Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 65 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This lecture finishes the story of John Calvin and then asks what the word Calvinism should and should not mean. Dr. Busenitz walks carefully through the five points, insists that Calvin was a pastor with a missionary heart rather than an ivory tower theologian, and shows why the man who wanted an unmarked grave would likely wince at a movement bearing his name. The closing minutes cross the Channel to William Tyndale, whose English New Testament, and whose dying prayer, set the stage for the English Reformation.
The Servetus trial forced even Calvin's enemies to side with him, and in 1555 Ami Perrin and the Libertine leaders were implicated in a plot against the city, fled or were executed, and the balance of the council shifted. French Protestant refugees strengthened Calvin's support, and after roughly ten bitter years he enjoyed about a decade of peaceable ministry.
Calvin held real authority in the church and real influence in the city, but no civil or political power at all. He could not vote, sit on the council, or pass a law, and he was not made a citizen of Geneva until the very end of his life. The lecture presses this because the caricature of Calvin as the dictator of Geneva remains a favorite tool of character assassination.
When Bloody Mary began killing Protestants in England, refugees streamed to cities like Geneva, and John Knox pastored the English refugee congregation in Calvin's chapel from 1556 to 1559. Shaped by Calvin, these exiles returned home carrying Geneva's vision with them, and in England they would be known as the Puritans.
Seriously ill in 1558 and expecting death, Calvin raced to complete the final 1559 edition of the Institutes, grown from six chapters to eighty. The lecture recommends Truth for All Time, a short English translation of Calvin's own summary of the Institutes, as a two-hour way to read Calvin before claiming his label. In 1559 he also founded the Geneva academy with Theodore Beza as rector, the successor who would carry and systematize his theology.
Calvin died May 27, 1564 at fifty-four, having lectured on Ezekiel and been carried to the pulpit on a bed in his final months. He ordered burial in a common wooden casket with no gravestone, fearing posthumous hero worship, and the city register recorded simply that Calvin went to God. His pulpit motto, soli Deo gloria, governed even his funeral.
Calvin wrote about himself only three times in all his works and labored for obscurity, so the lecture finds it ironic that a movement bears his name. Asked for his own labels, Calvin would have said Augustinian, and behind that Pauline and biblical. Dr. Busenitz does not forbid the term but counsels preaching the texts and letting Scripture convince people, rather than opening a ministry by planting a divisive flag.
TULIP, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints, was formulated at the Synod of Dort in 1618 and 1619, decades after Calvin, in answer to an Arminian challenge. Calvin taught the substance of all five, but Calvinism is broader than five points: it is submission to God's sovereign lordship in every area of life.
The gospel call is a real invitation to all sinners, and Calvin placed his treatment of election after the call of the gospel. The lecture pictures a door: outside it reads repent and believe; only from inside does one look back and read chosen before the foundation of the world. Election in Scripture comforts believers after conversion; it is never an obstacle to preaching. On double predestination the lecture says Calvin did not teach it and neither does Dr. Busenitz, reading Romans 9 as God passing over the non-elect rather than actively electing them to condemnation.
Irresistible grace does not mean God drags anyone kicking and screaming; it means God changes the heart so the sinner comes willingly and joyfully. Perseverance of the saints is not a get-out-of-hell-free card for a childhood prayer but the truth that the truly saved persist in faith and fruit to the end. Salvation is monergistic, a single work of God, not a cooperation between God and the sinner.
Far from smothering evangelism, Calvin trained French refugees and sent them back into France, where many died, and Calvinist missionaries reached across Europe and even to Brazil. The lecture points ahead to Brainerd, Edwards, and William Carey, all strong Calvinists, as proof that the charge that Calvinism kills missionary zeal is false.
Calvin wrote exegetical commentaries on nearly the whole Bible, sticking to the text rather than passing controversies, which is why they endure. He championed the simple, straightforward meaning of Scripture and criticized Origen's allegorizing, though in Old Testament apocalyptic passages, such as Amos 9, he treated kingdom promises allegorically and read Israel in the New Testament as the church, while expecting from Romans 11 a great turning of Jewish people to Christ within the church age.
Turning to England, the lecture recalls Wycliffe's hand-copied translation from Latin, then introduces William Tyndale, who translated the New Testament from Erasmus' Greek text by 1525, printing in 1526, and smuggled pocket-sized copies into England in grain sacks. Betrayed by a spy near Belgium, he was strangled and burned in 1536, silenced mid-sermon because martyrs were winning converts at the stake. His dying prayer asked God to open the king of England's eyes; two years later Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible, built largely on Tyndale's work, and roughly eighty percent of the King James New Testament descends from him. He translated for about four million English speakers; some two billion speak the language today.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
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 Libertine opposition to Calvin finally collapsed in 1555 when
2. Regarding Calvin's civic standing, the lecture stresses that he
3. The English exiles who sat under Calvin's influence in Geneva returned home to be known as
4. Facing what he thought was death in 1558, Calvin pressed to finish
5. Calvin asked to be buried
6. Asked to label himself, the lecture suggests Calvin would have said he was
7. The TULIP acronym was formulated
8. In the Institutes, Calvin placed his treatment of election
9. On double predestination, the lecture concludes that
10. The lecture explains irresistible grace as God
11. Against the charge that Calvinism kills missions, the lecture points to
12. Calvin's commentaries have lasted because he
13. William Tyndale translated his New Testament from
14. Tyndale was strangled before burning in 1536 because
All fourteen correct. Lecture 9 is complete.
Calvin worked hard to keep his own name out of the spotlight, yet a whole system carries it. When are theological labels useful in a church, and when do they get in the way of the text?
The lecture pictures election as words seen only after walking through the door of the gospel. How does that ordering shape the way you would share the gospel with someone worried they might not be elect?
Tyndale translated for four million English speakers and could not have imagined two billion. Where might small, faithful work today carry consequences no one can foresee?
Jesus promises in John 6 that everyone the Father gives him will come to him, and whoever comes he will never cast out.
The lecture commends Truth for All Time, Calvin's own short summary of the Institutes published in English by Banner of Truth, as a first step before tackling the full work, alongside Calvin's commentaries themselves.