Calvin Geneva and His Influence on European Reformation - Essay Example

According to George (pp. 23-25) in 1536, Calvin went to Geneva, where he was a reform led by Guillaume Farel well under way. In the light of the opinion of Cottret (pp. 78-81) Calvin was persuaded to stay in Geneva and helped manage the second major wave of Protestantism. In their ordinances of 1541, he gave a new organization to pastors, doctors, the elderly, and those who were deacons of the church. Its institutes of the Christian religion (1536) had great influence in France, Scotland (where John Knox led the reform of Calvinist), and among the Puritans in England.

Geneva became the center of a large company that reached missionary in France, where the Huguenots became so influential that a synod met in Paris in 1559 for ordering a church at the national level of about 2,000 congregations reformed. As a result of the French wars of religion, the party of Huguenot was controlled and kept the French monarchy Catholic kingdom (Hpfl, pp. 90-98). It could be claimed that Calvin has exerted an enormous influence in the realms of economics and politics through his famous teaching on "predestination" (Kingdon, pp. 231-233) which he developed from the New Testament letters of Paul and writings of Augustine.

This doctrine mentions that God has the complete right to choose whom he will for salvation, which, while ruling out human endeavor or goodness as a factor in the equation, can lead - as Max Weber notably argued - to concerned individuals seeking from God signs of their having been selected (McGrath, pp. 78-84). These most clearly take the form of economic success, rewards for tough graft and sound investment, and although Calvin himself aimed to be wary of commercial activity, placing in high regard the life of poverty, the great economic revolution of much of Europe and the United States in subsequent centuries was led by people claiming allegiance to his ideas.

Prestwich (pp. 78-79) Calvin saw the world, including the realm of history, as "the theater of God's glory," and he urged Christian scholars to peruse the past in order to discover patterns of divine providence and spiritual blessing. Calvin advocated a kind of historical scholarship that was both critical and providentialist (Prestwich, pp. 78-79), one in which the line between sacred and secular history was intentionally blurred. He wrote:"It is not enough to have our eyes open and to note well and mark what God does during our lives, but we must profit from ancient histories.

In fact, this is why our Lord has wanted us to have some notable judgments left in writing, so that the memory of them would remain forever. And we should not only profit from what is contained in Holy Scripture, but when we hear what is spoken by the histories written by the pagans, we should also have the prudence to apply to ourselves what God has done" (Badertscher, pp. 67-71). It appears that Calvin's reforming project in Geneva coincided almost exactly with the Council of Trent and reassertion of Catholicism after the blow dealt it by the popularity of Luther's ideas.

Philosophy of religion the theological teaching and political views developed by the French theologian and church