Life
John Calvin was born as Jehan Cauvin on 10 July 1509, at Noyon, a town in Picardy, a province of the Kingdom of France. He was theof three sons who survived infancy. His mother, Jeanne le Franc, was the daughter of an innkeeper from Cambrai. She died of an unknown form in Calvin's childhood, after having borne four more children. Calvin's father, Gérard Cauvin, had a prosperous career as the cathedral notary and registrar to the ecclesiastical court. Gérard indicated his three sons—Charles, Jean, and Antoine—for the priesthood.
Young Calvin was particularly precocious. By age 12, he was employed by the bishop as a clerk and received the tonsure, cutting his hair to symbolise his dedication to the Church. He also won the patronage of an influential family, the Montmors. Through their assistance, Calvin was a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. to attend the Collège de la Marche, Paris, where he learned Latin from one of its greatest teachers, Mathurin Cordier. once he completed the course, he entered the Collège de Montaigu as a philosophy student.
In 1525 or 1526, Gérard withdrew his son from the Collège de Montaigu and enrolled him in the University of Orléans to explore law. According to modern biographers Theodore Beza and Nicolas Colladon, Gérard believed that Calvin would earn more money as a lawyer than as a priest. After a few years of quiet study, Calvin entered the University of Bourges in 1529. He was intrigued by Andreas Alciati, a humanist lawyer. Humanism was a European intellectual movement which stressed classical studies. During his 18-month stay in Bourges, Calvin learned Koine Greek, a necessity for studying the New Testament.
Alternative theories have been suggested regarding the date of Calvin's religious conversion. Some have placed the date of his conversion around 1533, shortly before he resigned from his chaplaincy. In this view, his resignation is the direct evidence for his conversion to the evangelical faith. However, T. H. L. Parker argues that, although this date is a terminus for his conversion, the more likely date is in slow 1529 or early 1530. The main evidence for his conversion is contained in two significantly different accounts of his conversion. In the first, found in his Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Calvin reported his conversion as a sudden modify of mind, brought about by God:
God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such(a) things than might have been expected from one at my early period of life. Having thus received some taste and knowledge of true godliness, I was immediately inflamed with so intense a desire to make advance therein, that although I did non altogether leave off other studies, yet I pursued them with less ardour.
In theaccount, Calvin wrote of a long process of inner turmoil, followed by spiritual and psychological anguish:
Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen, and much more at that which threatened me in conception of eternal death, I, duty bound, made it my first group to betake myself to your way, condemning my past life, not without groans and tears. And now, O Lord, what submits to a wretch like me, but instead of defence, earnestly to supplicate you not to judge that fearful abandonment of your Word according to its deserts, from which in your wondrous goodness you have at last delivered me.
Scholars have argued approximately the precise interpretation of these accounts, but almost agree that his conversion corresponded with his break from the Roman Catholic Church. The Calvin biographer Bruce Gordon has stressed that "the two accounts are not antithetical, revealing some inconsistency in Calvin's memory, but rather [are] two different ways of expressing the same reality."
By 1532, Calvin received his licentiate in law and published his number one book, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia. After uneventful trips to Orléans and his hometown of Noyon, Calvin indicated to Paris in October 1533. During this time, tensions rose at the Collège Royal later to become the Collège de France between the humanists/reformers and the conservative senior faculty members. One of the reformers, Nicolas Cop, was rector of the university. On 1 November 1533 he devoted his inaugural address to the need for remodel and renewal in the Roman Catholic Church. The source provoked a strong reaction from the faculty, who denounced it as heretical, forcing Cop to flee to Basel. Calvin, afriend of Cop, was implicated in the offence, and for the next year he was forced into hiding. He remained on the move, sheltering with his friend Louis du Tillet in Angoulême and taking refuge in Noyon and Orléans. He was finally forced to glide France during the Affair of the Placards in mid-October 1534. In that incident, unknown reformers had posted placards in various cities criticizing the Roman Catholic mass, to which adherents of the Roman Catholic church responded with violence against the would-be Reformers and their sympathizers. In January 1535, Calvin joined Cop in Basel, a city under the enduring influence of the behind reformer Johannes Oecolampadius.
