John Calvin belonged to the second generation of reformers. Calvin was a Frenchman, born in 1509 at Noyon in Picardy, and trained in law and humanist scholarship. Sometime in the early 1530s he underwent what he later called a sudden conversion. In 1534, after posters attacking the mass appeared in Paris and other towns, reportedly even on the door of the king's bedchamber, the French crown cracked down on Protestants, and Calvin fled.

The Institutes

In Basel, Calvin published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, a compact Latin handbook dedicated to the king of France that defended the persecuted evangelicals as loyal subjects. He kept expanding it for the rest of his life; the final Latin edition of 1559 was a full system of theology, and his French versions helped shape French prose. Calvin agreed with Luther on justification by faith and the authority of Scripture. He differed in emphasis: he stressed God's sovereignty, the ordering of the whole Christian life, and the church's need for discipline. On the Lord's Supper he took a middle road, teaching that believers truly feed on Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, though not in a bodily way.

Predestination

The doctrine most linked with Calvin's name was not unique to him; Augustine, Luther and Zwingli all taught forms of it. Calvin stated it with unusual sharpness. Calvin taught that God, from eternity, chose some people for salvation and passed over others, a view often called double predestination. He meant it as comfort: salvation rests on God's unchanging choice, not on human weakness. Critics, Catholic and later Protestant, objected that it made God seem arbitrary and undermined human freedom. Dutch followers of Jacobus Arminius pressed that objection, and the Synod of Dort rejected their position in 1618 and 1619.

Geneva

Calvin passed through Geneva in 1536, just after the city had broken with its bishop and its duke. The reformer Guillaume Farel warned him of God's curse if he left, so he stayed. Clashes with the city's leaders got him expelled in 1538; he spent three productive years in Strasbourg and returned in 1541 largely on his own terms. His Ecclesiastical Ordinances of that year set out four church offices: pastors, teachers (called doctors), elders and deacons. Deacons cared for the poor and sick. Elders sat with the pastors in the Consistory, a body of pastors and lay elders that oversaw the morals and beliefs of Genevans. It summoned people for quarreling, drunkenness, dancing, adultery or lingering Catholic practices, and could bar them from communion; it also mediated family disputes and heard complaints from abused or abandoned spouses.

Servetus

Geneva's darkest episode came in 1553. The Spanish physician and scholar Michael Servetus, already condemned by Catholic authorities in France, arrived in Geneva. Servetus was burned in Geneva in 1553 for denying the Trinity. Calvin fully supported the conviction, though he had asked for the quicker death of beheading. Most Protestant leaders approved. A few did not, and their protest is part of the story of toleration in the final level.

The Reformed international

Geneva became a training school for refugees. In 1559 Calvin founded an academy to educate pastors, many of whom returned to France as preachers to the Protestant communities called Huguenots. Reformed churches, the family of churches shaped by Zurich and Geneva, spread to the Netherlands, parts of Germany, Hungary and Poland. John Knox, who had lived in Geneva, led the Reformation that made Scotland Protestant in 1560. English Puritans looked to Geneva as a model of a reformed church.

Reformed Protestants living under hostile rulers also developed political ideas. After the massacres of 1572 in France, Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor, and other writers argued that lesser magistrates, such as nobles and town officials, could lawfully resist a ruler who became a tyrant. These theories of limited government, built on ideas of covenant and consent, fed later arguments for constitutional rights. Max Weber's famous thesis linking Calvinism with the spirit of capitalism is a classic debate in sociology and returns briefly in the final level.

Worked example: a Thursday at the Consistory

Suppose it is a Thursday in 1550, the day the Consistory usually met. Before it stand a woman who still mutters a Latin prayer to the Virgin, two neighbors who came to blows over a boundary hedge, and a husband accused of beating his wife. The woman is told to learn the catechism and attend sermons. The neighbors are made to reconcile in front of the elders. The husband is rebuked and warned that he will be barred from communion if it happens again. Was this tyranny over private life, or a community taking responsibility for its weakest members? Historians who have read the Consistory's registers find both: a body that pried into dancing and gossip, and also one of the few places where a battered wife could bring her complaint and be heard by men with power to act.