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Great Reformer
Is freedom of conscience indebted to John Calvin?
by Barton Swaim
10/31/2009 12:09:00 AM, Volume 015, Issue 08
Calvin
by F. Bruce Gordon
Yale, 416 pp., $35
There are a few great historical figures whose names can provoke denunciations even from people who have little more than vague impressions of who they were. John Calvin is foremost among these. The variety of pejorative mischaracterizations attaching themselves to the name Calvin is incredible. He is regularly described as a bloodthirsty persecutor of heretics, a crank obsessed with predestination, a pugnacious killjoy, a religious extremist, and a totalitarian dictator.
Calvin's association with the persecution of heresy is especially puzzling. It's certainly true that he believed in the suppression of theological heresy by force--as, indeed, did the overwhelming majority of Protestants and Catholics in the 16th century. Thousands were executed elsewhere in Europe during his lifetime. Calvin himself reluctantly approved the execution of one anti-Trinitarian heretic, a man whose demise Calvin could not have prevented even if he had wanted to. And as Calvin scholars have never tired in pointing out, he pleaded with the council, unsuccessfully, to carry out the execution in a more humane way than by burning. Yet Calvin has somehow acquired the reputation of Tomás de Torquemada.
That he is so frequently called Geneva's "dictator" is slightly more reasonable, but only slightly. Calvin had a great deal of moral authority over both church and the civil government, especially after the 1555 council elections drove most of his opponents from power. But even at the height of his influence, Calvin had far less power over one city-state than Archbishop Laud had over England ...
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