John Calvin has not had a good press among the general or even the educated public. Marilynne Robinson caricatures the popular view: ‘an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism.’ Even Les Murray, who of course knows a lot of ‘religious stuff’, in a recent poem (‘Visiting Geneva’), addresses ‘John Calvin, unforgiver / in your Taliban hat’. The reasons are, no doubt, complex. Calvin has mistakenly been given sole responsibility for the fate of Michael Servetus. His relationship with Geneva has been misunderstood. Predestination has been seen as the centrepiece of his theological system, when it is questionable whether one can speak of a ‘system’ at all.
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