John Calvin And The Early French Reformation: Political And Theological Responses To Persecution, 1533–1562

By Ryan J. Ross

[Ryan J. Ross, who received his MA in history from Florida Atlantic University, currently serves as an administrator at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL.]

In 1533, one year before the Affaire des Placards, when anti-Catholic posters appeared throughout Paris and other French cities provoking protracted religious persecution, the Protestant reformer-in-waiting, John Calvin, wrote from Paris to his close friend François Daniel, already affirming, “I need not say that these are troublous times; they speak for themselves.”[1] By this time it was likely that Calvin’s sudden conversion to the Reformed faith had already taken place and he was acutely aware of the precarious situation the French Protestants and reform movement were in. Within ten months after the placards appeared in Paris (including one on the door of King Francis I’s bedchamber) on October 17, 1534, the royal government unleashed a violent wave of persecution, leading to banishments, confiscations of goods, and at least twenty executions.[2]

It comes as no surprise then that by the end of 1534, Calvin departed from France to pursue his studies and writing in a safer environment. Biographer Bruce Gordon has stated that this year was perhaps the most intriguing of the Reformer’s life, not only due to what we know about Calvin but also because of the many unanswered questions concerning this period of his life.[3] Calvin had already begun writing what was probably his first post-conversion work, Psychopannychia (Soul Sleep), on a topic that, according to Gordon, must have bewildered Calvin’s contemporaries. But the work also raises an important question for investigation. “Why would a young man,” Gordon asks, “in danger of persecution for his beliefs, put quill to paper on the subject of the immortality of the soul?” His question helpfully organizes much of the subject of the present article, namely, the relationship between Calvin’s early life, religious and political persecution, and his life-long theological and literary contribution to the Protestant Reformation.[4] It is evident that as early as 1534, Calvin had begun to think about what happened to believers who had physically suffered for their faith to the point of death. And yet the heaviest persecutions were still to come. Over the years as they continued to escalate, Calvin responded by formulating a serviceable theology of persecution and suffering in support of his reforming brothers and sisters in France. In the present study we seek to answer therefore two related questions: (1) How did John Calvin, while living in Geneva and Strasbourg, respond to the French political situation, including the government’s persecution of Protestants? and (2) How did that response change over the duration of his three-decade long “exile,” and why? While indebted to historians and theologians who have contextualized Calvin’s thought within various historical and exegetical traditions, this article’s main contribution lies in its emphasis that Calvin’s experiences were both historically meaningful and especially formative to his thinking.[5] That is to say, the circumstantial issues affecting John Calvin’s sixteenth-century life are as crucial to understanding his sixteenth-century thought as are his methodological approaches and theological traditions.

The conversion of John Calvin has been one of the most debated aspects of his life. What has been almost entirely neglected in the historiography on his conversion, however, is perhaps the most useful in understanding both his change of thought and his sustained interest in the subject of religious persecution. Despite the repeated scrutiny of Calvin’s early letters, his Prefatory Address to King Francis I, and well-known statements in his preface to the Commentary on the Psalms, written on July 22, 1557, many have failed to understand his conversion as a response to the changing political and religious landscape of France. His conversion to the Reformed faith amidst heightened persecution in France should be viewed not only as the terminus a quo of his faith but also the intellectual basis for his later responses to persecution.[6]

Quirinus Breen made an ambitious attempt to uncover the mental-world of the young John Calvin in the early 1930s. Breen understood French humanism as the controlling force in Calvin’s early life, arguing that the French humanist movement had “practically spent its force at about the time of his conversion.”[7]

For Breen, Calvin’s commentary De Clementia (1532) was an “exceptionally useful document” in highlighting Calvin’s humanism, providing him an explanatory framework for his conversion.[8] So important was the publication of De Clementia for Calvin, according to Breen, that its lack of success was “a deep wound to his spirit” and “may have been one of the factors conditioning his conversion to radical Protestantism.”[9] After Calvin’s “high hopes of attaining a name as a humanist” through its publication were not met, he “in turn react[ed] against the humanists as a group.”[10]

François Wendel has recognized that the Commentary on the De Clementia introduces important questions for Calvin’s conversion, but has found nothing to confirm the hypothesis that it was written in the hope of bringing Francis I “to consider a policy of flexibility and clemency towards the Protestants, much as Seneca wrote this same treatise in order to persuade Nero to be more benevolent to his subjects.”[11] Apart from the observation that Calvin’s humanist convictions guaranteed his opposition to violent persecution, Wendel provides no analysis of the transformative role persecution played in the thought of John Calvin.[12] The historical agents at work in the conversion of Calvin were the excommunication of his father and his gradual orientation away from humanism by 1534. Wendel’s contribution is similar to that of Quirinus Breen and French historian Abel Lefranc, whose earlier work points to the excommunication of Calvin’s father as a critical juncture in his religious thought.[13]

Catholic theologian Alexandre Ganoczy takes up the question of Calvin’s conversion directly in Le jeune Calvin: Genèse et évolution de sa vocation réformatrice (1966).[14] Ganoczy has aimed to present a new hypothesis in which he argues that Calvin’s “subita conversio” was not to be considered a break from the Roman Church or the superstitions of the papacy, but rather that his description in the preface to the Commentary on the Psalms should be understood theologically, not historically.[15] Ganoczy argues that Calvin has not described in the preface a chronology which led to his conversion, but that the meaning of “sudden conversion” should be understood in “a theological-prophetic context and not in a purely historical point of view.”[16] Ganoczy has, therefore, departed from an early but growing scholarly consensus around the events and dates of his conversion, stating that “historians have incorrectly emphasized the negative aspect of Calvin’s conversion, seeing it as a break with the ‘superstitions of the papacy’ and the ‘Roman Church’ rather than as a response to a call to reform the Church.”[17] In trying to find a positive aspect to Calvin’s conversion, Ganoczy has, however, been forced to abandon “determining its date, place, and setting.”[18]

Historian T. H. L. Parker has aptly concluded that “on no part of Calvin’s life has so much energy been bestowed, so much ingenuity exercised, as upon the date, the manner, the causes, and the agencies of his conversion…. Such different views, such different datings have been advanced, and after nigh a century of Calvin-study so little certainty has been achieved.”[19] Parker has argued, at times confusedly, that it is not impossible that Calvin was converted to the evangelical faith by some of his friends.[20] After stating that Calvin’s first biographers, Theodore Beza and Nicolas Colladon, made Pierre Robert Olivétan responsible for Calvin’s conversion, Parker suggests that Olivétan was “an influence, even the leading influence, in his conversion.”[21] Parker also identifies Melior Wolmar, Calvin’s contemporary in Paris, as the one who won him to the evangelical faith.[22] In addition to these friends, however, Parker admits that one should not overlook the possibility that family troubles with the Noyon church authorities brought about a “loosening of the ties [with Catholicism].”[23] Parker has also curiously used dates differing from those of many Calvin scholars, placing his conversion around 1529 or early 1530, suggesting that Calvin’s “mixing in reformist circles” was evidence it had already occurred.[24] Parker has therefore placed his conversion during his legal studies and before he went to Paris for further studies and finished the Commentary on De Clementia.[25]

