Calvin’s Life and Early Years: Noyon to Strasbourg

When you think about what you’ve heard, what people have told you, what you’ve read, what you’ve got from somewhere about John Calvin, what comes to mind? I’m going to make notes too, by the way. Not because I’m going to hold you accountable. Oh, predestination. Big thing, right? If you know one thing about Calvin, I’m sorry? Okay, double predestination. Okay, so we’ll say two times predestination up there. I’m sorry? Election, okay, a different word for, and I may go ahead and tip my hand and say a better word for that same issue. Good. What else? You’ve heard about Calvary. Hmm? Tulip. Oh, my word. Don’t get me started, but we’ll put it up there. I will go ahead and again say this is just the most appalling kind of summary of what Calvin believed.

It’s out there. If you look up Calvinism, if you go into Google and type in Calvinism, what you will get is tulip, five points, and other such nonsense, which we will have occasion to talk about, not tonight, but later on. What else? okay well that comes into this doesn’t it but yeah the doctrine of sin uh which for calvin is roughly the same thing as self-knowledge as we’ll talk about but that’s a good very good point okay he’s a reformer good of the 16th century and really the second generation reformer of Geneva, we’ll go ahead and say, if that’s okay, in the southwestern corner of Switzerland. Anybody been to Switzerland? Okay, you’ve been to Geneva? Anybody been to Geneva? You see the Reformation Memorial? No? No? Anybody seen the Reformation Memorial or seen the little grave that for so long no one knew?

Oh, Chris has been there. You seen the little grave marker that says J.C.? All right, good. Uh-huh, yeah, for a long time no one knew to associate that little marker with Calvin because it was so inauspicious, you know, so many famous people are buried with remarkable big monuments, and it took a long time, only in the last maybe two decades when that little marker was identified with John Calvin. Anything else you picked up about Calvin from somewhere? Okay, education is huge for Calvin. That’s right. In fact, you could almost go so far as to say that it would be hard to be converted, it would be hard even to be a Christian without study. The positive way to put it is the service of God through the life of the mind. The life of the mind as an offering to God.

Tremendously important. both to Calvin and to later, quote, if we say Calvinism. Very important. Good. Anything else you’d like to lay on the table? I’m going to say here is an agenda of things that, this is some things we’ve heard about Calvin. One of the things that I hope will be clear as time goes along is that Calvin has a PR problem. most of what everyone knows, so to speak, about Calvin is wrong. And so that begins to be a place where we can start talking about that with some of those issues. Apart from those issues that we’ve already said we already know about, are there things that you want to make sure over the course of the next four weeks we talk about? I promise you, all that. We’ll talk about all those issues. Are there other issues you just want to make sure get on the agenda for the next four weeks?

The real man. Okay. Well, we’ll certainly start with that tonight. Okay. Real Calvin. Anything else? Are there other theological questions? Huh? Why? Oh, what a good question. And why did he not go back to France? Most folks probably don’t know why that’s a good question, but we’ll even start on that tonight. That’s a very important issue. What else? I heard another voice. Okay, good, good question. Okay, are there others? Good, well, why don’t we start? since the bulletin and the website and things have given this out as a Bible study, why don’t we start with the text of Scripture? And if there’s a text of Scripture that really could be placed over Calvin’s life as the text that his life lived out, I think it’s got to be the opening verses of chapter 12 of Genesis.

And Calvin thought so too, by the way. Calvin identified with Abraham. And so here is the story from the beginning of chapter 12 of Genesis 12:1 and following of the call of Abraham. The scripture says this, Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country. This is, if there’s one little piece of words, one little phrase from this whole text that Calvin pulled out, well he did, repeatedly pulled out and said, this is God’s command to me, go from your country. Calvin was constantly, very self-aware, not only in relation to friends, but in relation to his family, in relation to his adopted city of Geneva. His life was constantly replaying the command of God, go from your country. And if you like to select from the Bible a personal verse, and some people do, Calvin might very well have selected not even just a verse, that those few words from Genesis 12.1, go from your country, this almost stands over Calvin’s life as the central text.

