what he wanted. The job qualifications: “Always keep in mind what I seek to find in her, for I am none of those insane lovers who embrace also the vices of those with whom they are in love, where they are smitten at first sight with a fine figure. This only is the beauty that allures me: if she is chaste, if not too fussy or fastidious, if economical, if patient, if there is hope that she will be interested about my health.”

Meanwhile, Calvin was having personal problems that he felt might be eased, if not solved, by having a wife. “I can’t call a single penny my own. It is astonishing how money slips away in extraordinary expenses.” As T.H.L. Parker writes, “His health was poor: he was not perhaps a good manager of his awn affairs; his impatience and irritability might be softened by marriage.”

In fact, Calvin seemed so convinced that the next step in his life during 1539 should be marriage that he reserved a date “a little after Easter” with his friend William Farel, whom he wanted to officiate at the ceremony. We don’t know whether he had a particular bride in mind.

But a few months later the first candidate was brought forward. She was a wealthy German woman, who had a brother serving as her campaign manager. A strong supporter of Calvin, the brother argued that such a marriage would be most beneficial. Calvin had often said that he wished to live the life of a scholar. Since royalties from sales of theological books would not provide much of an income, it would be helpful for him to have a wealthy wife.

Calvin had two problems with the first candidate: first, she didn’t know French and did not seem eager to learn it; secondly, as he explained to Farel, “You understand, William, that she would bring with her a large dowry, and this could be embarrassing to a poor minister like myself. I feel, too, that she might become dissatisfied with her humbler station in life.”

Farel had his own candidate to suggest. She spoke French and was a devout Protestant, but was about fifteen years older than Calvin. Calvin never followed up on this one.

The next candidate spoke French and didn’t have any money, but was highly recommended by friends. Calvin seemed interested, enough to invite her to Strasbourg for an interview.

Calvin again alerted Farel, “If it come to pass, as we may certainly hope will be the case, the marriage ceremony will not be delayed beyond the tenth of March.” The year is now 1540; Calvin is now 31. “I wish you might be present, that you may bless our wedlock,” but then Calvin added, “I make myself look very foolish if it shall so happen that my hope again fall through.” But fall through it did.

John was now so embarrassed by the entanglements and by his off-and-on again letters to William Farel that he wrote, “I have not found a wife and frequently hesitate as to whether I ought any more to seek one.”

But when he stopped seeking, he found. In his congregation of refugees was a young widow, Idelette de Bure Stordeur. She, her husband, and their two children had come to Strasbourg as Anabaptists. Listening to John Calvin’s faithful exposition of Scripture, they were converted to his Reformed views.

Jean Stordeur, Idelette’s husband, had been an Anabaptist leader, and undoubtedly John Calvin had discussed theological matters with the Stordeurs in their home. In 1537, when Calvin was still in Geneva, Stordeur had come to that city to debate with the Reformers there. Stordeur lost the debate, was ordered out of Geneva, and returned to Strasbourg. Undoubtedly, the discussions continued when Calvin arrived in Strasbourg two years later. Eventually, Calvin’s use of Scripture convinced the Stordeurs in most of their areas of difference, but not all. In some, perhaps, Calvin tempered his own thinking. But soon the Stordeurs were in Calvin’s church, partaking of the Lord’s Supper; after further discussion, they had their son baptized by Calvin; eventually, the entire family became members of the church which now numbered nearly 500 refugees from France and the Low Countries.

Then, in the spring of 1540, Jean Stordeur, stricken with the plague, suddenly died. Idelette grieved for the loss of her husband; John sorrowed for the loss of a friend.

It was at this time, as John Calvin had almost given up thoughts of marriage because of the string of fiascoes, that his pastor-friend Martin Bucer said to him “Why not consider Idelette?” John did. Idelette was attractive and intelligent, a woman with culture, apparently from an upper middle-class background. She was also a woman of character and quiet strength.

It didn’t take much time for the Reformer to pen another letter to William Farel, asking him to come and perform a wedding ceremony. This time it was no false alarm, and in August, John and Idelette were married. Idelette was perhaps more concerned that her children have a good father, and John was relieved to have finally discovered a good wife.

Her first major adjustment was to move into Calvin’s student boarding house and learn how to cope with a sharp-tongued housekeeper.

There were also health problems. Both of them became ill shortly after the wedding and were confined to bed. Calvin’s thank-you note to Farel said, “As if it had been so ordered, that our wedlock might not be overjoyous, the Lord thus thwarted our joy by moderating it.”