Calvin biographers William J. Bouwsma and Alister McGrath have been much more cautious in recounting Calvin’s conversion. Bouwsma has maintained that Calvin’s description of it consisted almost entirely of one passage in the preface to the Psalms, written in 1557, almost “thirty years after the supposed event, to which, during this long interval, he had never before directly referred.”[26] Bouwsma goes on to state that “the passage seems to me almost useless as evidence for what it is commonly taken to demonstrate.”[27] More importantly for Bouwsma, “whatever may be said of his ‘conversion,’ it did not obliterate but built on his evangelical humanism.”[28] Alister McGrath’s effort to resolve the “many riddles” generated by Calvin’s conversion has resulted in a very persuasive, yet incomplete attempt at answering the question, “What historical and human agencies were employed by the ‘providence of God’?”[29] McGrath has clearly recognized the import of John Calvin’s leave from Paris, presumably following Nicholas Cop’s famous rectoral address. “Events,” McGrath notes, “brought home to Calvin the importance of his developing religious views. These were not ideas conceived and debated in ivory towers; they were ideas which threatened to destabilize a city and a kingdom, and which identified Calvin as a marked man.”[30] McGrath also perceptively notes that Calvin’s resignation of the chaplaincy of La Gésine on May 4, 1534, “may point to a watershed in Calvin’s career.”[31] If this is the moment of Calvin’s institutional break with the Catholic Church, then, according to McGrath, this might suggest that his conversion occurred shortly beforehand. McGrath, unfortunately, goes no further, stating that this remains only conjecture.[32]

Bruce Gordon’s and H. B. Lee’s scholarship has been some of the most recent in the field of Calvin studies. Gordon’s recent biography, Calvin (2009), has attempted to reconcile Calvin’s preface to the Psalms and an earlier work, Calvin’s Reply to Sadoleto (1539), in which “his conversion” was described as more of a process. Gordon claims, “There is no Road to Damascus moment, no flash of light; rather it is the story of a young man whose spiritual life was increasingly in conflict with the world around him. This is an early expression of Calvin as a stranger in a foreign land.”[33] Calvin, Gordon believes, was describing in the preface a gradual, progressive reality expressed in theological terminology.[34] Gordon relies almost entirely on Heiko Oberman’s work, which views the Reply to Sadoleto and the preface to the Psalms as expressing the same truth of conversion from two different angles. The Reply “reports on the horizontal search for truth by trial and error,” and the preface “highlights the vertical dimension of conversion as unprepared illumination from above.”[35] Oberman, content with the assumption that “the best arguments advanced in the scholarly tradition strongly point to the year 1533,” remains unconcerned with the subject of dating the conversion.[36] H. B. Lee’s work has attempted only to correct a growing scholarly consensus that understands Calvin’s conversion not as sudden and decisive but gradual.[37] Lee has sought to link Calvin’s own words with his theological understanding of God’s providence. For Lee, the conversion of Calvin was “not the product of a gradual recognition and human decision, but the event of a decisive regeneration, resulting in true and evangelical faith under the sovereign guidance of God.”[38] While there is some novelty to Lee’s analysis, it is evident that Ganoczy’s theological-prophetic interpretation has found revised expression.

Many of these interpretations of John Calvin’s conversion—and the earthly, historical agents responsible for it—have much to commend them, but they each have ignored the agents Calvin himself cited as necessitating a response to the reformed faith and the governmental persecution against it. For him the witness and experience of religious persecution acted as a catalyst, helping him to recognize apparent political and legal abuses of French evangelicals and perceive the errors of Catholicism, to which he had previously been so obstinately devoted. This fact becomes all the more revealing when analyzing the language Calvin used to describe the persecuting Catholics, from whom he had only recently separated.

In Calvin’s Prefatory Address to Francis I of France, he made clear the connection between religious persecution and his antipathy toward Catholic theology.[39] His address, written on August 23, 1535, also reveals how politically-minded he was in responding to the matter of French persecution.[40] He wrote,

When I perceived that the fury of certain bad men had risen to such a height in your realm, that there was no place in it for sound doctrine, I thought it might be of service if I were in the same work both to give instruction to my countrymen, and also lay before your Majesty a Confession, from which you may learn what the doctrine is that so inflames the rage of those madmen who are this day, with fire and sword, troubling your kingdom.[41]

Calvin went on to write that “you ought to weigh the fact that if it is enough merely to make accusation, then no innocence will remain either in words or deeds.”[42] Calvin was, in effect, appealing to an equitable sense of due process: “Justice, then, most invincible Sovereign, entitles me to demand that you will undertake a thorough investigation of this cause, which has hitherto been tossed about in any kind of way, and handled in the most irregular manner, without any order of law, and with passionate heat rather than judicial gravity.”[43] After writing that his interests were not self-serving, removing any question that his purpose was “obtaining a safe return to my native land,” he stated the issue directly: “Our controversy turns on these hinges: first, they contend that the form of the church is always apparent and observable. Secondly, they set this form in the see of Rome and its hierarchy.”[44] It is noteworthy that the subject of the fourth book of Calvin’s Institutes addresses these two main issues, wherein he also outlines the functions of civil magistrates and the law. For Calvin, the religious persecution in France was primarily a legal problem, though it was inseparably tied to Catholic ecclesiology.

Calvin penned these words to King Francis I in 1535, but he recognized the dangerous political situation in France much earlier. In a letter to François Daniel in 1533, Calvin identified recent anti-reformist developments taking place in France with remarkable political savvy. Calvin noted that he was in possession of “a forest of materials which furnish most satisfactory evidence” concerning Marguerite de Navarre, whose poem Le miroir de l’âme pécheresse (“The Mirror of the Sinful Soul”) had elicited the attention of her brother, King Francis I, after “certain factious theologues” tried to prohibit it from being read in Paris. Calvin stated that if he had not restrained his pen while providing Daniel with the “leading features” of the issue at hand, “it would grow almost into a goodly volume.”[45]

Calvin was therefore no stranger to anti-reformist events at the time of his conversion. Not long after this experience, in fact, religious persecution of the French evangelicals grew to such a height in Paris in the early 1530s that Calvin made arrangements to leave the city and, soon afterward, the country. There is little doubt that his eventual exile was a consequence of the policies resulting from the Affair of the Placards, which ended conciliatory relations with French Protestants.[46] He wrote to his “brother and most trusty friend” Daniel again, in 1534, that it was of chief interest to communicate to him that he was “getting on well” and “making some progress in study.” Calvin then intimated that the kindness of Louis du Tillet, in whose home Calvin lived in Angoulême, was given for “the sake of letters.” Calvin closed the letter by informing Daniel that he “learned from experience that we cannot see very far before us.”[47] “When it appeared to me that my situation might not be an agreeable one, a quiet nest was built for me, beyond my expectation, and this is the doing of the Lord.”[48] The product of Calvin’s “earnest striving” during that interval of “repose” in Angoulême, and later at Basle, resulted in arguably one of the most important theological works written during the Reformation: Christianae religionis institutio (1536). Calvin’s letter to Daniel in 1534, however, indicated more than Calvin’s belief and comfort in the doctrine of providence; it also suggested that Calvin’s conversion had already taken place and that he experienced some measure of persecution while looking for an opportunity to publish his work for the sake of his reforming French countrymen.[49] It was in exile from France, then, that John Calvin published his first major contribution to the evangelical faith of his French brothers.

Calvin’s attention to political developments after his conversion in France has also failed to receive the attention it deserves. The purpose of the Institutes was not merely to express a confessional, systematic faith; the aim was also to absolve Calvin’s fellow countrymen and to expose the errors and superstitions of the papacy. Calvin’s early letters, his Prefatory Address (written in 1535), and his preface to the commentary on the Psalms (1557) testify to one unified experience: it was religious persecution—often justified through political efforts—which most affected his thought. Witnessed persecution was the primary historical agent that bore upon his thinking. Ganoczy perhaps came closest to recognizing this fact when he noted,

During Calvin’s last trip to Noyon and Paris a new burning took place in the capital; the preacher Canus de la Croix was burned alive at Maubert Square on 18 June 1534, after heroically testifying to his faith. We would surely like to know what new impact this scene, or at least the account of it, might have produced on our humanist’s very sensitive mind.[50]

But by this time Calvin was well acquainted with such experiences. Calvin wrote in his Prefatory Address, “I undertook this labor [of writing the Institutes] especially for our French countrymen, very many of whom I saw to be hungering and thirsting for Christ.”[51] This is consistent with the language Calvin used in his preface to the Psalms, indicating, “It [the Institutes] was published with no other design than that men might know what was the faith held by those whom I saw basely and wickedly defamed by those flagitious and perfidious flatterers.”[52] Calvin went on to state that as a result of those flatterers “many faithful and holy persons were burnt alive in France” and that the report of those burnings reached foreign nations, exciting “the strongest disapprobation among a great part of the Germans.”[53] “False pamphlets were circulated, which stated that only Anabaptists and other seditious people were killed, in order to allay the indignation of the Germans.”[54] Thus, Calvin was fully aware of the anti-reformist political developments occurring in France in the early 1530s. He openly identified Catholics as insincere, unfaithful criminals working at unjustly condemning and persecuting the French Protestants through misrepresentation and diplomacy.[55]

After stating his opinion of how French religious authorities went about pacifying the Germans when news of the government’s persecution of Protestants reached their land, he stated the issue unequivocally:

[It] was not only that the disgrace of shedding so much innocent blood might remain buried under the false charges and calumnies which they brought against the holy martyrs after their death, but also, that afterwards they might be able to proceed to the utmost extremity in murdering the poor saints without exciting compassion towards them in the breasts of any, it appeared to me, that unless I opposed them to the utmost of my ability, my silence could not be vindicated from the charge of cowardice and treachery.[56]

The publication of the Institutes was “to vindicate my brethren, whose death was precious in the sight of the Lord” and because “the same cruelties might very soon after be exercised against many unhappy individuals, foreign nations might be touched with at least some compassion towards them and solicitude about them.”[57] He then summated that those seditious people were “overthrowing not only religion but also civil order.”[58] Calvin’s responses demonstrate not only an acute awareness of the political instability in France but also an interest in the welfare of the suffering French people. It is equally important that it was not merely reports about French politics that concerned Calvin; it was also witnessed and experienced governmental persecution. He repeatedly mentioned that it was what he “saw” and “observed” that led him to respond to the religious persecution. Nevertheless, Calvin did not yet explicate a positive theology of persecution. His responses were mostly confined to describing Catholic theology—and Catholic persecutors—in negative terms, and indicate that he was not yet concerned with formulating a positive theology of persecution and suffering.

Calvin’s language was replete with negative descriptions of the persecuting Catholics as “wicked,” “ungodly,” “madmen,” “raging,” and “furious.”[59] As we have seen, he wrote in his Prefatory Address that “the fury of certain wicked persons has prevailed,” and in his Institutes is shown the nature of the doctrine against which “those madmen burn with rage who today disturb your realm with sword and fire.”[60] Calvin then declared, “I shall not fear to confess that I have embraced almost the sum of that very doctrine which they shout must be punished … by fire.”[61] Calvin was responding to experienced and witnessed persecution by testifying to the faith and providing a means of further expression for his French brothers and sisters.[62] Calvin used this providential occasion of suffering, as he understood it, throughout his career. He even called on others to make similar use of such occasions of persecution. In a letter to the church at Basle in November 1537, Calvin again highlighted the important relationship between the experience of religious persecution and testifying to the faith. He wrote that “a new outbreak of the ungodly has burst forth…. Two persons have been burnt, concerning the manner of whose death you will hear from the eye-witness himself. Many have been thrown into prison, who are in jeopardy of their lives, unless timely opposition is made to the fury of those who, already drunk with the blood of these two victims, are not otherwise at all likely to set any bounds to their persecuting spirit.”[63] But he quickly recognized the effect that this might have on others in France. “Of a truth, we may question whether the same strength of mind will be found in the others. Relief, therefore, ought to be brought to them in their present exigency, if anyhow it can be supplied, lest those may break down who are weaker in faith.”[64]

It is also noteworthy that Calvin’s notion of justice, or political equality for French Protestants, continued to play a part in his thought, even as he appealed less informedly to recent political developments. Just as he wrote to King Francis I about justice in his Prefatory Address in 1535, not many years after receiving his legal training, Calvin found yet another opportunity to implore ministers to act with justice. Calvin added in his letter to the church at Basle,

Besides, the utmost care must be taken that the blood of the godly, which is so precious in the sight of God, may not be lightly esteemed by us. We hear that a treaty was lately agreed upon by your Rulers with our King, in which some mention was made of religion, to the effect that henceforth those who agree with yourselves in their sentiments of religion, should not be punished with the wonted severity. If that is true, we must not allow so favourable an opportunity of helping the brethren, to escape unimproved.[65]

Later in 1541, Calvin would beseech the pastors of the church at Zurich to act similarly, declaring in a postscript,

Our princes and the free cities have urgently recommended the safety of the brethren to the King of France. The letter having been delivered to the ambassador, I have not ventured to add mine, informing Farel of what had been done. I beseech you, however, for Christ’s sake, that you will take care your Senate writes also as soon as possible. I hear, indeed, that the cruelty of the wicked persecutors rages in many parts of the kingdom with great fury. I expect, however, this time, that some abatement of severity may possibly be obtained.[66]

As late as the 1540s, Calvin continued to encourage others to make use of political appeals primarily to relieve French suffering. His negative depiction of Catholics and his use of politics in order to abate suffering from persecution find clear expression in his thought during the decade following his conversion. How Calvin responded to the witnessed and reported religious persecution of his native brothers and sisters was not devoid of prayerful petitions, but legal and political responses to the on-going religious persecution of his countrymen pervade his early letters and writings about his early years in France.

