John Calvin

John sat on his mother’s bed. She was unwell and found his games tiring, but she enjoyed it when they sat and talked together. “Tell me about when you were a little girl,” he said.

His mother smiled. “My father and mother live in a small town right in the north of France. They have an inn and when I was a girl people were always coming and going. Sometimes I hid in the kitchen and listened to what the grown-ups were talking about. Most of them were traders on their way to England.”

“Is my father a trader?” The five year old asked.
Smiling at the thought, his mother explained. “No, he is a lawyer and he works at the Cathedral here in Noyon.”
“What did lawyers do?”
“All sorts of things,” she said. “Sometimes his work is about buying and selling land.”
“So he is a trader.”
“I suppose in a way he is,” laughed his mother. “But it’s not his own things that he’s buying and selling: everything he works with belongs to the church.”
“The church must be very right,” the little boy thought aloud.
“Yes,” agreed his mother. “I think it is.”

A few weeks later John was waking up in the morning and he went bounding up to his mother’s bedroom to see how she was doing.

“Shhh! Please be quiet,” the woman told John, just a few months later. “It’s not nice to make a noise in a house of the dead.”

“But I want my mother!” he sobbed. “I don’t want her dead.”
“Well, you’ll just have to get used to it. And you’ll have to be quiet too. Your poor father needs peace.”
The child didn’t know what peace was, but he knew there was something that he needed to help his sore heart.
“Do I need peace?” he asked the woman who had come to prepare his mother’s body for the funeral.
When she looked crossly he went outside to get far away from her.

From that day onwards life was different for the young John Calvin. He did all the things that had to be done, but nothing was ever the same. There was no mother to answer his questions or to kiss him better when he fell and grazed his knees. He must have missed her softness, her nighttime kisses and their special times together. Life must have had its sad time for little John Calvin.

Seven years later, John’s father called him into his office one day, “I have something I want explain to you,” his father told John. It was the year 1521. “An arrangement has been made to give you a job.”

John’s face fell. “But I don’t want a job. I want to study.”
His father sat down. “If you would just listen to what I’m trying to say!”
Calvin took a seat in front of his father. “This is something that happens in the church. You are given a job and are paid for it, but you don’t actually have to do the work.”
“Why?”
“Because someone else does it for you.”
“So what’s the job and why doesn’t the other person get the pay?”
“The job is looking after a church and he does get paid, through not very much. That leaves plenty for you.”
“What do I need the money for?” John asked, puzzled.
“Education doesn’t come cheap,” his father said. “The money will help pay for it.”
John puzzled over that. It seemed to him a very odd thing but he was glad to have the money.

When he was fourteen years old, Calvin went off to university, first in Paris where he studied Theology (that’s the study of God) then, because his father wanted him to, he studied law in another French university. But before he had finished his studies in law, John’s father died. He was on his own and could make his own decisions.

“I’ve decided to go back to Paris to study Greek and Hebrew,” he told a friend.
“That’s a dangerous thing to do,” the other young man laughed. “If you read the Bible you might become like that man Luther!”
Calvin looked his friend in the eye. “I don’t think I’m as easily convinced as he was,” he announced. “I was brought up in the Catholic Church. It pays for my education. If you think I’m likely to leave it after all that and to start to preach that the Church is not telling the truth, you can think again.”
“Keep your head on!” said his friend. “I was only joking.”

It wasn’t long before John Calvin had done exactly what his friend had joked about. “I was absolutely caught up in all the superstitions of the Church,” he wrote later, “then I was suddenly converted and God tamed my heart and made me teachable.” When he wrote to his friend to tell him what had happened, the letter that came back was not very encouraging.

“You’ve made a brave decision,” it read, “but a very dangerous one. If I were you I’d prepare to leave Paris, because if you don’t go you’ll be chased out. The Church and the King don’t like Reformers. Are you quite sure you really are one of them?”

