John Calvin was born in 1509. He had tremendous influence on the founding
and growth of America, yet he never set foot here. In fact he was a Frenchman,
living in Switzerland, and died 43 years before the founding of Jamestown, the first colony established here. He is considered to be a great theologian,
but he went to university to be a lawyer.
He never studied religion beyond the basics at the university.
While there, he was fascinated with the Greco-Roman philosophy of Stoicism. Stoicism was the dominant belief system of educated Romans at the peak of their empire. It’s not a “religion,” per se, but it does teach anti-Christian values, and our earliest Church fathers debated against it frequently. It teaches that everything in the universe is predestined, and each of us has been given a role to play by fate. We had no choice in that determination. According to them, our goal in life is: don’t complain--just play our role well. Regarding adversities, we should rise above excessive emotion, and accept with resignation what fate has assigned to us. In 1532 Calvin put together a commentary on Seneca, the leading Stoic in Rome. But his commentary had a twist—he tied together (?) the philosophy of Stoicism and the teachings of Christ. In 1534 he became a Reformer, at the peak of Luther’s popularity in Germany. Calvin fled to Geneva, Switzerland, which became ruled by Protestants. The leaders of Geneva were impressed with Calvin’s religion and energy, and made him the leader of the Reformation there.
He believed that he was selected by God to bring God’s
church back to the “correct” doctrine. His greatest attribute was a singular
confidence—and a massive ego. To quote
him: He “knows, beyond doubt, that what
(he says) is coming from God.” He was
determined not to equivocate, or change, his doctrine as he had seen Luther do
over the years. We’ll see, later on,
where that takes him.
Let’s discuss Calvin’s doctrine. In 1536 he wrote the first edition of The
Institutes of Christian Religion. He
expanded it in later editions—but didn’t change what it taught. Its most-publicized aspect was its teaching
on predestination. According to Calvin,
before God ever created the earth, He determined that Adam would fall, and all
of his descendants would inherit his sin and guilt. But in God’s “mercy,” He placed all Adam’s
descendants in two categories: He chose
a very small portion of mankind to be the elect, to be given eternal life in
heaven. And thereby He chose everyone
else to be tormented forever in hell.
This doctrine is also known as “double predestination,” since
automatically those who aren’t selected in one group fall into the other. Now keep in mind two things: (1) nobody can change these two elections
(thus you can see the Stoic influence);
these were pre-ordained before you were born. (2) God’s selection was completely arbitrary—done
without regard to any works, good or bad, or how we live our lives. That’s because we’re all totally depraved (so
he says), and completely unable to come to God without His help. Any faith in God that you have is only
because He randomly gave it to you. A
person’s lack of faith would be simply because God didn’t select that person
for it—he was thus predestined for hell.
Does this doctrine sound anti-God to you?
You would think that few people would accept this philosophy,
because it doesn’t line up with God’s personality in the Bible. But people grabbed onto the nice collateral idea
that the elect can know beyond doubt that they are the elect, and you cannot
possibly lose your salvation—thus sayeth Calvin. He got a huge following—from “the elect.”
Not so much from the non-elect.
Another aspect of his theology was, he didn’t see the
difference between Christ’s moral teachings and the Old Testament Law. Thus, he felt that communities should be
theocratic, like Israel. That means
everyone, whether elect or not, needed to be brought into this covenant with
God. Thus state-wide infant baptism was
mandatory. The Anabaptists, who believed
in believer’s baptism only (as does Scripture), were thus heretical. His approach to them? Torture them, get them to recant. They need to accept the truth. (Luther had the same attitude in Germany, but
less passionate). In Calvin’s
Institutes, it further spells out that every nation should be governed only by
the elect. The job of civic government
was to protect the true faith, and regulate the lives of its citizens so they
follow God’s law. Even the non-elect had
to “toe the line.” If the nation does
what was right, God would prosper it. If
the nation was experiencing military or economic decline, or natural disaster,
it must be that God was punishing that nation for something they’re doing
wrong. The state mandates church
attendance for all, and the city elders’ job includes observing carefully the private
lives of all its attendees to make sure they’re living in bounds with God’s
Law. The church could excommunicate
those who strayed, and then the state also would punish them—such as kicking
them out of the community.
Membership on the church rolls was limited to the
elect. To keep non-elects out of
membership, anyone who claimed they were the elect had to give a detailed
testimony to the church demonstrating that they believed all of Calvin’s
teaching, and that they had a conversion period in their lives—it might have
taken many years for that conversion to reach salvation levels. Keep in mind, the New Testament procedure
was, you had a conversion, it might be instantaneous upon preaching, and you
repented—and you got baptized. The
baptism was the public announcement of your salvation—not a public auricular
confession as Calvin demanded.
