If Martin Luther started the Reformation with his 95 theses nailed to the church door at Wittenberg, John Calvin shaped the then-radical theological views in ways that still echo today.
His story started out as the opposite of Luther’s. Calvin’s father desired the priesthood for him, but changed his mind and pushed law school instead (whereas Luther started as a law student before a dramatic, thunderstorm-fueled turnaround). Somewhere in the midst of his studies, Calvin encountered Luther’s teachings, and everything changed, according to a Christianity Today profile on the theologian.
“He [God] tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years—for I was strongly devoted to the superstitions of the papacy that nothing less could draw me from such depths of mire,” Calvin wrote.
He is perhaps most closely connected with the acronym T.U.L.I.P., which has come to represent the five tenets of Reformed theology, or Calvinism:
T: Total depravity
U: Unconditional election
L: Limited atonement
I: Irresistible grace
P: Perseverance of the saint
Reformed pastor and author John Piper points out that these English titles for the five points of Calvinism are often disputed and debated, and that the points themselves were created by Reformed thinkers more as a response to opposing Arminian doctrine than as a summary of Calvin’s views.
Still, Piper writes, the five points are part of the confessions of two Reformed denominations. They also are adhered to with varying degrees by a new generation of Calvinists.
In 2009, Beeson Divinity School President Timothy George wrote about Calvin’s “comeback” among younger Christians, citing the reformer’s history of fleeing one place or another after his controversial views drew the ire of the establishment. Calvin’s physical itinerancy resonates in our ever-changing culture.
George wrote that “postmodernity has placed us all…on the border between the fading certainties of modernism and new ways of understanding the world and its promises and perils. Calvin, a displaced refugee, speaks directly to the homeless mind of many contemporaries looking for a place to stand.”
– Meredith Flynn, with information from Christianity Today, DesiringGod.org, Samford.edu