Born at Noyon, France in 1509, John Calvin was described by William Cunningham as ‘by far the greatest of the Reformers with respect to the talents he possessed, the influence he exerted, and the services he rendered’. The second of three sons who survived infancy, he was bereaved of his mother in childhood. His father Gerard was a man of considerable ability who rose from humble beginnings to enjoy a lucrative career as cathedral notary, registrar to the ecclesiastical court and procurator fiscal, and was ambitious to have his three sons, Charles, John and Antoine educated for lucrative positions in the hierarchy of the Roman Church. By the age of twelve, John was employed by the bishop as a clerk and received the tonsure (a shaven head, marking out his preparatory consecration to the priesthood). But the religiously devout young Romanist ‘as yet knew not the Lord’ who was to bring him out from the spiritual darkness which enveloped the pre-Reformation Church and make him a blessing throughout the Christian world.

Student for the Priesthood⤒🔗

Among the many abuses in the unreformed Church at the time was the practice of bestowing benefices (ecclesiastical church offices and titles, even upon young children who received the major part of the revenues while the duties were performed for a pittance by others). Such revenues were often used like modern day bursaries to provide promising young men with the best education available in Europe at the time. Patrick Hamilton also benefited from this corrupt system when he was appointed titular abbot of Fearn, Ross-shire while only a young child. It is significant that Calvin shortly after his conversion surrendered publicly his benefices and their income.

Calvin also obtained the patronage of an influential aristocratic family, the Montmars, by whose additional assistance he was able at the age of 14 to attend the College de la Marche in the University of Paris where he was taught Latin by one of its greatest teachers, Mathurin Cordier who became his close friend. The course completed, Calvin entered the somewhat forbidding College de Montaigu as a philosophy student for the priesthood. Here the hard-working, self-disciplined Calvin made rapid progress, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the early church fathers such as Augustine. But discipline at this college was harsh and severe. Trivial offences were punished with birching. As for Calvin he embraced it as a challenge. He threw himself into his studies with characteristic intensity, working both night and day. His sleep suffered and fasting was enforced. The food provided for the students was poor and meagre and it is not surprising that Calvin’s health was undermined for life.

Change to Study Law←⤒🔗

In 1525 his father who had fallen out with the ecclesiastical authorities withdrew his son from studying for the priesthood and enrolled him in the University of Orleans to study law and Greek under Melchior Wolmar, believing that his exceptionally gifted son would earn more money as a lawyer than as a priest. But Wolmar was a Lutheran whose newfound friendship and discussions with Calvin aroused earnest enquiry in the latter who then began to question Church teachings in his search for Gospel truth. Having heard that the famous humanist lawyer Alciati was teaching in the University of Bourges Calvin enrolled in 1529. During his eighteen months there he continued his Greek studies. By 1532 he had already both graduated in law and published his first book, a philosophical commentary and dissertation on Seneca’s De Clementia. It won high praise from fellow humanist scholars on account of its erudition, clear thinking and acute analytical skill. But it was merely an academic work on heathen philosophy. A profound alteration was about to take place in his whole outlook similar to that of the Apostle Paul who testified:

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ … for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.

Conversion←⤒🔗

It was sometime during this period that Calvin appears to have undergone a saving change. Although morally blameless in his outward life, an obedient son to his father, and an exemplary student not given to frivolities, Calvin’s soul was deeply disturbed by a growing sense of the utter sinfulness of his heart and life. Convicted of his natural pride and self-righteousness and finding no peace from the directions or penances imposed by his priestly father-confessor, he had begun to search the Scriptures and to cry to God for light and mercy. While little is known of the circumstances surrounding his conversion we do have a reference to the event in the preface to his Commentary on the Book of Psalms:

God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life.

Another incidental reference occurs in Calvin’s Letter to Cardinal Sadolet, when testifying to the saving power of the Gospel in his own case and calling upon God as witness, he confesses that,

All my life I had been nourished in error and ignorance. And when my mind had been made ready to be truly attentive, I began to understand, as if someone had brought me a light, in what mire of error I had wallowed, and had become filthy, and with how much mud and dirt I had been defiled. Being then grievously troubled, I judged nothing more necessary to me after having condemned with groaning and tears my past manner of life than to give myself up to betake myself to Thy way.

