The young Frenchman fleeing Paris
John Calvin escapes France
John Calvin is twenty-four years old, a brilliant French humanist who has converted to Reformed Christianity, and he is running.
The Affair of the Placards in October 1534 — Protestant broadsheets attacking the mass, placed overnight on the doors of churches across France, including allegedly on the door of the king's own bedchamber — triggers a wave of persecution against French Protestants. People are burned. People are tortured. People flee.
Calvin flees.
He is not yet famous. He has written a commentary on Seneca, some humanist treatises, and begun a systematic account of Reformed theology that he is still working on. He is slight, intense, prone to illness, constitutionally averse to conflict — a scholar who wants to read and write in peace, not a public figure.
He goes to Basel. He finishes his systematic theology, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, and publishes the first edition in 1536. It is dedicated to the King of France — a defense of Protestant teaching addressed to the monarch who is burning Protestants. It is twenty-six years old and already the most systematic account of Reformed theology yet written.
He intends to go to Strasbourg after Basel and continue his studies in peace.
He passes through Geneva.
Geneva will not let him pass through.
“I have learned from experience that we cannot see very far before us.”
— John Calvin, letter, c. 1540s AD
“A man's heart plans his course, But the LORD directs his steps.”
Calvin was trying to get to Strasbourg. God had other plans.
The man who would become the theologian of divine sovereignty — who would develop the most comprehensive account of God's governance of all things — was himself governed by circumstances he did not choose, stopped in a city he was only passing through, by a man he had never met.
The Lord establishes his steps. Calvin believed this with everything in him. He also experienced it — lived it against his own preferences, in a city he did not choose, for the rest of his life.
The theology you develop is often the theology you are being forced to live.
Where have you been stopped in a city you were only passing through? And is it possible that the stopping was the establishment of steps, not the frustration of plans?