12 CALVIN, John, C. H. Cayce John Calvin was a leader in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. He was the founder of the Presbyterian church. He was never connected with the Baptists. His teaching agreed with the Baptist teaching on many points. He taught the doctrine of election and predestination of the saints, and the effectual work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration. These principles had been taught in the ages before Calvin. He was not the author of them. They have been called Calvinism because he figured so prominently in teaching them in the Reformation. But few Presbyterians now hold to all the main principles advocated by Calvin. The Primitive Baptist, March, 1909.
CALVIN, John, Sylvester Hassell Checked in German Switzerland by the battle of Cappel, the Reformation made a more important conquest in western or French Switzerland, from which it was to move westward, with the course of empire, to France, Holland, England, Scotland, and North America. William Farel (1489-1565), one of the first and boldest of the French Reformers, preached from 1526 in the French parts of the cantons of Berne and Biel, in Neufchatel, in 1530, and in Geneva in 1532.
The Reformation had reached Geneva in 1528, and was adopted by the Council of this free city in 1535. In 1536 the city gained its most distinguished teacher, John Calvin (1509-1564), a native of Noyon, in Picardy, seventy miles northeast of Paris. He became the ablest theologian and disciplinarian of the Protestant Reformation; and his work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, has been well called “the masterpiece of Protestantism.”
For commanding intellect, lofty character, and far-reaching influence, Calvin was one of the foremost leaders in the history of Christianity. He was always poor and sickly, severely moral and censorious (even in childhood being called by his companions “the Accusative Case”). He was educated by his father, first for the Catholic priesthood and then for the law. He injured his health by studying nearly all night; and attained such proficiency in the law as to be called to lecture to his fellow-students in the absence of the professor.
But Providence called him to a higher work. Deeply convicted of sin, he sought inward peace by the Roman Catholic methods, and found it not. Miserable and abject, with tears and cries, he was enabled to flee to God, and throw himself upon his free mercy in Christ, and thus he entered into rest, and joyfully testified, “We are saved by grace, not by our merits, not by our works. Only one haven of salvation is left for our souls, and that is the mercy of God in Christ.”
He renounced Romanism, joined the persecuted Protestants, and had to flee Paris (in 1533), in which city, during the next two years, “twenty-four Protestants were burned alive, while many more were condemned to less cruel sufferings. For more than two years he wandered a fugitive evangelist, under assumed names, from place to place.”
In 1534 at Orleans he published his first theological work (Psycho-pannychia), a treatise against the Anabaptist doctrine of the sleep of the soul between death and the resurrection. In 1536 at Basel he published the first edition of his Institutes— his sole motive in issuing this work being, he says, “to remove the impression that his persecuted brethren in France were fanatical Anabaptists, seeking the overthrow of civil order, which their oppressors, in order to pacify the displeasure of German Lutherans, industriously propagated.” The eloquent and powerful preface was addressed to Francis I., the King of France.
“The Institutes,” says Prof. Schaff, “are by far the clearest and ablest systematic and scientific exposition and vindication of the ideas of the Reformation in their vernal freshness and pentecostal fire. The book is inspired by a heroic faith ready for the stake, and a glowing enthusiasm for the saving truth of the gospel, raised to a new life from beneath the rubbish of human additions. Though freely using reason and the fathers, especially Augustine, it always appeals to the supreme tribunal of the word of God, to which all human wisdom must bow in reverent obedience. It abounds in Scripture learning thoroughly digested, and wrought up into a consecutive chain of exposition and argument. It is severely logical, but perfectly free from the dryness and pedantry of a scholastic treatise, and flows on, like a Swiss river, through green meadows and sublime mountain scenery.
Greeted with enthusiasm by Protestants, the Institutes created dismay among Romanists, were burned at Paris by order of the Sorbonne (Theological College), and hated and feared as the very “Talmud” and “Koran of heresy.”