Here we have a young man who, like Luther, was overwhelmed by his consciousness of sin and found pardon and peace by resting on Christ alone for salvation.

Calvin, however, was reticent about the details of his conversion. Knowing something of the deceitfulness of his heart, its pride and self-love, he felt that the details concerned no one but himself and that to God alone should the glory be ascribed. His conversion was not some cold intellectual decision on his part but a soul-humbling discovery of God’s mercy in Christ to a lost sinner. He saw how an all-wise Providence had hitherto directed his steps. The love of Christ now constrained him to a life of entire devotedness to his new Master. ‘My heart’, wrote Calvin, ‘I offer as a sacrifice unto Thee’. It was to be the motto of his life. For Calvin, salvation first to last was of the Lord.

Hebrew and Greek←⤒🔗

Following his father’s death, Calvin returned to Paris in 1533 to study Hebrew as well as Greek at the new humanist college of Fortet where he made friends with a group of fellow students interested in the teachings of Luther. Among them was Olivetan, his cousin (who later translated the Bible into French). Both Melchior and Olivetan appear to have been instrumental in leading Calvin step by step to Christ. In debate with Olivetan, Calvin found he could not resist the cogency of his friend’s appeal to the Holy Scriptures. It convinced him of the impossibility of harmonising evangelical truth with papal dogma. For some of his reforming friends who were terrified at the thought of separating from the visible Catholic Church (which seemed to them a sinful schism) the reformation was to be effected from within, Gospel truth working like leaven within the corrupt organisation. But for Calvin a return to the apostolic concept of the visible church was required, founded on the truth of Scripture alone.

Persecution←⤒🔗

Another of his student friends was Nicholas Cop, a reformer who had been appointed rector of the University. On November 1st, 1533 he devoted his inaugural address to the need for reform and renewal in the Catholic Church. It was forceful Lutheran evangelical truth delivered to an audience comprising members of the hierarchy, nobility, and chief citizens of Paris. It aroused the fury of the faculty who denounced it as heretical. That Calvin had helped Cop in its preparation seems undeniable. In any case he was implicated in Cop’s offence and for the next year he and Cop were forced into hiding. To avoid detection by their enemies, they separated: Cop to Basle, a city then under the influence of the reformer Oecolampadius: Calvin to Angouleme where he found shelter with his friend, Du Tillet, a scholarly parish priest and canon of the cathedral who had already embraced Lutheran doctrines. Here a splendid library of almost 4000 volumes and manuscripts was placed at his disposal.

The respite, however, was short-lived and in common with other Protestants he was forced to flee France during the Affair of the Placards when unknown but imprudent reformers provoked a violent backlash against Protestants by posting placards in Paris and other cities strongly attacking the Mass. While their zeal for truth was commendable, the manner of its execution and the language used in the placards was highly inflammatory and instead of convincing their fellow countrymen of the idolatry of the mass it served only to enrage the French King and his Roman hierarchy. Many suffered death by torture and burning at the stake.

The Institutes←⤒🔗

Finally, in January 1535, Calvin joined Cop in Basle where he resumed his studies and wrote his great work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. In 1536 it was published as a brief perspicuous exposition in six chapters of the true faith of the church drawn from the Bible and arranged systematically. Above all it was readable and intended for ordinary readers. Not since 1517 when Luther published his 95 Theses did a publication create such a sensation throughout Europe. Calvin at the age of 26 found himself among the foremost of the European reformers.

In the words of the historian Schaff: ‘This book is the masterpiece of a precocious genius of commanding intellectual and spiritual depth and power’. Throughout Europe it was welcomed as the clearest, strongest, most logical, and most convincing defence of Christian doctrine since the days of the apostles. Its preface to Francis I King of France explains one reason for its appearance: to defend the persecuted believers from the calumnies of the Romanists and to show that the faith the sufferers professed was none other than the teaching and practice of the apostolic church. Calvin continued to expand the original edition throughout his lifetime to become a dogmatic textbook of four volumes. William Cunningham summarises our debt to Calvin:

If Calvin’s system of doctrine, government and worship is in the main Scriptural, he must have enjoyed very special and abundant communications of God’s Spirit in the formation of his convictions, and he must have rendered most important services to mankind by the diffusion of invaluable truth.