He says, go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation. And I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you, I will curse. And by you, all the families of the earth shall bless themselves. Calvin would never have gone on beyond those few words at the beginning to say that he had perfect confidence that God was going to bless the world through him, because if there was one thing in his theological mind and in his piety that stands above all other realities. It’s the insistence that God is great and glorious and my first requirement in the presence of God is to be humble. Humilitas, Calvin would talk in Latin, talk about humilitas as the appropriate human attitude in the presence of God.

That’s not what you’ve heard about, Calvin. You’ve heard about the tyrant of Geneva. You’ve heard about how the bishop of Savoy was thrown out only to be replaced with a new bishop, Calvin. Well, Calvin himself would never have agreed with those sorts of things. Humility in the presence of God was a byword with him. And so he wouldn’t have wanted to claim that God would bless all the world through him, but he did claim very explicitly that God’s command to him was, go from your country. And as it turns out, the world has really been blessed by his name. Also cursed, you know. It certainly is true that the servant of God can never count on being loved in this world. And Calvin certainly had enemies, and he had enemies during his own lifetime whose slanders against him have survived down to our own time.

But in the eyes of critical historians who can look at these things with a cool eye, have realized the kinds of terrible slanders of Calvin that had already begun to gain currency during his own lifetime were not true. He was an enormously disciplined, humble, devout Christian. And in his time, as in all times, that attracts enemies and it attracts slanders. and people made some things up about him that were not good. More we’ll say about those things as time goes on. I want to recommend a couple of books to you that I’ve tried in my preparation for this time together to kind of hew to these. There’s an enormous literature on Calvin that’s out there in the world. There are many important books that you can go and read. I’ve tried to select two books one on Calvin’s life and one of his own writing about his theology that I can recommend to you, that they’re readable and they’re straightforward.

If anyone wants to go deeper, I’ll be glad to help you do that. But I want to give you two suggestions of books that are readily available. This is a brand new biography of Calvin that I commend to you. John Calvin, A Pilgrim’s Life by Herman Selderhuis. Funny name, hard to pronounce. If you look at it, you’d never, but if you know Dutch, you can see this is a Dutch name. And Herman is Dutch. He’s a, full disclosure is, he’s a good friend. I’m not, if he wasn’t my good friend, I would still be recommending the book to you, I have to say, is recently published by InterVarsity Press. Very, very accessible, readable biography of Calvin that depends mainly on Calvin’s letters. There are other books that I also suggest to you that are much less affordable and much less readable.

And if you want to go deeper in Calvin’s life, I can give you some suggestions about that. But I think Herman Selderhuis’s new biography from InterVarsity. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful book, and I’ve tried to kind of stick to things that you can go back and trace in this book in my preparation rather than bringing in a lot of other things, although we will talk about a few things that are not in Herman’s book in terms of Calvin’s life. The other thing, I was astonished at the price of this little thing because I looked at the book and I thought, golly day, it’s got to be cheap because it’s only about 100 pages, but it’s not cheap. But it’s still a very readable introduction to Calvin’s theological thinking. His little Instruction in the Faith of 1537, this is something he wrote not long after he arrived in Geneva, as a kind of introduction to reformed thinking for the people of Geneva.

It was meant for a lay readership from the very beginning. And there are other books that are more technical. His commentaries, of course, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which we’ll talk about. But this is a very easy… The problem is this little big 100-page paperback costs $30. I’m sorry to say, but there are used copies on Amazon for a lot less. Last time I looked, starting at $2.50 for an underlined copy used on Amazon. And so also abebooks.com is a good source of less expensive used books. But even at $30, you know, if you’re curious enough about Calvin, this is very, very readable. And when we come next week, today we talk mainly about Calvin’s life and kind of get oriented to the person. For the next three weeks, we’ll be talking about theology and basically trying to stick to the outline of this book.

