Calvin 500th Anniversary of his birth

Welcome to my new website. My name is Hazlett Lynch, and I want this website to be useful to the Christian world in general, and especially to those who cherish the Reformed Faith. I want it to inform and hopefully reform readers according to the Word of God. It will also challenge those who read it, as well as being a resource that will educate and inform readers.

The 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Genevan Reformer, John Calvin, in 2009, is something I am looking forward to eagerly. That Calvin cannot be ignored is self-evident; he is either loved or hated, with little in between, but he cannot be ignored.

But for those of us privileged and honoured to be born into, nurtured in, and have personally accepted, the exposition of the Scriptures as presented by Calvin and his true sons, there can be few greater blessings.

I refer to Calvin's 'true sons.' While good and learned men have sought to claim the name of Calvin for their theological system, their actual teaching differs from what the reformer himself taught. Sadly, Beza, Calvin's successor in Geneva, extrapolated his master's teaching, and in so doing, departed from it in some important areas. But more in another blog post.

May I posit that Calvin's truest interpreter in Europe was one, Moise Amyraut (1596-1664), Professor of Theology at the Saumur Academy, in France, in the seventeenth century. You will learn that he was tried for heresy at Alencon and was acquitted, because his accusers realised that since he relied so much on Calvin's thought, to have condemned Amyraut was to condemn Calvin himself. This they could not do.

In England, Calvin's great exponent was Richard Baxter, who served mainly in Kidderminster, and where most of his great pastoral and evangelistic work was carried out, and where he wrote some of his best known works. But more of this in a later post.