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The real John Calvin
The great Reformer was no angel, but he set the stage for revolutionary change
 By Christopher Elwood
John Calvin has an image problem.
Most Presbyterians probably have at least a vague sense that he was a formative voice shaping the theology that guides their church today. But the image of the man himself — his personal character — either tends to be a little blurry, or decidedly negative. When I speak to people in the church about this founder of Reformed theology, their opening questions and comments usually betray a degree of suspicion:
“Didn’t he preach predestination?”
“He burned heretics at the stake, right?”
“He wanted everyone to believe exactly as he did.”
Even among his followers, Calvin has not typically inspired great affection. Admiration, perhaps, but not devotion. The feeling is perhaps worse among the broader population. Radio personality Garrison Keillor describes Calvin as the creator of a “chilly theology.” Even a sympathetic biographer, the French historian Bernard Cottret, concedes that he “was not the sort of man you could take out for a drink.”
The seeds of this negative reputation were sown in Calvin’s own lifetime, in the 16th century. Though many of his contemporaries respected Calvin as a faithful interpreter of Scripture, a gifted writer and preacher, a genius of church organization and an able pastor, others attacked him for a variety of real and imagined faults. Partly this was a result of the success of his ministry. From his base in Geneva, his writings helped to forge a growing, international movement to reform the church along lines Calvin thought he discerned in Scripture.
The movement’s dynamic nature naturally drew attention to the man at its center. Opponents — and they were not in short supply during Calvin’s lifetime — sought to discredit him. He was (they said) dictatorial, arrogant, harshly intolerant of those who challenged his views; he portrayed God as a ruthless and vindictive monarch; and reflecting in his own behavior the model of this punitive God, he eagerly sought the death of one of his theological opponents, the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus.
Against all of the claims that Calvin was a monster, his defenders across the years have tended to fall back on some rather weak arguments — as if to say, “He wasn’t as bad as all that.” When his first biographer, friend and successor Theodore Beza, took up the challenge, he prefaced his defense with a disclaimer: “I won’t make a man into an angel.” In other words, he conceded that Calvin was flesh and blood, a man with all-too-human flaws.
Such a view fits well with Calvin’s own explorations of his character. Though not especially inclined to discuss his interior life in public, he did occasionally confess to others what he considered his main vice: the excessive “vehemence” of his emotions. We would say that he was intensely passionate, and that he applied his passion with an incisive rhetorical style that sometimes alienated those not already on his side.
In the medical and psychological vocabulary of the time, he was “choleric”: fiery, hot-blooded, irascible. But he was also capable of creative leadership and bold initiative. To have a choleric temperament was not, in and of itself, a vice, of course. Calvin and his contemporaries believed that everyone possessed one or another temperament. One had to work with one’s own type, and seek to control whatever excesses it might be inclined toward. But Calvin did worry that his anger might get the better of him.
Beza, interestingly, in defending Calvin, never tried to deny his friend’s fiery character and avoided presenting him as an otherworldly or disembodied saint. He was, like so many of us, a mixture of good and not-so-good qualities. What was most important, in Beza’s view, was that in Calvin God had found a most useful instrument for building up the church.
Calvin rejected, on principle, the notion that any of us has the truth of God neatly wrapped up in her back pocket. Illustration by Brandon Jones.That, at least, was the opinion of one of his principal 16th-century supporters. But will such a view hold up today? In a world of sound bites, when the image of Calvin as harsh and unapproachable seems fixed in many imaginations, is it possible for us to avoid a simple caricature and see in him a more complicated and interesting servant of God? Calvin doesn’t need historians and theologians to defend him. But people of faith today, especially those who have inherited aspects of the legacy he helped to build, deserve something more true to life than a cartoon image of a rigid, intolerant dictator.
To challenge the cartoon, it seems worthwhile to acknowledge the obvious. Calvin was intolerant. But in this respect he reflected the values and fears of his own age. His was the city into which the lay theologian Michael Servetus wandered, more or less by chance. Because Servetus had attacked a doctrine most Christians regarded as essential to maintaining the faith and the peace of their territories (the doctrine of God’s Trinitarian character), he was seen as a danger to the welfare of church and state. The unfortunate man was arrested, tried for the capital crime of heresy, convicted and finally executed.
Servetus would almost certainly have met the same fate he found in Geneva had he wandered into any other city or territory in Europe. Calvin and his city were not more intolerant, and in some cases demonstrated a greater concern for fairness, even an inclination to leniency, than their neighbors, Catholic and Protestant. In fact, Servetus was the only person executed for heresy in Geneva in Calvin’s time. Many more lost their lives in other cities across Europe.
Calvin sought, and expected, a fresh word from God, founded not on what institutions — like the church — declared to be true, but on what we could discern of God’s word in Scripture. Illustration by Brandon Jones.Calvin’s early education and formation seem to have encouraged a broad-mindedness that cuts strongly against the grain of the usual caricatures. He grew up in the world of the Renaissance, excited about a world of learning that was founded not on the tired, old authorities of inherited ecclesiastical doctrine. He sought, and expected, a fresh word from God, founded not on what institutions — like the church — declared to be true, but on what we could discern of God’s word in Scripture. It was an approach with revolutionary implications.
Because Calvin expected to be surprised by God’s word, he wasn’t wedded to the established ways of interpreting the faith. As he taught Scripture, he delighted in showing how some of the interpretations that have been handed down to us simply don’t stand up to close scrutiny. He regularly acknowledged that certain passages can be understood in more than one way. Even when he thought he had come up with the most likely or best interpretation, he might conclude, “I won’t quibble with those who read this differently.” And he rejected, on principle, the notion that any of us has the truth of God neatly wrapped up in her back pocket.
He said so directly when he introduced his first commentary, on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, to his readers. We need, he said, always to be reminded of the fact that the best interpreters of Scripture have not agreed among themselves. We can see, from this fact, that God has blessed none of us with such intelligence as to have a complete and full understanding of God’s word to us. Why is this so? What was God thinking? Here Calvin speculated: Doubtless God wanted to keep us all humble and wanting to keep communicating with one another.
So we should recognize that we need one another, and we should seek to make responsible progress in understanding God’s word, while recognizing that we will never perfectly agree, at least not in this life.
Calvin lived in a world that felt strongly the need to fix with certainty what was true and how we should live in relation to the truth. Often he reflected that world’s quest to nail down the truth as precisely as possible. And his “vehemence” — his passion in defense of the truth as he saw it — may make him appear overly self-confident, arrogant, harsh, rigid.
But another side of Calvin appears when we probe his writings more deeply. We find there a man who acknowledged the divine mystery that far transcends our puny capacity to fashion words to describe it. We see an openness to new and surprising discovery. We find one able to say, at the end of a difficult life, that he had tried to do what was good and right, that his vices had always troubled him, and that he hoped his friends would forgive him for any harm he had done. We find a pastor, preacher, theologian who, though he could fairly be credited with solidifying the organization and theological basis for the fastest-growing Protestant movement of his day, would announce, “All I have done has been worth nothing.”
The fact that John Calvin emerges as a complicated figure — a somewhat prickly personality, who doesn’t attract an especially affectionate following — is appropriate to his own theological commitments. For Calvin, it was important that we not become religiously attached to human beings. None of us, after all, is an angel. He would worry if he thought we were inclined to pay his temperament too much attention. Better instead, Calvin would say, to concentrate on the one he sought to glorify in his living, teaching, preaching and pastoral care.
Christopher Elwood is professor of historical theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and author of Calvin for Armchair Theologians (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). |
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