I am a Calvinist. I asked Calvin into my heart almost twenty-four years ago, a tongue-in-cheek comment I once heard R.C. Sproul use. I didn’t grow up as a Calvinist, nor do I remember hearing that name until I was in college. More than a fun topic to argue about at Christian parties, it is a way of life. My wife and I named our only son, Calvin. I even have the bobblehead.

We—the elders and I at least—believe and teach Calvinism at TEC. The next part in the Reformed and Still Reforming series will work through the Five Points of Calvinism. We are reading Lectures on Calvinism by Abraham Kuyper with the men. Our apologetic methodology, our homiletic philosophy, our worship liturgy, and our hopeful evangelism are all informed by Calvinism.

Someone usually will ask, Why focus on a man? I’ve had enough conversations over the last two decades to know that at least three things are possible. One, it’s possible to hate talking about other men and be ignorant. Two, it’s possible to idolize other men and be ignorant. And three, it’s possible to “remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Hebrews 13:7). Obeying the Bible means listening to and learning from those who teach the Bible.

Another person might ask, Why use names? It’s okay to go without names, but sometimes we can be more biblical by using extra biblical names. If a man doesn’t believe in the Trinity he is going to hell. A man doesn’t have to believe in the word “Trinity,” but he most certainly has to believe in the eternal divinity and equality of each the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit while understanding that the three Persons are one God. “Trinity” summarizes that, and quite nicely. The same is true with “Calvinism.” Calvinism is a summary of cosmological and soteriological truths, that “Whatever the LORD pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps” (Psalm 135:6) and “From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever” (Romans 11:36). Calvinism asserts: God saves sinners. That is the gospel, and Calvinism is a nickname (per Spurgeon) that summarizes a God-centered gospel.

Calvin built libraries’ worth of mental categories for theology proper, for biblical exegesis, and for cosmological/worldview. Calvin himself could not have imagined the generational and tectonic shifts in the church and in governments and Western Civilization—perhaps no where else more than in the United States—that his theology would create. His views are anything but truncated, and his attack on dualism is surprisingly spiritual.

I have never thought that being a Calvinist meant believing every particular thing that Calvin taught. Nor did I realize how exhaustively universal were his teachings, or at least the implications of his understanding of God’s revelation.

Abraham Kuyper summarized Calvinism this way:

[T]he persuasion that the whole of a man’s life is to be lived in the Divine Presence has become the fundamental thought of Calvinism. By this decisive idea, or rather by this might fact, it has allowed itself to be controlled in every department of its entire domain. It is from this mother-thought that the all-embracing life system of Calvinism sprang. (Lectures on Calvinism, 26)

Tectonic relates to large-scale processes, in the context of geology regarding what happens on the earth’s crust and by analogy with any considerable development. Calvin’s life and theology brought and are still causing tectonic shifts.

Calvin’s Work

John Calvin was a pastor, theologian, and writer committed to soli Deo gloria.

Calvin did not belong to the first generation of Reformers. He was born on July 10, 1509 in France. That means when Luther posted his theses in Wittenburg Calvin was eight years old. By the time Calvin entered his work as a reformer, the first wave of Protestant battles had already been fought. But things were far from settled and there was a lot of work to do.

We know very little about his early home life. Calvin’s father, an attorney, sent him to the University of Paris to study humanities and law when he was fourteen. At the College de Montaigu he “he was instructed in the traditional curriculum of the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy)” (Gordon, Calvin, Kindle loc. 215-216).

His first book was a commentary on Seneca’s book De clement).

Calvin also made considerable use of Livy, Tacitus and Plutarch, his primary source was the second-century Roman historian Suetonius (69-122?) with his pithy and dramatic accounts of the first eleven emperors in his Lives of the Caesars… (Gordon, loc. 447-448).

But somewhere in 1533 he was converted and joined the protest against the Roman Catholic Church. Calvin immediately knew what he wanted. He wanted the enjoyment of literary ease so he could promote the Reformed faith as a literary scholar. He wanted to be left in isolation. Calvin wanted to serve the people, but not necessarily by being among them. He wrote of himself:

Being of a disposition somewhat unpolished and bashful, which led me always to love the shade and retirement, I then began to seek some secluded corner where I might be withdrawn from the public view. (Commentary on the Book of Psalms)

Shortly after his conversion he was forced to escape Paris due to rising persecution against the Protestants. He eventually left France entirely, exiled to Switzerland. To redeem the time he devoted himself to the study of Hebrew! It was during this time in 1536 that he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion—what is now a two volume tome—a detailed systematic theology. Calvin was only 27 years old. Years later he explained what motivated him:

While I lay hidden at Basel, and known only to a few people, many faithful and holy persons were burnt alive in France…It appeared to me, that unless I opposed to the utmost of my ability, my silence could not be vindicated from the charge of cowardice and treachery. This was the consideration which induced me to publish my Institutes of the Christian Religion…It was published with no other design than that men might know what was the faith of those whom I saw basely and wickedly defamed.

Calvin could not sit idly by without some effort to vindicate the faithful. These were truths worth dying for.

Later in 1536 there was a temporary period when protestant offenders could return to France without punishment. Calvin returned, put things in order and headed out for Strasbourg near the German border. But a war broke out between Charles V and Francis I resulting in troop movement that blocked the road to Strasbourg, and Calvin had to detour through Geneva.

Calvin planned on staying in Geneva one night. But Calvin’s arrival was brought to the attention of the towns’ leading Reformer, a man named William Farel. Calvin tells us what happened that night in the introduction to his commentary on the Psalms:

Farel, who burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance the gospel, immediately learned that my heart was set upon devoting myself to private studies, for which I wished to keep myself free from other pursuits, and finding that he gained nothing by entreaties, he proceeded to utter an imprecation that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquility of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, while the necessity was so urgent. By this imprecation I was so stricken with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had undertaken.

So imagine you’re moving, spending the night in a hotel, then someone from the town comes and asks you to live in that town for the rest of your life and be their pastor. And you say, “No. I’m on my way somewhere.” “Okay, well God curse you.” “Thanks for that, Will.” John Piper says,

In retrospect, one has to marvel at the providence of God that He should so arrange armies to position his pastors where he wanted them. (The Legacy of Sovereign Joy)

His life was irrevocably changed. Not just geographically, but vocationally. Never again would Calvin work in what he called “tranquility.” Being a shepherd is not tranquil work. Within four months he was appointed Pastor of St. Peter’s church. Within two years the city council banished he and Farel—they appreciated Calvin’s work that much. But they begged them to return in 1541, where he was to stay until his death in 1564.

One of Calvin’s acquaintances, Colladon, who lived in Geneva during these years described his life:

Calvin for his part did not spare himself at all, working far beyond what his power and regard for health could stand. He preached commonly every day for one week in two. Every week he lectured three times in theology…He never failed in visiting the sick, in private warning and counsel, and the rest of the numberless matters arising out of the ordinary exercise of his ministry. But besides these ordinary tasks, he had great care for believers in France, both in teaching them and exhorting them and counseling them and consoling them by letters when they were being persecuted, and also in interceding for them…Yet all that did not prevent him from going on working at his special study and composing many splendid and very useful books.

He just didn’t have enough to do, so he decided to write some books. During these years he lost his wife, Idelette de Bure—an Anabaptist. He wrote to his doctor and described his coughing blood and gout and kidney stones, along with blood loss in his bowels leaving him exhausted and anaemic. There were threats to his life.

And in all of this he was the ultimate exegete—pulling out the meaning of Scripture—of the Reformation age. He has commentaries on almost every book of the Bible that take up four or five feet of shelf space. He was the Reformation’s ultimate theologian—explaining how all the pieces fit together into a whole in his Institutes, which went through five editions until the final version in 1559. I appreciated how John MacArthur described it at a Shepherds’ Conference: Calvin dragged his theology through the entire Bible to see what needed adding and editing or omitting.

Calvin was committed to teaching in print and preaching. He began his series on the book of Acts in 1549 and finished in 1554. After Acts he want on to the epistles to the Thessalonians (46 sermons), Corinthians (186 sermons), the pastoral epistles (86 sermons), Galatians (43 sermons), Ephesians (48 sermons). On the weekdays during that season he preached 159 sermons on Job, 200 on Deuteronomy, 353 on Isaiah and so on.

One of the clearest illustrations that this verse-by-verse, line by line style was a self-conscious choice on Calvin’s part was the fact that on Ester Day, 1538, after preaching, he left the pulpit of St. Peters, banished by the city council. He returned in September 1541—over three years later—and picked up the exposition in the next verse. That is what we call stick-to-it-iveness, or maybe stick-it-to-them-iveness.

But what he gave more than anything else was a clear view of the great God. Calvin hated the ignorance about God and the false worship dominating so much of the church.

It is said that the driving passion of Calvin’s theology and work in the church was to free the church from all forms of idolatry.” (Sproul, Whatever Happened to the Doctrines of Grace, xiii)

Calvin was against abstract idols like fame and power and money and ourselves just as he was the concrete just as much as worship of images and relics and even the bread of the Mass. He called the human heart an idol factory and stressed that the tendency toward idolatry is rooted in the human heart. We pump out the idols. There is an internal production line spilling over with idols to worship. We exchange the truth about God for lies. We worship idols. We worship ourselves.

[A]lthough the Lord represents Himself and His everlasting Kingdom in the mirror of His works with great clarity, such is our stupidity that we grow increasingly dull toward so manifest testimonies, and they flow away without profiting us…[Y]et we are much alike in that, one and all, we forsake the one true God for prodigious trifles…Surely, as waters boil up from a vast, full spring, so does an immense crowd of gods flow forth from the human mind, while each one, in wandering about with too much license, wrongly invents this or that about God Himself.”(Calvin, Institutes, 1:63-65)

Any view of God that is not the revealed God of the Bible is just as much an idol as an additional god. Any time a person says something like, “My God isn’t like that” or “If that’s what your God is like, I want nothing to do with Him” it is likely they have created an image of the true God that they like better. Why? Because the god they’ve invented serves them better. Who is acting like the god at that point?

This was Calvin’s passion. He aimed with all his life to set before man, as the prime motive of existence, to illustrate the glory of God. Piper calls this the banner over all of Calvin’s life—zeal to illustrate the glory of God. The essential meaning of John Calvin’s life and preaching is that he recovered and embodied a passion for the absolute reality and majesty of God.

Therefore the unifying root of all of Calvin’s labors is his passion to display the glory of God in Christ. When he was thirty years old, he described an imaginary scene of himself at the end of his life, giving an account to God, and said,

The thing [O God] at which I chiefly aimed, and for which I most diligently labored, was, that the glory of thy goodness and justice…might shine forth obvious, that the virtue and blessings of thy Christ…might be fully displayed.

Twenty four years later, and one month before he died at age 54, he said in his last will and testament, “I have written nothing out of hatred to anyone, but I have always faithfully propounded what I esteemed to be for the glory of God.”

Criticism of Calvin

It is easy to love Calvin too uncritically. There are things for which he deserves criticism. His biggest problem, though, is not the handling of the heretic Servetus. He had little to do with the execution and, if anything, he tried to have the method of execution changed to a less tortuous method. Here is a very helpful article about the Servetus Affair.

The longer I spend time with him, getting to know God and myself as Calvin described, I think Calvin’s primary problem is that he considered himself to be too precious.

Bruce Gordon wrote a long biography and selected some of the worst excerpts of Calvin’s letters. Gordon seems to have had little sympathy for Calvin, but there is no reason to ignore Calvin’s issues.

Calvin was ruthless with heretics, and with some of his closest friends. He was very agreeable to everyone who agreed with him. He longed for unity of the Reformed churches in Europe and yet did just as much to divide as to collaborate. He loved and he gave grief to Martin Bucer, Huldrych Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Philip Melanchthon, Theodore Beza, and his closest friends, William Farel and Pierre Viret. He severely criticized those who accommodated to Catholic worship in France to avoid persecution, while he himself had escaped in exile. He preached a liberating gospel of forgiveness and also held grudges and settled old scores when given the opportunity. He criticized untrained pastors and kings, and was at times overly sensitive to criticism of himself. He got angry. A lot. He had a large personality, and took things personally. “He was always at his most vicious when cornered” (Gordon). For a man known by his teaching on the doctrine of predestination, for a teacher who explained the sovereignty of God in sweeping terms, Calvin often responded like an Arminian.

agitation about events, about the thoughts and actions of others and about his own perceived inadequacies was a constant and unwelcome companion. (Gordon, loc. 2126)

Men hated him. Numerous biographies were published soon after his death, more than a few of them as an attack, painting him as the heretic and tyrant. Here’s one taste:

“we have given this account of Calvin’s life as neither his friend nor his foe. I will not be lying if I say that he was the ruin and destruction of France. If only he had died in childhood or had never been born! For he brought so many ills to his country that it is only just to hate and detest his origins.“’ (Gordon, loc. 4880-4883).

Ironically, how many people hated Calvin is a good reason for considering what he had to say.

He never felt that he was doing enough. And yet,

Such was the man who rarely, if ever, changed his mind on a topic, yet continuously and restlessly reformulated and rewrote his thoughts in pursuit of greater clarity and insight. (Gordon, loc. 145)

Conclusion

B.B. Warfield said, ”No man ever had a profounder sense of God than he.” Warfield was a theologian who lived 300 years after Calvin. He never knew Calvin through face to face interaction, but he knew this from reading Calvin. That’s a good thing when someone picks that up from your writings. It was this relentless orientation on the glory of God that pushed Calvin in life and the Reformed tradition that followed.

When possible, I will read Calvin’s commentary on whatever passage I’m preparing to preach. He is almost always helpful 500 years later.

The dominating principle [of Calvinism] was not, soteriologically speaking, justification by faith, but, in the widest sense cosmologically, the Sovereignty of the Triune God over the whole Cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible. (Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 488)

I love being a Calvinist as regards the sovereignty of God in salvation and over every thumb’s width in creation. It is worth remembering Calvin’s teaching of the word of God, considering the outcome of his way of life, and imitating his faith. I look forward to meeting my brother and teacher in heaven some day.