Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 67 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
John Calvin never wanted the spotlight. He wanted a quiet corner and a library, and God kept dragging him into public view, first through a book that became a bestseller, then through a fiery preacher who threatened to call down a curse on his studies if he left Geneva. This lecture follows Calvin from Noyon to Geneva twice over, through the golden years in Strasbourg, the long war with the Libertines, and the Servetus affair that critics still raise against his name. Watch for the difference between the church council and the city council: it decides how you weigh nearly everything here.
Luther and Zwingli were first generation reformers; Calvin, roughly twenty-six years younger, belonged to the second and looked to them as fathers in the faith. Within Protestant circles his name remains the most controversial of the three, though in his own day his reserved personality made him the least controversial of the trio.
Calvin was born July 10, 1509 in Noyon, France. His father steered him first toward the priesthood and then toward law, purely for financial reasons, and Calvin began university at fourteen, held a master's degree by nineteen, and earned his law license by 1532. Along the way humanist learning gave him Greek, and Greek gave him the Scriptures.
In the preface to his Psalms commentary, one of the rare places he speaks of himself, Calvin says God by a sudden conversion subdued a mind hardened in the superstitions of the papacy and made it teachable. He kept studying law outwardly but burned to make progress in true godliness, and his old ambition for scholarly fame gave way to living for the glory of God.
Hiding in Basel while believers were being burned in France, Calvin published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 as an apologetic to the king of France, proving that French Protestants were nothing like the Munster radicals. It began as a small six-chapter summary and grew through revisions to eighty chapters and roughly fifteen hundred pages, the first great Protestant systematic theology.
War forced Calvin to detour through Geneva on his way to Strasbourg, intending to stay one night. William Farel, the fiery street preacher who had won Geneva for the Reformation, learned the author of the Institutes was in town and, when entreaties failed, swore that God would curse Calvin's retirement and studies if he refused to help. Calvin, stricken with terror as if God's hand had arrested him from heaven, stayed.
Geneva was a notoriously worldly city, and the moral reforms Calvin drafted and the city council enforced, rules against gambling, dancing, and immoral songs, bred resentment. People threw stones at his windows and named their dogs Calvin. The breaking point came at a communion service: ordered by the council to run the Lord's Table its way, Calvin and Farel refused to let the council rule the church, and in 1538, after two and a half years, both were given days to leave.
Calvin finally reached Strasbourg and called the three years there the best of his life. Under Martin Bucer he pastored hundreds of French refugees, published his first commentary, on Romans, and in 1540 married Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children whom he adopted. Their only son died days after a premature birth, and when Idelette died in 1549 Calvin wrote that he was no more than half a man.
The chastened city council begged Calvin back, and Strasbourg lent him for six months in the summer of 1541; the loan lasted the rest of his life. His first Sunday back he offered no rebuke and no told-you-so: he simply opened to the next verse in Romans where he had left off years before and kept preaching, as if no Sunday had been missed.
The 1541 ecclesiastical ordinances created the consistory, a purely religious council with authority to excommunicate but no civil power at all. The city council held every ounce of political authority, including over Calvin himself, who was not even a citizen with a vote. Keeping these two bodies straight is essential to judging everything that follows.
Calvin preached over two thousand sermons in Geneva, often daily, for over an hour, without notes, working verse by verse through nearly the whole Bible, skipping Revelation and the latter part of Ezekiel. From 1549 stenographers recorded the sermons, and those transcripts became his commentaries, a preach-first publishing model the lecture commends and traces forward to Spurgeon and beyond.
From 1546 to 1555 a faction that resented the moral code, the Libertines, made Calvin's life miserable. Ami Perrin, convicted under the no-dancing law, became their leader; a threatening letter landed on Calvin's pulpit; and by 1553 the Libertines controlled the city council, which refused Calvin's request to resign. When the consistory excommunicated Philibert Berthelier and the council absolved him, Calvin stood before the communion table as a Libertine drew a sword, declaring they could take his life before he would hand holy things to the profane. Perrin backed down, and communion proceeded in profound silence.
Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician, had long attacked the Trinity and denied the deity of Christ, capital blasphemy everywhere in Europe; his Restitution of the Christian Religion of 1553 was a deliberate jab at Calvin's Institutes. Condemned in France, he escaped and appeared in Geneva in August 1553, likely to taunt Calvin, and was arrested. The city council, packed with Calvin's enemies, ran the trial, stretched it out to embarrass him, and polled cities across Europe, which unanimously said Servetus must die. Calvin testified about blasphemy, visited the cell urging repentance, and sought a milder form of execution, but the council burned Servetus at the stake. The lecture concludes Calvin is largely exonerated here, and notes the irony that the standard attack on Calvinism rests on an act its namesake tried to soften.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. The lecture calls Calvin a second generation reformer because
2. Calvin's father redirected him from theology to law because
3. In the preface to his Psalms commentary, Calvin describes his conversion as
4. Calvin published the first edition of the Institutes in
5. What finally kept Calvin in Geneva when he intended to stay a single night?
6. Calvin and Farel were expelled from Geneva in 1538 after
7. Calvin called his three years in Strasbourg
8. On his first Sunday back in Geneva in 1541, Calvin
9. The consistory established by the 1541 ecclesiastical ordinances held
10. Calvin has commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible because
11. Which two portions of Scripture did Calvin not preach through?
12. When the council absolved the excommunicated Berthelier and a sword was drawn at communion, Calvin
13. Who tried, sentenced, and executed Michael Servetus?
14. Regarding Servetus, the lecture notes that Calvin
All fourteen correct. Lecture 8 is complete.
Calvin wanted a hidden life of scholarship and God kept pulling him into public ministry. How do you weigh personal inclination against evident need when discerning a call to serve?
The lecture leans hard on the difference between the consistory and the city council. Why does getting that distinction right change how we judge both the communion standoff and the Servetus affair?
Calvin, Edwards, and Spurgeon all endured seasons when their own people turned on them. What does that history offer a church, or a pastor, walking through conflict today?
The lecture sums up Calvin's detour through Geneva with the proverb that a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.
The lecture reads at length from Calvin's own testimony in the preface to his Psalms commentary and draws on accounts by Osterhaven and Godfrey; the Institutes of the Christian Religion remains Calvin's central work for those who want to go deeper.