“I’m certain,” Calvin wrote back. “The Church is full of things that need reform. Think about it. The money the Church gave me to do nothing paid for my education! And some poor soul did the work and got virtually nothing for it – all because my father was a cathedral lawyer. That can’t be right. It’s one of the many ways in which the Church is wrong. You were right about being chased out of Paris… this letter is from Geneva which I think will be my home now.”

“What will you do now?” he was asked by a Swiss Christian he met at a church.
“The thing I’m best at is studying, so I think that’s what I should continue to do,” replied John. “It’s all very well leaving the Roman Catholic Church, because of all the wrongs in it, but the Reformed Church will also make serious mistakes unless we really know what the Bible says and stick to it. I think that’s what God is calling me to do.”

“It’s a huge job,” His new friend said, smiling. “But God only gives work like that to those who can do it.”
“I feel safe here,” John told another friend in the year 1536.

“I know what you mean. It’s great that the people here voted to live according to the Bible and to abolish the teaching of the Roman Church in the city.”
“It means I can relax for awhile and get on with my writing without worrying about spies tracking me down.”
”I hope you’ll be here fore more than awhile,” another Reformer said. “We need you to help establish a church in Geneva.”
But two years later Calvin was on the move again. The town council had changed and he was no longer welcome. “Moving won’t stop my work,” he told his Swiss friends, as he packed up his papers. “A student can study anywhere.”

John travelled to the city of Strasbourg where he spent a wonderful year. While there he met a young woman named Idelette, whom he married. Idelette provided him with an instant family. Her husband had died and she had worried about what would happen to her and the children. She never dreamed that she would love again and that her children would have a fine stepfather. It was a very happy year.

“The only thing is that I don’t’ get the same peace to write,” John said, half seriously.
“You knew what you were taking on!” his wife laughed. “And you’re not doing too badly. You’ve just finished a book and you’re working on another one already.”

In the year 1541, John decided it was time to go back to Geneva. “I’ve worked out a system of church government that I think the Genevans will approve of.”

They did, even if they didn’t carry it out exactly as Calvin would have liked.
Reformers came from all over Europe to study with Calvin, many of them former priests in the Roman Church. Their discussions went on for hours and hours.

Eight years later, in 1549, Idelette died. John was heart broken. “First, my only son dies as a child, then my wife after just eleven years of marriage.”
“But you have us,” His stepson told him. “We’re your family.”

Calvin put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I know,” he said. “And it’s very hard for you all to lose your father, then your mother, when you are still so young.”

“But we’re not alone,” the boy said. “You have us and we have you.”
The man looked up into the strong young face. “You’re right,” he agreed. “And God will care for us.”
Some years later the city of Geneva permitted John to set up a school. Students from all over Europe came to study as it was the few places in Europe where religious freedom was tolerated.

“It’s great to study with you, Mr Calvin,” a former priest told his teacher. “And all your many books are brilliant. I know I can believe every word you say.”

“That, young man,” John told him, “Is probably the most frightening thing anyone has ever said to me.” His pupil looked shocked. “You came out of the Roman Church because it was teaching you things that were untrue, and now you’re prepared to believe all I say. For goodness sake use the brain God has given you. I will never deliberately misguide you but you must check everything I say, everything anyone says, by what is written in the Bible. That is the only source of truth.”

The young man was upset, and Calvin felt suddenly sorry for him. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’m just an ordinary human being like yourself, and I, too, can make mistakes. If you ever find yourself thinking that I’m special, ask someone who knows me well. If I have a pain I’m like a bear with a sore head. And if I go to bed with a stomach-ache I assume I’ll die before morning, but I’ve not done that yet.”

In the year 1564, John began to age. “I’m not really well,” John told a fellow teacher. “I’m not sure that I’ll manage a lecture today.” Everyone at the university started asking if John Calvin was ill. Or was this just another of his days of thinking he was worse than he really was. “He isn’t actually looking very good,” one of the students commented. “And his colour’s a bit odd,” another added. They were right. John Calvin was ill, and he never got better. Having influenced the Reformation in Europe more than any other man, he died on 27th May 1564.