Calvin saw the importance of his life as a pastor in his own day and did not focus on his influence in years to come. When his friend William Farel urged him to publish his study of Genesis, he replied, “As to my observations on Genesis, if the Lord shall grant me longer life and leisure, perhaps I will set myself about that work, although I do not expect to have many hearers. This is my especial end and aim, to serve my generation; and for the rest, if, in my present calling, an occasional opportunity offers itself, I shall endeavor to improve it for those who come after us. I have a mind to set about writing several things, but as my wife is now in ill health, not without danger, my attention is otherwise engaged.”⁴

In his own day he was above all else a pastor who had a passion for the gospel of Christ. It was that gospel and that passion that ultimately moved millions. He communicated faith, hope, and confidence in God. A Roman Catholic Spanish soldier in the Netherlands observed some years after Calvin’s death that he would rather face a whole army than one Calvinist convinced he was doing the will of God. Reformed Christianity was not a mild and innocuous religion. It was moving and powerful.

This book is an introduction to the life and thought of John Calvin. It aims at communicating Calvin’s passion and faith through extensive quotations from his works so that something of the force and eloquence of his language can be experienced by the reader.⁵ He moved millions not through the power of his personality but through the power of his biblical ideas and words. This book focuses on the essential Calvin, a man who lived out his Christian faith as a pilgrim and a pastor.

Chapter One: Calvin in Strassburg

In July 10, 1539 John Calvin reached his thirtieth birthday. In many ways his future did not seem very promising. He had shown his intelligence and scholarship in two books he had written, but his life had been very troubled. He had fled from his native France after his conversion to the Protestant faith and had ended up in the Swiss city of Geneva. After less than two years of pastoral service there, he was exiled from Geneva along with other ministers because of their insistence on moral discipline in the church. A discouraged and embittered Calvin traveled to Strassburg, an independent, German-speaking city state in the Holy Roman Empire near the border with France. There he became the pastor of a small congregation of a few hundred French refugees. Calvin’s years in Strassburg were a relief for him as he enjoyed a less conspicuous life than he’d had in Geneva, pastoring, studying, and writing. At the age of thirty, in his second exile, his body was beginning to show its tendency for weakness and illness. (In fact he had less than twenty-five years to live.) No one could have predicted that from these modest and uncertain circumstances Calvin would rise to be one of the most influential men of his age and of the modern era.