To understand how Calvin interpreted what he “saw” and “observed” in the early 1530s, Calvin’s life and thought immediately preceding his conversion must be considered. It is known that in the years preceding Calvin’s conversion amidst the severe religious persecution of the French people, he went to Orléans and Bourges to study law. Calvin would later indicate that this was his last formal study before his own sudden conversion:

Thus it came to pass, that I was withdrawn from the study of philosophy, and was put to the study of law. To this pursuit I endeavored faithfully to apply myself in obedience to the will of my father; but God, by the secret guidance of his providence, at length gave a different direction to my course. And first, since I was too obstinately devoted to the superstitions of Popery to be easily extricated from so profound an abyss of mire, God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life.[67]

It was in Orléans that Calvin met his dear friend François Daniel, with whom he maintained correspondence throughout his life; and in Bourges Calvin encountered the Italian Andrea Alciati, who taught law at the university. Gordon remarks that “the period of legal studies belongs, for the historian, to the lost years of Calvin’s life,” but it is not left without some light.[68] In fact, Gordon adds that Calvin’s rigorous legal training “left its imprint on every aspect of his life.”[69] “He was taught to frame legislation, write constitutions and offer legal opinions, all of which would loom large in his Genevan career. But the legacy was also intellectual. It was from this law that he would draw some of his most fundamental theological concepts.”[70] It was also during this period of Calvin’s life that he published his commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia. Published in 1532, this work offers much insight into his life and thought. Publication came at a considerable cost to him and from it he experienced severe financial hardship. The commentary as well as Calvin’s resultant economic struggles provide important historical context through which he interpreted the burgeoning French persecution taking place in Paris and other French cities. Moreover, Calvin’s admission of financial hardship during this period and later in his life affords insight into how he perceived his own contribution to the Reformed faith. It was through publications and sermons, not economic assistance, that Calvin was able to assist the reforming French churches and work towards relieving persecution and suffering.

In a May 1532 letter to François Daniel, Calvin wrote, “Well, at length the die is cast … but at my own expense, and [has] drawn from me more money than you can well suppose. At present, I am using every endeavor to collect some of it back.” He then added, “You can also help me not a little, if you will not take it amiss; you will do so on the score of our old friendship.”[71] Calvin’s severe financial need becomes clearer in his following letter to Daniel, also written from Paris: “The Books of Seneca on Clemency are at last printed: they are at my own cost and labour. The money which has been expended must now be collected on all hands. Besides, I must look to it, that my credit stands secure.

Do write as soon as you can, and let me know with what favour or coldness they have been received. What will it matter, if for some days I shiver in the cold while in search of lodging for the body!”[72]

Many years later Calvin would again express his earlier financial condition—as well as his present situation—in no uncertain terms, stating, “From my books which yet remain at Geneva, there will be enough to satisfy my landlord till next winter: as to the future, the Lord will provide. Although I had at one time a great many friends in France, there was no one who offered me a farthing.”[73] Certainly it is reasonable to conclude that after the publication of his commentary on Seneca in the early 1530s Calvin experienced severe financial difficulty while witnessing the legal abuses against the French evangelicals. Calvin nevertheless responded to persecution in France by devoting his exilic teaching career to aid his Reformed French brothers and sisters.[74] This economic reality followed him throughout his career. He alluded to it when comparing his life to King David’s in his preface to the Commentary on the Psalms: “It has greatly aided me in understanding more fully the complaints made by him of the internal afflictions which the Church had to sustain through those who gave themselves out to be her members, that I had suffered the same or similar things from the domestic enemies of the Church.”[75] Calvin then indicated his status at the time of his conversion, penning,

It has, notwithstanding, been of very great advantage to me to behold in him [David] as in a mirror, both the commencement of my calling, and the continued course of my function; so that I know the more assuredly, that whatever that most illustrious king and prophet suffered, was exhibited to me by God as an example for imitation. My condition, no doubt, is much inferior to his…. But as he was taken from the sheepfold, and elevated to the rank of supreme authority; so God having taken me from my originally obscure and humble condition, has reckoned me worthy of being invested with the honorable office of a preacher.[76]

Calvin elaborated on this point further in concluding his preface to the Psalms: “Others circulated ridiculous reports concerning my treasures,” but “if there are some whom I cannot persuade whilst I am alive that I am not rich, my death at length will prove it.”[77] These remarks from Calvin about his finances and sufferings from the “domestic enemies of the Church” are important in assessing the historical agents that bore upon his conversion, or the “commencement” of his calling to the evangelical faith, but they also suggest why Calvin thought preaching and publishing to be the most effective means to support the reforming French churches. He was never a rich man and was therefore in no place to use money to alleviate persecution in France. Whatever sufferings were exhibited to him during the early years of his pastoral and teaching ministry, Calvin recognized that it was through the “honorable office of a preacher” that he would benefit the reforming churches of France.[78]

Calvin’s early letters and writings supply abundant evidence that he was deeply concerned with the persecuted French people. Calvin applied himself diligently to relieve their sufferings and persecution throughout his life, but his greatest contribution, as he understood it, was to be found in his thought, not his actions and financial assistance. He indicated that men ought to meditate often upon the subject of persecution and suffering for the sake of the gospel and prepare themselves through careful meditations upon the selfsame subject.[79] Yet Calvin dealt with the subject for many years before expressing a more positive theology of persecution. His exegesis of Acts 8:1–4, published in 1552, may reflect a transitional period in his thinking as he considered whether it was lawful to escape persecution or to bear it in the flesh.[80] It is also noteworthy that Calvin’s comments, which were often brief, acknowledged historical differences of opinion between the early church fathers Tertullian and Augustine when discussing the passage. He also encouraged the reading of Augustine’s 180th Epistle, to Honoratus, for further consideration of the subject.[81] This fact suggested that Calvin had studiously considered the matter.[82]

In his commentary on Acts 8:1 Calvin interpreted that

it came to pass by the wonderful providence of God, that the scattering abroad of the faithful should bring many unto the unity of faith; thus doth the Lord use to bring light out of darkness, and life out of death. For the voice of the gospel, which was heard heretofore in one place only, doth now sound everywhere; in the mean season, we are taught by this example that we must not yield unto persecutions, but rather be encouraged unto valiantness; for, when the faithful flee from Jerusalem, they are not afterward discouraged either with exile or with their present miseries, or with any fear, that they degenerate into slothfulness; but they are as ready to preach Christ even in the midst of their calamity as if they had never suffered any trouble…. Therefore, if we desire to be counted their brethren, let us prick forward ourselves so diligently, that no fear or bitterness of cross discourage us, but that we go forward in showing forth the profession of faith; and that we never be weary of furthering the doctrine of Christ; for it is an absurd thing that exile and flight, which are the first exercises of martyrdom, should make us dumb and fainthearted.[83]