In his writings, John Calvin did not say much about his personal circumstances and even less about his wife—certainly not as Martin Luther did—but nevertheless you get from his letters a glimpse of Idelette as a wife who deeply cared for her husband as well as for her children. His biographers speak of her as “a woman of some force and individuality,” and John himself described her as “the faithful helper of my ministry” and “the best companion of my life.” He certainly was not disappointed in marriage.

Though he delighted in her company, during the first year of their marriage he didn’t have much of it. After their stint in their sickbeds, John had to travel, leaving his bride to cope with the boarding house problems as well as her two children. He was not eager to leave, but Emperor Charles, the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, had called the leading Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars together to discuss how they might stop their bickering and form a united front against the Turks, who were menacing his empire.

Three months later he arrived back home for a month before going to another conference called by the Emperor. “I am dragged most unwillingly,” he wrote, but he went.

While attending the conference, he received news that a plague was ravaging Strasbourg. He was concerned. “Day and night my wife has been constantly in my thoughts,” he wrote. He realized that just as the plague had taken her first husband only a year earlier, so it could now take Idelette, who was still weak from illness. He wrote, urging her to leave Strasbourg until the plague was over.

But Idelette had already taken action. She had taken her children and moved in with her brother Lambert. Lambert had been a wealthy landowner in Liege before he was forced to flee, leaving behind everything he had. But in only a few years in Strasbourg, he had once again become an honored citizen. Later that year, John was called to another conference. He and Idelette were separated for 32 of the first 45 weeks of their marriage.

Then came an even greater challenge than separation—the call to return to Geneva. He did not want to go; “I would rather face death a hundred times” than return to Geneva, he said. “If I had a free choice, I would prefer doing anything else in the world.”

But in September 1541, John headed toward Geneva to see if there was any reason why he should change his mind. “I offer my heart to the Lord in sacrifice,” he wrote. Idelette stayed behind in Strasbourg until he determined whether Geneva would be safe for her.

Geneva showered gifts on him. “There was a new robe of black velvet, trimmed with fur. And a house on Rue de Chanoines, a short narrow street near the cathedral. At the back of the house was a garden which overlooked the blue lake.” Then the Council sent a herald and two-horse carriage to bring Idelette, the children and all the family furniture from Strasbourg to Geneva.

It was a traumatic move for Idelette as well as for John. Strasbourg had become home for her and her children. Her brother and his family were there as well. All she knew of Geneva was what John had previously experienced there, and it all sounded like more uncertainty and confusion, if not trial and tribulation. But she went. And when she began settling down in the new house at Number 11 Rue de Chanoines, she was pleased. It was nothing like the crowded boarding house in Strasbourg.

The city council had loaned furniture to them, because they had very little of their own. Behind the house was a vegetable garden, which Idelette planted each year. She also planted herbs and flowers which scented the air. When guests came, John proudly took them out in the back yard to show off Idelette’s vegetable garden.

During their first summer in Geneva, Idelette bore a son prematurely. Little Jacques died when he was only two weeks old. It was a severe blow for both of them. “The Lord has certainly inflicted a bitter wound in the death of our infant son,” John wrote a fellow minister. “But He is Himself a father and knows what is good for His children.”

Three years later, a daughter died at birth, and two years after that, when both John and Idelette were 39, a third child was born prematurely and died. Then Idelette’s physical problems worsened. Coughing spells dragged her down.

While life in Geneva was better for John Calvin the second time around, it still was difficult. He had as many enemies in the city as he had friends. Some of the citizens called their dogs “Calvin.” What angered John more, however, was when the insults touched Idelette.

Idelette’s first marriage to Jean Stordeur had never been solemnized by a civil ceremony, because Anabaptists felt marriage was a sacred ceremony, not a legal act. Hence, years later in Geneva, the gossips in Geneva spread the word that Idelette was a woman of ill repute and that her two children had been born out of wedlock. John Calvin and Idelette were now unable to have children, the gossips said, because God was punishing them for her previous immorality.

Despite her poor health, Idelette tried to keep John on an even keel. Friends remarked that John was in better control of his temper, in spite of various provocations. No doubt, Idelette defused numerous explosions.

She was still in her 30s when disease, probably tuberculosis, began wasting her. In August 1548 John wrote, “She is so overpowered with her sickness that she can scarcely support herself.” And in 1549, when she had just turned 40, she lay dying. She had been married to John for only nine years.

