The Heart in the Open Hand

I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart. PSALM 119:32

A boy of Noyon. John Calvin — Jean Cauvin in his own French — was born on 10 July 1509 at Noyon, a cathedral town in Picardy, in the north of France. His father, Gérard Cauvin, had risen from modest beginnings to become a notary and a man of business for the bishop and cathedral chapter. His mother, Jeanne, died when he was a small child. Gérard was ambitious for his clever son and meant him for the church; the boy was given small church benefices while still young, whose income paid for his schooling. At about fourteen he was sent to Paris, where he studied Latin at the Collège de la Marche under Mathurin Cordier, a gifted and gentle teacher whom he loved all his life, and then at the stricter Collège de Montaigu.

From theology to law. Then his father changed his mind. Gérard had quarrelled with the cathedral chapter at Noyon, and he decided that the law would make his son a better living than the church. So Calvin went to Orléans and then to Bourges to study under some of the leading jurists of France. After his father’s death in 1531 he was free to follow his own tastes, and in 1532 he published his first book, a learned commentary on the Roman philosopher Seneca’s treatise On Clemency. It was the work of a promising young scholar with no obvious interest in reforming the church.

A sudden conversion. Somewhere in these years everything changed. Calvin almost never spoke of himself, but in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, written a quarter of a century later, he tells us that God, by a sudden conversion, subdued his mind and made it teachable, though it had been more stubborn in such matters than was usual at his age. He names no place and no date. He only names the One who did it. By 1533 he was known among those in Paris who were drawn to the evangelical teaching coming out of Germany and Switzerland, and when his friend Nicolas Cop, the rector of the university, gave an address that autumn that sounded dangerously Lutheran, Calvin was suspected of having helped to write it. He left Paris in haste. In 1534 he returned to Noyon and gave up his church benefices. That October, placards attacking the Mass were posted in Paris and elsewhere, one even reportedly on the king’s own door, and a fierce persecution followed. Calvin left France.

The Institutes. At Basel, under an assumed name, he wrote a book. The first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion appeared in March 1536. It was a small book, arranged like a catechism around the Law, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the sacraments, and it opened with a letter to King Francis I, defending the persecuted French evangelicals against the charge that they were rebels and heretics. Calvin was twenty-six. The book made his name. He would spend the rest of his life revising it, and it grew with him, until in its final Latin edition of 1559 it had become four books and eighty chapters.

Seized for Geneva. In the summer of 1536, travelling towards Strasbourg, he was forced by war to take a detour through Geneva, intending to stay one night. The city had lately thrown off its bishop and voted to live by the gospel, under the preaching of the fiery reformer Guillaume Farel. Farel learned that the author of the Institutes was in town and came to find him. Calvin pleaded that he wanted only to study in peace. Farel answered that God would curse his quiet studies if he refused to help in so great a need. Calvin later wrote that he felt as if God had laid His hand on him from heaven. He stayed.

Expelled. The first stay did not go well. Calvin and Farel drew up articles for the ordering of the church and a confession of faith that every citizen was asked to swear to, and they insisted that the church, not the city council, must decide who came to the Lord’s Table. The councillors resisted. At Easter 1538 the ministers refused to give communion in a city they judged unready, and within days they were banished. Calvin was twenty-eight, and he was relieved.

Strasbourg. The three years that followed may have been the happiest of his life. At the urging of Martin Bucer, the wise and generous reformer of Strasbourg, he became pastor of a congregation of French refugees there. He lectured, wrote his commentary on Romans, brought out a much larger second edition of the Institutes, and answered Cardinal Sadoleto, who had written to the Genevans inviting them back to Rome. He also gathered a little book of metrical psalms for his congregation to sing. From Bucer he learned how a church could be ordered and governed. And in 1540 he married Idelette de Bure, a widow from a family of Anabaptists he had won to the Reformed faith, who came with two children of her own.

The return. Geneva, meanwhile, had fallen into disorder, and in 1540 the city begged him to come back. He dreaded it. Yet in September 1541 he returned, and there he stayed for the rest of his life. It was in writing to Farel about this summons that he used the words that became his motto: he offered his heart to the Lord, promptly and sincerely. His seal showed a hand holding out a heart.

Pastor of Geneva. Calvin never ruled Geneva. He held no civil office and became a citizen only in 1559. His power was that of the pulpit, the lecture hall and a tireless pen. Soon after his return the city adopted his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which set out four offices in the church — pastors to preach, teachers to instruct, elders to oversee, deacons to care for the poor — and established the consistory to exercise discipline. He preached through whole books of the Bible, often every day in alternate weeks, and from 1549 a secretary took down his sermons as he spoke.

Griefs and battles. His private life was marked by loss. In 1542 Idelette bore a son, Jacques, who lived only a short time. She herself died in 1549, after long illness, and Calvin wrote to his friend Pierre Viret that he was trying to master his grief. He never remarried. His public life was a long struggle. For years, powerful Genevan families resented the consistory’s discipline and the growing numbers of French refugees, and more than once Calvin seemed near to being driven out again. His position was secured only in 1555, when his opponents were defeated after a riot.

Servetus. In the middle of these struggles came the event that has darkened his name ever since. In August 1553 Michael Servetus, a brilliant Spanish physician who had published attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity and had lately escaped from the Catholic Inquisition in France, appeared in Geneva and was recognised and arrested. Calvin drew up the articles against him. The council consulted the other Swiss churches, who agreed that he must be severely punished, and on 27 October 1553 Servetus was burned alive outside the city. Calvin had asked for a less cruel death, and was refused. He never repented of his part, and the next year he published a defence of the punishment of heretics. In 1903, Calvin’s own spiritual heirs set up a stone near the place of execution, confessing that this was an error of his age and condemning it.

The school of Christ. His last years were his most fruitful. Geneva filled with refugees from France, Italy, England, Scotland and the Netherlands, among them John Knox, who called the city the most perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles. In 1559 Calvin founded the Genevan Academy, with Theodore Beza as its first rector, and from it trained pastors went out, many of them into danger, to plant Reformed churches across France. That same year the final edition of the Institutes appeared. In 1562 the full Genevan Psalter was completed.

How long, Lord? His health had long been broken — migraines, fevers, gout, kidney stones, and a lung disease that made him cough blood. He preached his last sermon in February 1564. In April he took leave of the city council and of the ministers, asking their forgiveness for his quick temper and thanking God for His mercy. He died on 27 May 1564. At his own request he was buried in the common cemetery without a monument, and the exact place is not known. Beza, who wrote his life, ended it by holding him up as a pattern of the Christian life, easier to slander than to imitate. Calvin would have wanted only one thing said: that God had been glorified.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Calvin tells us only that God subdued his mind and made it teachable. Write down, as simply, what God has done in your own life, and let Him be the subject of the sentence.

2. Think of a time God asked you to go somewhere you did not want to go. How did you answer? Is there such a call before you now?

3. Calvin’s happiest years came in exile. Thank God for a season of your life that looked like loss and turned out to be gift.

4. Face the story of Servetus honestly. Ask what convictions you hold so fiercely that you might be tempted to treat others without mercy for them.

5. Pray this week for a church or Christian worker in exile or under persecution, as Calvin did for the French churches all his life.

A PRAYER

Lord, You took a proud and stubborn scholar and made his mind teachable. Do the same with me.

Where You call me, give me grace to go, promptly and sincerely, even when I would rather stay in quiet.

Comfort me in loss as You comforted Your servant, and keep me faithful in long and wearisome struggles.

Forgive the sins of Your church done in Your name, and keep me from all cruelty in the defence of truth.

My heart I offer to You, O Lord. Take it, and keep it for Your glory. Amen.