Justified True Belief

(●) The French refugee who wrote the Reformation’s textbook at twenty-six, then gave the rest of his life to one small city that had already thrown him out once. + Martin Luther struck the match. John Calvin is the man who worked out, patiently and in order, what the fire had left standing. He was a lawyer by training and a scholar by temperament, and when he was driven out of France as a young man he wrote a short book to explain to a hostile king what people like him actually believed. That book, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, grew across five Latin editions into the standard work of Protestant theology, and for four centuries it has been where Reformed Christians, the churches that took their order and their doctrine from Geneva rather than from Wittenberg, go to find out what they think. For a reader who cares about the reasons for Christian belief he matters for a plain reason: more than anyone else in his century, Calvin insisted that faith is knowledge rather than a leap in the dark, and he spent his life saying where that knowledge comes from. God is known from the world he made and from the Scriptures he gave, and the Spirit who inspired the words is the one who convinces a reader they are true. Whether or not a reader ends up agreeing with him about election, that account of how a person comes to know God has shaped Protestant thinking about evidence, conscience, and certainty ever since. He was also, by the standards of famous men, strikingly unwilling to be remembered. He preached in Geneva for twenty-three years, wrote commentaries on all of the New Testament but three short books and on much of the Old, and answered well over a thousand letters, and when he died he asked to be buried without a monument. Nobody today knows which plot in the Plainpalais cemetery is his.

(●) 1509 AD: Born at Noyon in Picardy to a cathedral lawyer who meant him for the priesthood and settled for the law. + Jean Cauvin was born on 10 July 1509 in Noyon, a cathedral town about sixty miles northeast of Paris. His father Gérard was the legal agent and registrar of the cathedral chapter, which is to say he handled the paperwork and the property disputes of the local church, and he was well enough connected to have his sons educated alongside the children of the noble Montmor family. Calvin’s mother, Jeanne le Franc, was remembered as devout; she died while he was still a boy. Later, writing in Latin as scholars then did, he signed himself Calvinus, and the Latin form is the name history kept. In May 1521, two months short of his twelfth birthday, he was given a benefice at the cathedral: an endowment attached to a church office, whose income supported the holder. It was ordinary practice, and it meant his schooling was paid for by the church he would one day leave. At fourteen his father sent him to Paris, first to the Collège de la Marche, where a gifted teacher named Mathurin Cordier drilled him in Latin so well that Calvin dedicated a commentary to him twenty-seven years later, and then to the Collège de Montaigu, a school famous for its cold rooms and stale herrings. Erasmus had loathed the place. Ignatius of Loyola enrolled there about the time Calvin left it. Then his father quarreled with the cathedral chapter over the settling of an estate, and the quarrel went badly enough that Gérard died out of communion with the church he had served. Around 1528 he pulled his son out of theology and pointed him at law, which paid better. Calvin studied at Orléans under Pierre de l’Estoile and at Bourges under Andrea Alciati, an Italian humanist, which in that century meant a scholar who went back to the ancient texts in their own languages instead of to the centuries of commentary stacked on top of them. From Melchior Wolmar he learned Greek. He was, by every account including his own, a shy and relentless student. His first book, published at his own expense in 1532, was not about religion at all: a scholarly commentary on the Roman philosopher Seneca’s essay On Clemency. It sold poorly.

(●) c. 1533 AD: A change he called sudden turned him from the old church, and within a year he was a fugitive. + Calvin almost never wrote about himself, and the one paragraph he did write about his conversion is so compressed that scholars have argued about its date ever since. Looking back at nearly fifty, in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, he said he had been stubbornly attached to the church he was raised in, and that God, by a sudden conversion, brought a mind more hardened than a young man’s should have been into a teachable frame. He gives no year, no place, and no scene. Most historians put it in 1533 or early 1534. Whatever happened inwardly, the outward consequences arrived fast. On 1 November 1533 his friend Nicolas Cop gave the customary rector’s address at the University of Paris and filled it with the new evangelical teaching about grace. Evangelical was simply what the reform party was called in those years, from the Greek word for good news, and it carried none of the associations a modern reader brings to it. The city erupted, Cop fled, and Calvin was implicated closely enough to run for it. In May 1534 he went home to Noyon and formally resigned his benefices, cutting himself loose from the income that had raised and educated him. That October, placards attacking the Mass, printed posters of a sort a man could be executed merely for carrying, appeared overnight across Paris and, according to the story that terrified the court, on the door of the king’s own chamber at Amboise. The persecution that followed sent evangelicals to the stake by the dozen. Calvin crossed the border to Basel, in the Swiss Confederation, and lived there quietly under an assumed name. He was twenty-five, stateless, and out of a career. What he did with the next year is the reason anyone remembers him.