On her sickbed she had two major concerns. One was that her illness should not be a major hindrance to John’s ministry. The other was her children.

Later, in a letter, John recalled the time: “Since I feared that these personal worries might aggravate her illness, I took an opportunity, three days before her death, to tell her that I would not fail to fulfill my responsibilities to her children.” She immediately responded by saying, “I have already entrusted them to God.” When I said that this did not relieve me of my responsibility to care for them, she answered, “I know that you would not neglect that which you know has been entrusted to God.”

On the day of her death, John was impressed with her serenity. “She suddenly cried out in such a way that all could see that her spirit had risen far above this world. These were her words, ‘O glorious resurrection! O God of Abraham and of all of our fathers, the believers of all the ages have trusted on Thee and none of them have hoped in vain. And now I fix my hope on Thee.’ These short statements were cried out rather than distinctly spoken. These were not lines suggested by someone else but came from her own thoughts.”

An hour later she could no longer speak and her mind seemed confused. “Yet her facial expressions revealed her mental alertness.” John recalled later. “I said a few words to her about the grace of Christ, the hope of everlasting life, our marriage and her approaching departure. Then I turned aside to pray.” Before long she quietly “slipped from life into death.”

John was grief-stricken. He wrote to his friend Viret, “You know how tender, or rather, soft my heart is. If I did not have strong self-control I would not have been able to stand it this long. My grief is very heavy. My best life’s companion has been taken from me. Whenever I faced serious difficulties she was ever ready to share with me, not only banishment and poverty, but even death itself.”

To his friend Farel he wrote, “I do what I can to keep myself from being overwhelmed with grief. My friends also leave nothing undone that may bring relief to my mental suffering … May the Lord Jesus … support me under this heavy affliction.”

John Calvin was only 40 when Idelette died, but he never remarried. Later he spoke about her uniqueness and pledged that he intended henceforth “to lead a solitary life.”

Idelette deBure Calvin’s life was full of heartache, but, never a complainer, she brought joy and peace wherever she lived. John had known much about God the Father as Sovereign. Through her life and in her death Idelette taught him a little about the Holy Spirit as Comforter.

William J. Petersen is senior acquisitions editor at Revell Books.

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History

From the Archives: To the Five Prisoners of Lyons

Offered to him in Sacrifice

The following letter was addressed by Calvin to five of his colleagues facing execution after Calvin’s efforts to intercede proved fruitless. The five were burned at the stake facing the end with composure, singing psalms, repeating passages of scripture and exhorting each other to courage.

From Geneva, 15 May 1553

My very dear Brothers:

We have at length heard why the herald of Berne did not return that way. It was because he had not such an answer as we much desired. For the King has peremptorily refused all the requests made by Messieurs of Berne, as you will see by the copies of the letters, so that nothing further is to be looked for from that quarter. Nay, wherever we look here below, God has stopped the way. This is well, however, that we cannot be frustrated of the hope which we have in Him, and in His holy promises. You have always been settled on that sure foundation, even when it seemed as though you might be helped by men, and that we too thought so; but whatever prospect of escape you may have had by human means, yet your eyes have never been dazzled so as to divert your heart and trust, either on this side or that. Now, at this present hour, neccessity itself exhorts you more then ever to turn your whole mind heavenward. As yet, we know not what will be the event. But since it appears as though God would use your blood to sign His truth, there is nothing better than for you to prepare yourselves to that end, beseeching Him so to subdue you to His good pleasure, that nothing may hinder you from following whithersoever he shall call. For you know, my brothers, that it behoves us to be thus mortified in order to be offered to Him in sacrifice. It cannot be but that you sustain hard conflicts, in order that what was declared to Peter may be accomplished to you, namely, that they shall carry whither ye would not. You know, however, in what strength you have to fight—a strength on which all those who trust, shall never be daunted, much less confounded. Even so, my brothers, be confident that you shall be strengthened, according to your need, by the Spirit of our Lord Jesus, so that you shall not faint under the load of temptations, however heavy it be, any more than he did who won so glorious a victory, that in the midst of our miseries it is an unfailing pledge of our triumph. Since it pleases Him to employ you to the death in maintaining His quarrel, He will strengthen your hands in the fight, and will not suffer a single drop of your blood to be spent in vain. And though the fruit may not all at once appear, yet in time it shall spring up more abundantly than we can express. But as He hath vouchsafed you this privilege, that your bonds have been renowned, and that the noise of them has been everywhere spread abroad, it must needs be, in despite of Satan, that your death should resound far more powerfully, so that the name of our Lord be magnified thereby. For my part, I have no doubt, if it please this kind Father to take you unto Himself, that he has preserved you hitherto, in order that your long-continued imprisonments might serve as a preparation for the better awakening of those whom He has determined to edify by your end. For let enemies do their utmost, they never shall be able to bury out of sight that light which God has made to shine in you, in order to be contemplated from afar.