Again, not because there are not other things we could bring in, but because it’s a good outline and it gives you, you know where it’s coming from and you’ve got a source that you can trace the things that we’ve talked about. Anything about, maybe about other books that you’ve heard about or know about? anything you want to talk about in terms of reading about Calvin things you remember up here I’ve got some books I’ve got the two volumes of the 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion Calvin’s big major book the thing that his greatest work he thought so himself and he was right it really is the summary of his thinking and two books of his sermons translated into English in the 16th century published in facsimile editions by Banner of Truth more recently.

Just if you want to have a look, they’re just sitting here on the chancel. Let’s see. Good. Here is a picture of Calvin in the 1550s. What does he look like to you? What do you see in that portrait? He looks stoic. Really, what leads you to choose that word? Okay, very You know, stoicism is such an important theme in Calvin’s life. Did you know the first book he ever wrote was a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, the great Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. Very early in Calvin’s development, stoicism is tremendously important. That philosophical attempt to not let emotions rule your life. Calvin’s capable of tremendous emotion. But he has this principled desire not to be. Because, we’ll talk about this, we’ll see another picture of what his desire is in just a minute. but he wants to devote his entire life to the service of God in Jesus Christ.

And part of that means he thinks he needs to not be ruled by his emotions. But he’s capable of tremendous, tremendous emotional expression. He doesn’t want you to think that, and he’s been pretty successful, you’d have to say, in terms of his public image, right? You think of Calvin, you think, Oh, very severe, never lets anything. But if you read his letters, he’s capable of tremendous feeling. A couple of examples. His fear. Such tremendous fear that he says, I would prefer to die in order to get rid of my fear. When he comes under pressure and feels he has to flee Paris. in an incident that I hope we have time to talk about in just a minute. But he feels that he’s about to come under religious persecution in Paris in 1534. He knows he has to flee in January, and he does.

And then writing to friends, he says, I’m so afraid I would rather die than have to feel this fear. And then later on, once he’s in Geneva, he had never married. he spent all this time he thought oh a wife would just be well finally he writes later on to his friend uh martin butzer who’s one of the reformers of strassburg and says well maybe i should marry it’d be good to have help around the house right so so he did in the in the end marry the widow of an Anabaptist and they were married to Calvin and well Idelette it was her name, Idelette de Bure her previous husband who had died was de Bure I can’t remember his first name and they were married nine years had two babies both of whom died in infancy Calvin expresses no grief about that He, as one biographer says, didn’t have the emotional energy to grieve over children whose acquaintance he had not made.

But when his wife, when Idelette dies, oh, the outpouring of grief is anything but stoic. He had married to have help in the house. I mean, he basically married a maid, right? Domestic servant. But, oh, she had become, he said, the most, oh, how does he put it? The most important partner in my life that I have ever had. And her death just ravishes him. So that, yes, there’s this stoic ideal, but he’s capable of tremendous emotional outpouring. Possibly that’s why he wants to cultivate this image, you know, because he has such a heart and it scares him. That’s a real possibility. Lots of things scared Calvin. when he was six years old his mother died he was he was born in uh in the city of noyon in Picardy um pardon my french pronunciation i do my best but if anybody’s really a good french that french i my ear is 10 when it comes to the french language i do what i can but um But his father had been a, had come from a long line of manual laborers, dock workers, basically.

But his father had moved up and had this kind of social mobility, I suppose, if you can have social mobility in the medieval period. It’s very difficult, but it could happen. And his father actually became a lawyer in Noyon, having come from this stock of dockworkers. And so Calvin is born in this middle-class household, a fairly rare phenomenon for someone to move up the social scale in that way. To go from dockworker to attorney, this is a big deal in the late 15th and early 16th century. Calvin’s born in 1509 in Noyon to Gérard Cauvin, but then when he’s six years old, his mother dies, and his mother was this sort of, as I suppose she would be to any child whose mother dies, this sort of ideal to him. She’s very pious, very beautiful. Calvin is her second child.

