I’m guessing the title may have caused you to read on…..
The premise is a simple one. John Calvin is the third most
important person in history, behind Jesus Christ and Paul the Apostle.
A French refugee escaping persecution from the Catholic
Church, Calvin arrived in Geneva around 1536. The whole city turned to Jesus
Christ as a result of Calvin’s work. But the key to my statement relates more
to what he wrote rather than what he did.
Calvin was only nine years old when Martin Luther nailed his
ninety-five bullet points to the church door. So, this is second-generation Reformation
that we're talking about. Incredibly bright and magnificently hardworking, keeping
four secretaries employed at the same time, Calvin wrote. Book, after book,
after book.
What Luther started, Calvin recorded.
Calvin's teaching spread rapidly through Europe and around
the rest of the world. His emphasis on the sovereignty of God found its way
into the Westminster Confession of Faith. Written by English Puritans, and
taking their teaching from Calvin, this book became a leading doctrinal document
of its age for both the UK and the US. Calvin’s teaching travelled the Atlantic
with the Pilgrim Fathers and consequently, became integrated into the early
American documents, in particular, the Mayflower Compact and the later
Declaration of Independence.
Despite the best work of the current incumbent in the White
House, it can be argued that the United States is still the most important and
influential nation in the world today. And embedded into its early documents
and its culture are the writings of John Calvin.
Calvin's influence throughout the world maintained and
expanded the earlier Reformation work of Martin Luther. As theologian James I Packer
says,
Calvin became the most
influential man in the world in the sense that his ideas made more history than
did those of anyone else alive in his day and for at least a hundred years
after. The epoch from the middle of the
sixteenth century to the beginning of the age of Sir Isaac Newton, toward the
end of the century following, was in truth the age of Calvin. No other
description covers the facts…. Without him, pure Protestantism might not have
survived beyond the middle of the seventeenth century.
World influence? Jesus. Paul. Calvin.
Further Reading:
