I. Calvin’s childhood
Jean Calvin (the Latin form of Cauvin) was born in the French city of Noyon, Picardie, on July 10, 1509 – a quarter of a century after Luther and Zwingli had been born. He was married three times, the second marriage ending in divorce because of the adultery committed by his wife, the daughter of a refugee. His father, Gérard Calvin, insisted that his son choose the career of a clergyman; that is why in 1521, when Jean was only twelve years old, he ensured for his son the income of a chaplain at the Cathedral of Noyon. In 1527, at the age of 18, the boy also received the revenues of the parish of St. Martin de Marteville. Yet, in spite of his father’s wishes, Jean Calvin never became a clergyman.
II. France in Calvin’s days
In 1509, the year of Calvin’s birth, Louis XII was reigning in France and Henry VIII was coming to the throne in England. In the same year were published the famous books The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Quintuplex Psalterium by Lefèvre d’Étaples. It was a time of monarchical consolidation and of economic, social and cultural progress.
a) King Frances I
One of the most noteworthy French monarchs, King Frances I, ruled between 1514 and 1547. He had a knightly, warlike spirit but he also loved culture and was the patron of Renaissance humanistic arts. During his reign, the conservative spirit of the Middle Ages and the renewing spirit of Renaissance humanism and of the Reformation confronted each other. The conflict between them would end in a division of Europe and of France as well.
b) The Church of France
The Catholic Church of France was extremely wealthy and powerful. Mediating between papacy and French monarchy, the Church had to defend the economic interests of the country, which had determined King Charles VII to promulgate the famous Bourges “Pragmatic Sanction” in 1438, stipulating that the Pope should submit to the decisions of the councils, the tithes taken from the Church revenues should be cancelled, and the local communities should be free to elect their leaders. The treaty between Rome and France was negotiated in Bologna, following the great victory of King Frances I at Margnano, and was signed by the Pope in the “Primitiva illa Ecclesia” papal bull on August 18, 1516. According to this treaty, the king had the power to name bishops and archbishops – i.e. he was granted spiritual authority, while the Pope had the right to collect taxes – i.e. he was granted temporal, mundane authority.
c) The French evangelical humanists
As Sorbonne had become the centre of opposition to any kind of innovations – be they political or religious, some of the bishops realized that an evangelical reform of the French Catholic Church was absolutely necessary. In 1507, Bishop Étienne Poncher, wishing to reform the famous abbacy of Saint Germain de Près in Paris, sent a famous abbot there, namely Fr Guilaume Briçonnet, who soon turned it into a genuine study centre of Greek and Hebrew, meant to facilitate the access to the two original languages in which the Scriptures had been written. Thus, the abbacy became a centre for biblical studies headed by two remarkable scholars: Vatable, who had specialized in Hebrew, and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1450–1537), also known under his Latin name, Faber Stapulensis.
A humanist philosopher and theologian, Lefèvre had been born at Étaples, Picardie, in 1450. He was the first to translate the Bible from Latin into French: the New Testament appeared in 1523, the Psalms in 1525, the Four Gospels and the Epistles in 1525, the Old Testament (in four volumes) in 1528, and a complete French edition of the Bible in 1530. Because of Lefèvre’s numerous marginal heretical commentaries, the complete edition was included in the “Index librorum prohibitorum”, Vatican’s famous list of banned books, in 1546.
d) Sorbonne’s reaction: Nöel Beda and Louis de Berquin
Luther’s protest against Catholicism, together with the Protestant radicalization of the German Reformation after 1520, proved fatal for the representatives of the French Catholic Counter-Reformation. Six hundred copies of Luther’s reformist writings had reached Paris; the French Catholics were reading with enthusiasm the writings of the German monk whom the Pope had excommunicated and the French authorities were quite worried about it. In 1528, Nöel Beda or Bédier, an outstanding Sorbonne representative of conservative theology, published a treatise entitled Adversus clandestinos lutheranos, which was an all-out attack on humanists, whom he accused of having paved the way to heresy. Unfortunately, during the same period there also arose a polemic between Erasmus and Budé, a controversy that would lead to a dissension among French humanists. In response to Beda’s attack, Berquin published a study, which in reality was a translation from Erasmus’ works, in which he was giving twelve reasons for the fact that Beda himself was guilty of heresy.