History

From the Archives: Selections from Confessions of Faith

Selections From Confession of Faith which all the citizens and inhabitants of Geneva and the subjects of the country must promise to keep and hold. (1536)

The Word of God

First we affirm that we desire to follow Scripture alone as rule of faith and religion, without mixing with it any other thing which might be devised by the opinion of men apart from the Word of God, and without wishing to accept for our spiritual government any other doctrine than what is conveyed to us by the same Word without addition or diminution, according to the command of our Lord.

One Only God

Following, then, the lines laid down in the Holy Scriptures, we acknowledge that there is one only God, whom we are both to worship and serve, and in whom we are to put all our confidence and hope: having this assurance, that in him alone is contained all wisdom, power, justice, goodness and pity. And since he is spirit, he is to be served in spirit and in truth. Therefore we think it an abomination to put our confidence or hope in any created thing, to worship anything else than him, whether angels or any other creatures, and to recognize any other Saviour of our souls than him alone, whether saints or men living upon earth; and likewise to offer the service, which ought to be rendered to him, in external ceremonies or carnal observances, as if he took pleasure in such things, or to make an image to represent his divinity or any other image for adoration.

The Law of God Alike for All

Because there is one only Lord and Master who has dominion over our consciences, and because his will is the only principle of all justice, we confess all our life ought to be ruled in accordance with the commandments of his holy law in which is contained all perfection of justice, and that we ought to have no other rule of good and just living, nor invent other good works to supplement it than those which are there contained, as follows: Exodus 20: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee,” and so on.

Natural Man

We acknowledge man by nature to be blind, darkened in understanding, and full of corruption and perversity of heart, so that of himself he has no power to be able to comprehend the true knowledge of God as is proper, nor to apply himself to good works. But on the contrary, if he is left by God to what he is by nature, he is only able to live in ignorance and to be abandoned to all iniquity. Hence he has need to be illumined by God, so that he come to the right knowledge of his salvation, and thus to be redirected in his affections and reformed to the obedience of the righteousness of God.

Salvation in Jesus

We confess then that it is Jesus Christ who is given to us by the Father, in order that in him we should recover all of which in ourselves we are deficient. Now all that Jesus Christ has done and suffered for our redemption, we veritably hold without any doubt, as it is contained in the Creed.

Righteousness in Jesus

Therefore we acknowledge the things which are consequently given to us by God in Jesus Christ: first, that being in our own nature enemies of God and subjects of his wrath and judgment, we are reconciled with him and received again in grace through the intercession of Jesus Christ, so that by his righteousness and guiltlessness we have remission of our sins, and by the shedding of his blood we are cleansed and purified from all our stains.

Regeneration in Jesus

Second, we acknowledge that by his Spirit we are regenerated into a new spiritual nature. That is to say that the evil desires of our flesh are mortified by grace, so that they rule us no longer. On the contrary, our will is rendered conformably to God’s will, to follow in his way and to seek what is pleasing to him. Therefore we are by him delivered from the servitude of sin, under whose power we were of ourselves held captive, and by this deliverance we are made capable and able to do good works and not otherwise.

History

T.U.L.I.P.

The familiar caricature of Calvin’s theology is symbolized by the mnenomic device TULIP: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints. These so called “five points of Calvinism” arose in the seventeenth century, amid great political and theological turmoil in the Netherlands.

In the early seventeenth century, Jacob Arminius, professor of theology at the University of Leiden, came under suspicion by the more orthodox Dutch Calvinists. Arminius was viewed to have seriously deviated from the orthodox doctrines of justification and election. Charges of Pelagianism were made, and the matter quickly escalated.

In retrospect, Arminius’ views were not, strictly speaking, Pelagian. He did, however, differ from Calvinist orthodoxy on a number of issues. He denied the doctrine of perserverance and questioned whether grace was necessary for one to come to faith. He also challenged the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The desire of Arminius was to uphold the goodness and mercy of God. He was concerned that Calvinist doctrines made God the author of sin and wanted to stress the importance of faith and holiness in the Christian life.

