I just ran across this old article.
It is 500 years since the birth of John Calvin, that astonishing man. He knew he was great. In a letter in 1554 to the Polish king, Sigismund II, urging upon him the need for a reformed Church, he laid claim to a remarkable position.
The papacy, he said, had apostasized, but "God himself brings the remedy in raising up fitting and upright teachers to build up the Church, now lying deformed among the ruins of Popery, and this office, which the Lord has laid upon us when he made use of our services in collecting churches, is one that is altogether anomalous."
I came across this passage in a new biography by Bruce Gordon (Calvin, Yale, £25), late of St Andrews University, now at Yale, both institutions deeply formed by Calvinism. So wide has Calvin's influence become in the half millennium since his birth that we hardly register his name in a brand of underwear (Klein) or a strip-cartoon (and Hobbes).
This week's Church Times asks: "Was Calvin a monster?" Beginning Dr Gordon's book, I was ready to learn to love John Calvin. Finishing it, I found myself not quite up to the task. He repels intimacy. In his denunciation of Genevan citizens who defended the sinful practice of dancing, for example, his tone sounds like that of Mohammed denouncing the evil people of Mecca. One day the city is not going to tolerate them.
The two big obstacles to admiring Calvin are a chill authoritarianism and his repulsive doctrine of double predestination.
Calvin's influence in Geneva can seem like that of Savonarola in Florence, the century before. Both changed the religious practice of a city, with the co-operation of the ruling magistrates. The difference is that Savonarola was burnt and Calvin joined in the burning.
A half-mad heretic called Servetus was burnt at the stake at Geneva in 1553. Calvin said that he would have preferred to see him beheaded. Best of all he would have liked him to recant. The same preference was expressed at the time by churchmen surrounding Queen Mary in England, who sent Protestants to the stake. Burning was a convention of state law at the time, but it does not win our hearts. Even by the arguments of the day, who was to say which were the right culprits to burn?
Worse, if true, is a doctrine of predestination that puts men and women in eternal fire by God's long-laid plan. It is not that some kind of predestination is untenable. If people go to heaven by God's grace, his gratuitous gift must have been decided from all eternity. That is different from God creating people with the intention of sending them to hell.
In 1551 Calvin was confronted by a reformer called Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, who accused him of making God out to be the author of evil in deciding the fate of the damned before their creation. Bolsec was imprisoned by the magistrates and lucky to be banished from the city.
I had hoped to find Calvin's doctrine not as bad as it was reputed to be, but a more inspiring side to his mind was a conviction that all depended on the grace of God. He followed in practice the teaching of St Paul. Indeed Dr Gordon makes Calvin out to have identified with St Paul so closely that he began to see himself as a second Apostle chosen by God to remake his Church.
Dr Gordon also portrays Calvin as a man accustomed to being the most intelligent person in the room. In a letter to Cranmer in 1552, while Edward VI was still alive, Calvin rebuked the Archbishop for mishandling the reformation, saying: "How very remiss you have been in many matters."
Calvin's hopes for unity among reformers were constantly dashed. Far from the reformers in Poland following his lead, most of their ministers had by the year of his death in 1564 embraced strong anti-Trinitarian sympathies. In other words they did not express belief even in the same God as Calvin.
“The two big obstacles to admiring Calvin are a chill authoritarianism and his repulsive doctrine of double predestination”, says Christopher Howse.
Was John Calvin really a monster?
By Christopher Howse
5:36 PM BST 25 Jul 2009
It is 500 years since the birth of John Calvin, that astonishing man. He knew he was great. In a letter in 1554 to the Polish king, Sigismund II, urging upon him the need for a reformed Church, he laid claim to a remarkable position.
The papacy, he said, had apostasized, but "God himself brings the remedy in raising up fitting and upright teachers to build up the Church, now lying deformed among the ruins of Popery, and this office, which the Lord has laid upon us when he made use of our services in collecting churches, is one that is altogether anomalous."
I came across this passage in a new biography by Bruce Gordon (Calvin, Yale, £25), late of St Andrews University, now at Yale, both institutions deeply formed by Calvinism. So wide has Calvin's influence become in the half millennium since his birth that we hardly register his name in a brand of underwear (Klein) or a strip-cartoon (and Hobbes).
This week's Church Times asks: "Was Calvin a monster?" Beginning Dr Gordon's book, I was ready to learn to love John Calvin. Finishing it, I found myself not quite up to the task. He repels intimacy. In his denunciation of Genevan citizens who defended the sinful practice of dancing, for example, his tone sounds like that of Mohammed denouncing the evil people of Mecca. One day the city is not going to tolerate them.
The two big obstacles to admiring Calvin are a chill authoritarianism and his repulsive doctrine of double predestination.
Calvin's influence in Geneva can seem like that of Savonarola in Florence, the century before. Both changed the religious practice of a city, with the co-operation of the ruling magistrates. The difference is that Savonarola was burnt and Calvin joined in the burning.
A half-mad heretic called Servetus was burnt at the stake at Geneva in 1553. Calvin said that he would have preferred to see him beheaded. Best of all he would have liked him to recant. The same preference was expressed at the time by churchmen surrounding Queen Mary in England, who sent Protestants to the stake. Burning was a convention of state law at the time, but it does not win our hearts. Even by the arguments of the day, who was to say which were the right culprits to burn?
Worse, if true, is a doctrine of predestination that puts men and women in eternal fire by God's long-laid plan. It is not that some kind of predestination is untenable. If people go to heaven by God's grace, his gratuitous gift must have been decided from all eternity. That is different from God creating people with the intention of sending them to hell.
In 1551 Calvin was confronted by a reformer called Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, who accused him of making God out to be the author of evil in deciding the fate of the damned before their creation. Bolsec was imprisoned by the magistrates and lucky to be banished from the city.
I had hoped to find Calvin's doctrine not as bad as it was reputed to be, but a more inspiring side to his mind was a conviction that all depended on the grace of God. He followed in practice the teaching of St Paul. Indeed Dr Gordon makes Calvin out to have identified with St Paul so closely that he began to see himself as a second Apostle chosen by God to remake his Church.
Dr Gordon also portrays Calvin as a man accustomed to being the most intelligent person in the room. In a letter to Cranmer in 1552, while Edward VI was still alive, Calvin rebuked the Archbishop for mishandling the reformation, saying: "How very remiss you have been in many matters."
Calvin's hopes for unity among reformers were constantly dashed. Far from the reformers in Poland following his lead, most of their ministers had by the year of his death in 1564 embraced strong anti-Trinitarian sympathies. In other words they did not express belief even in the same God as Calvin.
