In everything Calvin did, he purposed to give all the glory to God. Calvin’s aim was not to spar over theological points for the sake of it but to draw his listeners and readers to bow their knees and worship the one true and living God.

A visit to modern Geneva in Switzerland might include a trip to see the International Monument to the Reformation on the grounds of the University of Geneva. The wall is over one hundred meters long, and at its center are sixteen-foot carved figures of four men: William Farel (1489–1565), Theodore Beza (1519–1605), John Knox (c.1514–1572), and, standing between Farel and Beza, John Calvin (1509–1564). Tourists probably snap a photograph without any knowledge of who these men were or their importance to the Reformation and its effect upon the shape and development of modern Europe. R.C. Sproul, in an afterword to a volume of scholarly essays on John Calvin, wrote:

John Calvin was a Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians, a titan in the midst of dwarfs. He stands head and shoulders above the rank and file of theologians, scholars, and biblical experts down through the ages. He abides in the elite company of men like Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards. As Aristotle received the epithet “the philosopher,” so Calvin received a similar sobriquet from Philipp Melanchthon, who referred to Calvin simply as “the theologian.”

Background

Born in 1509, in Noyon, Picardy in northeastern France, Calvin as a boy was set on a course of education that would lead him to become a priest. Those plans were disrupted for a season after his father ran into trouble with the cathedral authorities, for whom he worked as a financial administrator, and was subsequently excommunicated. The young Calvin was advised to leave his plans for the priesthood and become a lawyer, studying at Orleans and Bourges. One of his tutors at Bourges was a man called Melchior Wolmar, a man with evangelical sympathies who taught him Greek, employing the New Testament as a source.

Following his father’s death, Calvin, now back in Paris, published what we might think of as his doctoral work, a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia. The importance of this publication lies in something that deeply affected Calvin for the rest of his life. He was a “Renaissance man,” with its stress on ad fontes, “back to the sources.”

Conversion

The date of Calvin’s conversion is, according to one author, “among the most disputed topics of Reformation scholarship.” Some have dated his conversion as early as 1529 and others as late as 1533. Although there were human instruments to account for his acceptance of a Reformation understanding of salvation, he gave all the credit to God. Writing two years before his death, in a profound treatise on election, Calvin could say, “It is not within our power to convert ourselves from our evil life, unless God changes and cleanses us by his Holy Spirit.”

Ministry

John Calvin the Reformer came to prominence after his conversion, having to flee Paris for fear of capture and probable execution. Sometime in 1536, Calvin wrote and later published the first edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven when he wrote it. It was a quarter of the size of the final edition in 1559 and remains one of the most important theological books in history to this day.

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