His untimely death provided only a temporary reprieve. The fires were soon rekindled by his followers. Under the leadership of John Uytenbogaert, the Arminians met in 1610 to draw up what was called a remonstrance. It was simply a petition for toleration and a summation of their views in five points. They modified the doctrine of unconditional election, asserting that God did not elect individuals. They argued that God’s election was more general and had reference to that group of men who exercised faith. Like Arminius, they also denied perseverance of the saints, saying God’s gift of faith could be resisted by man. Finally, the Arminians affirmed that Christ died for the sins of every man.

The orthodox Calvinists responded with a seven-point statement called the counter-remonstrance. The government tried to settle the controversy with a series of ecclesiastical conferences. But matters only grew worse. Riots actually broke out in some areas of the Netherlands. Finally, amid a battle between political rivals, Prince Maurice and Oldenbarnveldt, a national synod was called to settle the controversy.

The synod convened in 1618 in the Dutch city of Dordrecht [Dort]. To insure fairness, the Dutch Calvinists invited delegations from Reformed churches throughout Europe. Simon Episcopius represented the Arminian position at Dort. The rejection of Arminian theology was unanimous. Five theological points were formulated to answer the Remonstrants. The Canons of Dort declared that fallen man was totally unable to save himself [Total Depravity]; God’s electing purpose was not conditioned by anything in man [Unconditional Election]; Christ’s atoning death was sufficient to save all men, but efficient only for the elect [Limited Atonement]; the gift of faith, sovereignly given by God’s Holy Spirit, cannot be resisted by the elect [Irresistible Grace]; and that those who are regenerated and justified will persevere in the faith [Perseverance of the Saints].

These doctrines have been called the five points of Calvinism and are often symbolized by the well-known “TULIP.” However, they are not a full exposition of Calvin’s theology. To be sure, these doctrines do reflect Calvin’s viewpoint in the area of soteriology. For example, the synod of Dort does not address Calvin’s devout commitment to Scripture, nor does it say anything about the Trinity or Christ. The doctrines of Dort are more properly viewed in their historical context as a theological response to the challenges of seventeenth-century Arminianism.

History

John Calvin: Did You Know?

To signify his willingness to sacrifice all to the service of the Lord, Calvin’s seal pictured a burning heart in a hand and was accompanied by this motto: “Promptly and Sincerely in the work of God.”

Calvin’s early training was as a lawyer and his first published book was an academic commentary on the ancient philosopher Seneca.

Although neither were Protestants, both Calvin’s father and his brother Charles were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.

Calvin was not granted citizenship in Geneva until five years before his death in 1564. He had been the city’s most famous person for over twenty years.

Calvin’s association with the Swiss city of Geneva was not part of his plans. He visited the city only because of a detour to avoid the hostilities of a war raging between the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and the King of France, Francis I. Calvin had intended to remain in Geneva a single night before resuming his travel to Strasbourg. John Knox, the Scottish Reformer, visited Calvin’s Geneva. He wrote to an English friend saying of the city, it “is the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the Apostles.”

Although he never met the great German Reformer, Martin Luther, Calvin esteemed him very highly. To his friend Heinrich Bullinger, Calvin wrote: “even if he [Luther] were to call me a devil I should still regard him as an outstanding servant of God.”

Calvin married a widow with two children. After her death in 1549, he raised her two children as his own.

Calvin encouraged congregational psalm-singing in the church at Geneva. Calvin viewed music as a gift of God, and even put to music a number of the psalms himself.

Nearing his journey’s end, Calvin gave strict instructions that he be buried in the common cemetery with no tombstone. He wished to give no encouragement to those who might make it a Protestant shrine. Today, his grave site is unknown.

Calvin did not like to waste a minute of his time. Even on his death-bed, his friends pleaded with him to refrain from his labors. He replied: “What! Would you have the Lord find me idle when he comes?”

Once when Calvin was sending a letter to his close friend Pierre Viret by one of a pair of students, he noticed that the other was a little jealous at not being the messenger. Calvin quickly dashed off another letter to Viret. The letter contained only the request that Viret pretend it was a valuable letter.

During the course of his ministry in Geneva, lasting nearly twenty five years, Calvin lectured to theological students and preached an average of five sermons a week. This was in addition to writing a commentary on nearly every book of the Bible as well as numerous treatises on theological topics. His correspondence fills eleven volumes.