Why Calvin was so concerned with whether flight or exile were appropriate responses to the experience of persecution should not be surprising. This question was a deeply personal one for him. He had encountered persecution after his conversion in 1533 in France and immediately departed from his native country after witnessing anti-reformist political developments, leading to the unjust defamation and death of his countrymen. Though he employed his teaching ministry for the cause of his French countrymen, Calvin would have certainly asked himself if he should have remained in France and suffered for the sake of the gospel, or departed and given himself to preaching and writing for their faith. His exile was all the more decisive after the Edict of Fontainebleau, issued in July 1540, which legitimated the persecution of his Reformed French brothers and sisters.[84] Though Calvin was in Strasbourg after his expulsion from Geneva at the time, he was no less aware of developments in France. In an October 1540 letter to Farel, written only a few months after the edict, Calvin wrote that the King of France was “contending in cruel persecution of the godly” and endeavoring to gain the favor of the Roman idol.[85] He then added that he had written a letter to the Queen of Navarre, having “earnestly besought her that she would not desert us in a time of so great affliction.”[86] By the early 1550s, the circumstances in France were no less dire. On June 27, 1551, the Edict of Châteaubriand was published to prevent Reformed assemblies from gathering and to secure punitive measures against “heretical” evangelicals. The law specifically forbade subjects from “corresponding with, sending money to, or otherwise favoring persons who had left the kingdom to reside in Geneva.”[87]

It was during these increasing political measures against the Reformed French churches, which in many ways resulted from the teachings of Calvin and other Geneva-based reformers, that he formulated a positive theology of persecution. He never lost sight of the persecutions taking place in France and remained especially concerned with the issue after he returned to Geneva in September 1541. From Geneva in 1549, Calvin wrote to Farel, “Awful persecution blazes now over that region [areas of northern France]; let us then assist the godly brethren with our prayers. The Frenchman is as mad as ever.”[88] In another letter written about a year later in Geneva, Calvin declared to Farel,

It is a sure enough token that the ferocity of the beast [King Henry II of France] is in no degree appeased, when our brethren, so far from experiencing any alleviation of their sufferings, are more closely pursued every day. Another Lion [Emperor Charles V] is said to be making certain extraordinary exertions. We should, therefore, ask God to subdue their rage, or, at all events, to waste their strength by mutual collisions—as he has hitherto done—that they may not be able to do any more damage.[89]

On July 10, 1552, Calvin informed five Frenchmen who were imprisoned in Lyons that “as soon as you were taken, we heard of it, and knew how it had come to pass.”[90] His letter to the five prisoners of Lyons is especially interesting because its subject deals with doctrinal issues, such as vows, glorification of the body, and purgatory, a clear indication that for Calvin politically enforced suffering for the faith must be interpreted within a theological context. He was not unaware that persecution prompted many practical questions. His theological responses were therefore correspondingly pastoral and practical.

This practical theology begins to come into focus when Calvin comments on Phil 1:12–14 in 1548.[91] His understanding is that the “Apostle provides against this danger [of fearing that the gospel would not advance in persecution], when he states that the gospel had been promoted by means of his bonds.”[92]

The design, accordingly, of this detail is, to encourage the Philippians, that they may not feel deterred by the persecution endured by him…. By this instance we are taught that the tortures of the saints, endured by them in behalf of the gospel, are a ground of confidence to us. It were indeed a dreadful spectacle, and such as might tend rather to dishearten us, did we see nothing but the cruelty and rage of the persecutors. When, however, we see at the same time the hand of the Lord, which makes his people unconquerable, under the infirmity of the Cross, and causes them to triumph, relying upon this, we ought to venture farther than we had been accustomed, having now a pledge of our victory in the persons of our brethren. The knowledge of this ought to overcome our fears, that we may speak boldly in the midst of dangers.[93]

Calvin concluded his commentary on this passage by enjoining that it would be a disgrace not to associate with those persecuted and suffering for the cause of the gospel. “We must act in such a manner, as to give a helping hand, as far as possible, to the servants of Christ when in difficulty.”[94]

Calvin’s letter to the French brethren in 1559 also evinces a firmness in his thought on persecution. By this time he was all the more resolved to remove flight from persecution as a legitimate alternative. He wrote,

[We] exhort you, in the name of God, whatever alarms Satan may create, not to faint, or by withdrawing from the combat to deprive yourselves of the fruit of the victory which has been promised and confirmed to you. It is most certain that if God did not give the reins to Satan and his agents, they could not thus molest you. And for this reason you should come to the conclusion, that if your enemies plot your ruin it is because God on his part has granted them such a permission in order to prove your faith.[95]

Calvin continued that God had “means without number … to check all their fury when he shall have glorified his name by your constancy. Now when you are called to this trial all that remains for you to do is to prepare yourselves for the confession of the faith which God requires, as a sacrifice which is well-pleasing to him.”[96] Calvin concluded this letter, “We have here touched on what should be your conduct during the fiery trial. The main point is that each of you should diligently exercise himself in the reading of the Word, ... to serve him with all perseverance, never wearying, whatever befall you.”[97]

Less than three years before his death, the dedication of Calvin’s Commentary on Daniel, written August 19, 1561, to “all the pious worshippers of God who desire the kingdom of Christ to be rightly constituted in France,” offers perhaps some of the strongest evidence that Calvin had not only developed a theology of persecution, in which the advance of the gospel and glory of God was at stake, but also that his intellectual labors throughout his career in both preaching and publishing were for the sake of the French people. Calvin’s thought and theology were rendered in service of those in his native country. It becomes evident from his dedication that he wanted to express that he had never abandoned them but served them spiritually in absentia.

Although I have been absent these six-and-twenty years, with little regret, from that native land which I own in common with yourselves … yet it would be in no degree pleasing or desirable to me to dwell in a region from which the Truth of God, pure Religion, and the doctrine of eternal salvation are banished…. I have no desire to return to it; yet it would be neither in accordance with human nor Divine obligation to forget the people from which I am sprung, and to put away all regard for their welfare. I think I have given some strong proofs, how seriously and ardently I desire to benefit my fellow-countrymen, to whom perhaps my absence has been useful, in enabling them to reap the greater profit from my studies. And the contemplation of this advantage has not only deprived my banishment of its sting, but has rendered it even pleasant and joyful.[98]

Calvin stated moreover that “throughout the whole of this period I have publicly endeavored to benefit the inhabitants of France, and have never ceased privately to rouse the torpid, to stimulate the sluggish, to animate the trembling, and to encourage the doubtful and the wavering to perseverance.”[99] He continued, “I must now strive to the utmost” because “a most excellent opportunity has been providentially afforded to me; for in publishing the Lectures [on the Book of Daniel], I have the very best occasion of showing you, beloved brethren, in this mirror, how God proves the faith of his people in these days by various trials.”[100] For Calvin the Book of Daniel was proof that flight in the face of persecution for the sake of preserving one’s life may act contrariwise to establishing the church and vindicating the glory of God. The prophet Daniel was an historical example of this reality. Daniel, according to Calvin, “preferred to be cast among the savage lions” instead of “desisting from the open profession of his faith.” Calvin, then, inferred that although Daniel was drawn out from certain death in the grave, “God does not always stretch forth his hand from heaven in the same way to preserve his people.” We must, therefore, “observe how courageously holy men devoted themselves to death for the vindication of God’s glory” for “it becomes us to embrace the consoling doctrine which raises the dead from the grave, and opens heaven, and implants unaccustomed rigor in those whom the earth is unworthy to sustain, as if all the elements were subservient to our salvation.”[101]

