Lights and Shadows of the Reformation: John Calvin
by Carole Adams, May 18, 2009
Editor’s Note: We are pleased to have the Foundation for American Christian Education (FACE) as one of our official sponsors of the Reformation 500 Celebration. To learn more about the work of FACE, click here.
On a back street of old Geneva stands St. Peter’s Church. Stark stones and interior gloom shroud its incomparable history from those who lack eyes to see and ears to hear. The history that echoed from this place down the centuries reformed hearts from Geneva to the heroic French Huguenots, the Dutch Burghers, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, and the New England Pilgrims, who then gave their lives for the liberty of conscience.
Inside, standing under the massive polished pulpit next to Calvin’s simple chair, the story of a city reformed by the staunch will of one man filled to the full with the Word of God comes to life. George Bancroft in his History of the Colonization of the United Statescalls this man “a young French refugee, skilled alike in theology and civil law, in the duties of magistrates and the dialectics of religious controversy, entering the republic of Geneva, and conforming its ecclesiastical discipline to the principles of republican simplicity, established a party, of which Englishmen became members, and New England the asylum.”
Amazing feat for a “young French refugee”! How essential it is to teach our children in every generation the value and reach of one life lived before the Face of God! How important that we ourselves learn the incomparable lessons of providential history and are instructed by the faithfulness and diligence of those who served God fully in past generations.
These providential stories serve parents and teachers as bulwarks against the onslaught of godlessness from our culture and from much of what is called “education” today, inspiring students to noble deeds and character.
As our family planned this pilgrimage to Geneva, part of our daughter’s Reformation Study Tour as a high school senior, one little book in particular made the story of this John Calvin, born Jean Cauvin, sing in our hearts: Lights and Shadows of the Reformation, circa 1928. We first meet John Calvin, in this little book, as a sixteen-year-old of “pale aspect and piercing eye” whose progress was so rapid at college that he was removed from the classes and taken singly to the higher branches of study. He began to study the Scripture at the urging of Protestant friends and the fervor of Huguenot martyrs, and before long he found Christ, or Christ found him.
He said, ‘O Father, His blood has washed away my impurities; His cross has borne my curse; His death has atoned for me . . . We had devised for ourselves many useless follies . . . but Thou hast placed Thy word before me like a torch, and Thou hast touched my heart, in order that I should hold in abomination all other merits save that of Jesus.’
He grew in his knowledge of the Scripture in a dangerous time when “heretics” were routinely martyred for the Gospel. At the age of twenty-five, when asked to write an address to be presented to the college, he took care that at least for once they should hear the Gospel.
Christian philosophy was ‘the gift of God to man by Jesus Christ Himself . . . What is the hidden will that is revealed to us here? It is this: The grace of God alone remits sins . . . . The Holy Ghost which sanctifies the heart and gives eternal life is promised to all Christians.
Never had they heard such an address, and loud was the outcry. His arrest was ordered by Parliament. His friends made a rope of his bedclothes, by which he lowered himself out of his window into the street and fled. He exchanged clothes with a vine-dresser who was a “friend of the gospel” and with a hoe on one shoulder, and a wallet with provisions on the other, took his steps away from Paris, traversing the less frequented roads and avoiding observation.
He traveled much, served as an evangelist, and continued his scholarly studies periodically. In strengthening his ties with other leaders of the Reformation, he became increasingly anxious that Reformers were not only being put to death, but that their characters were traduced, and the faith they held was misunderstood. To step in, as it were, between the victims and their executioners, and tell the latter, and indeed the world, what the former held, caused Calvin to set to work to compose a booklet called “Institutes of the Christian Religion” which later he greatly expanded into the classic work we know today.
This began a body of work that included commentaries on the Pentateuch and Joshua, on the Psalms, on the Larger and Minor Prophets; homilies on First Samuel and Job; Commentaries on all the books of the New Testament . . . The Institutes (in Latin and French); and catechisms, letters, apologetics, ecclesiastical, and poetical writings. “His literary activity in either the number or the importance of works, is not surpassed by an ecclesiastical writer, ancient or modern, and excites double astonishment when we take into consideration the shortness of his life, the frailty of his health, and the multiplicity of his other labors as a teacher, preacher, church ruler, and correspondent.”
The Founders of the United States knew through their understanding of the Gospel, largely the result of John Calvin’s influence in the colonial clergy, that neither Greece nor Rome could produce a form of government that enabled the personal liberty of the individual, though they contributed essential elements. Our Founders heard the Gospel of Christ from their pulpits, clothed in the doctrines of Calvin whose contribution was a truly clear understanding of the profound yet simple precepts of Jesus Christ. This was the keystone of liberty upon which a Christian constitutional federal republic was to be founded.
Celebration is a joyous way to teach our children in order that they might teach their children the truths of His Story that must be preserved, or lost, at our own peril. Vision Forum’s Reformation 500 Celebration is the opportunity to participate in just such a joyous celebration. Come to Boston in July to learn fully the life and character of this “young French refugee . . . of pale aspect and piercing eye” who was one of the three major lights of the Reformation and whose shadow we stand in yet today.