History

From the Archives: The Gratuitous Love of God

Calvin’s understanding of the the Atonement did not begin with election or pre-destination but with the love of God, as Robert Peterson shows in Calvin’s Doctrine of the Atonement. The section below is from Calvin’s commentary on I John 4:9 about the love of God.

We have the love of God towards us testified also by many other proofs. For if it be asked, why the world has been created, why we have been placed in it to possess the dominion of the earth, why we are preserved in life to enjoy innumerable blessings, why we are endued with light and understanding, no other reason can be adduced, except the gratuitous love of God. But the Apostle here has chosen the principle evidence of it, and what far surpasses all other things. For it was not only an immeasurable love, that God spared not his own Son, that by his death he might restore us to life; but it was goodness the most marvellous, which ought to fill our minds with the greatest wonder and amazement. Christ, then, is so illustrious and singular a proof of divine love towards us, that whenever we look upon him, he fully confirms to us the truth that God is love.

He calls him his only begotten, for the sake of amplifying. For in this he more clearly showed how singularly he loved us, because he exposed his only Son to death for our sakes. In the meantime, he who is his only Son by nature, makes many sons by grace and adoption, even all who, by faith, are united to his body. He expresses the end for which Christ has been sent by the Father, even that we may live through him: for without him we are all dead, but by his coming he brought life to us; and except our unbelief prevents the effect of his grace, we feel it in ourselves.

History

It Was Both A Horrible Decree and Very Sweet Fruit

Frank A. James III

Calvin on Predestination

What was running through John Calvin’s mind as he contemplated the doctrine of predestination? Was he locked in a trance, eyes rolled back, imagining a somber God lurking in the mists of eternity, arbitrarily picking and choosing who would be saved and who would be damned?

No, Calvin’s thoughts about predestination did not originate with morbid and abstract speculations, as some might suppose, but with a pastor’s concern for the people who filled the pews of his church every Sunday. As a pastor, Calvin noticed that people responded differently to the preaching of the gospel. “If the same sermon is preached, say, to a hundred people,” he observed, “twenty receive it with the ready obedience of faith, while the rest hold it valueless, or laugh, or hiss, or loathe it.”

What Calvin saw troubled him. Why did some men fervently embrace Christ, while others firmly rejected him? He searched the Scriptures and there he found the doctrine of predestination.

Historical Context

Calvin was not the first to treat the doctrine of predestination, but it is the name of John Calvin with which this doctrine has become inseparably linked. This is due in part to Calvin’s detailed exposition of predestination and partly because he, more than anyone else since Augustine, was called upon to defend it. Past interpreters of Calvin often fell victim to the misconception that predestination resided at the center of his theology. However, today most acknowledge that he never discussed predestination as his most basic presupposition.

Admittedly, he did accord a growing importance to predestination in succeeding editions of the Institutes. In the first edition of 1536, it did not warrant special discussion. But later, when Augustine’s doctrine came under assault, Calvin felt obliged to meet the challenge. “Even a dog barks,” he wrote to a friend, “when his master is attacked: how could I be silent when the honor of my Lord is assailed?”

Attacks on predestination came from two directions. The Roman Catholic Archdeacon of Utrecht, Albert Pighius, mounted the first assault. In his book On the Freedom of the Will, he challenged both predestination and Calvin’s concept of free will. Pighius portrayed Calvin’s doctrine as destroying the basis for morality and making God the author of sin.

Calvin first responded to the question of free will with his own book in 1543. He planned to address the matter of predestination in another work. But Pighius died suddenly, and Calvin turned to more pressing matters.

Controversy about predestination broke out again in 1550, after Jerome Bolsec arrived as a refugee in Geneva. A former Carmelite monk, Bolsec had left the Roman church and become a Protestant. He took up the medical profession, but his interest in theological questions remained intact.

Shortly after his arrival in Geneva, Bolsec began to publicly denounce the doctrine of predestination. Such a doctrine, he said, made God a patron of criminals, and worse than Satan. At first he was dealt with rather gently. He was admonished by the Church authorities and told to cease from such activities. Calvin even met privately with Bolsec in an effort to resolve differences. Bolsec, however, remained unconvinced.

After other reprimands, Bolsec finally let fly his most blatant attack. During a church meeting in October, 1551, he suddenly erupted in a vigorous renunciation of predestination and the Genevan clergy. Just about that time, Calvin happened to enter the church. Verbal sparks flew. Afterwards, Bolsec was arrested and put in prison.