(●) 1536 AD: At twenty-six he published the Institutes, and a red-bearded preacher kept him in Geneva with a curse. + The first edition of the Institutio Christianae Religionis appeared in Basel in March 1536, and the Latin title claims less than the English one has come to suggest. An institutio is an instruction, the sort of book a teacher puts into a beginner’s hands, and this one really was small enough for a traveler to carry: six chapters covering the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments (for Calvin that meant baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and nothing else), the ceremonies Rome added to them, and the question of how a Christian is to live under a government. In front of it Calvin set an open letter to Francis I of France, dated 23 August 1535, which is really a legal brief. The king was burning his subjects on the claim that they were dangerous radicals. Calvin answered that the accused held nothing but the faith of the ancient church, that they threatened no throne, and that a ruler who executes people without hearing them is not doing justice. Nobody had put the evangelical case to a king with that much composure before, and the young author was suddenly known across Europe. He wanted a scholar’s life. Later that summer, meaning to settle in Strasbourg, he found the direct road closed by war and detoured through Geneva, a French-speaking city of about ten thousand that had driven out its bishop and voted to live by the gospel a few months earlier. He intended to stay one night. Guillaume Farel, the fiery preacher leading the change there, heard he was in town, came to his lodging, and demanded he stay and help. Calvin refused. Farel then, in Calvin’s own account, called down God’s curse on his studies and his quiet if he walked away from a need this urgent. That is what an imprecation is, a curse invoked on a man’s head, and Calvin wrote that this one struck him with terror. He abandoned the journey. The city’s papers that autumn do not trouble to give his name. He is ille Gallus, that Frenchman, whose post was reader in Holy Scripture, and who drew no salary at all until the following February.

(●) 1538 AD: Geneva banished him, and three years of exile in Strasbourg made him a pastor and a husband. + The first Geneva experiment collapsed in under two years, and it collapsed over the Lord’s Table. Calvin and Farel held that the ministers must be able to refuse communion to the openly unrepentant, and that the church, not the city council, should decide who was in that condition. The council disagreed, and pressed them to adopt the ceremonies used in nearby Bern, on which Geneva depended politically. At Easter 1538 the two men climbed into their pulpits and refused to serve the sacrament to a city they judged unfit to receive it. Within days the council banished them both. Calvin took it as a release. Martin Bucer, the reformer of Strasbourg, talked him into pastoring the congregation of French refugees there, several hundred people who had run from the same persecution he had. Those three years were the making of him. He learned to preach to people he knew by name, buried their dead, and built the pattern of worship and psalm-singing he would take back to Geneva. He also worked: the second edition of the Institutes in 1539, three times the length of the first; his first Bible commentary, on Romans; and a reply to Cardinal Sadoleto, who had written to Geneva urging it to come home to Rome. The reply was so effective that the Genevans who had exiled him began to reconsider. In August 1540, at thirty-one, he married Idelette de Bure and took on her son and daughter. She was the widow of a man Calvin had talked out of Anabaptism, the radical wing of the Reformation, which rejected the baptism of infants and in nearly all its streams wanted Christians out of public office altogether. Friends had spent more than a year trying to match him. He had written to Farel in May 1539, in a letter that reads exactly like a man who has never given the matter serious thought, that he was none of those lovers who are smitten at first sight by a fine figure, and that the only beauty which drew him was a woman who was chaste, obliging, not fastidious, thrifty, patient, and likely to take an interest in his health. By every sign the marriage was a happy one. He was also, in these years, poor enough to take in student boarders and to sell some of his books.

(●) 1541 AD: Geneva called him back, and he came with a church order in his hand. + The council that expelled him spent three years discovering how hard the city was to govern without him, and then asked him to return. Calvin dreaded it. He wrote to Farel that there was no place on earth he feared more, and he went anyway, arriving on 13 September 1541 with one condition: the church was to have a written constitution. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances were adopted that November. They set out four offices, all of them drawn from the New Testament and all of them copied afterwards across half of Europe. Pastors preach and administer the sacraments. Teachers, whom he called doctors, instruct in Scripture and train the next generation, so that the supply of preachers does not depend on one gifted man staying alive. Elders, laymen chosen from the city’s councils, watch over the moral life of the congregation, and this is the office a modern reader is least likely to expect, since it hands the oversight of a church to tradesmen and merchants rather than to clergy. Deacons handle relief for the poor and the sick, which in Geneva meant a hospital and a fund for the flood of refugees arriving with nothing. The Ordinances also created the Consistory: the pastors and twelve lay elders sitting together every Thursday to hear cases of drunkenness, feuding neighbors, husbands who beat their wives, and doctrine gone strange. It could summon, admonish, reconcile, and in the last resort bar someone from the Lord’s Table. What it could not do was fine, imprison, or execute. Those powers stayed with the city council, and the difference matters for anything said later about Geneva. What Calvin himself was in that city is the thing most easily got wrong. He was a salaried preacher and a foreigner. He held no civil office, had no vote, and was not even made a citizen of Geneva until 1559, twenty-three years after he first walked into it. His influence was the influence of a man who out-argued everybody and outlived most of them. The household was quieter than the public life. A son, Jacques, was born in 1542 and died within days. Idelette never fully recovered her health, and died on 29 March 1549. Calvin, then thirty-nine, did not marry again, and mentioned her afterward only briefly, calling her the faithful helper of his ministry.

(●) 1553 AD: His fiercest years ended with a man burned at Champel and the opposition broken. + Through the late 1540s and early 1550s a substantial party in Geneva wanted the preachers put back in their place. Calvin’s enemies called themselves the Children of Geneva and were called Libertines by his party, which was his side’s word for a man they judged loose about doctrine and morals alike; their leader, Ami Perrin, was captain-general of the city and had once been Calvin’s ally. The quarrel was partly doctrine and mostly power: whether a church court could shut a leading citizen out of communion, and whether the pulpits would be filled by Frenchmen. Stories from those years have men naming their dogs Calvin. He was shouted at in the street. There were casualties on the way. Jérôme Bolsec, a physician, attacked Calvin’s doctrine of predestination in public in 1551 and was banished by the council for it. Then, in August 1553, Michael Servetus arrived. He was a brilliant Spanish physician who had described the circulation of blood through the lungs, and he had also spent more than twenty years writing against the Trinity, which in that century was a capital matter on both sides of the Reformation. The Catholic authorities at Vienne had him in prison that spring; he broke out, they went on with the trial without him, condemned him in his absence, and in June burned him in effigy, which meant burning a figure made in the shape of the man they no longer had. Of all the cities in Europe, he then stopped in Geneva. He was recognized at a sermon within days of arriving, and arrested. Calvin supplied the articles of accusation and testified against him. The council sentenced him to be burned, and Calvin, with the other ministers, asked that he be beheaded instead, which the council refused. Servetus died at the stake on the hill of Champel on 27 October 1553. The following year Calvin published a defense of the execution. Almost every Protestant government of the day would have done the same, and the Catholic court at Vienne had already passed the identical sentence. That is context and not an excuse. What Calvin himself did in the case, and what he wrote afterwards to justify it, has to be weighed on its own. The political fight ended in May 1555, when a drunken disturbance by Perrin’s supporters was treated by the council as an attempted coup. The leaders fled and were condemned in their absence, several who stayed were executed, and the opposition was finished. For the last nine years of his life Calvin worked without serious resistance in Geneva, and the change shows in what he built next.

(●) 1559 AD: He opened a school for Protestant Europe, finished his great book, and asked for an unmarked grave. + The Academy of Geneva opened on 5 June 1559 with Theodore Beza as its head: a grammar school below and a theological faculty above, free to poor students, teaching Hebrew, Greek, philosophy and Scripture. It filled immediately with young men who could not study at home because their governments would have arrested them, and it sent them back out again. Within a few years Geneva was training the pastors of the underground French churches at a rate of scores per year, and the Academy became the ancestor of a long line of Protestant colleges. In the same year the city finally made Calvin a citizen. 1559 also brought the last Latin edition of the Institutes, reorganized into four books and eighty chapters, the version everyone means when they name the title. He had rebuilt it four times in twenty-three years, and he says in the preface that he was never satisfied until it stood in this order. A French translation followed in 1560, and it did for written French something like what the King James Version would do for English. He was ill for most of the last decade: fevers, migraines, gout, kidney stones, and the tuberculosis that killed him. He preached and lectured from a chair when he could not stand, and was carried to church in the final months. On 28 April 1564 he called the city’s ministers to his bedside, said that his failings had been many and his intentions honest, and asked their pardon for his temper. He died on 27 May 1564, aged fifty-four. At his own instruction he was buried the next day without pomp and without a stone, though Beza reports that most of the city followed him out to the common cemetery at Plainpalais. The grave went unmarked, and the spot was lost inside a generation.

What He Taught

(T1) Scripture carries its own authority, and the Spirit who gave it is the one who convinces us of it. + Imagine handing a beautifully printed book to someone whose eyesight has gone. They can see that there is writing in front of them and make out almost none of it, until you find their glasses, and then the words speak. That is Calvin’s picture of what Scripture does. The world already shows God to anyone with eyes, but human sight is bad enough that we get him wrong in a hundred ways; Scripture is the pair of spectacles that brings the blur into focus. The harder question is how anyone knows the book is God’s in the first place. The answer available to him was the one Rome gave: the church certifies the Scriptures. Calvin thought that put the cart in front of the horse, since the church was built on the apostles and prophets rather than the other way round. His alternative is what later writers call the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit: the same Spirit who moved the writers works in the reader, so that Scripture is believed for its own sake, as a person recognizes light without needing a lecture on optics, or knows honey is sweet without a chemist’s report. He is not dismissing evidence. He gives a whole chapter of it, the antiquity of Moses, the honesty of writers who record their own disgrace, the simplicity of the fishermen, the survival of the book through every attempt to destroy it, and he says such arguments are useful and true. His claim is about what they can accomplish. Arguments can show a man that the case is strong; they cannot make him love what the book says, and only the Spirit does that. Paul had already put the same distinction plainly (1 Corinthians 2:14).

(Q) "Let it therefore be held as fixed, that those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture; that Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit." + Source: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.vii.5 (Beveridge translation, 1845). The chapter is answering the objection that without the church’s verdict nobody can be sure the Bible is God’s word. Two chapters later Calvin turns the same argument against enthusiasts who claimed private revelations, insisting that the Spirit who authored the Scriptures does not contradict them (T1).

(T2) Knowing God and knowing yourself are one lesson, and neither can be learned alone. + The Institutes opens with a sentence that sets the shape of everything after it: nearly all our wisdom consists of two parts, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. The two are tied together like the ends of a rope. Look honestly at your own weakness, ignorance, and appetite for excuses, and you are pushed to ask what you were made for and by whom. Look at God, and your own condition stops looking normal. Calvin uses an ordinary example: eyes accustomed to nothing but dim indoor light judge themselves perfectly sharp, and only sunlight tells the truth about them. Underneath this lies his conviction that nobody starts from zero. He calls it the sensus divinitatis, the sense of divinity: an awareness of God stamped on every human mind, which is why no nation has ever been found without religion of some kind, and why even people who deny God have to keep working at it. Paul says as much about what creation makes plain (Romans 1:20). Alongside it Calvin sets the world itself, which he loved to call the theater of God’s glory, a phrase he uses again and again: the stars, the anatomy of the human body, the ordinary miracle of a harvest, all of it staged so that no spectator can claim there was nothing to see. Then comes the honest part. The sense of divinity survives in us the way a struck bell keeps ringing out of tune. It produces idols, superstition, and self-flattering religion as readily as worship, because we take the raw awareness and bend it to what we want. So general knowledge of God leaves people without excuse and does not save them; for that, the spectacles are needed (T1).

(Q) "Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." + Source: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.i.1 (Beveridge translation, 1845). The first line of the book, unchanged through every edition from 1536 to 1559. Calvin immediately admits he cannot say which of the two comes first, since each drives a person toward the other.

(T3) Salvation is God’s work from first to last, and its heart is being joined to Christ. + Calvin is popularly remembered for predestination, and the first surprise for a reader who opens the Institutes is where the subject actually sits. Book Three does not begin with eternal decrees. It begins with a plainer problem: Christ lived, died and rose a long way from here, so how does any of that reach me? His answer is union with Christ. Everything Christ has is useless to us while he stays outside us, and the Holy Spirit is the bond that makes him ours, so that forgiveness, adoption and a new character are not three separate transactions but one gift with three faces. Jesus had used the image of a branch in a vine (John 15:5). From that union come the two things Calvin refuses to separate. Justification is God accepting a sinner as righteous for Christ’s sake rather than for anything found in the sinner, which is what Paul means when he says salvation is a gift and not a wage (Ephesians 2:8-9). Sanctification is the slow remaking of that same person into someone who loves what God loves. Calvin’s point is that you cannot have one without the other, because you do not receive them separately; you receive Christ, and both come with him. Nobody, he says, is justified by a Christ who leaves them unchanged. Only after all that does he reach election, and he reaches it as a pastoral question rather than a speculative one. Why does the same sermon change one hearer and slide off another? Calvin’s answer is that God chose, before the world was made, to have mercy on people who had no claim on it, and that the reason lies in God and not in anything foreseen in them (Ephesians 1:4-5). He knew exactly how the doctrine sounds. He calls it a labyrinth for anyone who tries to walk into God’s hidden counsel by curiosity, insists that nothing may be said about it beyond what Scripture says, and points the anxious away from speculation and toward Christ, in whom, he writes, we are to see our election as in a mirror. Whether he succeeded in keeping God just is the argument the church has been having ever since.

(Q) "And the first thing to be attended to is, that so long as we are without Christ and separated from him, nothing which he suffered and did for the salvation of the human race is of the least benefit to us." + Source: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.i.1 (Beveridge translation, 1845). The opening of the book on how salvation reaches us. The next sentence says that to give us what he received from the Father, Christ must become ours and dwell in us (T3).

(T4) We are not our own, and an ordinary life lived for God is the whole of Christian obedience. + A few chapters into the same book Calvin writes a short treatise on Christian living so practical that publishers pulled it out and sold it separately for centuries. Its foundation is a line of Paul’s: "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body." (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) Calvin draws the whole of ethics out of that. If we belong to someone else, then our own preferences are not the rule of our decisions, and the question in front of every choice is not what suits us but what pleases him. He gives it three parts, and none is what a modern reader expects. Self-denial is first, and it is chiefly about other people: giving up the assumption that you are the center, and treating your gifts as goods held in trust for your neighbor. Cross-bearing is second, since Christ said his followers would carry one (Matthew 16:24); Calvin, who buried his wife and his infant son and lived in constant pain, writes about grief without a trace of pretending it does not hurt, and says the Christian is not a Stoic, one of those ancient philosophers who trained themselves to feel as little as possible, but a man who weeps and still trusts. Meditation on the future life is third, and it is the reason the other two are bearable. Then he turns and does something the medieval tradition rarely did. He refuses to make the highest form of obedience a matter of leaving ordinary life. God has assigned each person a calling, a station with duties attached, and the farmer, the magistrate (the word covered anyone holding civil office then, from a town councillor up to a king) and the mother are serving God in their work as truly as any monk. He is equally firm against the sourness that treats every pleasure as a trap: God made food taste good and flowers look beautiful, and gratitude, not grimness, is the right response. What he asks is moderation, hands open enough to give things away, and no man forgetting that he holds his life on loan.

(Q) "We are not our own; therefore, neither is our own reason or will to rule our acts and counsels. We are not our own; therefore, let us not make it our end to seek what may be agreeable to our carnal nature. We are not our own; therefore, as far as possible, let us forget ourselves and the things that are ours. On the other hand, we are God’s; let us, therefore, live and die to him." + Source: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.vii.1 (Beveridge translation, 1845). The hinge of his treatment of the Christian life, and the passage later printed on its own as The Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (T4).

(T5) A true church is known by preaching and sacraments, not by its address. + The most urgent practical question of the century was how a frightened layman was supposed to tell a real church from a false one, now that there was more than one claimant. Rome’s answer was continuity: the true church is the one with the bishops and the pedigree. Calvin gave two marks instead, and they are deliberately modest. Where the word of God is honestly preached and heard, and where the sacraments are administered as Christ instituted them, there is a church of God, whatever its condition otherwise. That test could be applied by a weaver in a cellar in Lyon, and it was. He worked out the consequences with a lawyer’s care. A church so identified is not perfect and never will be; Calvin has no patience with separatists who leave over blemishes, since the wheat and the weeds grow in the same field until harvest. Its officers are the four the Ordinances named, chosen with the consent of the congregation, and its discipline exists to heal rather than to punish, which is why he insisted that excommunication, the shutting of a member out of the Lord’s Table until he mends, aim at restoring the person and never at their ruin. On the Lord’s Supper he stood between the two Protestant camps and paid for it from both sides. Luther held that Christ’s body is truly present in the bread; Zwingli of Zurich held that the meal is a memorial and a pledge. Calvin taught that the bread and wine really give what they signify, and that the Spirit lifts the believer to feed on the living Christ in heaven, so that the gift is genuine even though the body stays where the ascension left it. In 1549 he and Heinrich Bullinger of Zurich signed the Consensus Tigurinus, the Zurich Agreement, which held the Swiss churches together and which the Lutherans rejected. The two Protestant families, Lutheran and Reformed, have been separate ever since. He was equally clear about the state, and here the record cuts both ways. Church and civil government are distinct, each with its own commission, and a minister has no business wielding the sword. But he also held that a Christian magistrate is bound to protect true worship and suppress public blasphemy, which is precisely the principle that produced the fire at Champel.

(Q) "Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence." + Source: Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.i.9 (Beveridge translation, 1845). Calvin adds the promise that where two or three gather in Christ’s name he is among them. The sentence became the standard Protestant answer to the question of where the true church is to be found (T5).

(Q) "God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life." + Source: Calvin, preface to the Commentary on the Book of Psalms, 1557 (Anderson translation, Calvin Translation Society, 1845). Nearly the only autobiographical paragraph he ever published, written at forty-eight in the preface to the commentary he cared most about. He explains there that he had wanted nothing but obscurity and study, that God kept dragging him into the light, and that he saw his own story in David’s. Everything the next century built on him rests on a man who insisted the work was not his idea.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Geneva became a school for refugees, and they carried his church order home to half of Europe. + The most effective thing Calvin ever did was to run a small city that thousands of frightened people passed through. Refugees arrived from France, England, Scotland, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, learned how a reformed congregation is put together, and went home. John Knox pastored the English congregation there in the 1550s and wrote to Anne Locke in December 1556 that Geneva was the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles; he took its pattern to Scotland, where the Scots Confession and the Presbyterian order followed within a few years. The pattern traveled with them, and it is worth noticing how quickly. The Huguenot churches of France, Huguenot being the nickname French Protestants were given and eventually kept, organized on Genevan lines and held a national synod as early as 1559, a synod being an assembly of delegates sent up from the congregations to settle together what none of them could settle alone. The Dutch Reformed churches adopted the Belgic Confession, and out of the Palatinate, the German territory around Heidelberg, came the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, a set of questions and answers learned by heart. English readers took it in more quietly, through the notes of the Geneva Bible, translated by exiles in his city and the Bible most English Protestants actually read for two generations. In the next century the Westminster Assembly produced a confession and catechisms that are recognizably in the same line, and the New England colonies were founded by men who had learned from all of it. Two features made it portable. It needed no bishops and no royal favor, so it could be assembled underground; and it put educated laymen on the church’s governing body, which meant a congregation could survive the loss of its minister. Whatever one thinks of the theology, that design is the reason Protestantism did not die in France under a hostile crown.

