John Calvin
John Calvin was a French lawyer who reorganised a Swiss city and produced the most systematic theology of the Reformation. Born at Noyon in Picardy in 1509, the son of a cathedral notary, he was sent to Paris for theology and then to Orléans and Bourges for law when his father quarrelled with the chapter, and he acquired the humanist training that shows in everything he wrote — his first book was a commentary on Seneca. He experienced what he called a sudden conversion around 1533 and left France after the affair of the placards in 1534, when anti-Catholic posters appeared across Paris and on the king's own door and the persecution began. He published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion in Basel in 1536 at twenty-six, and expanded it for the rest of his life. He was passing through Geneva that year and was effectively bullied into staying by Guillaume Farel, who told him God would curse his studies if he refused. He was expelled in 1538 and recalled in 1541, and spent the following twenty-three years building an order in which the church governed itself through pastors, teachers, elders and deacons, and a consistory disciplined the population's morals — attendance, dancing, blasphemy, adultery. Its record includes the burning of Michael Servetus for denying the Trinity in 1553, which Calvin supported. His doctrine of predestination, and the international academy that trained pastors for France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Hungary, made Geneva the model Protestant city. He died in 1564 and was buried in an unmarked grave at his own insistence. His influence ran furthest through institutions rather than doctrine. The presbyterian structure he designed — elected elders, assemblies, no bishops — became the constitution of the Scottish kirk, the Dutch church and the New England towns, and a good deal of later republican practice was learned in it.
- Lived: 1509 CE – 1564 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: theologian, reformer, religious_leader
