by William Potter

In the year 2000 many polls were taken and many articles written regarding the individual that historians considered the most influential person of the 20th century. The answers ranged from FDR to Albert Einstein, from Ronald Reagan to Winston Churchill. Maybe it was whoever invented air conditioning. Who was the most influential person in the last 500 years? This year there seems to be a battle between the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) and the “naturalist” Charles Darwin (1809-1882) since their birthdays are 500 and 200 years ago, respectively.

Calvin was a French theologian and pastor in Geneva, Switzerland whose book The Institutes of the Christian Religion created a furor in the Roman Catholic Church. He defined in systematic fashion, the meaning of various biblical doctrines which contradicted church dogma. Much of what he wrote had been taught by St. Augustine more than a thousand years before but was no longer in favor. Calvin believed that he was revivifying the teachings of the apostles and arguing that the true church should return to belief in Scripture as the only rule for life and faith, and that God should be worshipped only as the Bible commands.

Men who agreed with Calvin and other reformers like his earlier contemporary Martin Luther, were often persecuted by the Roman church and by governments whose allegiance remained with the papal religion.  Nonetheless, priests, educators, and intellectuals travelled to Geneva from across Europe to learn from the French pastor. Many of those students, men like John Knox,  returned to the nations of Europe with the gospel; the Reformation spread and took hold in various places, especially Northern Europe, England, and Scotland. Reformed churches sprang up in Hungary, Poland, France, and elsewhere.

In reaction, the Inquisition and the princes of Catholic-dominated states counter-attacked. The clash between the reformers and the Roman Catholic Church spurred debates, trials, massacres and “wars of religion.” People profoundly influenced by the Genevan Reformer were eventually labeled “Calvinists” and they dominated the ecclesiastical world of the Dutch Church in the Netherlands, Presbyterian Scotland, and Puritan England.

The English Puritans, the Scots, and the Scots-Irish built Calvinist communities in New England and all along the frontiers of America, especially in the South. Many exiled French Calvinists, known as Huguenots, came to the shores of America in the Carolinas, especially Charleston. The Dutch settled in New York and the Hudson River Valley. Men of Calvinist heritage or influence helped build colonial America, declare independence, and pen the Constitution. One of the foremost founders and a signer of the Declaration, John Witherspoon, was a Scots Presbyterian pastor and President of Princeton College.

The world was turned upside down at The Battle of Yorktown bringing about the successful establishment of an independent United States, but it would not have happened without the earlier impact of the Reformation, and especially that part led by John Calvin. During this 500th anniversary year, there will be special tours of Geneva and France in his honor. One of the largest celebrations of Calvin will be held in the original stronghold of Calvinist theology and culture in early colonial America– Boston, Massachusetts. There is still room to join the hundreds of families from July 1-4, who will be making the journey to Boston Commons to celebrate the 500th anniversary of one whom a number of preeminent historians have called “a true founding father of the United States.”

Vision Forum Ministries - Reformation 500 Celebration

(For those of you enamored with the impact of Charles Darwin on world history, there will be many comparisons made at the conference between the respective legacies of Calvin and Darwin over the last two centuries and today.)

Bill Potter