III. Young Calvin’s studies
a) The Marche College and the Montaigue College
The years of young Calvin’s studies in Paris should be seen against this turbulent background. According to traditional sources, he arrived in Paris in 1523, at the age of 14, and studied first at the Collège de la Marche and then at the Collège de Montaigue.
b) His philosophical and theological studies at the University of Sorbonne in Paris
Calvin was a student of the University of Sorbonne where he also studied scholastic theology. In 1528, at the age of 18, he graduated from the Department of Philosophy and received a magister atrium degree. Yet, instead of pursuing an M.A. in theology, as was to be expected, he turned to law, as his father wanted him to do.
c) His legal studies at the University of Orleans
The University of Orleans was the only French university where one could study civil law at that time. He started studying there and then he moved to Bourges. The humanistic intellectual atmosphere there was very different from the atmosphere of conservative scholastic theology at the Sorbonne University. As Budé points out, French judicial humanism was a Christian type of humanism according to which the study of the Antiquity was but a preparation for the study of the Gospels.
IV. From a humanist to a reformer
a) Calvin the humanist
In 1531, Calvin graduated from the University of Orleans, received his law degree and was eager to build up a reputation as a humanist. He wrote an ample philological and rhetorical commentary on Seneca’s treatise De clementia, in which he was intent on making people notice his impressive philological and literary skills as a classicist. He dedicated it to Claude de Hanges, a former colleague at the Montaigue College, who had become the abbot of a monastery in Noyon.
b) His academic allocution of November 1, 1533
In the fall of 1533, the reformist humanistic circles inside the Sorbonne appointed Doctor Nicholas Cop as head of the university. Dr. Cop conceived his inaugural speech (the concio academica) as a sermon about the Beatitudes (Matthew 6). His academic allocution was a courageous attack on scholastic theology, which he was accusing of sophistry, and a fervent plea for a reformation of the Church based on the New Testament. Although the style of the allocution was not entirely young Calvin’s style, he most likely participated in the process of drafting it.
Between 1532 and 1533, when he was 23 and 24, respectively, Calvin progressed very fast from a moderate humanist of the Evangelical type (like Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples) to a genuine reformer.
c) The 1534 crisis
In many respects, the year 1534 was a cornerstone in the history of the Church of the West. Most dramatic events took place in Munster, a city occupied by radical Anabaptists – who had behaved like fanatics in Paris too, where the position of the Catholic Evangelists had badly deteriorated because of religious persecutions and brutal repressions on the part of fanatical Anabaptists.
d) Calvin in Basel
In October 1534, a series of executions were carried out in France and Calvin, together with his close friend, Du Tillet, sought refuge in Switzerland and settled in Basel where Calvin joined the Swiss reformers. Johannes Oecolampadius, the mayor of the city of Basel, had already joined the Reformation after having read Luther’s writings; he was also a great admirer of Zwingli.
e) Institutio christianae religionis
Calvin was now 26 years old and living in exile. Here he published the first version of his fundamental work, Institutio christianae religionis, a masterpiece of Christian theology and a remarkable study on Protestant theology. The book appeared in March 1536 and contained seven theses in which Calvin was expressing his disapproval of the Roman-Catholic polemic against the Reformation, dismissing each objection that the Roman-Catholics had raised against the Reformers’ doctrine, particularly the objection to the reformers’ claim that their teachings were new. In addition, he rejected the accusation that their teachings were dubious and excluded the existence of miracles, as well as the charge that they did not correspond with the tradition and with the doctrine of the Church Fathers. Calvin did not adopt a merely defensive attitude. He also accused the Roman-Catholics that they were the ones who had deviated from the teachings and practices of the apostles. The Institutio christiane religionis had the following structure: a preface and six chapters. Altogether, the book had 516 pages.