In 1536 Calvin settled at Geneva, and lived there the remainder of his life, with the exception of three years (1538-1541), when he was banished from the city on account of his severe discipline (during which period he lived at Strasburg). In 1540 he married Idelette van Buren, “the widow of an Anabaptist preacher whom he had converted,” as the historians tell us. Their three children died in infancy. Otherwise their married life was very happy, but short, lasting only nine years, when his wife died. He deeply lamented her, and never married again.
Calvin desired to make his church at Geneva the model, mother, and seminary of all the Reformed (or Presbyterian or Calvinistic) Churches. The Presbyterian polity, or church government, is imaginarily derived, primarily from the old Jewish Sanhedrims, and secondarily from the Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon Senates; but the best authorities declare that the gradation of Session, Presbytery, Synod and General Assembly was an invention of Calvin himself (his doctrine of the organization of the church and of its relation to the State being the only original feature of his system, says J.R. Green).
And the civil government already existing in Geneva and other cities (consisting of four Councils, rising in power one above the other) seems to have suggested the idea to him. In Geneva were the Little Council (or Council of 25), the Council of 60, the Council of 200, and the General Council or General Assembly of Citizens. As for the two permanent Jewish courts called the Lesser and the Greater Sanhedrim, the first of inferior and the second of appellate jurisdiction, they are nowhere mentioned in the Old Testament, but are believed by most critical scholars to have been derived by the Jews from the Macedonians (or Greeks) about 300 B.C.—the very name, Sanhedrim, being, not a Hebrew, but a Greek word. Calvin’s Consistory (or Presbytery), composed of six preachers and twelve “laymen,” of which body he was President, exercised a most stringent, vigilant, inquisitorial supervision, in respect to doctrine, morals and manners, over the entire life of every inhabitant of Geneva; not only excommunicating persons of every age and sex, but handing them over to the civil authorities to be imprisoned, tortured or put to death for heresies, improprieties and immoralities.
The proceedings of the Consistory were filled, and the executioner was kept busy. A child was beheaded for striking its father and mother. Another child, sixteen years old, for attempting to strike his mother, was sentenced to death, but, on account of its youth, the sentence was commuted; and having been publicly whipped, with a cord about its neck, it was banished from the city. A woman was chastised with rods for singing secular songs to the melody of the Psalms. A man was imprisoned and banished for reading the writings of the Italian humanist Poggio.
Profanity and drunkenness were severely punished; dancing, and the manufacture or use of cards, or nine-pins, and even looking upon a dance, and giving children the names of Catholic saints, and extravagance or eccentricity of dress, and the dissemination of divergent theological doctrines, brought down upon the delinquent the vengeance of the laws.
No historical student needs to be told what an incalculable amount of evil has been wrought by Catholics and by Protestants from a mistaken belief in the perpetual validity of the Mosaic civil legislation, and from a confounding of the spirit of the old dispensation with that of the new—an overlooking of the progressive character of Divine revelation.’—George P. Fisher’s History of Reformation. Christ and his Apostles did not persecute; neither does the true church of Christ. The Protestant persecutions of each other, and of Catholics, and of Anabaptists, were derived from Rome, and were in direct and horrid contradiction of the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience.
Calvin’s condemnation and execution of the almost Anabaptist and the Anti-Trinitarian, Michael Servetus (1553), though then approved by his brother Protestants, is a sad and ineffaceable blot upon his character—the bloody deed producing only evil, utterly condemned by the entire spirit of the New Testament, and by every person (not a Roman Catholic) of today.
It is noteworthy that in 1537 Peter Caroli accused Calvin and Farel of Anti-Trinitarianism (or Arianism and Sabellianism), because they would not enforce the Athanasian Creed, and had not used the words Trinity and Person in the Confession that they had drawn up. In his first residence at Geneva, Calvin had avoided using these terms, although having no particular objection to them; as he was very indifferent to the terminology of theology, so long as the truth was expressed. Jerome Bolsec was imprisoned and banished from Geneva in 1551 for denying the doctrine of predestination.
