John Calvin

John Calvin, twenty-six years younger than Luther, had become one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in France. While in his twenties, Calvin had been a lawyer, a Roman Catholic and a humanist intellectual. Humanists were interested in literature of the ancient Greeks, and some, like Calvin, saw the importation of the Greek classics in the 1400s as having saved the culture of Europe from barbarity. Still in his twenties, after having made a name for himself among French intellectuals and having joined those calling for reform of the Church, Calvin was driven into exile in 1536, to Basel, Switzerland.

Calvin clung to the idea common among Christians that the world worked by God’s mysterious will. Calvin believed that God's power was absolute, and he held to the old contradictory position of predestination and human will. God created order, he believed, and it was a disgrace for someone to allow himself to deviate from that order, including men acting effeminate and women doing masculine things. He described such women as deserving not only of being spat upon but also having some piece of filth thrown at them. (Sermon 143 on Deuteronomy, quoted by William J. Bouwsma in John Calvin, page 234.) Calvin was absolutistic. “All human desires,” he wrote, “are evil.” He added that “Nothing pure or sincere can proceed from a corrupted and polluted nature.” (Quoted by Bouwsma, p. 36.)

Calvin became an authority in the Swiss city of Geneva, and the city saw itself as carrying out God's plan for virtue. Geneva's government included a body called the Consistory, whose duty was to watch over everyone and to admonish those it decided were leading "a disorderly life." Calvin believed that the Consistory's activities should be thorough and its eyes everywhere.

For adults and children, the city established a set of questions and answers as a guide for daily living. Geneva had citizens who believed in sexual freedom, and Calvin denounced them. And, to quote Bouwsma, “He denounced dancing because he thought it a prelude to fornication.” He used the euphemism “sleep with” rather than bolder language which might incite sin.

Calvin was troubled by contacts with Islam, which he claimed brought the French “only filthiness and defilement.” Calvin also targeted those who wanted the separation of church and state. He described them as “libertines” -- a category of people that he saw as including those who questioned the authority of God.

Calvin saw city authority as "medicine to turn sinners to the Lord." Geneva promoted austere living and fasting, and it maintained a curfew. Fancy clothing was frowned upon. Dancing and card playing were prohibited.

News spread that Geneva was a city of morality, and this attracted people to Geneva from around Europe, many of them refugees from persecutions in France, England, Spain, Scotland and Italy.

One of the refugees who went to Geneva was the Spanish humanist Michael Servetus, an old friend of Calvin's who had been arrested by the Inquisition for denying the Trinity. Servetus believed that mortal sins were committed only by adults -- not by people under twenty. This view impressed the authorities in Geneva as dangerous, "Especially," said one, "with the young so corrupted." Servetus asked to be allowed to leave Geneva. Instead, in 1553, he was burned at the stake, with Calvin believing that Servetus deserved death because of his "execrable blasphemies. "

Calvin cautioned people not to make an "idol" of him or to make Geneva as a new "Jerusalem," and rather than migrate to Geneva he wanted people to adapt to the environments in which they found themselves. Despite Calvin's differences with the Lutherans, he spoke of them as members of the true Church. What would become known as Calvinism reached the French-speaking provinces of the Netherlands and continued to spread, eventually to Britain and then to Britain's colonies in North America.

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