[Faith-talk] Good Night Message for Sunday, April 21, 2013

[Paul]

Hello and good morning, afternoon or evening to all of you, depending on where in the world you happen to reside.  Here in eastern North America, minus Newfoundland and Labrador, the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon and the Caribbean island nations or foreign dependencies, it's still Sunday evening, whereas you in other parts of the world are in your Monday already.  Anyway I hope and pray that your day is going well or went well.

We have an article from the year 2009 dealing with the subject of church history and specifically a brief biography of the great reformer John Calvin.  This article first saw the light for us blind folks in "Torch Times" in an issue that year.  The article in question is entitled "Calvin in Cameo" by John Benton and is rendered as follows:

(2009 saw the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin.  Here is a short biography of his influential life).

John Calvin was a Frenchman, born in 1509 at Noyon, north east of Paris, into a strongly Roman Catholic family.  He went to the University of Paris, where he studied for the priesthood and then as a lawyer.

Turned By God

At sometime in 1532/33 he was converted.  He did not like to talk about himself, so we know very little about it, but he does mention it once in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms.  "God drew me from obscure and lowly beginnings and conferred on me the most honorable office of herald and minister of the Gospel.  My father intended me for theology from my early childhood.  But when he reflected that the career of the law proved everywhere lucrative, he changed his mind.  I was called away from the study of philosophy to learning law.  I tried my best to work hard, yet God at last turned my course.  What happened first was that, by an unexpected conversion, He tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years--for I was so strongly devoted to the superstitions of the papacy that nothing less could draw me from such depths of mire.  And so this mere taste of true godliness set me on fire with such a desire for progress.  Before a year had slipped by anybody who longed for a purer doctrine kept on coming to learn from me, still a beginner, a raw recruit."

It seems this unexpected conversion meant he was not seeking God, but God had pursued him.

Trained By Scripture

He was part of the second phase of the Reformation.  Biblical faith had been choked by the superstitious Catholicism of medieval Europe.

Luther had rediscovered the Gospel and justification by faith alone in Christ alone.  Calvin's contribution was to consolidate and, in a sense, to rebuild an understanding of the church.  Protestants were persecuted, bu soon Calvin had written the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.  It is a kind of systematic overview of biblical teaching (all the great Reformation truths are there--Scripture alone, Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone), but it is also full of intense devotion (especially the section on prayer).  In a day when Bible concordances did not exist, he soon showed he had the Bible at his fingertips.  He had an immense mind, and he was also an original thinker.  As far as I know he was the first writer to categorize the work of Christ under the headings of "prophet, priest and King."

But, though he was a mental giant, he was physically weak.  To blunt the pain of migraine he ate only one meal a day.  He had kidney stones and ulcerated hemorrhoids, all this with chronic asthma.

Tackled By Farel

Traveling to avoid persecution and to study, he stopped one night in Geneva and was apprehended and tackled by Guillame Farel and coerced into helping lead the newly reformed church there.  This was in 1536.  Geneva had just gained independence from the prince-bishop of the Duchy of Savoy.  This had been accomplished with the military help of the city of Berne.  But this was all to cause factions in the city; some for Berne, some for the old ways, etc. and Calvin's time there ended after two years.

In 1538 we find him as pastor in Strasbourg.  There he introduced congregational singing.  In 1540, age 31, he married Idelette, the widow of a man who died of plague.  She lived just another nine years.  Their only son died in infancy.  But Calvin brought up her two children by the previous marriage as his own.

Teaching in Geneva

In 1541 he accepted the invitation to return to Geneva.  Before, there had been a lot of animosity against him--guns fired outside his house, people demanding Communion with drawn swords and his opponents giving his name to their pet dogs! He would rather have gone elsewhere, he tells us.  But he felt constrained by God and so began 23 years of astonishingly influential ministry.

He would preach twice on Sundays and once on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.  All his preaching was straight exposition, going through Bible books making the meaning plain.

Geneva was a city of 10,000 people with some 6,000 refugees.  Eventually Protestant refugees in Geneva paid a man, Denis Raguenier, who had developed a kind of shorthand, to write up Calvin's sermons.  We now have some 4,000 of them (342 on Isaiah!).  He preached without notes, directly from the Hebrew and Greek, and this was facilitated by the fact that he was usually writing commentaries on the biblical books from which he was preaching.  Among the refugees in Geneva was John Knox, the great man whose prayers caused Mary Queen of Scots to tremble and who brought the Reformation to Scotland.  Knox called Geneva "the most perfect school of Christ since the times of the apostles."

And there, many pastors and missionaries were trained.  Missionaries were sent all over Europe, but especially into France.  By the time of Calvin's death in 1564 there were some 2,150 reformed congregations in France with about three million members and nearly all the pastors had studied in Geneva.

Twisted By History

Adolf Von Harnack, the Ritschlian church historian, described Calvin as "the man who never smiled." But his letters to his friends tell a quite different story.  Despite other caricatures, Calvin was not a dictator.  He never held political office.  Of course, he was not a man without faults.  He made one big mistake in agreeing to the execution of a heretic (Servetus).  And this tragedy flowed partially from Calvin's own view which connected church and state.  But generally, under his influence, Geneva was transformed.  Care of the poor and elderly was organised.  The city had one of the first sanitary systems in the world.  Education for the young began.  All this was done through suggestion, not wielding political power.

And really his life stands as an enormous memorial to the transforming power of the Bible and the preached Word of God.

Aged 54 when he died, he requested that he be buried in an unmarked grave.  To this day I don't think we know where he is buried.  His enemies accused him of being "drunk with God"! But his own motto was, "I give Christ all.  I keep back nothing for myself".

(The author, John Benton, is indebted to Don Stephens's short life of Calvin in his MP3 series "Great Christians You Should Know," available from Know Your Bible Recordings, PO Box 125, Liverpool L17 0WX, UK).

And there you have your church history lesson for today.  Of some interest to the undersigned is that, some years ago while listening to a radio program by the late D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that Dr. Kennedy made the observation that Calvin's name was not Calvin, but Chauvin.  And we all probably know what word comes from that: "chauvinistic." Anyway just an extra sidelight on the article.  I only included the availability of more material in case some of you in the UK would like to try to obtain a copy of this series, which sounds very interesting.

And now may the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob just keep us safe, individually and collectively, throughout this night or day and especially in these last days in which we live.  Your Christian friend and brother, Paul