John Calvin

Jean Calvin was born on 10 July 1509 in Noyon, in northern France, the son of a cathedral notary. He studied humanities in Paris and law in Orleans and Bourges, and emerged as a Latin- and Greek-trained humanist with strong skills in Hebrew as well. In the early 1530s he experienced what he later described as a "sudden conversion" and aligned with the Protestant movement; following the French crown's crackdown on evangelicals in 1534, he fled into a life of exile in Swiss-speaking cities. The first Latin edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion), published in 1536 when he was twenty-six, gave the new Reformed movement a systematic theology of God's sovereignty, human fallenness, election and predestination, the church and sacraments. Successive editions expanded the work into a comprehensive classic; the 1560 French edition became one of the foundational texts of modern theology. The same year, while passing through Geneva, he was pressed by Guillaume Farel to join its reformation. In Geneva he reorganized worship and discipline, was expelled in 1538 after conflict with the council, spent three formative years with Martin Bucer in Strasbourg, and returned in 1541 to stay until his death. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances and consistory court became the institutional template for Reformed churches. In 1559 he founded what became the University of Geneva, training pastors and refugee Protestants. The most controversial moment was the 1553 burning at the stake of the antitrinitarian Michael Servetus, in which Calvin was deeply involved as theological adviser to the city council. He defended the verdict afterward, and the case is treated as a major stain on the Reformed legacy. He died in Geneva on 27 May 1564; by then his Calvinism had spread to France, the Netherlands, Scotland and New England, embedding presbyterian governance and a disciplined Protestant work ethic into early modern society.