John Calvin Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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John Calvin (1509–1564), the most systematic Protestant theologian of the Reformation, has, through his writings, influenced the nature and scope of secular authority and the right of Christians to resist their rulers. Born in Noyon, France, Calvin studied liberal arts in Paris, law at Orléans, and then a humanist curriculum at the Collège Royal in Paris. In 1534, he fled to Basel, Switzerland, because of his association with evangelical figures. In Basel in 1536, he published a compendium of the Reformed faith titled Institutes of the Christian Religion, a work that he would continue to revise and expand throughout his life.

The Institute’s success gained Calvin notoriety in evangelical circles, and he was recruited by Guillaume Farel (1489–1565) to help organize a Reformed church in Geneva. Enemies of Farel and Calvin secured their expulsion from Geneva in 1538, and Calvin moved to Strasbourg where he became leader of the French Reformed community and participated in religious dialogues among participants. In 1541, supporters in Geneva recalled Calvin who, using his practical experience heading a community in Strasbourg, created a new church ordinance and order of worship that became the basis of the Genevan reformation. He remained at the center of the Genevan church until his death.

Calvin’s frequent revisions to his most important work, the Institutes, reveal an evolution in his political thought. In the first published edition in 1536, his views share much with those of the mature Martin Luther (1483–1546). Calvin offers a form of Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms when he asserts that the state is charged only with maintaining external righteousness by regulating such acts as blasphemy and should not interfere with a believer’s personal relationship with God. Calvin also largely agreed with Luther that all subjects owe political obedience to the authorities and should offer only passive resistance to even tyrannical rulers because God places all rulers in power. However, again following Luther’s line of thinking by the mid-1530s, he accepted that “popular magistrates” in some circumstances may collectively resist tyrants.

By the 1539 and 1543 editions of the Institutes, Calvin’s thought had evolved, reflecting his experiences as a participant in the civil life of Strasbourg and Geneva. Calvin expanded several sections on church organization where he advocated an aristocratic or mixed form of government. This shift had an impact on his view of civil polity. For the first time, he fully articulated a preference for mixed government, arguing that the divinely ordained form for ecclesiastical government must provide the model for civil polity. He also shifted his views on secular authority. No longer did he advocate clearly separate secular and ecclesiastical spheres. Instead he presented the Christian polity as a single whole in which both secular and ecclesiastical institutions derived their authority directly from God and cooperated to govern a polity of like-minded believers. This conceptualization of the Christian polity came out of Calvin’s experiences and offered an influential new theory of the relationship between ecclesiastical and civil authorities in Reformed communities.

Bibliography:

Bouwsma,W. J. John Calvin: A Sixteenth–Century Portrait. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Calvin, John. John Calvin: Selections from his Writings, edited by John Dillenberger. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
Höpfl, Harro. The Christian Polity of John Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.