There were others. I think Calvin’s the second of seven, I believe. Yeah, I know. They were coming fast and furious. I heard the murmur. But I know I’m right about this. He’s the second of seven, and nevertheless, she dies after six years. Yeah, maybe so. I don’t know. There’s only one older than Calvin. We only know the name. And there were five boys. Antoine is older than Calvin. Then there comes Jean. And one of the two sisters was named Marie, and we don’t know the name of the other sister. But Antoine sort of followed Calvin around for the rest of his life. They were always together. That’s why we know about him so well, because he sort of becomes attached to Calvin’s household. And he’s there with Calvin basically for the rest of their lives.

Calvin’s father, Gerard, was, as I said, an attorney, but he gets into trouble fairly early in Calvin’s education. Calvin, at 14, begins his college education, which does not say anything about his intelligence. That was fairly common. In fact, maybe just a year or so late to begin college. And he begins college at the Collège de la Marche, which is a piece of the University of Paris, when he’s 14 years old. And he studies for a number of years, but then very late in his study of the arts, which is the preliminary piece. Well, no, I beg your pardon. He’s finished his study of the arts. He’s begun to study as an attorney and has advanced pretty well in that and has done very well in school as an attorney. His father then dies, and now he is free to study theology, which is what he’s really wanted to do all along.

The legal faculty at Orléans, which is where he was at the time when his father died, then confers on him the doctor of laws just because they think he’s great, and he goes to the study of theology, but that legal degree serves him very well. In fact, later on in the 18th century, the philosopher Rousseau, who’s a native of Geneva, doesn’t have any sympathy with Calvin’s theology, but he does leave behind this encomium to Calvin as having written the laws, the current laws of Geneva, which he did do. He revised the laws based on his legal study, and Rousseau said, this is the freedom of Geneva. Calvin may have been wrong about everything, but he was right about this, and he did a beautiful job rewriting the laws of Geneva. So it was very important later on.

So his father dies. Once again, you see, so now Calvin has lost his mother when he was six. he loses his father somewhat later on I don’t remember the exact date but it’s in the like 1529 2829 somewhere in there and he begins to study theology he’s coming under the influence of Lutherans through some of his teachers including the man who taught him Greek who he later on will bring to Geneva at the academy. We talked about, somebody mentioned the lifetime of learning, always very important. Calvin later on found that the University of Geneva brings his old teacher, Greek and Latin, to Geneva to teach children and young people there. Well, one of the turning points comes in in November of 1533. One of Calvin’s friends in Paris is Nicolas Cop.

Cop is the rector of the University of Geneva, but he is the rector of the, I mean, pardon me, the University of Paris, but he’s He’s a rector at Paris more for his connections, his network, rather than his intelligence. And he delivers the commencement address, what in the old days was called a commencement. When do you have a commencement address in our time? Huh? Graduation when? Huh? What time of year? In the spring. You know why it’s called commencement? What does commencement mean? the beginning, you know when the commencement address used to be? Yeah, at the opening of the academic year. That’s right, that’s why we call it that. And so Nicolas Cop delivers the commencement address at the opening of the academic year, when degrees were conferred in that time, and everybody knows that Cop is not bright enough to have written that address.

He read it, but they say, everybody in paris looks around and says okay who really wrote it because we all know he hadn’t got the goods to have done that and and suspicion quite rightly falls very quickly on calvin there’s this young bright guy who there’s been a lot of talk but nobody’s ever had any proof and well now we know that’s who it’s got to be and so he has to get out of town really fast so By May of 1534, he is in Angoulême, in Switzerland, with a friend of his for the time being, Louis du Tillet. You don’t need to know that. He’s with an aristocratic friend, okay? For a couple of, until late in 1535. Now, the reason I say for a friend for the time being is that du Tillet goes back over to Rome and then attacks Calvin later on and tells him he doesn’t have a real call to ministry.

But that’s for later. For an idyllic two years or so, a year and a half, Calvin is able to live and study in this aristocratic household, has basically no expenses, has a tremendous library, and it’s everything he always wanted. Calvin never wanted anything except to be a quiet scholar. God always had a different plan for him. But this was the one little time when God allowed him to do what he always wanted to do. He had books. It was a kind of preparation. It was a time of preparation and foundation laying for his later ministry for about a year and a half. He was able to sit quietly in Angoulême and read books. And he wrote a book. He had written a book once before. In fact, he had written two. And the first book that he wrote was this commentary on the De Clementia of Seneca, which was published at his own expense.

