CalvinA revealing new portrait of John Calvin that captures his human complexity and the sixteenth-century world in which he fought his personal and theological battles During the glory days of the French Renaissance, young John Calvin (1509-1564) experienced a profound conversion to the faith of the Reformation. For the rest of his days he lived out the implications of that transformation—as exile, inspired reformer, and ultimately the dominant figure of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin’s vision of the Christian religion has inspired many volumes of analysis, but this engaging biography examines a remarkable life. Bruce Gordon presents Calvin as a human being, a man at once brilliant, arrogant, charismatic, unforgiving, generous, and shrewd. The book explores with particular insight Calvin’s self-conscious view of himself as prophet and apostle for his age and his struggle to tame a sense of his own superiority, perceived by others as arrogance. Gordon looks at Calvin’s character, his maturing vision of God and humanity, his personal tragedies and failures, his extensive relationships with others, and the context within which he wrote and taught. What emerges is a man who devoted himself to the Church, inspiring and transforming the lives of others, especially those who suffered persecution for their religious beliefs. |
From inside the book
... Bible. His coherent, penetrating and lucid vision of God's abiding love for humanity, expressed in some of the most exquisite prose of his age, has continued down the centuries to instruct and to inspire. Like all great writers he ...
... biblical commentaries were revised and reprinted. Utterly driven, Calvin laboured all the hours the day permitted to bring knowledge of God's saving action in Christ to the people and to combat those he believed to be opponents of the ...
... Bible . Only in the 1550s , with the emergence of churches , can one talk of French Protestantism . For the sake of simplicity , I have not used the term ' Huguenot . Finally , I speak of the Catholic and Protestant churches . Calvin ...
... Bible to the world, and through scripture he saw his own life mapped out. In the Bible he found the man he was called to be: a prophet and apostle single-mindedly dedicated to one cause. His vocation, as described in his psalms preface ...
... Bible . Yet this was not unproblematic . A supreme confidence in his role as divinely appointed reformer of the whole Church , not simply of Geneva , sat alongside an uneasy , fretful sense of falling woefully short of that commission ...