Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [117]
CALVIN’S IDEAS On most important doctrines, Calvin stood very close to Luther. He adhered to the doctrine of justification by faith alone to explain how humans achieved salvation. Calvin also placed much emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God or the “power, grace, and glory of God.” Thus, “God asserts his possession of omnipotence, and claims our acknowledgment of this attribute; not such as is imagined by sophists, vain, idle, and almost asleep, but vigilant, efficacious, operative and engaged in continual action.”11
One of the ideas derived from his emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of God—predestination—gave a unique cast to Calvin’s teachings, although Luther too believed in this principle. This “eternal decree,” as Calvin called it, meant that God had predestined some people to be saved (the elect) and others to be damned (the reprobate). According to Calvin, “He has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction.”12 Calvin identified three tests that might indicate possible salvation: an open profession of faith, a “decent and godly life,” and participation in the sacraments of baptism and communion. In no instance did Calvin ever suggest that worldly success or material wealth was a sign of election. Significantly for the future of Calvinism, although Calvin himself stressed that there could be no absolute certainty of salvation, some of his followers did not always make this distinction. The practical psychological effect of predesti-nation was to give some later Calvinists an unshakable conviction that they were doing God’s work on earth. Thus, Calvinism became a dynamic and activist faith. It is no accident that Calvinism became the militant international form of Protestantism.
John Calvin. After a conversion experience, John Calvin abandoned his life as a humanist and became a reformer. In 1536, Calvin began working to reform the city of Geneva, where he remained until his death in 1564. This sixteenth-century portrait of Calvin pictures him near the end of his life.
© The Art Archive/University Library, Geneva/Gianni Dagli Orti
To Calvin, the church was a divine institution responsible for preaching the word of God and administering the sacraments. Calvin kept the same two sacraments as other Protestant reformers, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Baptism was a sign of the remission of sins. Calvin believed in the real presence of Jesus in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but only in a spiritual sense. Jesus’s body is at the right hand of God and thus cannot be in the sacrament, but to the believer, Jesus is spiritually present in the Lord’s Supper.
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CHRONOLOGY New Reform Movements
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The Zwinglian Reformation
Zwingli made cathedral priest at Zürich
1518
Reform adopted in Zürich
1523
Marburg Colloquy
1529
Death of Zwingli on the battlefield
1531
The Anabaptists
Anabaptists expelled from Zürich
1523
New Jerusalem in Münster
1534–1535
The Reformation in England
Henry VIII
1509–1547
Act of Supremacy
1534
Execution of Thomas More
1535
Edward VI
1547–1553
Mary
1553–1558
Calvin and Calvinism
Institutes of the Christian Religion
1536
Calvin begins ministry in Geneva
1536
Ecclesiastical Ordinances
1541
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CALVIN’S GENEVA Before 1536, John Calvin had essentially been a scholar. But in that year, he took up a ministry in Geneva that lasted, except for a brief exile (1538–1541), until his death in 1564. Calvin achieved a major success in 1541 when the city council accepted his new church constitution, known as the Ecclesiastical Ordinances.
This document created a church government that used both clergy and laymen in the service of the church. The Consistory, a special body for enforcing moral discipline, was set up as a court to oversee the moral