John Calvin 1509 – 1564

John Calvin was a French Protestant theologian, pastor, and the principal architect of the Reformed branch of the Reformation. After legal training at Orleans and a sudden conversion in the early 1530s, he settled in Geneva, where, with one significant interruption, he shaped a distinctive ecclesiastical, civil, and intellectual order from 1541 until his death. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, expanded over five editions, gave Reformed theology its classic systematic form, and his commentaries on most books of the Bible shaped Protestant exegesis for generations. His teaching on divine sovereignty, predestination, and the Christian life left an enduring mark on European and Anglo-American thought.

Jean Calvin — Iohannes Calvinus, born Jean Cauvin — was born in 1509 at Noyon in Picardy, the son of an episcopal secretary. He was sent to Paris in 1523 to study for the priesthood, redirected by his father into law at Orleans and Bourges, and back in Paris in the early 1530s completed humanist studies and his commentary on Seneca's De Clementia. By 1534 he had broken with Rome and was forced to flee France during the affair of the Placards.

Settled in Basel he published in 1536 the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the work he would expand and revise through five editions to its definitive form of 1559. Persuaded by Guillaume Farel to stay in Geneva, expelled by the city council in 1538, received during three years of exile at Strasbourg, he returned in 1541 and ruled the Genevan reformation as the city's chief pastor until his death. His commentaries cover almost the whole of scripture; his sermons, letters, treatises, and disputations fill the dozens of volumes of his collected works.

Calvin's Institutes is the most systematic and philosophically careful work of the Reformation, and his doctrines of the sovereignty of God, of double predestination, of the regulative principle of worship, and of a presbyterian church polity shaped Reformed theology, Puritan culture, and the political thought of Calvinist resistance from the Netherlands to New England. He died at Geneva in May 1564 and asked to be buried in an unmarked grave.