Who Was John Calvin?
John Calvin was born Jehan Cauvin on July 10, 1509, in Noyon, Picardy, in northern France. He was educated at the University of Paris, and later studied law at Orléans and Bourges – training that would later show itself in the systematic, almost legal precision of his theological writing. His conversion to the Reformed faith came in the early 1530s, and by 1536 he had fled France for Basel, where he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion – a work he would continue to expand and revise for the rest of his life, from a slim introductory volume to the eighty-chapter work completed in 1559.
Later that year, while traveling toward Strasbourg, Calvin made what was meant to be an overnight stop in Geneva. The reformer William Farel, who recognized him as the author of the Institutes, persuaded him to stay and help establish the Reformation in a city where Protestantism had only the shallowest of roots. The uncompromising reforms Calvin and Farel pursued led to their expulsion from Geneva in 1538. Calvin spent the following three years in Strasbourg, pastoring a congregation of French refugees and lecturing on Scripture – years he later described as among the happiest of his life. In 1540 he married Idelette de Bure, a widow with two children; she died in 1549, and Calvin wrote afterward that he had been bereaved of “the best friend of my life.”
In 1541, Geneva's council, having seen what the city became without him, asked Calvin to return. He remained there until his death on May 27, 1564, at the age of fifty-four. At his own request, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Geneva's Cimetière des Rois; its exact location is unknown. The reluctance to be memorialized is itself characteristic – Calvin’s life's work was the Institutes and the commentaries, not a monument, and it is through those texts, not through any grave, that his thought continues to be read.
In Their Own Words
“Man, after he had been deceived by Satan, revolted from his Maker, and became entirely changed and so degenerate, that the image of God, in which he had been formed, was obliterated.”
– Commentary on Genesis, on Genesis 3:1“We must reflect upon our lamentable condition; namely, that the image of God being destroyed, or at least obliterated in us, we scarcely retain the faint shadow of a life, from which we are hastening to death.”
– Commentary on Genesis“I have been bereaved of the best friend of my life, of one who, if it had been so ordained, would willingly have shared not only my poverty but also my death. During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry.”
– on the death of Idelette de Bure, 1549Selected Bibliography
- Institutio Christianae Religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion) – first ed. 1536, final ed. 1559
- Commentary on Genesis – 1554
- Commentaries on the New Testament – various, 1540s–1560s
- Reply to Cardinal Sadolet – 1539
- The Geneva Confession (with William Farel) – 1536