Further, God has assigned you a vocation in life. Your job is to excel in it, since you were serving God. (This idea is one of the foundations of a very successful Capitalism.) Wealth and prosperity were signs of God’s approval of your efforts. Poverty is an indication of God’s judgment. (How do you line this up with Jesus’ statement, “Blessed are the poor”? And what about His scathing rebukes of the rich?)
Geneva under Calvin was a dream come true for his
followers—but a reign of terror for everybody else. In one year after taking charge, he drew up a
Genevan catechism, the accepted doctrine—and every city resident had to appear at
the main church to hear its reading.
They had to promise to receive it as the one, the only true
doctrine. Anyone who failed to do so was
banished from the city. If that
happened, the city’s fathers took over the homes that they were forced to leave
behind. Very profitable for them. Thus, overall, they had a religious
police-state. Anybody guilty of even the
smallest infraction would be reported.
Officers questioned people about the conduct of their neighbors—and they
even interrogated children about their parents.
Calvin made many enemies, but smashed every instance of dissent. He was so confident in his correctedness,
that he didn’t believe in showing any mercy to “heretics”—defined as those who
had a different religious belief than his.
People were regularly tortured, imprisoned or exiled who dared to
differ. There were many executions. In 1546, Jacques Gruet, not a threat to
Calvin, who simply criticized him, was hideously tortured until he
“confessed”—and then he was beheaded! When
it appeared, later, that Calvin had more opposition, he requested the city
council to declare that only his Institutes were “the pure doctrine of the
gospel” and “could not be criticized by any citizen.”
His
huge ego reached its most grotesque result in the Michael Servetus case. Servetus doubted the Trinity—a difficult notion to get anyone’s
head around, as many early church councils wrestled with this. In the U.S. today, there are 11 Pentecostal “Oneness” denominations having 24 million
followers. I have attended one of their
meetings. Though I disagree with their
non-trinitarianism, I do not have an urge to kill any of them. They seemed to have an otherwise normal church
service. Calvin did Servetus a favor, he
felt, by sending him a copy of the Institutes. Servetus had the audacity to annotate his own comments, and sent it
back. This began a flurry of arrogant
letter-writings back and forth. Finally
Calvin said in a letter to another friend, “If I consent, he (Servetus) will
come here. But I will not give such
word. For if he comes here, and my
authority is worth anything, I will never permit him to depart alive.” There never was a doubt about Calvin’s
authority—no imprisonment, no exile, no torture or beheading went without his
consent. He was called “the pope of
Geneva.” Servetus made the mistake of naively
wandering in (he originally lived in Spain).
He was arrested. Calvin himself
prepared the 38 counts against Servetus, at least one of which was “insulting
Calvin’s authority.” Servetus did not
have the right to an attorney, since as Calvin said, he could “lie without
one.” At trial he was not allowed to
explain or defend any of his points. He
was sentenced to be burned at the stake alive.
He was chained to a stake. The
authorities then piled wood around him, half of which were green (which takes
longer to burn, prolonging the agony of suffering). The crowd watched in fascination. Keep in mind: Calvin, by his position and by consenting,
was guilty, in our courts, of conspiracy to murder. This was similar to David’s crime (II Samuel
11:14-17)—yet it was just as bad as murder--the Bible flat-out calls it murder
(II Samuel 12:9).
Unlike David, though, Calvin was unrepentant. Several months later he opined that he was
“indifferent” to the hand-wringers who would want him to be apologetic. Those who got weak when it comes to justice
for blasphemers were guilty themselves, he wrote.
In 1556 many in opposition had a demonstration against him. “Riots”
were frowned upon. They were arrested
and sentenced to death. This death
sentence was the grisliest to date—they were drawn and quartered. This was the epitome of the cruelest
punishment possible. Most countries of
the time reserved it for the greatest crimes, like treason. But to the Genevans, the worst crime was
disagreeing with Calvin’s “words from God.” They were first hung in such a way that their
neck would not be broken. They just hung
there, strangling. They were barely
alive when they would be cut down, then cut open at the waist and all their
entrails pulled out and burned in front of their eyes. Then they were finally beheaded.
So, was the murderer Calvin (based strictly on the Gruet and Servetus
cases above) a believer in Christ? Based on Scripture,
as I point out in other blogs, that means did he follow Christ’s commandments
and abide in Him (I John 3:24)? Unless he repented, I think
not; I believe he ended up unsaved. No
one could consent to these unimaginable things and claim they “love the
brethren” and love God, which believers must do (I John 4:8). Are
you a follower of Calvin’s theology?
Then you agree that people are predestined to hell by God, by random
selection, not based on any works or faith?
But, here’s the big question--can the theology of clearly an
unsaved man be accurate? Can a theology of an unsaved man get you to
heaven? Think about that.
Acknowledgements:
David Bercot, CD, “Geneva.”
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