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No successful reformer of the sixteenth century could ignore the needs of the society in which the reform took place, for the educational and welfare needs of people continued after the Reformation. Before regions became Protestant, the Catholic Church had funded schools and charity through its parishes and institutions. Catholic priests and nuns had staffed schools and hospitals and administered welfare. Catholic confraternities of lay and clerical members had engaged in charitable activities. There had been some centralization of welfare in lay and government hands, but to a large extent, schools and hospitals were run by the church and its clergy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Calvin's Institutes have earned him the title of “the preeminent systematician of the Protestant Reformation.” His reputation as an intellectual, however, is often seen apart from the vital spiritual and pastoral context in which he wrote his theology. For Calvin, theological understanding and practical piety, truth, and usefulness are inseparable. Theology first of all deals with knowledge - knowledge of God and of ourselves - but there is no true knowledge where there is no true piety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the sixteenth century, the life and thought and works of John Calvin have provided a fertile field for scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including theology, history, linguistics, economics, and political science, to name but a few. Periodically, in order to guide interested researchers through the continually expanding mass of material on Calvin and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Calvinism, various bibliographical survey articles have been prepared. These articles have varied in their comprehensiveness, categories, and their chosen time period. In order not to go over previously charted territory, this contribution will focus on works published since 1990, and will focus on books rather than articles. Those wishing to keep abreast of literature, including articles, on Calvin and Calvinism on a yearly basis, are advised to consult the Calvin bibliography published annually in the November issue of the Calvin Theological Journal. The bibliography, together with other relevant material, are accessible through the Meeter Center's website www.calvin.edu/meeter. Another fine, though now slightly outdated, resource for finding information on Calvin resources is the second volume of Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, edited by William S. Maltby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anyone, whether historian or theologian, who writes on John Calvin is likely to venture judgments concerning his place in Christian theology. Over the years the judgments have varied widely. Calvin's admirer Benjamin B. Warfield, for example, argued that the man the Roman Catholic Church judged a heretic actually marked a fresh epoch in the history of the catholic dogma of the Trinity. A less generous opinion, made from another ecclesiastical corner, is that Calvin was at best a mere epigone of Martin Luther, at worst a debaser of pure Reformation doctrine. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was said that Calvin represented a certain “atrophy” or “degeneration” of the idea of Protestantism (Ferdinand Kattenbusch), and in the mid-twentieth century one of the most widely used textbooks of church history in Germany could still present Calvin's theology in the form of six “deviations” from the theology of Luther (Kurt Dietrich Schmidt). Yet another well-known estimate from the last century judged Calvinism a more creative intellectual force in the modern world than Lutheranism but placed Calvin himself, with Luther, on the side of the “old Protestantism,” which only tried to give a new answer to an old medieval question, “What must I do to be saved?” (Ernst Troeltsch). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509 in the small French town of Noyon about sixty miles north-east of Paris, and died on May 27, 1564 in Geneva, an independent city-state whose common interests increasingly lay with the major cities of Switzerland. Noyon would remain a fairly unimportant place, but the fact that Calvin was a Frenchman - originally Jean Cauvin by name - is integral to understanding his role in church history. This made him an outsider in Geneva, but paradoxically it was his achievement, far more than anyone else's, that promoted Geneva to a city of European stature. Most of Calvin's adult career was spent in Geneva, from 1536 to his death, with a break during 1538-41. Prior to his time, it was a place of modest size with scant claim to distinction. It had no university nor leading light of the new learning of Renaissance humanism, it housed no major industries or finance enterprise, it was home to no significant printing press and wielded little or no political or military clout. It was, however, a regional trade center and not far from routes carrying traffic of all kinds between northern and southern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary style of sixteenth-century polemical writings is quite foreign to modern readers. For those theologians, religion was a matter of life and death, literally. Phrases and expressions that should not be used in “polite company” today are found heavily seasoning the writings of both Roman and Protestant polemical authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a theologian and pastor, Calvin addressed political ideas and issues more from necessity than from direct inclination or intention. The proper relationship of the church to civil government inevitably became a major concern for each of the reformers. So Calvin was obliged to work out, at least in outline form, the foundational political ideas he perceived to be generated by Holy Scripture. Calvin's chapter “On Civil Government” from the last book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion remains his most explicit statement. But just as important for seeing fully his framework for thinking politically are his earlier pages on issues of church polity, his earlier chapter “On Christian Freedom,” his extensive commentaries on scriptural references to political questions, and, of course, his many tracts and letters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not surprising that a theologian who argued consistently that preaching was the ordinary means appointed by God for the salvation of the elect