You know about what do you call these things now, today? These publishers you have to pay they don’t pay you you pay them what do you call that uh i can’t remember the name of them uh you know a their ego ego stroking publishers there’s some word for it uh you pay them and then they publish your book and you get a nice book well this is what calvin did he published his commentary on De Clementia, 500 copies at his own expense hardly a copy sold and so it was a failure and then he wrote another book on on the because he was very put out there were these people around anabaptists teaching that when you die you just go to sleep so it’s the doctrine of soul sleep they called it Calvin writes a book, no, it’s called The Awakening of the Soul. The soul’s not asleep.

The soul goes immediately to be with Christ. Well, that’s fine, but he couldn’t even pay anyone to publish that until 1545 when he had already made a name for himself. So he’s written two manuscripts up to now. One’s been a complete failure in the marketplace, and the second one he couldn’t even pay somebody to publish. in 1535 late in 1535 he finishes a little book and it really was little just a little handbook called an introduction to the christian religion and these other books had been scholarly and technical and he had hoped for a he had aspired to a reputation as a brilliant man on the basis of the commentary on the De Clementia and the Psychopannychia, the awakening of the soul. But this book, the introduction to the Christian religion, actually succeeded in the marketplace.

And this is like, you know, writing two fancy scholarly books that no one cares about. I mean, it’s not like it. This is what it is. And then you write a self-help book and everybody loves it. You can just imagine to this intelligent, brilliant man what this was like. But he wrote the self-help book and it was very successful in the marketplace and made him famous. Well, things disintegrated in Angoulême. Someone who, we don’t know who it was, some person whose name has not come down to us, it wasn’t Calvin, but some nameless soul got up one day in Angoulême and stormed out of church sort of yelling about the falsehood of the Catholic liturgy. And that brought attention. And every one of reforming tendencies had to get out of town. You see, once again, Calvin has to leave.

And you see why we pick Genesis 12.1 as the text for Calvin’s life? He’s always having to get out of town. Yeah? Oh, well, it was a reforming, it was Lutheran. Yeah, the commencement address had these Lutheran ideas, like that people ought to be able to read the Bible, and worries about whether you could really buy your way out of purgatory or if there really was any such thing as purgatory after all. you know these kinds of issues that were in that luther had put in the air so so yeah so Angoulême, Calvin once again has to get out of town because of reforming ideas and they tend to focus on him because he’s bright and articulate and he has these ideas and he naturally attracts people to himself who are interested in these things well it turns out that the emperor the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, is having a small little war with the King of France, Francis I. And, oh, I’ve got a map here that actually shows how this works, so I can find my doodad.

Ah, you know, so Paris is here, and Ben in Switzerland is there, Here is Strasbourg, and Geneva is down in here. It’s not marked on the map. Calvin needs to get preferably to Strasbourg or Bern or to Basel, which is, I think, kind of in this area. And you see from Paris, it’s real quick. If you can get from Paris, say, to Bern, no big deal, right? But, unfortunately, the emperor and the king of France are having this little war, and so Calvin has to go all the way down here to Geneva before he can come back north to one of these places he wants to get to. So he comes down to Geneva, and you know how long he’s going to stay in Geneva? One night. he gets a room a hotel room basically a room in a den for one night but the problem is that his friend still his friend at this time Louis du Tillet who in whose home he stayed for all those years Louis du Tillet had already gone to geneva and so he was there he runs into calvin well and And he then goes straight to Jean Farel, we usually say Farel, F-A-R-E-L in English, who’s kind of running the church in Geneva and tells him that the famous Calvin is in town because of this book.

