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John Calvin, Reformer of Geneva, died on this day in 1564. In his honour, Todd Granger, The Confessing Reader, has posted a collect and several links to online information about this seminal figure in Protestant Christianity.
Calvin had a much more pervasive influence on Protestantism than did Luther or any other Reformation leader. As Harold O. J. Brown has said, “Without Luther, Protestantism could hardly have begun; without Calvin, it could hardly have survived.”
He emerged as a religious leader while still in his 20s, and he was recognised even during his own lifetime as a pre-eminent theologian. Like Luther, he was Augustinian in theology; both men placed utmost importance on God’s sovereignty and the doctrines of grace and election.
Not only was he the great systematiser of Protestant Reformed theology, Calvin has also had a major impact on the development of Western thought in general. His ideas on aesthetics, science, history, and civil society have been immensely influential in the post-Reformation West and remain so today. He must be regarded as one of the formative influences in the development of Western culture and civilisation.
A prayer of John Calvin:
Grant, almighty God, that as we do not at this day look for a redeemer to deliver us from temporal miseries, but only carry on a warfare under the banner of the Cross until he appear to us from heaven to gather us into his blessed kingdom — O grant that we may patiently bear all evils and all troubles, and as Christ once for all poured forth the blood of the new and eternal covenant, and gave us also a sign of it in the Holy Supper, may we, confiding in so sacred a seal, never doubt that he will always be propitious to us, and render manifest to us the fruit of this reconciliation, when, after having supported us for a season under the burden of those miseries by which we are now oppressed, you gather us into that blessed and perfect glory which has been procured for us by the blood of Christ our Lord, and which is daily set before us in his Gospel, and laid up for us in heaven, until we at length shall enjoy it through Christ our only Lord. Amen.
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