Not all in Geneva shared Calvin’s view of predestination. The city government and the ministers of the Genevan church decided to consult with the other Swiss churches about Bolsec. They generally sided with Calvin, but the replies were less than Calvin had hoped. While affirming election, the other Swiss churches were more reticent about reprobation. The result was a milder judgment on Bolsec. He was banished from Geneva and eventually returned to the Roman church.

It was under such convulsive circumstances that Calvin was provoked to defend and clarify his views. Had it not been for Pighius and Bolsec, one wonders if Calvin’s name would have been so closely associated with predestination.

Calvins Perspective on Predestination

To Calvin, predestination was like a tightrope—fearful and wonderful at the same time. He proceeded with caution and prudence, keeping his balance only by holding firmly to the teachings of Scripture. “The moment we exceed the bounds of the Word,” he wrote, “… there we must repeatedly wander, slip, and stumble.”

When one reads Calvin’s own writings on predestination, a different picture emerges than most would expect. Rather than an arid scholastic discourse, Calvin speaks of predestination as immensely practical and beneficial to the Christian. He confidently affirms, “… in the very darkness that frightens them not only is the usefulness of this doctrine made known but also its very sweet fruit.”

The God of Predestination

With pastoral experience and Scripture as his guide, Calvin reached this profound conclusion: God “does not indiscriminately adopt all into the hope of salvation but gives to some what he denies to others.” He defined predestination as “God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.” Predestination, like a coin, has two sides, election and reprobation. Predestination, for Calvin, especially draws attention to two attributes of God. Election displays God’s gracious mercy. Reprobation manifests God’s righteous justice.

The Mercy of God

From Calvin’s pastoral perspective, predestination is “the Lord’s clear declaration that he finds in men themselves no reason to bless them but takes it from his mercy alone.”

Nothing else displays God’s mercy like the doctrine of predestination. It is the story of sinful, undeserving men receiving the gift of salvation for no other reason except that God wished to extend his kindness to them. Calvin was less dismayed over God’s just reprobation. That he could understand. But he was completely awe-struck by the realization that God extended mercy to the undeserving.

The best expression of God’s mercy is Christ. Great stress is laid on the fact that election is “in Christ.” For Calvin, that not only means Christ is the supreme object of the Father’s election, but also that Christ is the instrument of election. Calvin even takes the further step of describing Christ as “the Author of election.” In Calvin’s view, Christ actively participated in the choosing of the elect. At every point across the spectrum of election, from its inception through its execution to its realization, Christ is the focal point of God’s mercy.

In the final analysis, to diminish predestination was, for Calvin, to denigrate the role of Christ in accomplishing salvation. Is it any wonder that he was so insistent that predestination “ought to be preached openly and fully?”

The Justice of God

It was the dark side of predestination that aroused so much scorn toward Calvin. But he saw in reprobation more than fire and brimstone. No other doctrine so powerfully reveals the righteousness of God. To acknowledge reprobation is to acknowledge that the God of Christianity hates and punishes sin. Even the sins of the elect are punished in their substitute, Christ.

Opponents accused Calvin of making God the author of sin. He rejected such a notion as insidious, asserting that, by definition, God’s inscrutable will is righteous. “For God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous.” No one can lay a charge against God.

Just as God is the ultimate cause of election, so also God is the ultimate cause of reprobation. Calvin would not sidestep this conclusion. Indeed, it is the frank acknowledgment of God’s reprobation that prompts Calvin’s piercing confession: “It is a horrible decree.”

Calvin did not pretend to understand why God ordains some to reprobation any more than he understood why God elects some to salvation. He could only declare: “the reason of divine righteousness is higher than man’s…slender wit can comprehend.”

Calvin’s conception of reprobation is incomplete without an important corollary. Although God is viewed as the ultimate cause of reprobation, still Calvin insists that “none undeservedly perish.” Condemnation of the reprobate occurs “because men deserved it on account of impiety, wickedness, and ungratefulness.” None suffer punishment apart from a consideration of personal guilt. Calvin does not attempt to explain how these two aspects of reprobation fit: he simply embraces the tension.

Man and Predestination

“They who shut the gates that no one may dare seek a taste of this doctrine,” warned Calvin, “wrong men no less than God.” The unavoidable result of a clearer view of God is a truer picture of man.

True Humility

The wicked receive precisely what they deserve. The elect receive what they do not deserve. This recognition of the immense goodness of God stirs the pious soul to “true humility.” Without a proper understanding of predestination, Calvin cautioned, “humility is torn up by the roots.”

