John Calvin
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| John Calvin | |
 Engraving from the original oil painting in the University Library of Geneva |
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| Born | July 10 1509 Noyon, Picardy, France |
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| Died | May 27 1564 (aged 54) Geneva, Switzerland |
| Occupation | Pastor and theologian |
| Religion | Reformed Protestant |
| Spouse | Idelette de Bure |
| Parents | Gérard Cauvin and Jeanne Lefranc |
John Calvin (July 10, 1509 – May 27, 1564) was a French Protestant theologian during the Protestant Reformation and was a central developer of the system of Christian theology called Calvinism or Reformed theology. In Geneva, he rejected Papal authority, established a new scheme of civic and ecclesiastical governance. He is famous for his teachings and writings and infamous for his role in the execution of Michael Servetus.
Calvin was born with the name Jean Chauvin (or Cauvin, in Latin Calvinus) in Noyon, Picardie, France, to Gérard Cauvin and Jeanne Lefranc. In 1523, Calvin's father, an attorney, sent his fourteen-year-old son to the University of Paris to study humanities and law. By 1532, he had attained a Doctor of Law degree at Orléans. In 1536, he settled in Geneva, Switzerland. After being expelled from the city, he served as a pastor in Strasbourg from 1538 until 1541, before returning to Geneva, where he lived until his death in 1564.
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[change] Calvin's thought
Calvin was trained to be a lawyer. He studied under some of the best legal minds of the Renaissance in France. Part of that training involved the newer humanistic methods of exegesis, which dealt with a text directly via historical and grammatical analysis, as opposed to indirectly via layers of commentators. His legal and exegetical training was important for Calvin because, once convinced of the evangelical faith, he applied these exegetical methods to the Scripture. He self-consciously molded his thinking along biblical lines, and he labored to preach and teach what he believed the Bible taught.
While Reformers such as John Huss and Martin Luther may be seen as somewhat original thinkers that began a movement, Calvin was a great logician and systematizer of that movement, but not an innovator in doctrine. Calvin was very familiar with the writings of the early Church Fathers and the great Medieval schoolmen, and he was also in debt to earlier Reformers. Calvin did not reject the Scholastics of the Middle Ages outright but rather made use of them and reformed their thoughts in accordance with his understanding of the Bible.
Calvin is often associated with the doctrines of predestination and election, but he differed very little with the other magisterial Reformers regarding these difficult doctrines.
[change] Bibliography
[change] General collections
- Works by John Calvin at Project Gutenberg
- Writings of Calvin at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL)
[change] Theological works
- Institutes of the Christian Religion at CCEL
- Psychopannychia
- Jean Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, [1]
[change] Commentaries
- Calvin's Commentaries on the Bible at CCEL
- Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, (with Calvin's dedication to Edward VI), tr. by John Owens, Edingurgh, The Calvin Translation Society, 1855.
[change] Letters
- Jules Bonnet, Letters of John Calvin, Carlisle, Penn: Banner of Truth Trust 1980. ISBN 0-85151-323-9
[change] Secondary sources
- Bernard Cottret, Calvin, a Biography, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Eerdmans, 2001. ISBN 0-567-08757-3
- Roland Bainton (1974). Women of the Reformation in England and France. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-5649-9.
- John Farrell, "The Terrors of Reform," chapter five of Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau. Cornell University Press, 2006.
- John Foxe. An Account of the Life of John Calvin
[change] Other websites
