Podcast: The Man behind Calvinism (Derek Thomas)
This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
Why John Calvin Still Matters
In this episode, Derek Thomas discusses John Calvin's enduring legacy. He reflects on the importance of predestination and election in John Calvin's theology as a whole, describes what it would have been like to have Calvin as your pastor, and explains what really happened when Michael Servetus was put to death in the town where Calvin ministered.
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Full Transcript
Matt Tully
Derek, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.
Derek Thomas
Thank you, Matt. It’s a pleasure.
01:30 - John Calvin’s Relevance
Matt Tully
John Calvin was born over five hundred years ago and I think one question that many might be wondering is, *Why are we still talking about him today? Why would we care about what he said five centuries later?
Derek Thomas
Well, if you did a cursory survey of church history various figures would stand out—Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas—but John Calvin especially because of what he said and how much he said. He had a stenographer take down every word that he spoke in public for the last almost twenty years of his life, and he preached every single day. He wrote a great deal, but he also had a profound impact on the shape of theology. And whether you agree or disagree with him, one way or another you simply can’t avoid him.
02:47 - John Calvin’s Stenographer
Matt Tully
Do we know why he had a stenographer following him around in that last couple of decades of his life? Did he ever comment on that? What was the goal behind that?
Derek Thomas
It was especially related to his preaching. Calvin, at that point in his life, was preaching every day. There were noonday services and Calvin preached without notes. All he had in the pulpit was his Greek or Hebrew text, and they realized that these sermons were being lost. Not just for the people of Geneva, but for other cities in Europe struggling with an emerging Reformation and needing the kind of leadership that John Calvin and others were providing.
So the stenographer was in part the decision of the city council. You know, we think of the Reformation as a spiritual movement but it was also a highly political movement. It was an attempt to distance themselves from having to pay taxes to the Holy Roman Empire. And so the entire city was involved in that. And the way to ensure the solidity of the Reformation was to provide the city with good preachers. And that, in part, was why Calvin was urged to stay in Geneva in 1536.
04:26 - Spiritual and Political Realities
Matt Tully
For someone who hears that and, as they’ve read about the Reformation, or frankly other religious significant religious events in the history of the church, gets the sense of that intermingling of spiritual concerns political realities and maybe and feels like that undercuts the validity of the spiritual concerns—how would you respond to that kind of thing?
Derek Thomas
Yeah, it’s a valid concern, I think. And we mustn’t judge this in an anachronistic way, because we live in North America, where the separation of church and state is so rigid that you think it’s actually in the Bible somewhere. But you have to put yourself back into sixteenth-century Europe and ask yourself, How could the Reformation gain such solidity across different languages and political systems, except that it was arm-in-arm with the civil state? There was no getting away from that in the sixteenth century. It would be the seventeenth century before some of that would be would be addressed. And to some extent, if one thinks about it, the Church of England has a civil dimension to it. The Presbyterian Church in Scotland is by law one that is upheld by state legislature to this day.
Matt Tully
It can seem so foreign, especially in American context, where we just have this long tradition of a separation of church and state and that often feels to many Americans like a pretty core principle that almost seems central to the American project.
Derek Thomas
And I guess with the loss of civility, it would be very difficult for a contemporary North American to imagine what a relationship between church and state would even look like except for one of fractious disharmony. Whereas in the sixteenth century there were a lot of common goals between the desire for civility and the upholding of laws—that were largely based on the Bible. So the very understanding of morality or ethics or a legal system was largely done in the civil state with reference to what the Bible said, even if it was a Roman Catholic understanding. But still, there was a connection between how the civil state viewed itself. There was virtually no atheism in the sixteenth century. Indeed it would be a criminal and execution-able offense to call yourself an atheist in the sixteenth century. So it’s a very different world.
07:53 - Calvin’s Involvement in an Execution
Matt Tully
One of the most prominent examples from Calvin’s own life that illustrates this union of church and state that many of us today would find somewhat off-putting or confusing is the case of Michael Servetus, a man who was condemned as a heretic and then burned at the stake because of his unorthodox views on the Trinity. And many Christians today are horrified when they learn that Calvin was to some degree involved in that condemnation and execution. For the state to execute somebody because of their religious beliefs would be kind of beyond the pale and horrible. So what should we make of Calvin’s involvement in that execution? How can we listen and benefit from somebody who was involved in something like that?