You see, the one book that he succeeded with, this is the book that made him famous. And so du Tillet goes and says, Oh, the famous Calvin. And Farel, when Calvin wakes up the next morning, Farrell is in his hotel room, if you like, in his room in the inn, and starts sort of, well, in this sort of personal sermon that God requires you to remain in Geneva. and help us with the Reformation. And he tells him that if you don’t remain in Geneva, you will go to hell. And that’s the burden of it. Calls down this curse on him if he won’t stay in Geneva and help them with the reform of the church there. And so what is Calvin to do? Well, he takes this in deadly earnest. All his life, a point that Herman Selderhuis makes so clearly, all his life up to then, older men had directed the direction of his life.

Calvin had always been susceptible to father failures. And so here’s Farel, another older man. and his father had always told him what to study, where to be, you know, what school to be at, and so forth. And his teachers, like Melchior Volmar, who we talked about a minute ago, and others, had told him, you know, had been, well, here’s John Farel, also an older man, very certain of what God requires of Calvin, and so he adopts it, he takes it very, very seriously. and of course he stays in Geneva. That lasts for three years. He’s in Geneva from 1536 to 1539. He writes this little book during that time and does a number of other important things, sets up the organizational plan for that church which includes the consistory. Now let me tell you just a little bit about the consistory the consistory is this body that includes all the pastors who sit at one table with Calvin kind of in charge and a group of lay leaders at another table sort of facing them and and the four syndics are it’s like four mayors of Geneva are at this table together with other elected leaders, roughly equal numbers to the number of pastors.

What does this sound like? Okay, well it sounds a little like a presbytery, doesn’t it? Well, that is what it is. And these individuals, this meeting of the consistory governs a lot of things that happen in relation to the church. Not as much as Calvin would like, but some things. They have a good deal of control and can certainly recommend things to the you know, you think politics is tough in Greenwood, they’ve got three city councils. Okay? The council of 200, the council of 60, and the council of 25. Small council. Who’s really in charge. but you know they’ve got three levels and the consistory can recommend, the consistory has the power to require a person not to come to the Lord’s Supper one time but anything beyond the one time’s got to go to the city councils, almost any other disciplinary matter has to go to the councils but Calvin during this three years he sets that up well he’s frustrated by this he doesn’t like the fact that that he can’t get any more authority than this for the pastors and for the church.

How many times did you celebrate the Lord’s Supper? Anybody grow up Presbyterian or Protestant, Baptist? How many times did you celebrate the Lord’s Supper when you were growing up? A year. Once a quarter, four times a year. You know why he did that? This is what did always done, right? Well, I’ll tell you why you did that. It’s because Calvin thought you should celebrate it every week. And the old Roman order, the Catholic requirement, was that you have to do it once a year. And the once a year thing was a minimum. But the ceiling always becomes a floor, right, when you set that kind of rule and so at a minimum people would sell it would go would participate in the lord’s supper once a year they i mean the most devout catholic in say six in say 1501 might take the lord’s supper once a year at easter they go to confession and take the Lord’s Supper.

That was really devout. Now, Calvin comes into Geneva and says, once a week. And the syndics and the small councils say, good golly, we hadn’t had communion but once in our lives. Now you want to… And communion was scary because of transubstantiation. that’s right anybody ever had communion in the episcopal or catholic church yeah what what you know why you have those little wafers in huh yeah but why does it take that form rather than a loaf no crumbs you can’t make one of those little wafers make a crumb because if you got a crumb and it gets loose oh my golly it’s jesus toenail it’s in the carpet right you’ve lost control um and and do you know it was in the 1960s before most roman catholics who were who were alive then in their lives were alive you know who had been alive for a time who had celebrated their First Communion, say by 1966, you know how many times those people before the mid-60s had had the cup, had received the cup at communion?

Never. Never. The cup was withheld from the laity because wine is, you know, it’s just too hard to control. You know, they might dribble. They might drool. And then you’ve got the blood of Jesus, you know. It’s out of, who knows what people might step on it or something and you so you it’s hard you got to it’s hard to realize for modern people modern presbyterians you know we’ve got this harmless communion you know wonder bread and welches right uh and it’s hard to imagine how scary it is to to the late medieval mind and you want us to do this how often once a week that’s just crazy it’s too scary we can’t put ourselves through that every week and so four times a year looked like a really uh you know generous compromise we hadn’t had it but once in our lives so we’ll do it four times a year call it and god help us that’s why and we nobody ever asked why and that’s and just went on and on got passed from hand to hand, generation to generation, and you have communion four times a year.

