Calvin’s Role in the Reformation

Many scholars view Calvin as the greatest of the reformers. He insisted that the church return to the original principles of Christianity. Yet one of his main teachings, predestination, is reminiscent of teachings in ancient Greece, where Stoics said that Zeus determines all things and that men must resign themselves to the inevitable. The doctrine is clearly not Christian.

During Calvin’s day French Protestants became known as Huguenots, and they were severely persecuted. In France, beginning on August 24, 1572, in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, Catholic forces struck down thousands of them, first in Paris and then throughout the country. But the Huguenots also took up the sword and were responsible for killing many during bloody religious wars during the latter part of the 16th century. They thus chose to ignore the instruction given by Jesus: “Continue to love your enemies and to pray for those persecuting you.”​—Matthew 5:44.

Calvin had set the example, using methods to promote his religious convictions that the late Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick described as ruthless and shocking. Under the church law that Calvin introduced to Geneva, 58 people were executed and 76 were banished within four years; by the end of the 16th century, an estimated 150 had been burned at the stake. One of these was Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and theologian, who rejected the Trinity doctrine, thereby becoming Everyman’s “heretic.” Catholic authorities burned him in effigy; the Protestants went a significant step further by burning him at the stake.

John Calvin, born 25 years after Luther and Zwingli, moved to Switzerland from France as a young man, established a virtual church-state in Geneva, died at 54