V. Calvin’s first stay in Geneva (1536–1538)
In the second half of July 1536, Calvin settled in Geneva, the city that would make him famous. In May 1536, two months before his arrival, the Reformation had already been introduced in Switzerland.
a) Geneva prior to the Reformation
Julius Caesar was the one who recorded the first historical information about Geneva in De Bello Gallico; the information dates from 58 B.C. At the time that Calvin arrived there, the citizens of Geneva were longing for a full emancipation from the dominion of the old medieval regime symbolized by the local authority of the dukes of Savoy and of the bishop-prince. The fact that the representatives of the local authorities were almost always absent from the city – since neither the dukes of Savoy nor the bishop resided in Geneva – facilitated the long-desired emancipation of the citizens. The Episcopal Council and the thirty-two clergymen of the Cathedral’s assembly held the spiritual power, whereas four municipal councils had the civil power; they usually elected the four mayors of the city.
b) Guillaume Farel and the Reformation in Geneva
The determination to return to apostolic Christianity intensified the struggle for political emancipation in Geneva. After having studied the Scriptures, the first Swiss reformer, Guillaume Farel (1489–1565), became convinced that the Church was in need of an Evangelical Reformation; consequently, on February 23, 1524, he held a public conference in Latin, in which he presented thirteen reformist articles. He continued with other public conferences and delivered sermons on the subject of the Reformation. In January 1528, he participated in the famous Berne dispute that ended in the triumph of the Reformation in Geneva. Eight years later, on May 25, 1936, all the citizens of Geneva gathered in a public assembly and voted by an overwhelming majority for the endorsement of the Reformation in its entirety, pledging to live henceforth by the Evangelical laws and by the word of God and to put a stop to all papal abuses.
c) Calvin’s arrival to Geneva
Initially, Calvin intended to spend only one night in Geneva and then move on. Yet he decided to stay, and on September 5, 1536, he initiated an educational course on St. Paul’s Epistles, followed by courses on the other books of the New Testament. The courses were held in St. Peter’s Cathedral in the afternoon.
d) The Lausanne dispute and the conflict with Pierre Caroli
During the first ten days of October 1536, Calvin took part in a public dispute organized by the City Council of Berne with a view to consolidating the Reformation in the city of Lausanne. As Calvin’s intervention definitely ensured the reformers’ triumph, he was appointed a preacher in Lausanne, thus joining Farel and Viret. Pierre Caroli, another appointed preacher, accused Calvin, Farel and Viret of anti-Trinitarianism and neo-Aryanism, which was a very grave accusation in the context of that time, since it involved a serious challenge to the dogmatic orthodoxy of the Swiss Reformation. On May 14, 1537, the Synod of Berne met in Lausanne and accused Pierre Caroli of blasphemy, divesting him of his responsibilities as a preacher and declaring that Calvin, Farel and Viret were not anti-Trinitarian, but true believers in the doctrine of the Trinity.
e) The Reformation in Geneva
The dispute that took place in Lausanne made Calvin’s prestige increase in Geneva too, so that by the end of 1536 he was appointed a preacher and pastor of the local Reformed Church. As early as the fall of 1536, Calvin and Farel had already started applying the program of the Reformation in Geneva by imposing moral discipline, faith and a truly evangelical behavior. In November 1536, they submitted three documents to the City Council for approval: a confession of faith, a doctrinal document, and four articles dealing with the organization of the Reformed Church and of the Protestant cult in Geneva.
f) The crisis and the expulsion
The citizens of Geneva were not ready to accept the transformation of their recently gained political freedom into religion subservience, which led to a confrontation between them and the reformers. The two municipal councils cancelled the former appointments of Calvin and Farel and ordered them to leave Geneva in three days. Thus, Calvin’s first two years of Genevan activities (1536–1538) ended in failure.