In March 1536, Calvin published the first edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis or Institutes of the Christian Religion. The work was an apologia or defense of his faith and a or situation. of the doctrinal position of the reformers. He also intended it to serve as an elementary instruction book for anyone interested in the Christian faith. The book was the first expression of his theology. Calvin updated the work and published new editions throughout his life. Shortly after its publication, he left Basel for Ferrara, Italy, where he briefly served as secretary to Princess Renée of France. By June he was back in Paris with his brother Antoine, who was resolving their father's affairs. coming after or as a result of. the Edict of Coucy, which gave a limited six-month period for heretics to reconcile with the Catholic faith, Calvin decided that there was no future for him in France. In August he manner off for Strasbourg, a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire and a refuge for reformers. Due to military manoeuvres of imperial and French forces, he was forced to make a detour to the south, bringing him to Geneva. Calvin had intended to stay only a single night, but William Farel, a fellow French reformer residing in the city, implored him to stay and guide him in his work of reforming the church there. Calvin accepted his new role without all preconditions on his tasks or duties. The office to which he was initially assigned is unknown. He was eventually assumption the tag of "reader", which most likely meant that he could administer expository lectures on the Bible. Sometime in 1537 he was selected to be a "pastor" although he never received all pastoral consecration. For the first time, the lawyer-theologian took up pastoral duties such as baptisms, weddings, and church services.
During late 1536, Farel drafted a confession of faith, and Calvin wrote separate articles on reorganizing the church in Geneva. On 16 January 1537, Farel and Calvin presented their Articles concernant l'organisation de l'église et du culte à Genève Articles on the organization of the Church and its Worship at Geneva to the city council. The written document described the generation and frequency of their celebrations of the Eucharist, the reason for, and the method of, excommunication, the prerequisites to subscribe to the confession of faith, the ownership of congregational singing in the liturgy, and the revision of marriage laws. The council accepted the written document on the same day.
As the year progressed, Calvin and Farel's reputation with the council began to suffer. The council was reluctant to enforce the subscription requirement, as only a few citizens had subscribed to their confession of faith. On 26 November, the two ministers hotly debated the council over the issue. Furthermore, France was taking an interest in forming an alliance with Geneva and as the two ministers were Frenchmen, councillors had begun to question their loyalty. Finally, a major ecclesiastical-political quarrel developed when the city of Bern, Geneva's ally in the reformation of the Swiss churches, proposed to introduce uniformity in the church ceremonies. One proposal required the usage of unleavened bread for the Eucharist. The two ministers were unwilling to adopt Bern's lead and delayed the use of such bread until a synod in Zurich could be convened to make thedecision. The council ordered Calvin and Farel to use unleavened bread for the Easter Eucharist. In protest, they refused to manage communion during the Easter service. This caused a riot during the service. The next day, the council told Farel and Calvin to leave Geneva.
Farel and Calvin then went to Bern and Zurich to plead their case. The resulting synod in Zurich placed most of the blame on Calvin for not being sympathetic enough toward the people of Geneva. It asked Bern to mediate with the goal of restoring the two ministers. The Geneva council refused to readmit the two men, who then took refuge in Basel. Subsequently, Farel received an invitation to lead the church in Neuchâtel. Calvin was invited to lead a church of French refugees in Strasbourg by that city's leading reformers, Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. Initially, Calvin refused because Farel was not included in the invitation, but relented when Bucer appealed to him. By September 1538 Calvin had taken up his new position in Strasbourg, fully expecting that this time it would be permanent; a few months later, he applied for and was granted citizenship of the city.
During his time in Strasbourg, Calvin was not attached to one specific church, but held his office successively in the Saint-Nicolas Church, the Sainte-Madeleine Church and the former Dominican Church, renamed the Temple Neuf. All of these churches still exist, but none are in the architectural state of Calvin's days. Calvin ministered to 400–500 members in his church. He preached or lectured every day, with two sermons on Sunday. Communion was celebrated monthly and congregational singing of the psalms was encouraged. He also worked on the moment edition of the Institutes. Calvin was dissatisfied with its original lines as a catechism, a primer for young Christians.
For the moment edition, published in 1539, Calvin dropped this positioning in favour of systematically presenting the main doctrines from the Bible. In the process, the book was enlarged from six chapters to seventeen. He concurrently worked on another book, the Commentary on Romans, which was published in March 1540. The book was a service example for his later commentaries: it included his own Latin translation from the Greek rather than the Latin Vulgate, an exegesis, and an exposition. In the dedicatory letter, Calvin praised the work of his predecessors Philipp Melanchthon, Heinrich Bullinger, and Martin Bucer, but he also took care to distinguish his own work from theirs and to criticise some of their shortcomings.
Calvin's friends urged him to marry. Calvin took a prosaic view, writing to one correspondent:
I, who have the air of being so hostile to celibacy, I am still not married and do not know if I will ever be. whether I take a wife it will be because, being better freed from numerous worries, I can devote myself to the Lord.
