John Calvin (Afterword by R. C. Sproul)

For a New Reformation

Derek Thomas, John W. Tweeddale, Derek Thomas, John W. Tweeddale

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781433523991
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

More than500 years ago, 16th-century Reformer John Calvin was born—a theologian whose teachings set the stage for reformation of the church around the world. The modern world is in continual need of his Christ-exalting doctrine and vision of the Christian life. In 20 essays by leading Reformed pastors and scholars, this primer explores Calvin's life, teaching, and legacy for a new generation. This book is a clarion call to Christians everywhere to take seriously the ongoing need of theological reformation across the globe.

Part 1

The Life and Work of John Calvin

1

The Young Calvin

Michael A. G. Haykin

My ministry . . . ought to be dearer to me than my own life.

—John Calvin, preface to his Commentary on 2 Thessalonians1

“I Am Not Eager to Speak about Myself”2

At one point in John Calvin’s earliest publication after his conversion, Psychopannychia, the 1534 treatise against the Anabaptist doctrine of soul sleep, the French theologian reflected on what life is like without a saving knowledge of the living God. While his comments are not autobiographical in form, they can, as Heiko Oberman has pointed out, be interpreted as a commentary on his own life prior to his conversion:

Do you want to know what the death of the soul is? It is to be without God, to be deserted by God, to be abandoned to yourself. . . . Since there is no light outside of God who lights our darkness, when he withdraws his light then our soul is certainly blind and buried in darkness; our soul is mute because it cannot confess, and call out to embrace God. The soul is deaf because it cannot hear his voice. The soul is crippled since it does not have a hold on . . . God.3

It is not at all surprising that Calvin would have veiled his experience in this way, for of all the Reformers, he was the most reluctant to discuss details of his life in works destined for public consumption. As he told Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547), “I am not eager to speak about myself.”4 He had, as Oberman aptly puts it, a “dislike of self-disclosure.”5 From his hand, there are really only two major sources for details about his life before his conversion, namely, sections from his Reply to Sadoleto (1539), which need to be used with caution since they are not explicitly autobiographical,6 and those from the preface to his Commentary on the Book of Psalms (1557).7 Occasional remarks here and there in other passages in the works of Calvin, some of which are noted below, help fill in some of the gaps of his early life, as does the biography of the French Reformer by his friend and ministerial colleague Theodore Beza (1519–1605). Beza wrote two lives of his friend and mentor. The first saw the light of day three months after Calvin’s death in 1564.8 The following year, one of Beza’s fellow pastors, Nicolas Colladon, published a considerably enlarged life of Calvin that built on the work of Beza but incorporated new material.9 Ten years later, after Colladon had left Geneva in 1571 for Lausanne, Beza issued a revision of his own biography but one that also made liberal use of the material in Colladon’s work.10

“Intended . . . for Theology”

John Calvin11 was born on July 10, 1509, in Noyon, Picardy, in northeastern France, to Gérard Cauvin (d. 1531) and his first wife, Jeanne, née le Franc (d. 1515), both of whom Beza described as “widely respected and in comfortable circumstances.”12 From a town clerk, Calvin’s father had risen to occupy the position of a financial administrator in the cathedral of Noyon. A quarrel with the cathedral authorities, however, led to his excommunication, in which state he died in 1531. Calvin’s mother, whom Calvin does not appear to have ever actually mentioned in print,13 died when John was a young boy of six. It may well be the case, as some historians have argued, that his mother was steeped in the medieval Roman Catholic devotion to relics, for in Calvin’s biting treatise on relics, he recalls kissing a reputed fragment of the hand of Anna, the mother of Mary, at the Church of Ourscamp, not far from Noyon, where his mother may have taken him.14 John also had three brothers—an older brother, Charles (d. 1537), and two younger brothers, Antoine (d. 1573) and François, the latter dying as a child—and two half sisters, daughters of Gérard by his second wife.15

Given Gérard’s close ties to the church, it is not surprising that he initially desired John to study for the priesthood. In fact, Gérard also directed John’s older brother, Charles, into the priesthood, though the latter left it in 1536.16 “My father,” Calvin recalled in the late 1550s, “intended me as a young boy for theology.”17 So it was in 152318 that young Calvin set off for Paris to study for a master of arts degree that would eventually lead to theological studies and the priesthood. Owing to his father’s connection with the church, Calvin was able to finance his studies from various church benefices he had been given in childhood and his early teens—one of the abuses of the medieval church. In Paris he initially studied for three months at the Collège de la Marche, where he improved his skill in Latin under the superb tutelage of Mathurin Cordier (1479–1564). Calvin later recognized his debt to Cordier when in 1550 he dedicated his Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians to his old teacher:

It was under your guidance that I entered on a course of studies, and made progress at least to the extent of being some benefit to the Church of God. When my father sent me as a boy to Paris I had done only the rudiments of Latin. For a short time, however, you were an instructor sent to me by God to teach me the true met...