Derek Thomas
Yes, there are several things. First of all, we need to be careful not to view the matter from a twenty-first-century North American perspective. It was a fact that Servetus was a heretic. He was a heretic, not just in the eyes of Geneva and the Reformers and John Calvin, but he was a heretic in the eyes of Roman Catholicism. Had Servetus gone to a Catholic city—and he was warned not to—he would have ended up with the same sentence and a Catholic city would have condemned him.
Secondly Servetus was tried and convicted and burned by civil authority. It wasn’t the ecclesiastical authority—it was the civil authority that did that. Calvin was called upon as a witness to verify whether Servetus’s views were orthodox or heretical. And that was Calvin’s contribution. Calvin asked that the sentence be less severe than it was. He asked for a different form of execution, probably beheading. And you may react to that again with horror, but it did show that Servetus didn’t die because of Calvin. Calvin was just an expert witness in the trial and Servetus was put to death by the power of the state.
Matt Tully
It’s such an interesting nuance that sometimes gets lost in how we think about and retell that story. It’s often cast as if Calvin was kind of judge, jury, and executioner all at the same time.
Derek Thomas
Right. And that’s entirely false.
11:06 - Election and Predestination
Matt Tully
So Calvin is known for a number of things, not least of all his understanding of election and predestination. How prominently did those two doctrines fit into his theological system as a whole?
Derek Thomas
It was dominant. It was a key issue for Calvin. Calvin had an unrelenting view of the sovereignty of God and the fallenness of man. And that therefore, if we are going to be saved, it can only be by the intervention of divine will and divine power. But in saying that, Calvin isn’t introducing anything new into theology. Augustine would have said the same. And for that matter Thomas Aquinas would have said the same in his similar representing orthodoxy—high orthodoxy—of Roman Catholicism.
So the idea of election is by no means anything new to Calvin. There is an interesting sensitivity on the part of Calvin that when he first writes the Institutes as a small book, you could put it in your breast pocket and it was a quarter of the size, maybe less than a quarter of the size of the final edition, the subject of election was in book one, and especially when he expanded it to the fuller version of 1539. And it was where it logically belongs in the doctrine of God’s self-disclosure, where you might find it perhaps in Ephesians 1, but that it comes up front as Paul expands on the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in chapter 1 he comes running out of the gate with election.
But then the final edition of the Institutes, and perhaps because of pastoral considerations as to how difficult election was to a lot of people, he moves the location of election to book three, which is actually where he is expounding the application of redemption. And I think that Calvin where you might find in Romans that election comes in Romans 9, 10, and 11 after Paul has outlined the application of redemption in the first eight chapters of Romans. So perhaps because of the influence of the epistle of Paul to the Romans on his thinking, which was considerable, and perhaps for pastoral reasons that you really can’t understand election until first of all you’re saved and redeemed. And pastorally the place to talk about election is after you have talked about how a person is justified and how a person comes into union with Christ.
Matt Tully
That’s so interesting. We can tend to think of Calvin the theologian, Calvin the ivory-tower scholar, and we forget that Calvin was first and foremost a pastor who really was trying to minister to normal people in his congregation. What do we know about him as a pastor?
Derek Thomas
He was never ordained, of course. He never went to seminary. So he’s this unique figure who finds himself in Geneva with a colossal mind and he’s published his first book at twenty-seven years old. And it’s the Institutes of the Christian Religion, but by the 1540s and 50s, and up until his death in 1564, Calvin is preaching a dozen sermons or perhaps a little more every two weeks. So he’s preaching a sermon almost every single day. His commitment is to expound the Scriptures.
When the Reformation came to Geneva it was declared to be reformed by the civil authorities. It wasn’t the church that did it. But the people of Geneva didn’t all suddenly get saved in a Pentecost-like moment. No. They now have to be taught and they’re ignorant. They don’t know anything. And moreover they don’t know their Bible. So Calvin is committed to preaching through the books of the Bible, verse by verse, largely Old Testament during the week and New Testament and Psalms on Sundays. And he went to a consistory meeting on a Thursday afternoon that considered issues of church discipline. Several hours he wrote letters. Many, many letters every day, and these were sometimes to people of great importance, but sometimes they were just to members of his own congregation.
