John Calvin trained as a lawyer and was once expelled from Geneva
The man whose name became shorthand for predestination started out studying law because his father thought it paid better than the priesthood. Geneva threw him out once, then begged him back in 1541. From there, Calvin shaped a theology that Presbyterians, Congregationalists and many other Reformed churches still claim as their own.
Jehan Cauvin was born on 10 July 1509 in Noyon, Picardy, where his father worked as notary to the cathedral and the church court. By twelve he was a bishop's clerk with a tonsure, and a patron family paid for schooling in Paris, where Mathurin Cordier taught him Latin. Around 1525 his father switched him to law at Orléans, reasoning that lawyers earned more than priests. At Bourges he learned Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament.
Exactly when he turned evangelical is disputed. Some put it near 1533; the historian T. H. L. Parker favours late 1529 or early 1530. Calvin himself left two quite different accounts, one describing a sudden change of mind wrought by God and another describing long anguish, which the biographer Bruce Gordon reads as two ways of telling one story. His first book, in 1532, was a commentary on Seneca. When his friend Nicolas Cop called for church reform in a rector's address on 1 November 1533, Calvin was implicated and went into hiding, finally leaving France after the Affair of the Placards in October 1534.
In Basel, in March 1536, he published the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a defence of reformed belief. A detour that summer brought him to Geneva, where William Farel persuaded him to stay. The pair drafted articles for reorganising the city's church in January 1537, but the council balked at enforcing them and expelled both men. Martin Bucer brought Calvin to Strasbourg to minister to French refugees.
Recalled in 1541, he imposed new church government and liturgy despite resistance from powerful local families. The darkest episode came when Michael Servetus, whose view of the Trinity both Catholics and Protestants considered heretical, arrived in the city; Calvin denounced him and the council had him burned. Refugee arrivals and fresh elections eventually pushed Calvin's opponents out. Alongside his letters to reformers such as Melanchthon and Bullinger, he wrote commentaries on most of the Bible before dying on 27 May 1564.
Source: John Calvin
