A young law student in Paris who, seized by a sudden conviction, abandons his legal career to devote his life to theology: this is how the story of John Calvin begins, one of the most decisive figures of the Protestant Reformation.
Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, in the city of Noyon, France. He studied law and the humanities in Paris, Orléans, and Bourges, training that would later shape his rigorous method of interpreting Scripture.
Around 1533, he experienced what he himself called a sudden conversion, breaking with the Roman Catholic Church. Persecuted in France, he took refuge in Geneva in 1536, the same year he published the first edition of his work Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Expelled from Geneva in 1538 over conflicts with the city council, he spent three years in Strasbourg as a pastor to French refugees. There he married Idelette de Bure, a widow with whom he lived until her death in 1549, and whom he called the best companion of his life.
In 1541, he returned to Geneva at the invitation of the Genevans themselves and set about organizing the local church with the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, creating a system of councils and discipline that would become a model for Reformed Presbyterianism.
Not everything in his leadership is a matter of pride. In 1553, the Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus was tried and burned in Geneva for heresy, with Calvin’s public approval; years earlier he had even written that he would never let Servetus leave the city alive. The episode is recognized today as a serious stain on his record, the fruit of the religious intolerance common to the era, but one from which Calvin cannot be excused.
In 1557, pastors sent by Calvin from Geneva took part in the first Protestant expedition to Brazil, in Guanabara Bay. Two years later, in 1559, he also founded the Academy of Geneva, a school that would train and send out more than a hundred pastors to France and other parts of Europe in the decades that followed.
Calvin died in Geneva on May 27, 1564, leaving behind dozens of biblical commentaries and a systematic theology that has endured for centuries. His emphasis on preaching, the study of Scripture, and the sending out of workers helped shape the missionary impulse that Protestantism would carry to the whole world.