VI. The Strasbourg exile
Between 1523 and 1533, the citizens of Strasbourg gradually accepted the Reformation, turning the city into the third main centre of the German Reformation – after Wittenberg (Saxony) and Zurich (Switzerland).
a) The Strasbourg reformers
Capito and Bucer, who had been responsible for the triumph of the Reformation in Geneva, needed to work much harder in order to make it successful in Strasbourg. They had to defend the German and Swiss type of Reformation both against the Catholics as well as against the radical reformers who had settled in Strasbourg and who considered it as the New Jerusalem of their radical dogmas. In the 1530 Augsburg Assembly, Strasbourg and three free German cities presented a confession of faith written by Capito and Bucer and called the Confessio Tetrapolitana; the document was meant to act as an intermediary between the German Lutheran position and the Swiss Zwinglian one.
b) Calvin in Strasbourg
Calvin arrived in Strasbourg at the beginning of September 1538 and spent three extremely fruitful years there. The main personalities of the city, i.e. Bucer, Capito, Hedio, Sturm, and Niger, received him with open arms, and the municipal council appointed him a professor of theology at the local college.
c) Calvin and the religious discussions that took place between 1539 and 1541
During his stay in Strasbourg, Calvin joined a delegation of the City Council and of the Church and was sent to Germany to take part in a series of discussions on theological themes, initiated by Emperor Charles V between 1539 and 1541. For political reasons, the emperor wished to reconcile the Protestant princes with the Roman-Catholic Church and make sure that they would stand by him in his war against the Turks.
The first discussion took place at Hagenau from June 25 to June 28, 1540 and had as a starting point a preliminary document secretly drafted by both parts; the document was called the Regensburg Chart. However, the two parts could not reach an agreement on the thorny issues of ecclesiology and the Holy Sacraments – particularly on the issue of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
d) The treatise on the Last Supper
The years spent in Strasbourg proved quite fruitful for Calvin from the point of view of theological writings too. In August 1539, he published a new amplified edition of his Institutio christianae religionis in Latin; the French translation would appear in 1541. In 1540, he published his first vast biblical commentary, namely, his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Subsequently he wrote A Short Treatise on the Lord’s Last Supper, which he published in Geneva in 1541. In it, he assumed the role of a non-polemical mediator between the German reformers and the Swiss reformers regarding the Eucharist, accepting the positive aspects but rejecting all excesses, i.e. the spatial presence of Christ (Luther) and the reduction of the Eucharist to a single sign (Zwingli). In spite of Calvin’s efforts, the two Protestant movements continued to be divided on the issue of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and, after a few years, the Eucharistic disputes started all over again.
e) Calvin’s answer to Cardinal Sadoleto
It was in Strasbourg that Calvin wrote one of his masterpieces, a brilliant work on the new situation created in Geneva following the exile of the reformers. Pope Leo X (1513–1521) had appointed Cardinal Sadoleto as apostolic secretary and the latter, a promoter of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, was the author of the Vatican official documents in the process against Luther. Between 1527 and 1536, Cardinal Sadoleto wrote his famous studies, i.e. the three volumes of his ample commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. On March 18, 1539, the cardinal addressed an open letter to the Senate and people of Geneva. Written in a diplomatic, conciliatory tone, the letter contained the traditional anti-Reformation arguments typical for Catholic apologists. Calvin decided to answer the cardinal’s letter and wrote his well-known Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto, one of his most outstanding letters; he had written it in six days. He maintained that Baptism and the Last Supper were the true Holy Sacraments. The main part of the letter called attention to the three fundamental and doctrinal teachings of the Reformed Church: the sermon, the Holy Sacraments, and strict moral discipline.
VII. Calvin’s second stay in Geneva (1531–1564)
a) The Geneva crisis and Calvin’s return
While Calvin was busy writing his letter to Cardinal Sadoleto, the reformers’ situation in Geneva was getting worse and worse. The enemies of Farel and Calvin had separated into individual factions. It was becoming quite clear that Geneva needed Calvin just as much as Calvin needed Geneva. On September 13, 1531, he arrived there, resumed his former occupations of pastor, preacher, professor of theology and leader of the Reformed Church, and became involved in a variety of preaching, writing and organizational activities, as well as in a series of theological controversies with the Catholics, Lutherans and Unitarians, as well as with most of the humanists.
