Things You Need to Know About John Calvin

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 a famous French 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 Protestant Reformer, at the peak of Luther’s popularity in Germany.  Because the Catholics were hunting down Reformers, Calvin fled to Geneva, Switzerland, which became ruled by Protestants.   The leaders of Geneva were impressed with Calvin’s keen mind and energy, and made him the leader of the Reformation there. 

He began "improving" on Luther's doctrine, and came to believe that he was selected by God to bring God’s church back to his idea of “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 predetermined 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 all through history in two categories:  He chose individuals, before they were even born, amounting to 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 with two groups, 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 foreknowledge or 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 to receive it—that person was thus predestined for hell. 

Does this doctrine sound like it reflects God's personality 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.   He got a huge following—from those who felt like “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. Old Testament Law should rule.  That means everyone, whether elect or not, needed to be brought into Old Testament rules.  He decided infant baptism of all was mandatory, to keep the infant, if it died, from going to Hell (even though that was not a Biblical doctrine).  The Anabaptists, who believed in believer’s baptism only (as does Scripture), were thus heretical, to Calvin.  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 about pursuing it).  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 mandated church attendance was 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. They would even survey your neighbors on you to find out "the truth." The church could excommunicate those who strayed, and then the state also would punish them, the worst punishment for the worst sins being hanging, burning, or even drawn and quartered. 

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—they usually related to the church how it took 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 economic 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.  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. They even interrogated children about their parents.  Calvin made many enemies, but smashed every instance of dissent.  He was so confident in his correctness, that he didn’t believe in showing any mercy to “heretics”—defined as those who had a different item in their theology 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 in private papers, 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 was a gifted and well-known Spanish Renaissance man, but he questioned  the Trinity (an understandable problem to ration out), the infant baptism, and predestination.  Calvin thought he would do Servetus a favor, he felt, by sending him a copy of the Institutes to straighten him out.  Servetus had the "audacity" to annotate his own critique of the Institutes, 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...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 was arrested.  Calvin himself prepared the 38 criminal 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 in the Bible it was just as bad as murder--it was called murder in 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.  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 still 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 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 at the end, 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).   
Now the big question:  Are you a follower of Calvin’s predestination theology?  Most Americans who call themselves "Christian" actually are--most don't know its details or the details of its founder.  I don't doubt that most are really Christian.  But when you think about it, do you really agree that people are predestined to hell by God, by random selection, not based on any of their works or faith? Is that what God is to you?

But, here’s the bigger question--can the theology of clearly an unsaved man be accurate?   Can the theology of an unsaved man get you to heaven?  Think about that.

Acknowledgements:  David Bercot, CD, “Geneva.”