Who was John Calvin?

Question 13003.

John Calvin was a French lawyer turned theologian who became the most systematic mind of the Reformation and gave his name to a movement he would probably have found embarrassing. I am not a Calvinist, which means I have to work harder than most to write about him fairly, and I want to try.

Caricatures are easy in both directions. He was neither the cold tyrant of popular imagination nor the flawless saint of some evangelical retellings. He was a gifted, driven, frequently ill man who did an enormous amount of good and some real harm.

Who John Calvin was

He was born at Noyon in Picardy in 1509, twenty-six years after Luther, and trained first for the priesthood and then in law at his father’s insistence. That legal training shows on every page he wrote. He is orderly, precise and relentless in a way Luther never was, and where Luther thunders, John Calvin builds.

He describes his conversion as a sudden turning by which God subdued his heart to teachability, and he says almost nothing else about it, which is characteristic. He disliked writing about himself. By 1534 he had left France under threat of persecution, and in 1536, aged twenty-six, he published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion.

He intended to spend his life quietly in scholarship. Passing through Geneva in 1536, he was confronted by the fiery reformer Guillaume Farel, who told him that God would curse his studies if he refused to help with the work there. John Calvin stayed, and Geneva shaped the rest of his life, apart from a three-year exile in Strasbourg after the city expelled him.

What he actually taught

The Institutes went through several expansions and became the most thorough summary of Protestant theology of its century. Its organising conviction is the knowledge of God and of ourselves, and its practical aim is worship. John Calvin wanted believers to know God in order to adore Him rather than to win arguments.

He held to justification by faith alone with Luther, to Scripture as the final authority, and to the union of the believer with Christ as the source of every blessing. A great deal of what he wrote is simply Protestant Christianity carefully expressed, and evangelicals of every stripe still profit from it.

He is remembered chiefly for his teaching on election and predestination, which he treated as an expression of God’s grace rather than as a speculation about divine decrees. It is worth noting that this doctrine occupies a much smaller proportion of the Institutes than his reputation suggests, and that the five points now labelled Calvinism were formulated at Dort in 1618, more than fifty years after his death. My answer on the five points of Calvinism covers those separately.

The Institutes, and why it lasted

It is worth understanding why one book by a young Frenchman is still being printed five centuries later. The first edition of 1536 was a small handbook of six chapters, written partly to persuade the king of France that the persecuted evangelicals were not seditious fanatics. By the final Latin edition of 1559 it had grown to four books and eighty chapters.

What made it endure was structure. Earlier Protestant writing was occasional, produced in the heat of controversy, and John Calvin gave the movement something it badly needed, which was a coherent account of the whole faith that a pastor could work through and a student could learn from. Whatever you think of his conclusions, the discipline of the thing is remarkable.

He also wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible, and it is there rather than in the Institutes that I think he is at his best. His handling of a text is patient, literal where the text is literal, and unwilling to force a passage to serve his system. He does not always succeed in that, and neither do I.

Read alongside the Greek and Hebrew, his exegetical instincts hold up well. He knows what dikaioo means and why it matters, and he will not let a doctrine rest on a mistranslation. That is a habit worth imitating whatever school you belong to.

Why I do not follow him here

I hold that election is grounded in God’s foreknowledge of faith rather than in an unconditional decree, that Jesus died for all without exception, and that the reason anyone is lost is their own refusal rather than a prior determination. Peter says the Lord is patient towards us, not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance, 2 Peter 3:9, and John says Jesus is the propitiation for our sins and also for the sins of the whole world, 1 John 2:2.

I also hold that predestination in Scripture has more to do with the standing and service of those who believe than with the selection of individuals for salvation, and I hold that with a degree of tentativeness rather than as settled dogma. Passages such as Ephesians 1:5 and 2 Timothy 1:9 read to me as describing what God has determined for believers rather than which individuals will become believers.

Where John Calvin and I differ most sharply is on the freedom of the human will, which I take to be genuine and to be the reason people are responsible for what they choose. His system is coherent and I understand its appeal, and I think it purchases that coherence at too high a price.

Geneva, and the Servetus affair

No honest account can skip this. Michael Servetus denied the Trinity, was already condemned by the Catholic authorities in France, and came to Geneva where he was arrested, tried and burned in 1553. John Calvin did not preside at the trial and argued for beheading rather than burning, which is not much of a defence and I am not going to offer it as one.

He agreed with the execution and defended it afterwards. That was the assumption of the age, held by Catholics and Protestants alike, and it was wrong. Baptists were saying so at the time, at considerable cost, which is why I feel able to name it plainly. Nobody has the authority to kill a man for what he believes, and I have written about why in my answer on religious liberty.

The wider Geneva of legend, a joyless theocracy run by John Calvin, is largely a myth. He was not a citizen for most of his time there, held no civil office, and was frequently opposed by the council. What is true is that the city’s discipline was intrusive by any modern standard, and that he approved of it.

What he got right

His commentaries are still in print for a reason. He reads the text carefully, resists allegory, keeps his eye on the author’s intention and refuses to speculate where Scripture is silent. Even where I disagree with his conclusions, I learn from how he arrives at them.

He also recovered the doctrine of vocation, teaching that ordinary work is service to God, and he insisted that theology exists for worship rather than for its own sake. His pastoral care of the French refugees pouring into Geneva was tireless, and the preachers trained there went back into France knowing they would probably die for it. Many did.

And he took Scripture seriously in a way that shames a good deal of modern preaching. Whatever else you say about John Calvin, he believed the text was worth an entire life.

How Baptists should read him

Read him, and read him critically. That is the same counsel I would give about any writer who is not an apostle, and it applies to the men I agree with as much as to those I do not. Take what is good, test everything by Scripture, and do not adopt a system wholesale because you admire its author.

I would also urge Baptists to stop using his name as a term of abuse. Many of my brothers hold his understanding of grace, love the Lord and preach the gospel faithfully, and the difference between us is real without being a difference about the gospel itself. My answer on Calvinism and Arminianism sets out the distinctions fairly.

And be aware that a good deal of what people call Calvinism today would not have been recognised by John Calvin. Systems tend to harden after their founders die, and the men who quote him most loudly have often read the least of him.

So, now what?

If you have opinions about John Calvin, acquire them first-hand. Read a few pages of his commentary on a passage you know well and see what you make of it. You may be surprised how pastoral he is, and how little he resembles the figure on the internet.

Then hold your own convictions the way you would want others to hold theirs. I am persuaded that Scripture teaches genuine human freedom and an atonement offered to all, and I can say that without treating those who differ as enemies of the gospel. Doctrinal disagreement between believers is meant to sharpen us rather than to divide us.

What would change in your reading if you approached every writer, including the ones you already agree with, with a Bible open beside you?

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

John 16:13, ESV