Word: calvinized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God, Alvin Plantinga of Michigan's Calvin College, develops a related argument from one of the pressing issues in modern epistemology. Though it sounds strange to the man in the street, philosophers ponder how an individual can know that there is any creature besides himself who thinks, feels and reasons, or how he can know that anything ever existed in the past. How, for instance, can we know if another person is in pain? Plantinga answers that such knowledge is acquired through analogy, and in God and Other Minds (Cornell...
Martin Luther was the lightning of the Protestant Reformation; John Calvin was its thunder. John was only eight in 1517 when the 95 theses were nailed up on a Wittenberg church door. Within 30 years he would rise to succeed Luther as leader of the Reformation, codifying what the master often conveyed with rhetoric. Calvin's lifelong opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion, as he boasts in this vigorous biographical novel, grew to be as long as ''the Old Testament plus a good part...
...journeys to Paris to study theology, then law, at the expense of the Roman Catholic Church. Reformation is in the air at the Sorbonne; the student undergoes a profound conversion. His new Protestantism is anathema to both church and state and he flees to Switzerland. In Geneva, Calvin becomes the voice of a new moral order; in one dispute he walks off the altar at Easter and is expelled from the city. Moving to Strasbourg, he ministers to French Protestant refugees, is married and waits for a summons back to Geneva...
...recall of Calvin does not mean remorse among the Genevans. The city, despite its placid lakeshore site, is a grim spot enlivened mainly by nocturnal vices: gambling, drinking, whoring. In one notorious district there is a tavern for every three dwellings. Though he cherishes his own ration of wine (teetotaling comes later in Protestant history), the cleric inveighs against every excess. He condemns dancing as a prelude to fornication and finds Genevan feasting obscenely luxurious. (Among the new ordinances he demands is one limiting banquets to three courses of a mere four plates each...
...Calvin's dictates have personal consequences: his sister-in-law is banished for adultery, his stepdaughter jailed for fornication. "I have found it to be true," observes a friend, "that men who know what is best for society are unable to cope with their families." Some of Calvin's decisions have darker and more far-reaching echoes. Prefiguring Salem, he allows some 30 "witches" to be burned, drowned or hanged as scapegoats during an epidemic. And he becomes, like so many rebels, fiercely doctrinaire, letting the refugee heretic Michael Servetus go to the stake...