understood the delivery of sermons as among his most important duties. During his ministry in Geneva (1536-38, 1541-64), John Calvin preached well over two thousand sermons. From 1549, his most characteristic pattern of preaching was twice on Sunday and every weekday of every other week. His sermons typically lasted for more than an hour, and they were delivered without a manuscript or notes. Toward the end of his life, when poor health prevented his free movement, he even asked to be carried to church in a chair so that he could fulfill his responsibilities in the pulpit. The sheer volume of his preaching endeavors demonstrates their importance to him. Needless to say, it would be impossible within the scope of this essay to summarize the rich content of his many extant sermons. In order to gain a better understanding of Calvin the preacher, however, we first need to examine his theology of preaching, for only when we ascertain the significance of the act of preaching within the economy of faith as Calvin himself understood it will we grasp his own urgent sense of commitment to the preaching task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Melanchthon, Luther's close friend and colleague and himself no mean theologian, reportedly dubbed Calvin “the theologian.” Other Reformation leaders, including Luther, published theological treatises of significance. On the Reformed side, Zwingli, Bullinger, Bucer, Beza, and Peter Martyr made theological contributions. Yet it was only Melanchthon who wrote something like a systematic theology with his Loci Communes (1521 and later editions). Even so, Melanchthon was quite willing to acknowledge that Calvin was without peer when it came to theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not easy to do justice to Calvin's writings in a short article. Most of his writings deal with the Bible and the church, which is not surprising. As a reformer, Calvin devoted himself to the church's reformation. In this he let himself be guided by the Bible. The Bible and then the church - that was the right order for Calvin, and that is the order that we will be following in this chapter. Calvin thought that people needed to have at their disposal a good translation of the Bible and he did everything to make that possible. He also spent much of his energy in explaining the Bible. Most of his writings are a direct fruit of this effort. Other writings can be connected to his devotion to church reformation of which his fight against heresy, sects, and other abuses is also a part. Some of his writings about doctrinal subjects like free will, election, and the Trinity are also significant. However, my decision to focus on the Bible and church means that those subjects will only be mentioned at the end of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well in advance of Calvin's entry into his vocation as a reformer of the church in Geneva and Strasbourg, the sixteenth century had already displayed a remarkable preoccupation with biblical interpretation and, as a consequence, an unprecedented eruption of exegetical publications. Factors contributing to this eruption are not difficult to identify, and Calvin's career and character as a biblical interpreter would recapitulate most of them. To begin with, the medium of intellectual exchange was forever altered by the dissemination of the printing press throughout Europe. As the costs of printing fell, books ceased to be a luxury item. Coupled to the growth of printing was a rising tide of scholarship that both consumed and produced those books. The humanist cry: Ad fontes - “back to the sources” - fueled scholars' appetites for these same sources as they emerged from the presses. Scholarship itself, along with scholarly standards, kept pace. A mastery of Latin alone was no longer enough to make one a respectable scholar: Greek and Hebrew were also required, and the growing competence of sixteenth-century scholars nourished, in turn, keener critical skills. For example, if these burgeoning sources, editions, and tools reminded scholars and preachers that there were new discoveries to be made in their old Bibles, Erasmus' early textual criticism of the New Testament undermined the magisterium of the Latin Vulgate and warned his readers they could not take even the wording of the Bible for granted, much less its theological content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, in Picardy in northern France, farm country marked by strong religious and ecclesiastical ties. His birthplace, Noyon, along with Amiens, Beauvais, Laon, and Senlis, belonged to the cathedral cities of this province, rich in tradition, which also possessed important abbeys such as Corbie and Péronne. The Picards made up one of the four recognized “nations” among the students of the University of Paris, and Calvin was proud throughout his life to belong to this elite. Even his character largely matched the “Picardian”: intelligent, logical, sensibly diligent, morally serious, and devoted to freedom and order - as well as overly sensitive, self-confident, and irritable. At the time of his birth, both a religiosity bordering on mysticism and a growing openness to humanist ideas were determining the spiritual climate of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To most visitors today, Geneva is a respectable, prosperous, staid city resting at the end of Lake Geneva where the Rhône River pours forth to begin its rush to the sea. The city is Swiss, neutral, and a center for international diplomacy. In the mind it is associated with peace conferences and conventions designed to protect the weak and vulnerable. However, this was not the city in which Calvin ministered. More than just the passing years have moved across the face of Geneva. In Calvin's day the city was smaller, less secure, and decidedly isolated. It was a locale facing the constant threat of armed assault. It was over-crowded and stuffed with refugees. And it was poor. Most surprising of all for most people today to realize is that Geneva was not Swiss. Indeed, Geneva did not enter the Helvetic Confederation until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For most of the years between its independence in 1535 and its entry into the Swiss state, Geneva did not even share a border with Switzerland. Thus, any real appreciation of Calvin's ministry in Geneva must begin with a realistic understanding of the environment in which he labored. What was his parish like? What was Geneva like? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]