And we’re starting to get people to open up a little bit to a more frequent communion. But that’s why you always have it four times a year. So on Easter Sunday of 1539, things came to a head. Calvin said we’ve got to have communion more often because it was a matter of church discipline. We want to be able to excommunicate people. I mean, that sounds rough, but excommunication just means exclude them from the Lord’s Supper. It sounds like kick them out of the church, shunning them like Amish, but really it just means exclude them from the Lord’s Supper because they’re not living, they’re living a morally offensive life that doesn’t reflect the gospel, and so we want to say you can’t partake unworthily. It’s really kind of protecting people from themselves and Calvin’s people.

The small council digs in their heels. The company of pastors led by Calvin dig in their heels. Comes to a head in April of 1539. Basically, Calvin excommunicates the entire city of Geneva. the pastors all agree with calvin that we just won’t serve communion not only will we not serve communion on easter we won’t even preach they come to the pulpits and they say nothing doing we’re not having anything we sang the psalm that’s it free to go well monday morning the small council tells Calvin and all the pastors they’ve got three days to get out of town and Monday afternoon they leave. They basically said, okay, you know, if we were serving man then this might be a problem but we’re serving God and they left and Calvin went to Strasbourg in the north and again, you know, what man means for evil, God means for good, Those three years that Calvin spent in Strasbourg really were very important, and he learned so much from being there.

He was there with another individual whose name I called a minute ago. Pardon the absent-minded professor moment there. Martin Bucer. And when you look at what Presbyterian worship is, So much depends on Martin Bucer. He’s the first person who really rethought worship on Protestant grounds. Before Bucer in Strasbourg, Protestants edited the Roman Mass. And they translated it into the vernacular. That’s what Luther did. He translated it, removed any talk of sacrifice. He didn’t want any talk of sacrifice. And so he removed all that kind of talk. Well, in Zurich, they did something a little more radical. They said, we’re not going to have weekly Eucharist, weekly communion. So they cut, well, anybody have experience with Episcopal worship? Anybody?

Yeah? Where does the, what, huh? Now, okay, where does the prayer of confession come in an Episcopal worship service? That’s where it comes, after Bucer, in a Presbyterian worship. It comes right before the communion. And so in Zurich, they just cut it off right there. They said, okay, that’s the end. And they left on that note. So Bucer rethinks the whole thing on Protestant grounds. Puts the confession at the beginning, for example. and right at the beginning in fact without any to do before that we sing a hymn and some other things before if you’re going to come into the presence of God you’ve got to do it with a pure heart and it is first thing out of the box you walk in the door and you’ve got confession of sin so Calvin learns a great deal from his three years in Strasbourg and that’s where we’ll leave it next week we will get Calvin from 1542 when he’s called back to Geneva to the end of his life as quickly as possible and then start talking about how you know God.

So we start in theology which is where I really planned to start next week to begin with but we didn’t get to the end of Calvin’s life tonight. So we’ll get him dead and buried within the first five or ten minutes next week and then we will then we’ll start in on his theology. Well, yeah, he just really started one assumes from his mother, who was so pious. I mean, she died when he was only six, but it seems that it was already inculcated in him by that time. We don’t know that much about Calvin’s life before he enters the Collège de la Marche at 14. But by that time, he is interested. And he is interested in a kind of God-directed life to the point where he’s really criticized by his peers and colleagues as being a little too moralistic. They think of him as, already by that time, goody two-shoes.

He was, yeah, was excommunicated over this issue of the wills of two priests, but repents at the very end of his life and is, as they said, buried in consecrated ground. one of his brothers actually became a Catholic priest but was ultimately excommunicated for his reforming ideas died young and was buried under the gallows after having been excommunicated once again this theme of Calvin being at loose ends in the world when Calvin becomes a kind of reformer and cuts the ties with the Roman church. He’s really just taking up family business. All right. I think we’re out of time. Blessings on you.