So he was first of all a pastor and secondly a scholar. But he was never in an ivory tower. All of his theological thinking was done in debate and in council with others and largely there is a connection between his preaching, his writing of commentaries, and his theological writing, and especially the Institutes of the Christian Religion. And all three of those areas have a symbiotic relationship. Indeed if you open the Institutes there’s very little in the Institutes by way of exegesis because he understands that you go through his commentaries for the exegetical work . . . and so in the Institutes there’s a bringing together of theological truth. But it’s often done with almost scant reference to any exegetical work.
Matt Tully
I want to return to his Institutes in just a moment. But what was he like as a counselor? A lot of pastors today spend a lot of their time counseling people, whether it’s related to their marriage or related to something they’re facing at work or some struggle in their own personal life. Do we have any record of what Calvin was like in that context?
Derek Thomas
Yes, to some extent. The minutes of the consistory, where some of that counseling would be done and the shape of that counseling—we have those minutes and those minutes are still being translated. They were taken down in hieroglyphics and in shorthand and so we do have some knowledge of what that would look like.
Who do you want to have lunch with, Luther or Calvin? Calvin was not a funny man. His disposition, I think, was always serious. He didn’t much like the company of fools. And I think he led this extraordinarily busy life, maybe sleeping only four hours a night most of his life, in constant pain of some description or another, and all without any form of modern medicine to alleviate that pain. I’m conscious here of a range of counseling and views about counseling in our time, even from a biblical and reformed point of view—but a great deal of counseling in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was teaching people what the Bible actually said. And it was very much led by what you know and what you understand about Scripture. In Calvin’s sermons there’s a lot of counseling—counseling to the intellect, counseling to the affections, counseling to unbelief, counseling to issues of relating to one another, and so on. The consistory dealt with a great deal of marital issues. Marital issues that now had reached a disciplinary status.
Matt Tully
Speaking of marriage. Do we know if Calvin was ever married?
Derek Thomas
Yes. It was very important for the Reformers to be married to remove the mythology of celibacy, which had been advocated by the medieval church and to underline the goodness and propriety of sex, of marital union. And so it was extremely important for the reformers to marry. It’s actually a very amusing moment when they advertise in various neighboring cities that Calvin requires a wife and Calvin made some remark that the only qualities that he looked for was that she would care for him and take care of his needs. And he was not a romantic, but he married Idelette de Bure, who was a former nun and a widow with two children of her own. And it was a very sweet marriage. I think it was a perfect marriage for Calvin.
One wonders how much of Calvin she actually saw because he worked all day and late into the night. They had a child who died at childbirth and Idelette herself died not long afterward from the effects of the birth. And Calvin writes very movingly and touchingly about the pain of bereavement, and it’s the only moment of tenderness that we actually have of Calvin’s relationship with her. But historians, I think, will agree that it appears to have been a very happy marriage and a perfect sort of relationship for somebody of Calvin’s temperament and calling.
Matt Tully
Yeah. You mentioned Martin Luther earlier and as many will know we have so much more, it sounds like, insight into Luther’s kind of daily life and thoughts and his relationship with his wife, who he wrote about fairly often it seems. When we think of the Reformation we probably often think of Luther first. What kind of relationship did Luther and Calvin have with one another? Did they live at the same time? Were they ever in contact?
Derek Thomas
It’s one of the amazing things about the Reformation that they had no contact whatsoever. They never met. The truth of the matter is that Calvin didn’t speak German and Luther didn’t speak French. And so there was immediately a linguistic barrier. There was also a national barrier. Luther was German with a capital G, promoted German ideas and German-ness, maybe too much—that’s an interesting issue in itself. Also, Luther was old enough to be Calvin’s father. So they were a different generation. And the only period when Calvin could have had any relationship with Luther was the period when Calvin was still relatively young. Calvin, I think, would have disagreed with Luther on a number of things. He’s very careful never to disagree publicly with Luther. It would have been disastrous for the Reformation had he done that. And even in the area where they would have come to very sharply different views on the supper, Calvin was very careful not to address Luther himself. He went after Lutherans but not Luther himself because, I think, Luther rightly had the status of the father of the Reformation. And so his comment is deferential towards authority.
