John Calvin

"Piety was the keynote of his character. He was a God-possessed soul. Theology was no concern to him as a study in itself; he devoted himself to it as a framework for the support of all that religion meant to him."

"He was wonderfully patient for those days and for one in his position with all kinds of creedal vagaries around him. It was only when these threatened (in his view) the foundations of morality and orderly government and therefore of society that he became severe. But (excepting in the case of Servetus) his severity limited itself to expulsion of the offender from Geneva as a disturber of the public peace, as a discordant element in the community whose continuance there might be fraught with insidious and perilous potencies of evil. Calvin in this respect accepted and applied the principle of the Justinian code, Cujus regio, ejus religio, though from a different motive, the motive not of the right of the powers-that-be to command the belief of subjects, but that of expediency in the interests of the public welfare, based as it was in his view on what he jealously regarded as the true religion."

"Calvin states that Muhammad is “the companion of the Pope who has done his very best to seduce those poor people who were enraged and saturated and poisoned by his false doctrine”. Calvin condemns Muhammad and the Pope as the two horns of the Antichrist described in Daniel’s prophetic seventh chapter. For Calvin, both the Pope and Muhammad seduced potential Protestant Christians away from the true path through false teachings and idolatrous practices."

"After witnessing Suleiman reach Vienna in 1529, both Luther and Calvin came to fear the influence of Islam and denigrated Muhammad as a consequence of that fear. Calvin in particular condemned Islam for its veneration of Muhammad as a prophet and claimed that Muslims set Mohammed apart from other men as an idol. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536), Calvin condemns the treatment of Muhammad as that of an idol. “The Turks in the present day”, he states, proclaim “with full throat that the Creator of heaven and earth is their God”, yet they reject the sovereignty of Christ and “substitute an idol in His place”. The replacing of Jesus with Muhammad is a grievous action for Calvin. He proclaims in a sermon, “[the Turks] set their Mahomet in the place of God’s Son”, for which he questions, “ought such a one be put to death, without forbearing?”"

"Calvin took the position that Islam was not merely a threat to European Christendom, but to potential Christians all over the world. Slomp finds Calvin believed that Muslims were former Christians “deceived by Muhammad”. In this way, Calvin placed the blame for Islam as a false religion that sentenced souls to damnation solely on one man, Muhammad. In Calvin’s Opera, Sermon 26 on Daniel 9, he explains that “Muhammad had corrupted the greater part of the world, setting an example for other sects which always want to say and invent something new. All sects that exist today ... have come out of this mud puddle. ”Thus, Muhammad is not merely responsible for Islam as a false religion, but all other sects that have developed since then that mislead the people who, in Calvin’s mind, rightfully belong to Christ. Calvin blames Muhammad for the damned state of all Muslims, citing Muhammad’s “deceitfulness” that has “bewitched” Muslims to idolize him instead of worshipping Christ."

"Apart from a few poets we see these followers of Calvin contributing very little to the arts and letters. They lacked painters, musicians, architects of originality; hilarity was for them suspect and their humor was limited. In their political activities they displayed strange and disquieting tendencies; in North America they brought the Indians, with the help of bullets, whisky, and infected blankets, almost to a vanishing point. In England they led the first great attack against the institution of monarchy in Christian history, in Ireland they displayed their homicidal talents in the most brutal type of warfare, in South Africa they established republics in which the institution of slavery survived till the threshold of the twentieth century, in Hungary they allied themselves with the pagan Turks and in Japan with the Shintoists against the Catholics."

"Calvin rejected the individualism of Luther and followed in the footsteps of older thinkers like Duns Scotus. The monarchical principle was everywhere gaining ground in Europe. He had a lawyer's love of law, and law reposed in the absolute will of the prince. Hebraize this fact, erect a cosmology upon it, and we have the vital principle of . From this cosmic absolutism, that conceived of God as the stable Will sustaining the universe, binding together what otherwise would fly asunder, two important corollaries were derived: the universality of the moral law, and the necessity of . From the former flowed that curious association of God's will with natural causes which induced Cotton Mather, when suffering from toothache, to inquire what sin he had committed with his teeth, and which left no free spaces or non-moral impulses in the lives of men. From the latter flowed the doctrine of ."

"Vernon Louis Parrington, (1st part of quote 2nd part of quote last part of quote; text at archive.org)"

"Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles."