By the early 1560s Calvin theologized that suffering and persecution were providential occasions by which God tested and refined faith as well as glorified himself in Christ.[102] His theology of persecution therefore made it exceedingly unlikely for him to encourage flight from such trials.[103] Calvin understood the spiritual work of cross-bearing as an integral part of the Christian life.[104] For Calvin, to flee from suffering and persecution was to spurn God’s sanctifying work and the means by which he prospered and purified his church.[105] Persecution, leading to death, was not to be considered a defeat in the battle for establishing the Reformed French churches; rather, it was to be considered a victory. As Calvin put it, “When God spares and even indulges the wicked for a time, he proves his servants like gold and silver; so that we ought not to consider it a grievance to be thrown into the furnace of trial.”[106] Yet Calvin often reminded the recipients of his words that it “should be a doctrine common to all of us, that as he entered glory by many afflictions, so we are bound to follow the same course … for … all the oppressions which fall out against the church are for the trial of the faith of the elect.”[107] He added to his June 1559 letter to the churches in France that “Jesus Christ did not spare his own blood in order to confirm the truth of the gospel,” so “we should not refuse to make him our example.”[108] For Calvin, the blood of Christ—and the blood of the persecuted faithful—would work towards the increase of believers in the church.[109] He implored the persecuted French people to “leave to God the advantages that will accrue from your life or death for the edification of his church.”[110] In another letter, written in November 1559, to the persecuted French faithful, he quoted Tertullian again on the subject of persecution. The selection Calvin chose, however, demonstrated much less ambivalence than his citation seven years earlier. Calvin adduced,

It has been said of old that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. If it is a seed from which we derive our origin in Jesus Christ, it should also be a shower to water us that we may grow and make progress, even so as to die well. For if this blood is precious in the sight of God, it ought not to be unprofitable for us; thus we see that St. Paul boasts that his bonds have contributed to the advancement of the gospel and expects that in his death the name of Jesus Christ will be exalted.[111]

In some of the last traces of his thought, delivered in the form of sermons less than two years before his death, he preached that “it is true that our conclusion should certainly be that he [God] will guide his Church. But this is not to say that he will guard it in the way that we might imagine. It is often necessary that he raise the dead; it is necessary that he ‘create a new people.’”[112] By this, Calvin meant that God was not only able to guide his church in unexpected ways, but that he often did it through the experience of death from persecution. He added in his 1562 homily on 2 Sam 10:10–19 that God “permits us to receive blows from the rod, and we seem to be poor people, scattered and totally abused,” but “even when this happens, let us not fail to hope in him.”[113]

Additionally, the historical as well as the immediate sermonic context of his August 11, 1562, sermon must not be overlooked. On March 1, 1562, at the Massacre of Vassy—considered to be the first major event of the French Wars of Religion—sixty-three Reformed French people were killed as a result of government-related persecution.[114] The period of religious in-fighting between the Reformed French evangelicals and the civil authorities was beginning to develop into a series of wars throughout the country. Calvin opened the sermon by reminding his audience, “Yesterday we began to discuss the two bases for a just war among men, which are: for the honour and worship of God and for the safety of all the people.”[115] It was important for Calvin that those who sat “on the tribunal of justice and have superiority are ordained as officers of God for the protection of his subjects,” but it remained the responsibility of all people to “give homage to him.” Calvin was not, however, authorizing all people to take up arms against those authorities to defend pure religion. As he explained, “For this is precisely where we should differ from profane people, that is, when we have a good cause, we are to learn to take refuge in God and to assure ourselves that he will be on our side to help us in time of need.”[116] In the last analysis, even Calvin’s thoughts on legitimate, just war were moderated with calls to the more passive bearing of the cross and afflictions, not an active rebellion against the government persecution of the French Reformed churches.[117] Calvin made this point abundantly clear in his May 23, 1562, sermon: “No matter how much those who reign are enemies of the truth, no matter how tyrannical and cruel they are, an individual does not have the right to punish them,” but “rather, let us patiently endure the shame, injuries, cruelties, and extortions of those who rule until God has remedied the matter in a way that is unknown to us.”[118]

The formulation of Calvin’s theology of persecution was not conceived or expressed at the time of his conversion. It was rather the result of years of French persecution—witnessed, experienced, and reported—and biblical study. Calvin’s early legal training and the publishing of his commentary on Seneca in 1532 were formative experiences on his thought, which is evinced in the way he responded to the persecution and legal abuses of the French evangelicals in his early years. His responses were often expressed in legal and political language. Despite his legal study and the literary achievement of the Seneca commentary—or as a consequence of it—Calvin experienced serious financial difficulty in the early 1530s, which was not unique to his early life. Despite conversion to the Reformed faith, his responses to witnessed persecution still reflected an early and under-developed understanding of biblical texts. Calvin therefore drew upon his training in law. He nevertheless repeatedly defended the Reformed faith from the attacks of religious and political leaders for the sake of the French church and his own conscience throughout his career. By the late 1540s, however, his responses manifested a marked transition in his thought concerning the suffering of his brothers and sisters as well as a deeper understanding of biblical theology. Though absent almost thirty years from France, Calvin employed his preaching and publishing for the faith of his persecuted countrymen. Instead of primarily focusing on relief from such suffering by political—and even prayerful means—Calvin’s later work reveals a theological emphasis on bearing the cross, not fleeing from it. For him, bearing the cross meant suffering for the name of Christ in a physical sense, but it also had a positive, spiritual dimension. In persecution God proved the faith, advanced the gospel, and glorified and exalted Christ in the church. Calvin therefore developed a theology of persecution, which he employed frequently in his later years for the consolation of the French elect and the edification of the church.

While it is difficult to identify precisely why this change from political to theological responses to religious persecution occurred in his thinking, some contours may be sketched with reasonable certainty. Calvin’s efforts to relieve the suffering and persecution of his native countrymen were never fully realized. From the early 1530s, especially evident in the Affair of the Placards in 1534, to more than thirty years after Calvin’s death in 1564, French Protestants made little ground in securing religious pluralism. By the time of his death, the French Wars of Religion were just beginning, and Calvin’s hope of attaining a peaceful kingdom devoted to pure religion, as he understood it, were all but frustrated. It cannot be ignored, however, that he was also a minister of the Word. He worked tirelessly and faithfully to understand the Word of God and what God required of him. Persecution and suffering were not foreign experiences to which he was unable to relate. Biblical precedents existed; therefore, Calvin labored to understand how to apply Holy Scripture to life—his and others’. Calvin’s understanding of church history also informed his view of the issues facing the Reformed churches in France. Christians had been encountering these questions for more than a thousand years. Thus, Calvin made ready use of such history and frequently employed it to the benefit and edification of his French brothers and sisters. Though it cannot be said that Calvin’s later thought was devoid of political responses to redress perceived injustices, he certainly responded to the suffering of the French evangelicals later in his career by offering a theology of persecution consistent with biblical and early church history and reflective of his own personal experiences.