But they never met. They didn’t correspond. And one wonders how the Reformation would have gone had they met or had they been able to correspond?
Matt Tully
You’ve studied both of them at length—what do you think that conversation would have been like if they were to sit down for dinner together?
Derek Thomas
Oh, I would pay good money to hear it. I just think they were very different temperaments and very different characters. I’m not a scholar on Luther at all—but he was a larger-than-life figure. Luther said outrageous things over lunch and in meetings in the pub over a glass of ale, and the table talk contains many offensive things he said—I mean, it was offensive in the sixteenth century and it sure is offensive now. And I think Calvin was much more careful about how he said things and had very little time for anything other than his work.
Matt Tully
So now turning to Calvin’s most famous book, and you’ve mentioned it already—Institutes of the Christian Religion. You’ve hinted at a few of these things, but maybe tell us why you wrote this book? What was the original purpose for writing it?
Derek Thomas
Well, you have to think of a lawyer, which he was. He had trained to be a lawyer. It was his father’s wish. His father fell out with the Catholic Church and then died, and then Calvin returned to what had always been his first love, and that was theology—not necessarily to become a priest, but he was in France, had become involved with the Reformation, had contributed perhaps a sermon or two that was pivotal to the Reformation in France, and suddenly falls foul of the authorities, and especially the king, to the point where he has to leave. He becomes an exile and he will never be back in France ever again because he would have been executed.
And at that point he’s a student, he’s been involved in some pranks about putting posters with some graphic drawings and words about the king and the Reformation, and then he disappears for a while and then reemerges two or three years later, and now for sure he has been converted—and very solidly converted. He’s written like a PhD on de Clementier. And he’s written a book about soul sleep, what happens in the intermediate state. And he writes this book, Psychopannychia, it’s a young man’s book and not terribly well written perhaps by later standards of his of his writing. But at twenty-six he writes the Institutes of the Christian Religion, and publishes it at twenty-seven. And no one has heard of this man. He is a nobody. He’s come out of nowhere and with the self-confidence to write what basically is a compendium of theology. It’s a systematic theology and has a very definite structure, although it’s a quarter of the size of what it will become, but this book has been published and people are beginning to read it and suddenly they realize that they’ve got a genius on their hands. And he is making his way through Geneva. He’s in a hotel of some description and I think his intent was to go to somewhere in Europe and become that ivory-tower scholar, perhaps teach at the university and write books, and I think that’s what Calvin wanted to do. And it was William Farel who put the heebie jeebies on him, threatening that God would punish him and strike him dead if he attempted to leave the city. And when those kinds of statements were made in the sixteenth century you took them seriously, so Calvin remains.
So the Institutes becomes a book that Calvin is constantly working on and over the next twenty to twenty-five years this book is going to grow to four times its original size. It’s going to take on a very definite shape, perhaps patterned after the Apostles’ Creed and perhaps patterned especially after Paul’s letter to the Romans. And when you read the Institutes today, if you pick up a complete edition—and there are many editions of the Institutes and recently the 1542 French edition has been published in an English translation by the Banner of Truth for example—it’s about half the size of the final version and in that sense a lot easier to read. But if you read the full complete edition of the Institutes it’s difficult to read because there are bits of it that are completely out of proportion to other bits of it. And the fact is that if a doctrine isn’t controversial in the sixteenth century—so the doctrine of the Trinity, for example—it receives very little attention. But if a doctrine is controversial and Calvin has got involved in the controversy then that section of the Institutes may be ten to twenty times the length that it perhaps needs to be because you have the full description of whoever it is that Calvin is contradicting.
33:00 - Misconceptions about Calvin
Matt Tully
So what would you say is the biggest misconception related to Calvin that you’ve encountered in your own life and ministry?
Derek Thomas
That he was fixated on election and predestination and you can’t get beyond that. And you miss the fact that Calvin was a preacher and pastor as much as, if not more than, he was a theologian. He loved the Bible and believed that the way to promote godliness was by making the Bible and its truth comprehensible to men and women.
Matt Tully
Well, Derek, thank you so much for joining us today on The Crossway Podcast and for sharing some of your own experiences with Calvin, your own understanding of him and his life. We appreciate you taking the time.
Derek Thomas
Thank you. It’s been fun.
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