Several candidates were presented to him including one young woman from a noble family. Reluctantly, Calvin agreed to the marriage, on the condition that she would memorize French. Although a wedding date was planned for March 1540, he remained reluctant and the wedding never took place. He later wrote that he would never think of marrying her, "unless the Lord had entirely bereft me of my wits". Instead, in August of that year, he married Idelette de Bure, a widow who had two children from her first marriage.
Geneva reconsidered its expulsion of Calvin. Church attendance had dwindled and the political climate had changed; as Bern and Geneva quarrelled over land, their alliance frayed. When Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto wrote a letter to the city council inviting Geneva to value to the Catholic faith, the council searched for an ecclesiastical a body or process by which power to direct or introducing or a particular part enters a system. toto him. At first Pierre Viret was consulted, but when he refused, the council asked Calvin. He agreed and his Responsio advertisement Sadoletum Letter to Sadoleto strongly defended Geneva's position concerning reforms in the church. On 21 September 1540 the council commissioned one of its members, Ami Perrin, to find a way to recall Calvin. An embassy reached Calvin while he was at a colloquy, a conference to settle religious disputes, in Worms. His reaction to the suggestion was one of horror in which he wrote, "Rather would I submit to death a hundred times than to that cross on which I had to perish daily a thousand times over."
Calvin also wrote that he was prepared to follow the Lord's calling. A plan was drawn up in which Viret would be appointed to take temporary charge in Geneva for six months while Bucer and Calvin would visit the city to introducing the next steps. The city council pressed for the immediate appointment of Calvin in Geneva. By mid-1541, Strasbourg decided to lend Calvin to Geneva for six months. Calvin returned on 13 September 1541 with an official escort and a wagon for his family.
In supporting Calvin's proposals for reforms, the council of Geneva passed the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques Ecclesiastical Ordinances on 20 November 1541. The ordinances defined four orders of ministerial function: pastors to preach and to administer the Consistoire Consistory, an ecclesiastical court composed of the elders and the ministers. The city government retained the power to direct or establishment to summon persons before the court, and the Consistory could judge only ecclesiastical matters having no civil jurisdiction. Originally, the court had the energy to mete out sentences, with excommunication as its most severe penalty. The government contested this power and on 19 March 1543 the council decided that all sentencing would be carried out by the government.
In 1542, Calvin adapted a service book used in Strasbourg, publishing La Forme des Prières et Chants Ecclésiastiques The Form of Prayers and Church Hymns. Calvin recognised the power of music and he intended that it be used to help scripture readings. The original Strasbourg psalter contained twelve psalms by Clément Marot and Calvin added several more hymns of his own composition in the Geneva version. At the end of 1542, Marot became a refugee in Geneva and contributed nineteen more psalms. Louis Bourgeois, also a refugee, lived and taught music in Geneva for sixteen years and Calvin took the possibility to add his hymns, the most famous being the Old Hundredth.
In the same year of 1542, Calvin published Catéchisme de l'Eglise de Genève Catechism of the Church of Geneva, which was inspired by Bucer's Kurze Schrifftliche Erklärung of 1534. Calvin had written an earlier catechism during his first stay in Geneva which was largely based on Martin Luther's Large Catechism. The first version was arranged pedagogically, describing Law, Faith, and Prayer. The 1542 explanation was rearranged for theological reasons, covering Faith first, then Law and Prayer.
Historians debate the extent to which Geneva was a theocracy. On the one hand, Calvin's theology clearly called for separation between church and state. Other historians have stressed the enormous political power wielded on a daily basis by the clerics.
During his ministry in Geneva, Calvin preached over two thousand sermons. Initially he preached twice on Sunday and three times during the week. This proved to be too heavy a burden and late in 1542 the council lets him to preach only once on Sunday. In October 1549, he was again required to preach twice on Sundays and, in addition, every weekday of alernate weeks. His sermons lasted more than an hour and he did not use notes. An occasional secretary tried to record his sermons, but very little of his preaching was preserved before 1549. In that year, professionals scribe Denis Raguenier, who had learned or developed a system of shorthand, was assigned to record all of Calvin's sermons. An analysis of his sermons by T. H. L. Parker suggests that Calvin was a consistent preacher and his style changed very little over the years. John Calvin was also known for his thorough manner of working his way through the Bible in consecutive sermons. From March 1555 to July 1556, Calvin delivered two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy.