From Lawyer to Protestant Reformer: 1528–1535
... I may promise this much, that [the Institutes of Christian Religion] will be a kind of key opening up to all the children of God a right and ready access to the
understanding of the sacred volume.... And since we are bound to acknowledge that all truth and sound doctrine proceed from God, I... acknowledge[d] it to
be God’s work rather than mine. To him, indeed,
the praise due to it must be ascribed.
—John Calvin, Preface to the 1545 French edition,
Institutes of the Christian Religion JOHN CALVIN
alvin studied law at two universities: Orléans and Bourges.
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At both places, the spirit of humanism enveloped him. Both universities emphasized the foundations of the Roman legal system and its code of law. Whereas Calvin started at Orléans, he moved to Bourges when that university attracted a famous Italian humanist to its law faculty, a man named Alciati. He then, later, decided to go back to Orléans to finish his legal education.
Calvin became a competent lawyer because of his work at these two schools. It is clear that he exercised his legal training later in life. He learned more than the practical application of law, however; he also developed habits of thought that would be of great advantage to him later, in his work as a Protestant reformer.
At the heart of the Protestant enterprise stood the Bible and its role in faith and doctrine. As Alister McGrath has said:
The origins of Calvin’s methods as perhaps the greatest biblical commentator of his age lie in his study of law in the advanced atmosphere of Orléans and Bourges. There is every indication that he learned... the need to be a competent philologist, to approach a foundational text directly, to interpret it within the linguistic and historical parameters of its context, and to apply it to the needs of the present day.6
Calvin graduated from Orléans in 1531, and by the summer he had moved back to Paris. He apparently hoped to make his mark there as a humanist scholar. He finished a commentary on an ancient Roman text, Seneca’s On Clemency, and selfpublished it in April 1532. Not only did the book not bring Calvin recognition as a humanist scholar, but it also turned out to be a financial disaster for him. He ended up having to borrow money from friends.
Not much is known about Calvin’s life over that next year. He left Paris not long after the publication of his book and went back to Orléans—whether to study, work, or teach is not certain. Then, after a little more than a year, Calvin is known to have attended a meeting in his native Noyon in
From Lawyer to Protestant Reformer
August 1533. Two months later, he was back in Paris. The atmosphere was volatile.
A THEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES The theological faculty in Paris spoke out vehemently against both the reform movement of Luther and humanism. They especially thought the call to study the Bible in its original languages unnecessary.
On the other hand, the faculty seemed to be out of favor with the king, Francis I. They were at odds with one another on a variety of theological and political issues. What is more, Francis appeared to prefer a type of moderate reform of the church (a spiritual reform from the inside by those committed to the church). This does not mean that Francis in any way favored the type of reform taking place in the Holy Roman Empire in those territories where princes had supported Lutheranism.
It may have been that Francis’s outlook was misread by some who hoped for evangelical reform in France similar to that promoted in Luther’s teachings. In the fall of 1533, a man by the name of Nicholas Cop had been elected rector of the University of Paris. He gave his inaugural speech on November 1, 1533.
The speech caused a sensation. He embraced moderate reform, drawing on the Christian humanist Erasmus and on Luther, but the call to reform was not a radical one. Still, given the environment in Paris at the time, it caused a firestorm. Cop was dismissed as rector. The French Parliament called him to appear before them. Cop escaped Paris, and King Francis I ordered the arrest of the person who allowed him to escape. What is more, action was taken against several individuals who were thought to have Lutheran sympathies. Calvin would certainly have been among their number had he remained. But he did not stay—he fled the city. The authorities searched his room and took his papers.
Historical evidence is ambiguous as to the authorship of Cop’s address. Some think Calvin wrote it, or at least had a hand in
JOHN CALVIN
writing it. Whether he did or did not, however, Calvin clearly stood close enough to Cop to think himself in danger.
During the rest of 1533 and all of 1534, Calvin moved around quite a bit. In May of 1534, he went to Noyon and resigned the positions he held in the Catholic Church that had supported him while he went to school. Everyone agrees that, by this time, Calvin had had a conversion experience that placed him firmly
A “NEW” NEW TESTAMENT
In 1516, Erasmus of Rotterdam published his Greek New Testament. As a humanist and a Christian, Erasmus had great interest in the sources of early Christianity. He pulled together what Greek manuscripts of the New Testament he could find and then edited the material to produce his work.
For more than 1,000 years, the Catholic Church used a version of the Bible called the Vulgate, which was translated by St. Jerome in the fifth century. It was called the Vulgate because Jerome translated Greek and Hebrew texts into Latin, which was then the “vulgar” (common) language. Because of the humanists’ interest in recovering original sources, Erasmus undertook the production of the Greek New Testament. His work became the foundation for other work, especially that of translation; during the time of the Reformation, Protestant scholars sought to make the Bible available in the language of the people. Martin Luther, for example, translated the New Testament from Greek into German in the early 1520s.
One example of the difference this new resource made can be found in the Gospel of Matthew. At 4:7 in the Latin Vulgate, Jesus says, “Do penance.” Penance was a particular rite of the Catholic Church—a sacrament that involved confessing sins to a priest. As a result of Erasmus’s work, it became clear that the passage should be translated as “Repent!” In other words, the command of Jesus had less to do with a church ritual and more to do with making changes in one’s life.
Though Erasmus himself remained Catholic, many Protestants used his work both to attack the practices and beliefs of the Catholic Church as unbiblical and to build constructive systems of thought and worship practices they considered to be true to the Bible.
Calvin would come to rely heavily on Erasmus’s New Testament the more he dealt with interpreting the Bible.
From Lawyer to Protestant Reformer
on the side of the Protestants. In October, there occurred the affair of the placards, notices that were put up in some of the main towns of France. The work of Protestants, these posters attacked the Catholic way of celebrating communion, the sacred reenactment of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples, something that stood at the heart of Christian worship. One had even been posted on the king’s chamber door. Reaction was swift. By November, over two hundred arrests had been made. Executions took place steadily over the next three months; early in 1535, one of Calvin’s friends was burned as a heretic.
In January 1535, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland. Except for a few brief excursions, he would live the rest of his live in exile from his homeland.
The 1536 Institutes During the brief time he was in Basel, Calvin completed his Institutes of the Christian Religion (whether he wrote the entire book while in Basel or whether he had already started it earlier and simply finished it there is debated). The dedication page is dated September 10, 1535, and publication came in March 1536.
Calvin began the book as a catechism, that is, as an elementary instruction in the faith of the evangelical Christians. Many church reformers used the word evangelical to describe themselves. They understood themselves to have returned to the evangel. (The Greek word evangelion is translated into English as “gospel,” and these evangelicals understood the teachings of and about Jesus to comprise the gospel; of course, the word is found in the titles of the New Testament books that tell about Jesus: the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
Evangelicals used the gospels to attack the perceived abuses of the Catholic Church while also using these books, along with others in their Bible, as the standard to judge true Christian teaching. Traditionally, the pope and bishops were understood to be the ones who spoke authoritatively on matters of Christian life and faith. Reformers claimed, however, that centuries of human additions and traditions had been added to the teaching JOHN CALVIN
of Scripture (a word some use to refer to the Bible), hence the church had suffered moral and doctrinal decline.
Calvin originally meant for his book to aid in teaching what should be considered “biblical.” Calvin perceived the work to be a “simple and... elementary form of teaching.”7 Because of the political turmoil in France, however, Calvin decided to present his work as a confession of faith to the King of France, Francis I, and thus addressed him directly in the opening of the book: “To the most mighty and most illustrious monarch Francis, most Christian king of the French, his esteemed prince and lord, John Calvin sends peace and greeting in the Lord.”8
Once he had given his greeting, Calvin began to argue on behalf of the persecuted evangelicals in France and refuted charges that the teachings of reformers were “new.” He contended, instead, that the substance of evangelical teaching lay within Scripture itself. In essence, to attack the tenets of evangelical faith bore the consequences of attacking Scripture itself as the Word of God. Calvin ended his dedicatory letter by warning the king that the innocent, faithful followers of God’s Word would receive, finally, divine vindication.
This episode is a clear reminder that, in sixteenth-century Europe, church and state were not kept separate. The two were, in the minds of most, irrevocably intertwined. Indeed, many saw the joining of church and state as God’s will. Thus, many reformers, including Calvin, would call upon the rulers and governing bodies to do what they believed to be their duty: protect, preserve, nourish, and strengthen true religion.
After the dedicatory letter in the 1536 Institutes, six chapters follow. The first chapter is an explanation of “The Law,” meaning here the religious law: the Ten Commandments found in the Bible. Much of what would characterize Calvin in his mature theology is sketched out there. This first chapter is very important as a guide to how Calvin’s theology developed over the course of his lifetime.
Calvin believed that all true teaching, or doctrine, was contained in the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self.
From Lawyer to Protestant Reformer
According to Calvin, God is infinite in power, wisdom, righteousness, and glory. God created the world, and all within it should serve God’s glory. Additionally, God is a just judge, taking vengeance on those who take away from God’s glory. Finally, God is merciful, willing to forgive and to take back those who trust in God.
Humanity, according to Calvin, who drew upon long established teachings of the tradition of Christianity, was created in the image of God, yet it turned away from God, choosing instead evil. Thus, although humanity is obligated to serve God’s glory, it does not.
Calvin argued that all humans know the depth of their disobedience. Everything one should do is inscribed in the natural law and lodged in a person’s conscience. God went further and created the written law, the Ten Commandments, as a witness to this natural law. Like Martin Luther, Calvin understood the function, finally, of this written law this way: to teach that “God is the Creator, our Lord and Father. For this reason we owe him glory, honor, and love. Since, however, not one of us performs these duties, we all deserve the curse, judgement—in short, eternal death. Therefore we are to seek another way to salvation than the righteousness of our own works. This way is the forgiveness of sins.”9
The law, in other words, presents what is necessary for humanity to do to glorify God. It also serves as a mirror, however, of how far humanity falls short in fulfilling this obligation. Thus, the law reveals two things: what humans must do to please God, and the fact that they cannot do so.
The solution to this problem, according to Calvin, is to turn to Christ and the forgiveness of sins God makes available through him. For Calvin, this was the only means of salvation: One had to rely on Christ’s mercy rather than one’s own goodness and good works if one were to ever be acceptable to God.
After having made these points, Calvin turned to an explanation of the Ten Commandments, treating each individually (for more information on the commandments, enter the JOHN CALVIN
keywords “ten commandments bible” into any Internet search engine and browse the sites listed). Then, in summary, he asserted that the whole purpose of the law pertained to love: love of God and love of neighbor. Calvin thought, in the end, that one could make three uses of the law: (1) as a mirror by which one came to see oneself as sinful in nature, thus causing one to turn to the mercies of God; (2) as a guide for the larger society in setting up constraints on the wickedness of people (do not kill, do not steal, etc.); and (3) for Christians, as an exhortation to do good, not in the sense that so doing contributed to salvation, but in the sense of having experienced God’s salvation through Christ, Christians would seek to express their gratitude through their actions.
Other chapters follow. The second deals with the notion of faith: both in the content of Christian faith (and on this Calvin turned to an ancient statement of Christian belief, the Apostles’ Creed) and faith itself. Although it is important to know what one believes (hence the explanation of the Creed), there is more to faith, for Calvin, than simply “believing.” True faith is putting “all hope and trust in one God and Christ, and to be so strengthened by this thought, that we have no doubt about God’s good will toward us.”10
Chapter 3 examines the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in heaven.. .”), analyzing each of the six petitions in the prayer. Moreover, Calvin looks at the reasons why Christians pray and discusses the practice of prayer.
Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the sacraments of the church. Seven sacraments had developed in Catholic Christianity: baptism, confirmation, communion (the ritual re-enactment of Jesus’s last supper using bread and wine, which can also be known as the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, and the Last Supper), penance, marriage, holy orders, and last rites. Following what had become common among most Protestants, Calvin focused on baptism and the Eucharist as what he considered the true sacraments, while arguing that the other five should not be considered sacraments at all and should be discarded.
From Lawyer to Protestant Reformer
The sacraments (most especially the Eucharist) are examined at length in a later chapter. As much as anything, how the different Christian groups understood the sacraments separated them from one another, oftentimes with terrible consequences. Calvin had come to accept the notion that baptism and the Eucharist alone were sacraments. Also, in this early writing, he already has a notion of “accommodation” at work: the idea that, since people are physical as well as spiritual beings, God accommodates his message to human senses. Thus, as well as hearing the Word of God spoken, Christians have the visible signs of the sacraments set before them, to help them in their weakness understand what God wants to say.
The final chapter, chapter 6, treats Christian freedom, ecclesiastical power (meaning that of the church), and civil government. Herein Calvin examines the proper understanding of the free conscience; the role of the church understood in its true sense—that place where God is with his people; and the state, whose purpose is to order society—to provide for the general wellbeing and safety of those subject to the government.
This relatively small book would grow over the years to many times its original size. And as the book grew, so did its author’s reputation and influence. It was the initial small work by which Farel and others in Geneva judged Calvin initially fit for leadership. Indeed, it would be the book, reworked over his lifetime, by which the larger world would come to judge Calvin, at least as a theologian of international and enduring importance. That lay in the future, however. In early 1536, Calvin found himself on the road again.