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
... Zwinglian ' as shorthand for what emerged from Wittenberg and Zurich . Similarly , I speak of the reform movement in France as ' evangelicals ' to indicate that they held a wide body of views , but that their central point of cohesion ...
... Zwingli.46 Lefèvre also wrote a commentary on the Pauline epistles in which he articulated a distinctly spiritualist tendency which downplayed the role of sacraments and the institutional church. In the second edition he challenged ...
... Zwingli, was moving in a different direction. The voices of French religious reform were growing discordant. A royal connection preserved this circle of evangelical churchmen. Marguerite of Navarre was a devout and talented woman who ...
... Zwingli by the mid-1530s, we cannot assume this to be the case when he was with Calvin a few years earlier.3 It remains an attractive possi- bility, though, that Calvin's shift to biblical humanism was brought about by a member of his ...
... Zwingli were known on account of their supposed rejection of Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper. It was nothing more than a sop to appease the Protestant German princes of the Schmalkaldic League. Although the deed had been ...