John Calvin (1509-1564) was born in Nyon, France. He prepared himself for a law career at the insistence of his father, but when his father died, he turned his interests towards the classics, and eventually toward the Christian faith. At the age of twenty-five the Bible became his main sourcebook.
His was an intensely intellectual ministry. That he did such extraordinary things in the course of a life broken by ill health and surrounded by every kind of danger and trial is due to the fact that he completed the Institutes when he was twenty-five and began when he was only twenty-three. Mark Pattison said, "Calvin seized the idea of reformation as a real innovation of character." The German Reformers were engaged in remodelling abstract metaphysical statements but Calvin embraced the lofty idea of the Church of Christ as a society of regenerated men and women.
He went to Geneva to make a great experiment. He believed that a preacher of the Gospel might create and inspire a Church to become an instrument of freedom and righteousness in the civic life of the city. He resisted the call to Geneva at first, believing that his own work was in the study rather than in the marketplace, but Farel stood over him and with prophetic vehemence pronounced a curse upon his studies if he did not come to the help of the Lord in Geneva. He said,
You have no other pretext for refusing me than the attraction you declare you have for your studies. But I tell you in the name of the Almighty if you do not come with me and share the holy work on which I am engaged, he will not bless your plans because you prefer your repose to Jesus Christ.
At first the people, alarmed at Calvin's moral strictness, drove him forth from their midst with a violent hatred that shook the preacher's sensitive nature. But he returned and was elected to be the mouthpiece of God to the city where he ruled and taught until his death at the age of fifty-four, in 1564.
Boza said of Calvin's preaching, "Every word weighed a pound." The congregation in Geneva agreed with him. Those words describe the heart of Calvin's preaching. John Broadus once said that a great preacher is "not a mere artist and not a feeble suppliant; he is a conquering soul, a monarch, a born ruler of mankind." Calvin's strong character gave force to his utterance, and this forcefulness was intensified by his saturation in the Word.
He believed in short sermons. He had no patience, he said, with a prolix style. Silvester Horne says of his sermons, "Seldom will you read anywhere discourses with so little illustration or ornamentation which are yet penetrating and pertinent. There are no chasings on the blade of his sword. It is plain keen steel and without an edge."1 Strong, stately, and lucid, his sentences carry you forward from point to point of his argument.
Calvin was a champion of extemporaneous preaching. He went so far as to declare that the power of God could only pour itself forth in extempore speech. As he preached without manuscript, his sermons were transcribed as delivered from 1549 onwards. It is in this way that two thousand of his sermons have been preserved.