Calvin advocated what he called a “learned ignorance,” which is to say that the Christian must humbly trust God’s righteous judgment even though he does not really comprehend God’s ways. This he contrasted with a “brutish ignorance.” The “brutish” are those who bury their head in the sand when faced with something they do not understand, such as predestination. By its very nature, the perspective of predestination obliges the godly man to rely upon God rather than his own limited understanding.

Assurance

As a pastor, Calvin had no doubt seen many parishioners troubled about their salvation. His years of ministry to the saints persuaded him that “Satan has no more grievous or dangerous temptation to dishearten believers than when he unsettles them with doubt about their election.” To counter Satan’s attack, he took courage from the doctrine of predestination. Rightly understood, predestination is a bulwark against doubt, an “impregnable security.” It “brings no shaking of faith, but rather its best confirmation.”

Ask Calvin how he knew that he was numbered among the elect, and he would reply, “Christ is more than a thousand testimonies to me.” If Christ is the cause, the instrument, and the object of election, as Calvin fervently believed, then Christ was also the “mirror of election,” in whom the Christian finds the basis for his assurance.

Stimulus to Christian Activity

Francis Hotman, one of Calvin’s devoted friends, wrote in 1556 that Geneva had been imbued with a new and vigorous spirit which had given birth to a race of “martyrs.” Predestination, rightly viewed, is a stimulus to bold Christian activity. Those upon whom God has set his mercy press on against all odds because their assured election has rendered them “invulnerable to all storms of the world, all assaults of Satan and all vacillation of the flesh.” The man chosen by God ought to confidently assert himself in the cause of Christianity.

Calvin vehemently rejected the charge that election leads to idleness. From his perspective, idleness and God’s election are mutually exclusive. When God extends his mercy, it must make a difference in the sinner’s life. God elects men to be holy.

One of the natural results of Calvin’s perspective of predestination was an intensified zeal for evangelism. “For as we do not know who belongs to the number of the predestined or who does not belong, we ought to be so minded as to wish that all men be saved. So shall it come about that we try to make everyone we meet a sharer in our peace.”

Historically, the outworking of an aggressive predestinarian theology can be seen in the vitality of the English Puritans and the French Huguenots. It provided the stimulus to George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards in the Great Awakening, provoked William Carey to initiate the modern missions movement, and inspired the dynamic preaching of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

Conclusion

The essential truth of predestination was not that some are justly condemned, but that many who deserve condemnation are pardoned. Calvin came to grips with the one indisputable fact; it is only when punishment is real that the mercy of God is real.

The doctrine of predestination was for Calvin a “horrible decree” but, even more, it was “very sweet fruit.” He did not pretend to understand it fully, for that would require that he comprehend God. Yet he could confidently pronounce, “even though… predestination is likened to a dangerous sea, still in traversing it, one finds safe and calm—I add also pleasant—sailing.”

“Let this be our conclusion,” Calvin writes at the close of his discussion of predestination in the Institutes, “to tremble with Paul at so deep a mystery; but, if froward tongues clamor, not to be ashamed of this exclamation of his: ‘Who are you, O man, to argue with God?’ ”

Frank James III is a Ph.D. degree candidate at Westminister Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

- More from Frank A. James III

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In this series

A Change in Plans

Conversion

What If?

Terror-Stricken to Stay

Reorganizing the Church

A Heavy Work Load

Poor Health

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Olivetan [1503–1538]

Lefevre D’Etaples [ca. 1455–1536]

Francis I [1515–1547]

Guillaume Farel [1489–1565]

Pierre Viret [1511–1571]

Martin Bucer [1491–1551]

Jacopo Sadeleto [1477–1547]

Sebastian Castellio [1515–1563]

Theodore Beza [1519–1605]

Heinrich Bullinger [1504–1575]

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A Reshaped Life-View

Scriptures Alone, Grace Alone, Faith Alone

So Relax

Faith and Prayer

When Life and Liturgy Meld

Fulfillment Through Failure

A Threefold Guidance System

Cross-Bearing

Meditation of the Future Life

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In this series

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The Word of God

One Only God

The Law of God Alike for All

Natural Man

Salvation in Jesus

Righteousness in Jesus

Regeneration in Jesus

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In this series

Historical Context

Calvins Perspective on Predestination

The God of Predestination

The Mercy of God

The Justice of God

Man and Predestination

True Humility

Assurance

Stimulus to Christian Activity

Conclusion

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