The consolidation of the Reformation in Geneva
In the fall of 1541, as soon as Calvin returned to Geneva, he started working on the consolidation of the Reformation. He wrote three studies that would become typical of the Calvinist type of Reformation, i.e. a catechism, a study on the Protestant cult and a study on ecclesiastical ordinances – all three of them published between 1541 and 1542.
b) Excesses, discipline, opposition
The puritan appeal against immorality turned into an excessive moral dictatorship that exceeded the limits imposed by wisdom and moderation. Moral and disciplinary strictness enforced both by the Church and by the Municipal Council led to drastic punishments inflicted on the people. Nevertheless, one cannot say that Calvin himself had turned into a totalitarian dictator acting like a Protestant “pope”. Resistance to his position started as early as 1545 and culminated in 1553, but ended by 1555. He had great difficulties facing it.
c) The theological controversies that took place during Calvin’s second stay in Geneva
During his second stay in Geneva, the French reformer was involved in a series of theological controversies aroused by conflicts with the Roman-Catholics, other Protestants and most humanists, to which he reacted by writing several polemical treatises in which he clarified the meaning of Protestant teachings.
1. The controversy with Albert Pighius
Albert Pighius, a Roman-Catholic, had written a book entitled On man’s free will and on the divine grace in ten volumes, which was published at Köln in 1542 and in which he was attacking Calvin and the other reformers. The book was dedicated to Cardinal Sadoleto. Calvin’s answer, which took two months to write, was prefaced by Melanchthon and was made public in 1543. It was definitely milder than had been Luther’s sharp retort to Erasmus of Rotterdam. Unlike Luther, Calvin acknowledged man’s “liber arbitrum spontaneum”, but denied man’s authority to decide what was truly sacred unless the Holy Spirit assisted him.
2. Calvin against the cult of the holy relics
In 1543, the year in which he printed his answer to Pighius, Calvin published a treatise against the Roman-Catholic cult of holy relics entitled An extremely helpful warning about the great benefit that Christianity would gain from making an inventory of all the relics of saintly bodies in Italy, France, Germany, Spain and other kingdoms and countries. Written in French, the treatise was immensely popular with the Protestants. In a sarcastic tone, Calvin was mocking the cult of the holy relics, maintaining that it had degenerated into unacceptable idolatry.
3. Calvin against the Sorbonne Articles
On March 10, 1542, the Department of Theology at the University of Paris published twenty-two articles summing up the main Catholic teachings that the Protestant were disputing. They had been signed by all the candidates to priesthood and endorsed by an edict from the king. In 1534, Calvin wrote a booklet in which he analyzed and rejected them, offering a reformist “antidote” for each of them.
4. Calvin against the Council of Trent
Calvin was also the first to criticize the dogmatic decisions of the fourth, fifth and sixth sessions of the Council of Trent, which took place in 1546 and which would end in December 1563, five months before Calvin’s death. These decisions condemned all Protestant views regarding the supreme authority of the Scriptures, the enslavement of human will, and justification by faith.
5. Calvin against the Interim
In the year in which Calvin published his rejection of the dogmatic decisions taken by the Council of Trent, Emperor Charles V defeated the Schmalkalden League formed by the Lutheran princes and issued an imperial edict in which he was imposing a preliminary confession of faith on all the Lutherans in Germany. Approved by the Augsburg Assembly in May 1548 and known as the Augsburg Interim, the edict contained all the teachings of the Catholic Church set out in an irenic tone – without any condemnation of the Protestant teachings whatsoever. Calvin criticized the Interim in a vehement tone, calling it an adulterous edict.
6. The Zurich Eucharistic consensus
Calvin held firmly to his beliefs even when the Protestants themselves engaged in controversies about the Eucharist, struggling not only for a political consensus, but also for a theological one – as it was quite clear that such disputes could only lead to deep divisions in the life and worship of all reformed communities.
The Eucharistic consensuses reached by Geneva and Zurich as well as the one that Geneva reached with Berne were credited to him. The text of the consensus, made up of twenty-six articles, was drafted and submitted to the public in manuscript in 1549. Two years later, in 1551, it was printed both in Geneva and in Zurich under the title of Consensus Tigurinus.
Calvin’s theological teachings about the Eucharist were recorded in all of the reformed confessions of faith and firmly asserted in the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) – the main symbol of faith embraced by all of the German and Dutch Reformed Churches.
7. Calvin against Westphal and Hesshus on the Eucharist issue
Although the Zurich consensus pleased Melanchthon’s Lutherans, it elicited a most powerful attack from all conservative Lutheran theologians. In 1552, Joachim Westphal (1510–1574), a conservative Lutheran theologian and the future bishop of Hamburg, wrote a treatise both against the Zurich consensus and against Calvin himself, to which Calvin responded by writing three polemical treatises (1555, 1556, 1557).
A few years later, Tilleman Hesshus (1527–1588), a Lutheran theologian and a firm supporter of Lutheran “Orthodoxy”, launched into another Eucharistic polemic against Calvin’s position. The latter defended himself in a treatise, which would be the last he wrote, in which he stated that his only concern was with sound teachings about the true communion with the Body and Blood of Christ at the Last Supper. In this treatise, he reiterated his own Eucharistic theology, which was an effort to bring together Zwingli’s spiritualism with Luther’s Lutheranism, avoiding the extremist tendencies of both of them.
8. Calvin against the Anabaptists
Calvin engaged in a polemic with the Anabaptists, too. In 1544, while he was living in Geneva, he published a short teaching meant to provide the faithful with the right weapons against the deviations of the Anabaptists, reiterating his creed that Baptism and the Eucharist are the main Sacraments that ensure man’s renaissance and redemption.
9. Calvin against Bolsec and Castellio on the issue of predestination
Another sequence of polemical confrontations was related to the issue of predestination. Calvin was of the opinion that God had predestined men and women either to eternal redemption or to eternal damnation. Confronted first by Hieronymus Bolsec and then by Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563), he wrote his famous treatise on predestination entitled De aeterna Dei predestinatione, dedicating it to the Geneva City Council under the name of the “Consensus Genevensis” or the “Consensus of the Genevan Pastors” (January 1, 1552). The treatise contained fragments relating to predestination taken from his former work, Institutio christianae religionis, which had appeared in 1536.
10. Calvin against the anti-Trinitarian Unitarians
a) The Italian humanists
Calvin’s last years were beset by a fierce polemic against the Unitarians. Italian Protestants, the Unitarians had been forced by the Inquisition to seek refuge in Switzerland where they had formed Protestant religious communities. Their centre was Basel, a city where Erasmus’s humanistic ideas were still very much in the air. Their aim was to sow the seeds of a new type of liberal, heterodox Protestantism on the Swiss soil.
b) Michael Servetus
Calvin’s conflict with Michael Servetus (1511–1553), an anti-Trinitarian humanist, was the most notable conflict that he was brought into. Ending in Servetus’ death at the stake, the conflict actually discredited Calvin in the eyes of the modern world, which labeled him as a perpetrator of persecution and religious intolerance.
Michael Servetus had written an ample theological study entitled Restitutio christianismi, in which he was defying Calvin’s views expressed in the Institutio christianae religionis. Starting from the study of the Bible, Servetus put forward a more radical Reformation than the one that was known to all, claiming that he was not a reformer, but a restorer of the Christian faith.
The civil court accused Servetus of heresy, violation of the kingly decrees and attempt to escape from prison. He was condemned to be burned at the stake. Calvin defended himself by exposing Servetus’ dogmatic errors. In a few months, he completed a study on the defense of the Christian faith and of the Holy Trinity, in which he was justifying the capital punishment applied to heretics; the study, written in Latin and translated into French at the beginning of 1554, had an official character and was signed by all the fifteen Genevan pastors. In justification of the Christian magistrates’ duty to punish heresy by death, Calvin set forth the mosaic theocratic legislation against idolatry and blasphemy.