Like Luther, Calvin was, in general, unselfish and unworldly, honest and conscientious, doing what he believed to be right, and not seeking human applause or temporal riches. His disciplinarian severity was induced, not by personal animosity, but by his views of the Scriptures and of what was required for the honor of God. Under his iron and bloody discipline (the result of a combination of “Church and State”), Geneva, from being one of the most licentious places, became the most moral town in Europe.
But some of the profligate people, hating him with a perfect hatred, would sometimes fire off fifty or sixty shots before his door in the night, and would set upon him their dogs, which would tear his clothes and flesh.
He received from the city a small house and garden, with about five hundred dollars per year, and was very generous to the needy. In the latter part of his life he ate but one meal a day, and sometimes went without that. He would not draw his salary when he was too sick to work, and he refused an increase in salary and all kinds of presents except for the poor. Besides his library, he left only about two hundred dollars, which he gave to his younger brother and his children. When Pope Pius IV. heard of his death, he paid him this high compliment: “The strength of that heretic consisted in this, that money never had the slightest charm for him. If I had such servants, my dominions would extend rom sea to sea.”
Like Luther, he had a fiery temper, which was the propelling power in his extraordinary life-work. He was a walking hospital, and the wonder is that he showed so patient a spirit as he did. In his fifty-fifth year, overcome with headache, asthma, fever and gravel, he yielded to his complication of bodily infirmities. He never complained of as utterly feeble, and reduced almost to a shadow, his mind retained its clearness and energy. Assembling the city councillors, and then the ministers around his bed, he declared that he had lived, acted and taught honestly and sincerely, according to his views of the word of God, never knowingly perverting the Scriptures, and never laboring for any personal end, but only to promote the glory of God.
He thanked them for their kindness, and craved their forgiveness for his occasional outbursts of anger. He exhorted them to humility and to a faithful observance of the pure doctrine and discipline of Christ. Sitting up in bed, he offered a fervent prayer for them, and took each one by the hand, and bade him a solemn and affectionate farewell; and they parted from him, with their eyes bathed in tears, and their hearts full of unspeakable grief.
According to his express injunction, no monument was erected over his grave, so that the exact spot, in the cemetery of Geneva, is unknown. “Like Moses, he was buried out of the reach of idolatry.” Ernest Renan, the French rationalist, finds the key to Calvin’s wonderful influence in the fact that he was “the most Christian man of his generation.” As Prof. Schaff says: “Calvin’s spirit resembled that of a Hebrew prophet. Soaring high above the earth, he was absorbed in God—who alone is great—and he looked down upon man as a fleeting shadow.
Though his system was Pauline, and though he strongly sympathized with Paul’s sense of the
freedom of the gospel salvation, yet he looked more to the holiness than to the love of God. His piety bears more of the stamp of the Old Testament than that of the New. He represents the majesty and severity of the law rather than the sweetness and loveliness of the gospel, the obedience of a servant of Jehovah rather than the joyfulness of a child of our heavenly Father.
On account of his logical and systematic mind and Institutes, he has been called the Aristotle of the Protestant Reformation. “The striking, the peculiar feature of his system,” says Fisher, “is the doctrine of predestination.” This doctrine, at the outset, indeed, was common to all the Reformers. They were united in receiving the Augustinian theology, in opposition to the Pelagian doctrine, which affected, in a greater or less degree, all the schools of Catholic theology.
It is very important to understand the motives of the Reformers in this proceeding. Calvin was not a speculative philosopher who thought out a necessitarian theory and defended it for the reason that he considered it capable of being logically established. It is true that the key-note in his system was a profound sense of the exaltation of God. Nothing could be admitted that seemed to clash in the least with his universal control, or to cast a shade upon his omniscience and omnipotence.
But the direct grounds of his doctrine were practical. Predestination is, to him, the correlate of human dependence; the counterpart of the doctrine of grace; the antithesis to salvation by merit; the implied consequence of man’s complete bondage to sin. In election, it is involved that man’s salvation is not his own work, but wholly the work of the grace of God; and in election, also, there is laid a sure foundation for the believer’s security under all the assaults of temptation.