(†) His commentaries taught Protestants how to read the Bible, and even his opponents kept them on the shelf. + Calvin commented on the whole New Testament except three short books, and on much of the Old, and the method he announced in the dedication of his first commentary changed the trade. The interpreter’s whole business, he said, is to lay open the mind of the writer, and the chief virtue is lucid brevity. That sounds obvious now. It was not obvious then. Medieval commentary habitually looked for four senses in every verse, so that Jerusalem meant the city, the church, the soul and heaven all at once, and Calvin thought the practice let a clever man make any text say anything. He worked in the plain historical sense, with the grammar and the setting in front of him, and he was willing to write that he did not know what a passage meant. The result outlived his party. Richard Hooker, the great defender of the Church of England against the more thorough Calvinists, still called him in the preface to the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity incomparably the wisest man that ever the French church did enjoy. Jacob Arminius, whose followers would break with the Reformed churches over predestination, wrote to a burgomaster of Amsterdam, one of the men who governed the city, in 1607 that he pressed the Scriptures on his students harder than anything else and sent them to Calvin’s commentaries next, since in the interpretation of Scripture Calvin was beyond comparison. They are still in print in English, in a nineteenth-century translation and a modern one, which few commentaries of that century can say. The preaching mattered as much. He worked through whole books verse by verse, several times a week, in French, without notes, and from 1549 a professional scribe named Denis Raguenier took him down in shorthand. About fifteen hundred of those sermons survive. The habit of continuous expository preaching that Protestant churches still keep is largely his.

(†) Christians have divided over his account of election ever since, and both sides argue from Scripture. + The argument began in his lifetime with Bolsec, and it has never stopped. It is a genuine disagreement inside the Christian family, not a quarrel between believers and unbelievers, and it deserves to be put with both sides at full strength. - The Reformed case. Salvation must be God’s free choice, or grace becomes a reward for something God saw in us, and Paul’s chain from foreknowledge to glory has a human link in it that he never put there (Romans 8:29-30, Ephesians 1:4-5). Election makes assurance possible, because a salvation that begins with God’s decision cannot be lost by our failures. - The reply. Jacob Arminius, and after him John Wesley, answered that Scripture states God’s desire for all to be saved and means it (1 Timothy 2:3-4, 2 Peter 3:9), that the invitations of Christ are addressed to everyone without a hidden footnote, and that responsibility for sin makes little sense if the choice was never genuinely open. Grace still comes first on this reading; it can be resisted. - What was decided, and by whom. The Dutch followers of Arminius put five articles to the States of Holland, the assembly that governed their province, in 1610, which is how they came to be called Remonstrants, a remonstrance being a formal statement of protest; the Synod of Dort answered them in 1618 and 1619 with the five points now remembered by acronyms, and the two traditions separated. The Church of England has held both parties inside it since. Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and the Orthodox have all read the texts differently, and Christians who agree on the creeds continue to disagree here. Calvin’s own instinct was to keep the doctrine tied to the pulpit and out of speculation, and he would not have recognized the later habit of making it the first thing a Christian hears. Later Reformed writers, working in the categories of the schools, sometimes built systems around it that he had deliberately left unbuilt.

(†) Where his record fails: he helped send a heretic to the fire and defended it in print. + Calvin held no civil office and passed no sentence, and the council of Geneva burned Michael Servetus on 27 October 1553. That is the limit of what can be said in his favor, and it is not much. He drew up the charges, testified in the trial, had written to Farel seven years earlier that if Servetus ever came to Geneva he would not let him leave alive, and when it was over he published a book defending the principle that obstinate heretics may be put to death by the magistrate. The plea he did enter, that the man be beheaded rather than burned, is the plea of someone arguing about method. His own century mostly agreed with him, which is a fact about the century. The one contemporary who did not let it pass was Sebastian Castellio, the scholar Calvin had once recommended to run Geneva’s school, who answered the defense in Contra libellum Calvini with the sentence everything since has been a footnote to: to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man. He wrote it in 1554, and it passed from hand to hand in manuscript for more than fifty years before anyone printed it. Castellio was arguing from Scripture, not against it. Jesus told Pilate that his servants were not fighting because his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), told the servants in the parable to leave the weeds standing until the harvest lest they tear up the wheat with them (Matthew 13:29-30), and Paul said the weapons of this warfare are not of the flesh (2 Corinthians 10:4). Calvin, who could read Greek better than almost anyone alive, read the magistrate’s duty to punish blasphemy out of the Old Testament and let it override them. Two smaller entries belong in the same column, from the same sources. His polemical writing could be savage in a way he himself apologized for on his deathbed, calling his anger a fault he had failed to master. And the discipline he designed, whatever its pastoral intent, gave a church court real power over a whole population’s private conduct, an arrangement that assumes the church and the city are the same body of people. The tradition that most admires him abandoned that assumption long ago, and was right to.