Happy 500th Birthday John Calvin

July 10th marks the 500th anniversary of John Calvin, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) reformation theologian. When I tell people that I will be celebrating this, I get a lot of strange looks. One of the great gifts Princeton Seminary has given us this year is a website devoted to the reading of the entire of Calvin's "Institutes of Christian Religion," his theological masterpiece, in one year: http://www2.ptsem.edu/ConEd/Calvin/. Each day, the website gives you the reading and commentary on the section of the Institutes being read that week. You can even get the Institutes read on a podcast. I talk about this with great excitement with my friends, and again get strange looks. I know what they're thinking: isn't this the John Calvin who gave us the horrible doctrine of predestination? Isn't this the man who preached fire and brimstone, and intimidated the good people of Geneva into living a strict, joyless life?

Many times when people give me these and other misreadings of John Calvin, I ask them if they ever read anything by him. For the most part, the answer is either "no" or "not for a long time." This is quite unfortunate. When I started reading Calvin in seminary I was shocked to find someone who wrote with beauty and depth and grace. He was a man who would talk about the "sweetness of the Lord" as much as anything else. Calvin was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. Part of his classical education was the art of rhetoric. Unfortunately, rhetoric is no longer taught as much as it should. Rhetoric is the ability to put your point of view forward with as much conviction, art and grace as to thoroughly convince the reader or listener of your point of view. This is why the preaching professor at Andover Newton is a professor of "Sacred Rhetoric." Calvin was suspicious of art in general. He was an iconoclast at heart, believing images without thoughtful reflection and explanation have a way of making too powerful impression on a person. The faculty of reason is always needed to balance out these nonverbal messages. His art was the art of rhetoric, the art of words and reason, and he used his art with the utmost beauty.

I used to joke in seminary that our church history class theme was "he wasn't such a bad guy after all!" Week after week I would find my professors trying to reclaim the goodness of a figure in church history who has been judged as bad by our modern minds. John Calvin fits this mode. Calvin did indeed pastor and teach in Geneva, yet his authority in town was never as great as many think. He was actually born in Noyon, France, and came to Geneva partly by invitation, partly by exhile. French protestants in his day were being slaughtered by the Catholic government and he was a marked man. It took years for Calvin even to have citizenship in Geneva. Up to that point, he could not even vote in civil matters. He was constantly battling with the city government over the rights of the church versus the state.

It is true that Calvin did believe and teach the doctrine of predestination. Yet we must remember that everybody else, with the exception of a few thinkers, also believed in predestination, including Roman Catholic theologians like Thomas Aquinas. If you actually read what Calvin says about it, you might be surprised. It has a place in his Institutes, but not a high profile place. In essence, he believed that Christians should not discuss this doctrine or talk about it too much, as it causes far too much anxiety. He also believed that no one really knows his or her fate in life. You could be the best Christian churchgoer and still be headed for damnation. This totally eliminates all the judgments that we humans make about ourselves and others. Ultimately, he encourages us to act as if we are elected by God for glory and leave the rest to the mystery to God. Obviously, a lot of theology has been done since then to give us a better understanding of heaven and hell, and God's election, but for his time, Calvin offered a theology that actually had pastoral overtones to them. Unfortunately, after Calvin died, his "followers" took this doctrine and made it a central pillar of "Calvinism." They used it as a litmus test of orthodoxy, and strayed far from Calvin's original intentions. Sometimes, I wonder if Calvin would actually be a "Calvinist."

Yet Calvin, was also someone who "told it like it is." He was not about to be blinded to the reality of human sin. He took it very seriously, and if we have a problem of with his understanding of sin, perhaps it says as much or more about us than it does about Calvin. He was a man afflicted by many illnesses in life. He was also a man in the midst of a religious battle that had more than theological implications. It involved governments and wars, about persecution and freedom. If his writings seem far too anti-Catholic, we have to realize that he was writing for the survival of a people of faith to believe in what they believe. In this country, we take this far too lightly. In his time, what you believed was literally a matter of life or death.

Calvin was a brilliant thinker, versed in the ancient classics. He knew ancient Hebrew, Greek, Latin and other languages. He read the Bible in its original languages. He wrote his most famous works in Latin and then translated them into French. He took reformed doctrines that were being preached and written about and organized them in a systematic, coherent order that stands the test of time. Many politidal writers say that Calvin was the father of modern democracy, that much of America's founding documents owe a great debt to Calvin.

John Calvin was a monumental figure. He was a theologian who represented a milestone in Christian thought. So as July 10 approaches, please think of him. Offer God a prayer of gratitude for his gift to your life. Whether you know it or not, your life is probably better because of John Calvin.