Happy 500th Birthday John Calvin!

Five hundred years ago, on 10th July, in the small village of Noyon in France, John Calvin was born. He was raised in a strong Roman Catholic family to be a priest, leaving home at the age of 14 to study in Paris where he was exposed to ideas about reform in the church. Calvin did not invent the Reformation, but having discovered some of its fundamental principles in the writings of Martin Luther, he began to articulate these ideas in dynamic, practical and popular language.

Expelled from Catholic France, Calvin journeyed to Geneva where he firmly established a movement for reform which resulted in the legacy of that stream of Christianity known as the Reformed or Presbyterian stream: a heritage shared by The Uniting Church in Australia. Our theology and worship today is strongly influenced by that inheritance and the Reformation principles of sola Christi, sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura—Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone.

Calvin's primary work was pastoral, but he penned numerous tracts and his correspondence was profuse. His seminal work, Institutes of the Christian Religion, became the guiding light for many early Protestants as they exited both the Middle Ages and the Roman Catholic church. At his own request, Calvin was buried in an unmarked grave in Geneva's common cemetery to avoid idolatry.
(Adapted from a range of sources from http://www.calvin500.com and http://www.calvin09.org)

Calvin’s reformed church and theology influenced Scottish Christianity through John Knox and Andrew Melville. It is through this Scottish Reformed link that Presbyterianism came to Australia. In 1984, L. Farquhar Gunn, commenting on the Presbyterian heritage of the Uniting Church, noted that “the sovereignty of God and the sinfulness of [humanity]” was “the basic concept from which all else springs”:

Salvation is God’s free gift. It is God alone who bring rebellious [humanity] back to [God]. It is the Sovereign God, who takes the initiative in Jesus Christ, who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves—reconcile us to [God].
(Breward, Ian (ed.) 1984. The Future of Our Heritage. Uniting Church Historical Society (Victoria), p. 4.)