What began as an admittedly sudden conversion, difficult to date, during political and religious uncertainty, ended in sustained concern to reform the church’s doctrine in the face of severe persecution. Calvin replied to French Huguenots and evangelicals throughout Europe with more theological context than legal subtext. He commenced his public ministry with legal pleas and a defense of the Christian religion, exposing the French government’s religious oppression. Calvin’s entire life, including his public and private correspondence, testifies to the fact that he had adjusted to a world of political and religious opposition to the French Reformation. Despite this reality, he remained steadfast in his belief that “if, therefore, we cannot find justice anywhere in the world the only support of our patience is to look to God, and to rest contented with the equity of his judgment.”[119]

Notes

1. John Calvin to François Daniel, Paris, 1533, in Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Education, 1858), 1:11.
2. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 41.
3. Ibid., 46.
4. Ibid., 43.
5. For some notable works on Calvin’s exegetical and theological traditions, see David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
6. The historiography on Calvin’s conversion is certainly vast, spanning many languages and centuries. I have tried to represent the most important work done in the field on this point. This survey has also attempted to account in some measure for the variety of scholarly views and approaches concerning his conversion.
7. Quirinus Breen, John Calvin: A Study in French Humanism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1931), viii.
8. Ibid., viii–ix.
9. Ibid., 12.
10. Ibid., 90.
11. François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 27.
12. Ibid., 27-28. Wendel does acknowledge, however, that Calvin wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion, in part, due to the fact that some people were trying to justify persecutions “by alleging that they were directed only against ‘the Anabaptists and seditious persons,’” but he does not develop this idea any further (pp. 146-47).
13. Lefranc’s La jeunesse de Calvin (Paris, 1888) remains untranslated and largely outdated, yet it provides valuable judgments on Calvin’s youth.
14. See, e.g., the preface and ch. 25 of the English translation: Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, trans. David Foxgrover and Wade Provo (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), 7-10, 241-66.
15. Ibid., 262-66.
16. Ibid., 263.
17. Ibid., 265.
18. Ibid., 266.
19. T. H. L. Parker, John Calvin: A Biography (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975), 162.
20. Ibid., 18.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 22, 201; T. H. L. Parker, Calvin: An Introduction to His Thought (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 1.
25. Parker, John Calvin, 165.
26. William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 12.
29. Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin: A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993), 71.
30. Ibid., 75.
31. Ibid., 73. Cf. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 355-56.
32. McGrath, Life of John Calvin, 73.
33. Gordon, Calvin, 34.
34. Ibid., 34-35.
35. Heiko A. Oberman, “‘Subita Conversio’: The Conversion of John Calvin,” Zwingliana 19 (1993): 289.
36. Ibid., 283. Oberman’s use of the dates 1552 and 1557 in discussing Calvin’s preface to the Psalms seems almost surely to reflect a conflation of the dates Calvin lectured on the Psalms and published some commentary on them and the date of the preface itself.
37. H. B. Lee, “Calvin’s Sudden Conversion (Subita Conversio) and Its Historical Meaning ‘Cor Meum Tibi Offero, Prompte et Sincere,’” AcTSup (2004): 105. The Latin phrase is translated, “My heart I offer to you, promptly and sincerely,” and is commonly taken to be Calvin’s personal motto. Lee has strangely omitted the Latin word Domine (“Lord”) after offero. Cf. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960), 1:540n6; John Calvin to François Daniel, Doxopolis [i.e., Angoulême], 1534, in Letters, 1:256-57.
38. Lee, “Calvin’s Sudden Conversion,” 116.
39. All references to John Calvin’s Prefatory Address to King Francis I will be taken from John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: 1536 Edition, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), unless otherwise noted.
40. On the disparity between the date here used for Calvin’s Prefatory Address and the one provided by nearly all translated editions of the Institutes, see Calvin and McNeill, Institutes, 1:31n51.
41. Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 1.
42. Ibid.
43. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1863), 1:4; Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 4, 13-14. I have used in a few select places the translation of Beveridge instead of Battles. In those places, I also provide the reader with the corresponding locations in the Battles translation.
44. Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 6.
45. John Calvin to François Daniel, Paris, October 1533, in Letters, 1:14.
46. For a general account of the historical situation in France two decades before Calvin’s Institutes was published in 1536, including the Affair of the Placards, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 193-96; Willem van ’t Spijker, Calvin: A Brief Guide to His Life and Thought, trans. Lyle D. Bierma (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 1-5.
47. John Calvin to François Daniel, Doxopolis, 1534, in Letters, 1:17-18.
48. Ibid.
49. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms (1557 ed.), trans. James Anderson, 5 vols. (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 1:25-26, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom08.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013).
50. Ganoczy, Young Calvin, 91.
51. Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 1.
52. Calvin, Psalms, 1:26.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. The terms “flagitious,” “perfidious,” and “flatterers” occur often in Calvin’s writings. In many usages the terms refer directly to Catholics inciting persecution against the French evangelicals and causing much suffering among them. It was not uncommon in the sixteenth century for Reformers to take up these phrases to describe Catholics. See, e.g., Martin Luther, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), in which there are eight such references, and On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), in which there are nine references, all referring to Catholics.
56. Calvin, Psalms, 1:26.
57. Ibid. See also Calvin’s letter to the church at Basle, in which he used the same language, stating, “The utmost care must be taken that the blood of the godly, which is so precious in the sight of God, may not be lightly esteemed by us” (John Calvin to the Ministers of the Church at Basle, Geneva, November 13, 1537, in Letters, 1:35).
58. Calvin, Psalms, 1:26; Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 12.
59. The Latin text presents this fact more strongly than the English translation. It was almost a sort of wordplay for Calvin in which he juxtaposed the burning of the faithful French countrymen with the burning rage of unfaithful madmen. See, e.g., the Latin text of the opening part of his Prefatory Address to King Francis I at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutio1/Page_1.html.
60. Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 1.
61. Ibid.
62. In the section of his Prefatory Address entitled “Plea for the Persecuted Evangelicals,” Calvin called it “our confession,” which is certainly evidence that Calvin conceived of the document as a public confession of his faith (Calvin and Battles, Institutes, 3).
63. John Calvin to the Ministers of the Church at Basle, Geneva, November 13, 1537, in Letters, 1:35.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. John Calvin to the Pastors of the Church of Zurich, Ratisbon, May 31, 1541, in Letters, 1:246-47.
67. Calvin, Psalms, 1:26, 31.
68. Gordon, Calvin, 21.
69. Ibid., 22.
70. Ibid.
71. John Calvin to François Daniel, Paris, May 23, 1532, in Letters, 1:7.
72. John Calvin to François Daniel, Paris, 1532, in Letters, 1:9.
73. John Calvin to Farel, Strasbourg, April 1539, in Letters, 1:112.
74. Bouwsma, John Calvin, 16. Bouwsma has also suggested that Calvin’s concern for the afflicted in France and his exile “contributed to his understanding of the gospel” (p. 17).
75. Calvin, Psalms, 1:25.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 1:30.