"From a reading of The Institutes of Christian Religion, The Tracts, and much of the Correspondence of Calvin, I am impressed with the fact that Calvin allowed very little place in his life for purely aesthetic enjoyment of art. His whole attention was directed to theological matters and the precise, and to him the inevitable, relation which these theological matters bore to human conduct. His was a keen, penetrating mind, sharpened by legalistic training, which had never gone through the torment of doubt that so affected Luther. Calvin based every thought on the scriptures. He did not speak for himself, but was only the interpreter of the Scriptures. On the one hand this made him very humble, but on the other since he was admittedly the most astute theologian of his day, he could not conceive of anyone doubting the truth and the authority of his interpretations. Little did he realize that he was attempting to set up a new form of religious tyranny, and in many respect succeeding. Calvin was completely ignorant of any approach to truth except by the way of logic and cold reason. There was nothing of the mystic about him as there was in Luther. He was lacking in imagination and in a sensitiveness to visual and aural beauty. In vain may one search for a single reference in his works to the beauty of Lake Geneva or of the Alps. Any man who would set out looking for a wife with a blue print of the desired qualities of his future mate in his hand, asking his friends for candidates, lacks qualities which we expect to find in a normal human being. But Calvin was not a normal human being. He was an organizing genius, wholly concerned with the matters of theology and conduct. His condemnation of Servetus has usually been cited as an example of his hardness of heart. Calvin's love for the classic poets, and the clear concise style of his own writing stand in welcome contrast to his lack of artistic sensitivity toward the other art media. I would not consider his encouragement of the congregational singing of the Psalms as showing a love of music as such, but only a realization of the power of music to help in bringing the word to the hearts of the people."

"Virginia Presbyterian dissenters firmly followed the Reformation teachings of John Calvin and John Knox, as these had been interpreted and adopted by a mid-1600s British Parliament which had been briefly dominated by the Puritans (whose very name indicated their zealous aspirations and earnest commitments to purify these established Church of England. In 1647 this so-called "Long Parliament" passed a series of Calvinist faith statements which were collectively known as The Westminster Standards. These consisted of a formal Confession of Faith and two instructional documents called the Larger and Shorter Catechisms."

"While Calvin in his preaching did not follow a lectionary of prescribed scripture readings for each Sunday of the year, his preaching did usually follow a previously publicized order of scripture selections, e.g.', a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, or on the Beatitudes, or even on a sequential selection of Psalms. In that sense Calvin used a prescribed lectionary (of sorts) which at least some of his hearers might have studied in preparation for listening to his sermons. On the other hand, the 17th century English Puritan Presbyterian and Congregational preachers (who were the principal models for the 18th century Virginia traveling preachers) just "took (any) text and preached from it.""

"With Calvin the decretum horribile is derived not, as with Luther, from religious experience, but from the logical necessity of his thought; – therefore its importance increases with every increase in the logical consistency of that religious thought. The interest of it is solely in God, not in man; God does not exist for men, but men for the sake of God. All creation, including of course the fact, as it undoubtedly was for Calvin, that only a small proportion of men are chosen for eternal grace, can have any meaning only as means to the glory and majesty of God."

"The question, Am I one of the elect? must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background. And how can I be sure of this state of grace? For Calvin himself this was not a problem. He felt himself to be a chosen agent of the Lord, and was certain of his own salvation. Accordingly, to the question of how the individual can be certain of his own election, he has at bottom only the answer that we should be content with the knowledge that God has chosen and depend further only on that implicit trust in Christ which is the result of true faith. He rejects in principle the assumption that one can learn from the conduct of others whether they are chosen or damned. It is an unjustifiable attempt to force God’s secrets."

"The religious believer can make himself sure of his state of grace either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action; Luther stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter. The Calvinist also wanted to be saved sola fide. But since Calvin viewed all pure feelings and emotions, no matter how exalted they might seem to be, with suspicion, faith had to be proved by its objective results in order to provide a firm foundation for the certitudo salutis. It must be a fides efficax, the call to salvation an effectual calling (expression used in Savoy Declaration)."

"The ascetic, when he wishes to act within the world ... must become afflicted with a sort of happy closure of the mind regarding any question about the meaning of the world, for he must not worry about such questions. Hence, it is no accident that inner-worldly asceticism reached its most consistent development on the foundation of the Calvinist god's absolute inexplicability, utter remoteness from every human criterion, and unsearchableness as to his motives. Thus, the inner-worldly ascetic is the recognized "man of a vocation," who neither inquires about nor finds it necessary to inquire about the meaning of his actual practice of a vocation within the whole world, the total framework of which is not his responsibility but his god's."