It is practical interests which Calvin is sedulous to guard; he clings to the doctrine for what he considers its religious value; and it is no more than justice to him to remember that he habitually styles the tenet, which proved to be so obnoxious, an unfathomable mystery, an abyss into which no mortal mind can descend. And, whether consistently or not, there is the most earnest assertion of the moral and responsible nature of man. Augustine had held that in the fall of Adam the entire race were involved in a common act and a common catastrophe. The will is not destroyed; it is still free to sin, but is utterly disabled as regards holiness. Out of the mass of mankind, all of whom are alike guilty, God chooses a part to be the recipients of his mercy, whom he purifies by an irresistible influence, but leaves the rest to suffer the penalty which they have justly brought upon themselves.
In the Institutes Calvin does what Luther had done in his book against Erasmus; he makes the Fall itself the primal transgression, the object of an efficient decree. In this particular he goes beyond Augustine, and apparently affords a sanction to the extreme or supralapsarian type of theology, which afterwards found numerous defenders—which traces sin to the direct agency of God, and even found the distinction of right and wrong ultimately on his omnipotent will.
[Editor’s Note: Notice that on this point Calvin does what every consistent Calvinist, every consistent Absoluter, must do—he traces sin to the efficient decree, the direct agency of God. He makes God to be the source of man’s sin. He later backtracks, but it is clear that, even in the hand of its master, Calvinism can never entirely clear itself of this problem. hlh]
But when Calvin was called upon to define his doctrine more carefully, as in the Consensus Genevensis, he confines himself to the assertion of a permissive decree—a volitive permission—in the case of the first sin. In other words, he does not overstep the Augustinian position. He explicitly avers that every decree of the Almighty springs from reasons which, though hidden from us, are good and sufficient. That is to say, he founds will upon right, and not right upon will.
The main peculiarity of Calvin’s treatment of this subject, as compared with the course pursued by the other Reformers, is the greater prominence which he gives to predestination. It stands in the foreground; it is never left out of sight. Luther’s practical handling of this dogma was quite different. Under his influence it retreated more and more into the background, until not only in Melanchthon’s system, but also in the later Lutheran theology, unconditional predestination disappeared altogether.
“The characteristic principles of the system now called Calvinism,” says Prof. A.A. Hodge, “were first fully developed by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (324-430), whose great opponent was Pelagius (Morgan), a British monk, a student of the Greek fathers. The opinions of Pelagius were unanimously condemned by the whole church, Eastern and Western, at the Councils of Carthage (407-416), Mileve (416) and Ephesus (431), and by Popes Innocent and Zosimus (417 and 418)—a sure proof that they were not in accordance with the original faith of the church. And up to the present time Pelagianism has never been adopted into the public creed of any ecclesiastical body except that of the Socinians (Unitarians) of Poland (Racovian Catechism, 1605).”
Afterwards the doctrines of Augustine triumphed, in their conflict with Semi-Pelagianism, at the Synods of Orange and Valence (529), and by the decrees of Popes Gelasius (496) and Boniface (530). Henceforth a moderate Augustinianism became the legally recognized orthodoxy of Western Europe, and actually tinctured the leading minds and events of that great community for several centuries. Bede, Alcuin and Claudius of Turin, and afterwards the best and greatest of the schoolmen—Anselm (910), Bernard of Clairvaux (1140), Hugo St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas (1247) and Thomas Bradwardine (1348)—were all of the school of Augustine.
The same is true of all the Reformers before the Reformation, —Wycliffe (1324-1384), John Huss (1369-1415), the Waldenses of Piedmont, John Wessel (1419-1489), John of Goch (1475), Savonarola (1493), John Reuchlin and Staupitz,the spiritual father of Luther. The Reformation was a reaction from the growing Semi-Pelagianism, as well as from the idolatry and tyranny of the papal church. It was in all its leaders, Luther as decidedly as Calvin, and in all its centers, England and Germany, as well as Scotland, Holland or Geneva, an Augustinianian movement.