11. Calvin’s death
After the crisis caused by Servetus’ execution and after the fierce opposition of the so-called “patriots” against him (which lasted two years, from 1553 to 1555), Calvin’s authority on theological subjects was no longer challenged in Geneva.
He continued to work steadily up to his death, immersing himself so completely in his tasks so completely that he almost neglected his serious illnesses; he was troubled by migraines, asthma, feverish states, gout, etc. Throughout his life he studied, wrote, preached, taught, and carried an ample correspondence (he wrote 4271 letters). He died peacefully, in his sleep, on May 27, 1564. He had lived 54 years, 10 months and 17 days.
The Protestant Reformation and the Orthodoxy
The issue of the Protestant Reformation has not proved to be a fertile source of academic debate for Orthodox theologians. Thus, nowadays, we do not have many studies referring to this theme. In the 16th and 17th centuries many ties were established between the Orthodox and Protestant theologians manifested in the form of dialogues.
a) The correspondence between the Patriarch Jeremiah and the Lutheran theologians from Tubingen University.
b) The Confessions of Faith of Metrophanes Kritopoulos.
c) The Confession of Faith of Patriarch Dositheos Notaras of Jerusalem.
d) The Confession of Faith of Patriarch Cyril Lucaris.
1. The Protestant Reformation and the Orthodox Church from Transylvania
The ties between the Romanian Orthodox Church and the protestants from Transylvania date from the Reformation period, but they have still continued and become more significant over the course of time due to the fact that both churches have shared the same territory and worked together well. They have created a rich ecumenical tradition for the Protestants and the Orthodox at many levels.
2. The assessment of the Orthodox-Protestant dialogue over the course of time
Throughout history, many official contacts have been established between the representatives of the Orthodox and the Protestant churches. Consequently, many agreements have been signed and consensus has been reached in the path of Christian unity. The Orthodox Church has always been open to finding solutions to the problems of church unity, being confident that all Christians are children of Our Heavenly Father.
Summary
Calvin represented a paradoxical historical phenomenon. A shy and fragile individual, he became an excellent organizer of the Reformation. His theological work and organizing activities were equally brilliant. He was not just the founder of the Calvinist doctrine, but of a reformed Christian doctrine par excellence. As a reformer, he went beyond the stage of individual justification by faith and reoriented the Protestant movement, pleading for the formation of an active ascetical community that proclaimed the absolute sovereignty of God in the history of humankind. Due to him, the Protestant Reformation turned into a Church structured as the people of God in the Holy Spirit. For the first time in history, Calvin reconciled Christianity with modern social and economic life. Thus, the Calvinists’ inner detachment from the world and their exclusive commitment to faith intertwined with their commitment to work and to their professional duties, which confirmed that they had indeed been chosen by God. Calvin dedicated his entire life to theology, to the glorification of God’s sovereignty on earth, warning Christians against the veneration of man above the Creator of all. His end strongly resembled Moses’ end. The popular image about Calvin’s thinking has been that of a rigorously logical system of thinking centered on the doctrine of predestination. Although his theological views presented in the Institutio christianae religionis are quite systematic, they do not make up a theological system. Calvin was not a scholastic theologian given to methodological scientific studies, but a biblical humanist preoccupied by pedagogy – by the study of the methods and styles of teaching. His goal was to present the Reformed Christian religion with the utmost clarity and comprehensibility. Calvin’s thinking was not a radically Christocentric one, but one that had a single normative paradigm, i.e. the Christological paradigm, dominated by the Calcedonian principle of “distinctio et non separatio”. He aimed at intertwining the divine and the human realms, without mixing them up or dividing them. He applied the principle of distinction, but not separation to the relationship between the Word of God and man’s words, to the relationship between sign and reality as signified in the Eucharist, to the relationship between Christian believers and Christ in the context of justification by faith, as well as to the relationship between the natural and the spiritual realm, the secular and the religious realm, the world and God.
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