Who was John Calvin?

Of all the famous theologians of church history, the titans of knowledge upon whose shoulders we stand, none has been more maligned or vilified than John Calvin. The public caricature of Calvin portrays him as nothing less than a monster, a mean-spirited ogre who ruled Geneva with an iron hand, sent poor Michael Servetus to his death, and introduced a diabolical view of predestination to the church. 

If Christ’s beatific promise applies, 

“Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven,”

then John Calvin needs a tractor-trailer to cart around his heavenly reward.

When I consider the great theologians of the church, I think immediately of my list of the top five: St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards. These are the giants with which God has gifted His church. They comprise the all-time all-star team in the roll call of theologians.

Each person had a distinctive personality. Each brought to the theological arena different strengths and weaknesses. They were not cookie-cutter copies of each other. Three of the five were gifted with keen philosophical minds: Augustine, Aquinas, and Edwards. Their intellectual power in probing abstract metaphysical concerns rank them among the top philosophers of western civilization.

Augustine was the dominant Christian thinker of the first millennium of church history. He worked under the disadvantage of not having someone like himself to go before him. He blazed trails where no pioneers had previously trod.

Aquinas was the dominant theologian of the Middle Ages. His monumental works, the Summae, are of lasting value to the church. Aquinas seemed almost superhuman. His penetrating thought and combined grasp of philosophy and theology rightly earned him the title conferred upon him by the Roman Catholic Church, Doctor Angelicus.

Luther was a man of great passion. Erudite and highly skilled in biblical thought and philology, he was a master of vignettes of insight. His perceptions, though not always systematic, were brilliant in their clarity and lucid in their penetration. He was a great leader of men who mixed the ability to deal at the academic level and communicating to the popular masses as well as to children.

Edwards, the least feted among my top five, was perhaps most brilliant of them all. He is second only to Calvin in terms of being vilified, portrayed as a sadistic, narrow-minded Puritan, preoccupied with hell and the wrath of God. This is the image garnered from English anthologies that expose students to one sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” perhaps the most misunderstood sermon in history.

Calvin was perhaps the most gifted systematicity of the “big five.” His knowledge of Scripture and theology was encyclopedic. He was known to quote lengthy passages from the Church Fathers, especially from Augustine, from memory at the drop of a hat. His ability in the debate was unmatched. His literary output was phenomenal. His literary skill matched his theological genius. Reading Calvin at times is like reading lyric poetry. The majesty of his language was appropriate to the loftiness of the subjects he treated. He was a man intoxicated by the majesty of God. No theologian, before or since had such a grasp of His beauty and loveliness. This marks everything that Calvin wrote and did.

If anything drove Calvin’s theology and ministry it was his love for the excellence of God and conversely his abhorrence of all forms of idolatry. His legacy includes a revolution of Christian worship marked by a theocentric focus on the praise and reverence for the nature and character of God. 

His love for the law of God reflects his love for the Being whose character is expressed in that law. Calvin’s work of reform was designed to bring Christian truth and Christian living together, moulded by deep spiritual affection. He was no mere moralist but a profound thinker whose concern for true spirituality earned him the sobriquet, “The theologian of the Holy Spirit.”

The caricatures of Calvin as a dour, stiff, cold tyrant are drawn by those who have never plumbed the depths of his thought. To counteract these distorted images I often have my students read his chapter on prayer in the Institutes before they read anything else of Calvin. Here they get a glimpse of a man as they eavesdrop on a soul naked before God.

The fame or infamy of Calvin with respect to the doctrine of predestination is a strange thing. There is certainly nothing in Calvin’s doctrine of predestination that was not first in Luther. Luther wrote more, and more polemically, about this doctrine than did Calvin, and referred to the doctrine of election as the cor ecclesiae, the very “heart of the church.” 

But Luther’s trusted comrade, Melanchthon, later modified Luther’s view, leaving Calvin to expound the doctrine more consistently. Calvin echoed not only Luther but Augustine in his exposition of the biblical and especially Pauline doctrine of predestination.

Calvin’s theology was formative to a broad spectrum of church confessions. His teaching is clearly seen in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, which formed the historic theological foundation of Anglican and Episcopal thought. 

His theology was virtually codified in the Scots Confession and the Westminster Confession, forming the bedrock of historic Presbyterianism and Reformed and Congregational Christianity. The influence is likewise apparent in historic Baptist confessions and creeds.

Modern Evangelicalism owes an enormous debt to John Calvin. Dispensationalism, which is a serious distortion of historical Calvinism, nevertheless grew out of the thought of men deeply influenced by the Reformer. Even James Arminius was a child of Calvin. 

Modern neo-orthodox thought, chiefly through the work of Karl Barth, appeared on the theological scene as a kind of neo-Calvinism (though some have argued that the neo would be better spelled without the e).

Calvin’s disciples include John Knox, Francis Turretin, the Puritans such as John Owen, Richard Baxter, Jonathan Edwards, as well as such modern theologians as B.B. Warfield, Charles Hodge, James H. Thornwell, Robert Dabney, J. Gresham Machen, G.C. Berkouwer, Cornelius Van Til, Gordon Clark, Francis Schaeffer, J.I. Packer, John Gerstner, Roger Nicole, James Boice, et al.

Beyond Calvin’s legacy in the world of theology, he also exercised an uncommon influence on the shaping of modern culture, government, and civilization. Max Weber in The Spirit of Capitalism documents Calvin’s influence not only in the shaping of modern democratic forms of government modelled after Calvin’s Geneva but also in the emergence of free-market capitalism as the basic structure of economics in the free world.

Calvin is also seen as the inspiration for the formative influence of the so-called Puritan work ethic. Calvin’s sweeping doctrine of Providence influenced generations of Christians who saw their labour as a vocation from God and their diligence as an offering to God. The fruits of their labour were received as from His gracious hand, giving impetus to thanksgiving and due diligence in the stewardship of worldly goods.

American society, particularly with respect to its strengths, is unthinkable apart from this extraordinary individual. Scholar, teacher, pastor, reformer, administrator, author, civic leader—John Calvin, in exercising this multitude of gifts, has been to the church of Christ a man for all seasons.

Author: Sproul, R. C.