Although Calvin was not the first to formulate the system which goes by his name (and which he himself professes to have borrowed from Augustine), he presented to the world the first and grandest work of systematic divinity, recast Augustinianism in its Protestant form, and handed it to the modern world stamped with his own name. From him his doctrines passed to that apostolic succession of Bullinger, Turretin, Witsius, John Owen and Jonathan Edwards; to the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) and the Westminster Assembly (1638); and so to the Independents (Congregationalists), the Baptists, and to the Presbyterians in all lands.
The Episcopal Church of England and America, whatever may be the teachings of its different leaders, was, beyond all controversy, in the intention of its founders, and in the first century of its history, and is yet in its doctrinal articles, essentially Augustinian.
“Every people of Europe,” says Prof Schaff, “was represented among Calvin’s disciples. He helped to shape the religious character of churches, and the political, moral, and social life of nations yet unborn. The Huguenots of France, the Protestants of Holland and Belgium, the Puritans and Independents of England and New England, the Presbyterians of Scotland and throughout the world, yea, we may say, the whole of the Anglo-Saxon race, in its prevailing religious character and institutions, bear the impress of his genius, and show the power and tenacity of his doctrines and principles of government.
The doctrine of predestination, in its milder infralapsarian (or sublapsarian) form, was incorporated into the Geneva Consensus, the Second Helvetic, the French, Belgic, and Scotch Confessions, the Lambeth Articles, the Irish Articles, the Canons of Dort, and the Westminster Standards (from which latter documents the same doctrine was incorporated into the English Congregational and Baptist Confessions of Faith of the seventeenth century); while the Thirty-nine (Episcopalian) Articles, the Heidelberg Catechism, and other German Reformed Confessions, endorse merely the positive, humbling, comforting part of the free election of believers (as also the Kehukee Baptist Association of North Carolina did in 1777 in a Confession which today constitutes the Articles of Faith of the churches of that Association, and which is given in the latter part of this work), and are wisely silent concerning the decree of reprobation, leaving that to theological science and private opinion.
Supralapsarian, which makes unfallen man, or man before his creation, a mere abstraction of thought, the object of God’s double foreordination for the manifestation of his mercy in the elect and his justice in the reprobate, was ably advocated by Beza in Geneva, Gomarus in Holland, Twisse (the Prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly) in England, and Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840) in New England, but it never received symbolical authority, and was virtually or expressly excluded (though not exactly condemned) by the Synod of Dort, the Westminster Assembly, and even by the Formula Consensus Helvetica (1675).
All Calvinistic Confessions, without exception, trace the fall to a permissive decree, make man responsible and justly punishable for sin, and reject, as a blasphemous slander, the charge that God is the author of sin. And this is the case with all the Calvinistic divines of the present day. Prof. Charles Hodge, who best represents the Old School Calvinism in America, rejects supralapsarianism, and defends infralapsarianism, which he defines thus: “According to the infralapsarian doctrine, God, with the design to reveal his own glory—that, the perfections of his own nature—determined to create the world; secondly, to permit the fall of man; thirdly, to elect from the mass of fallen men a multitude whom no man could number as “vessels of mercy;” fourthly, to send his Son for their redemption; and, fifthly, to leave the residue of mankind, as he left the fallen angels, to suffer the just punishment of their sins.” (Hassell’s History ppg 490-496)
Sylvester Hassell “Over against the mock sovereignty of the pope,” says Prof. Schaff, “Calvin set the absolute sovereignty of God, and he made this the chief article in his system; while Luther gave the greatest prominence to justification by faith alone; but the central place in the Christian system belongs only to the person and work of Christ—the incarnation and the atonement.”
Calvin had extraordinary light on the doctrine of grace and the holy effects of that doctrine in the heart and life; but he was in great and lamentable darkness in regard to infant baptism, indifference of the form of baptism, a modified sacramentalism, alliance of Church and State the civil punishment of excommunicated persons, the subjection of the individual church to a gradation of higher bodies, and the fellowshiping of Catholics and all the members of every so-called Christian ‘Church. (Hassell’s History pg 499)