78. Ibid., 1:22.
79. See, e.g., John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles (1551 ed.), ed. and trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 114-15, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom45.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013); John Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke (1555 ed.), trans. William Pringle, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 1:235, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom31.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013); and the dedication to Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł, written on August 1, 1560, in John Calvin, Commentary upon the Acts of the Apostles (1552 ed.), ed. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 1:8-10, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom36.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013).
80. Cf. John Calvin to the Five Prisoners of Lyons—Martial Alba, Peter Escrivain, Charles Favre, Peter Navihères, Bernard Seguin, Geneva, June 10, 1552, in Letters, 2:351-52.
81. The oft-repeated comment about Calvin’s lucid brevity is taken from the Epistle Dedicatory, John Calvin to Simon Grynaeus, in Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans (1540 ed.), ed. and trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 12, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom38.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013). Calvin’s reference is certainly to Augustine’s Letter 228 in which he gave advice on “what you ought to do in the midst of the dangers which have befallen us in these times.” The letter (CCXXVIII) can be accessed at http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF1-01/npnf1-01-23.htm#TopOfPage.
82. Calvin was undoubtedly also familiar with Tertullian’s Ad martyras, Ad Scapulam, and De fuga in persecution. Calvin quoted from ch. 50 of Apologeticum, in John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, November 1559 (Letters, 4:85-86). See also John Calvin to a Captive Lady, Geneva, September 13, 1553 (Letters, 2:430-31), in which Calvin also appeared indecisive on this question of flight in persecution when writing to a woman taken prisoner for her faith. He concluded by encouraging her to pray for discretion and a spirit of constancy in the affliction.
83. Calvin, Acts of the Apostles, 1:249.
84. On this point, see R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 321-28; Nicola M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 31-37; Nikki Shepardson, Burning Zeal: The Rhetoric of Martyrdom and the Protestant Community in France, 1520-1570 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2007), 21.
85. John Calvin to Farel, Strasbourg, October 1540, in Letters, 1:183.
86. Ibid.
87. Raymond A. Mentzer Jr., “The Legal Responses to Heresy in Languedoc, 1500-1560,” Sixteenth Century Journal 4 (1973): 22-24. In 1557, the Edict of Compiègne “made the very act of going to Geneva punishable by death” (p. 24). See also Knecht, French Renaissance, 70.
88. John Calvin to Farel, Geneva, July 19, 1549, in Letters, 2:225.
89. John Calvin to Farel, Geneva, August 19, 1550, in Letters, 2:280-81.
90. John Calvin to the Five Prisoners of Lyons, in Letters, 2:350.
91. The text is as follows: “But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel; so that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the palace, and all other places; and many of the brethren in the Lord, waxing confident by my bonds, are much more bold to speak the word without fear” (KJV).
92. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Philippians, Colossians, and the Thessalonians (1548 ed.), ed. and trans. John Pringle (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 26, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom42.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013).
93. Ibid., 26-27.
94. Ibid., 28-29.
95. John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, June 1559, in Letters, 4:49.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid. For further evidence that Calvin had developed a theology of persecution, in which the persecuted advances the gospel and glorifies God through suffering, see Calvin’s letter to the Prisoners of Paris in 1559, in which he compares his suffering to those persecuted in Paris and states that it moved him to deepest compassion and prayer for his brothers. Calvin then reminded them, “God wills us to feel the aid of his Spirit by our infirmities…. You know in what strife you are engaged, it is that God may be glorified, the truth of the gospel advanced, and the reign of our Lord Jesus exalted in its dignity” (John Calvin to the Prisoners of Paris, February 18, 1559, in Letters, 4:19). See also John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, June 1559, in Letters, 4:50; John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, November 1559, in Letters, 4:86.
98. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Daniel (1561-1562 ed.), trans. Thomas Meyers, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d.), 1:42, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom24.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013).
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid. Calvin expressed this thought similarly in his commentary on James: “We certainly dread diseases, and want, and exile, and prison, and reproach, and death, because we regard them as evils; but when we understand that they are turned through God’s kindness unto helps and aids to our salvation, it is ingratitude to murmur, and not willing to submit to be thus paternally dealt with” (John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, ed. and trans. John Owen [Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1855], 248).
101. Calvin, Daniel, 1:43-45.
102. See, e.g., John Calvin’s commentary on 1 Peter, published in 1551: “For trials as to us are full of reproach and shame, and they become glorious in Christ; but that glory in Christ is not yet plainly seen” (Catholic Epistles, 26). Calvin elsewhere stated, “But those who regard the glory of God, and are endued with sincere piety, ought to have far higher objects in view, and so to submit themselves to the will of God as to approve of all the events of his providence” (Daniel, 1:46-47).
103. On this point, see Calvin’s comments on 1 Pet 4:19 (1551), in which he maintained, “He [the Apostle Peter] draws the conclusion, that persecutions ought to be submissively endured” (Catholic Epistles, 120). Calvin later stated, “And indeed it is better for us to suffer for his name, without flinching, than to possess his word without being visited by affliction” (John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, November 1559, in Letters, 4:84). For further evidence, see Calvin, Institutes, 4.20.
104. It is noteworthy that Calvin’s first edition of the Institutes in 1536 did not include the chapter entitled “Of Bearing the Cross.” This section first appears in the 1539 edition, which was further revised and expanded in the 1559 edition. In the 1539 and subsequent editions of the Institutes, it is located in 3.8.
105. This point, though present in many of Calvin’s letters, is especially noticeable in John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, November 1559, in Letters, 4:80-87.
106. Calvin, Daniel, 43. See also Calvin, Catholic Epistles, 248-49; John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, June 1559, in Letters, 4:49-52; and John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, November 1559, in Letters, 4:84-85.
107. John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, June 1559, in Letters, 4:50.
108. Ibid., 4:51-52.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid.
111. John Calvin to the Brethren of France, Geneva, November 1559, in Letters, 4:85-86.
112. John Calvin, Sermons on 2 Samuel: Chapters 1-13, trans. Douglas Kelly (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1992), 468.
113. Ibid.
114. For more on this point and the religious wars in general, see the two exceptional historical surveys in Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629, New Approaches to European History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50-75; Robert J. Knecht, The French Civil Wars, 1562-1598, Modern Wars in Perspective (London: Routledge, 2000).
115. Calvin, Sermons on 2 Samuel, 461.
116. Ibid., 463.
117. On this point, see Daniel Pellerin, “Calvin: Militant or Man of Peace?,” Review of Politics 65 (2003): 39-41.
118. Calvin, Sermons on 2 Samuel, 14-15.
119. Calvin, Psalms, 1:67.