In case you had not heard today, July 10, is the 500th birthday of John Calvin.
While in no way wanting to diminish his place as one of the framers of Reformed theology and “movers and shakers” of the Protestant Reformation, I do find it interesting the degree to which our image of him is shaped by the last 450 years.
He was a native of France who is now almost synonymous with Geneva, Switzerland, which was his home and work place for much of his life.
We now view his theology mostly through the lens of a church council that formulated what we know as the “Five points of Calvinism” as a specific response to a theological dispute.
His formal training was in law but he began working on theology at his first academic appointment.
His first residency in Geneva was short-lived at close to two years but was invited back after an absence of three years and he returned and spent the remaining 23 years of his life there.
Much of his most famous work on sin and election can be traced back to ideas advocated by Augustine over a thousand years earlier.
While we as Presbyterians can trace our congregational structure and church officers back to Calvin much of our connectional heritage comes from the work of John Knox fleshing Presbyterianism out in Scotland.
Calvin first published his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1535 at the beginning of his theological career but it was always a “work in progress” as he revised it throughout his life.
Calvin’s goal was to reform Christianity in place, recovering the “primitive” (that is original) form of the New Testament Church rather than create a division with the Roman church. (Few reformers start out to create a new religion but rather try to open the eyes of the existing institution to the errors they perceive.)
What we can attribute to John Calvin is an immense body of work that includes commentaries on nearly the whole Bible (but famously not Revelation) as well as his monumental Institutes of the Christian Religion which runs almost 700,000 words in my English translation. He also gave us a tradition, passed on and refined by his successors, that acknowledges God as Sovereign over all, Jesus as Head of the Church, and Scripture the ultimate rule of life. It is a tradition where God has given the church and scripture to all the believers, those God has called, to manage on his behalf with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
So to our spiritual ancestor, Happy Birthday and thank you John Calvin.
Praying for our Churches
Hanmi: Young Nak Presbyterian Church, San Diego
Los Ranchos: Laguna Niguel Presbyterian Church, Laguna Niguel
Pacific: Knox Presbyterian Church, Los Angeles
Riverside: Grace Presbyterian Church, Temecula
San Diego: Point Loma Community Presbyterian Church, San Diego
San Fernando: The Staff and Leadership of San Fernando Presbytery
San Gabriel: Arabic Evangelical Church, Arcadia
Santa Barbara: First Presbyterian Church, Santa Paula
