Calvin the Theologian

http://www.churchsociety.org/churchman/documents/Cman_073_3_Packer.pdf

[Church Society] 4 Dec 2007--John Calvin’s theology arrests attention at the outset on two accounts: it has been extraordinarily influential, and it has been extraordinarily maligned.

For the first: it would hardly be too much to say that for the latter part of his lifetime and a
century after his death John Calvin was the most influential man in the world, in the sense
that his ideas were making more history than those of anyone else during that period.
Calvin’s theology produced the Puritans in England, the Huguenots in France, the “Beggars”
in Holland, the Covenanters in Scotland, and the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, and was
more or less directly responsible for the Scottish uprising, the revolt of the Netherlands, the
French wars of religion, and the English Civil War. Also, it was Calvin’s doctrine of the state
as a servant of God that established the ideal of constitutional representative government and
led to the explicit acknowledgment of the rights and liberties of subjects, and in due course to
toleration—though, admittedly, Calvin and his first followers failed to see that toleration was
logically demanded by their principles.1 These facts reveal Calvin as in effect the producer,
not merely of Protestantism in its most virile and thoroughgoing form, but of some of the
most fundamental ingredients in post-Renaissance Western civilization. It is doubtful whether
any other theologian has ever played so significant a part in world history.