It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him: —II Timothy 2:11
While we live in this world, our life is hidden, even as the life of trees is hidden in winter. Behold, trees are dry, we see no strength in them, a man would think it were but dead wood; but yet their strength shows itself in the springtime. Even so it is with the faithful. For while they are in this world, their life is shut up in hope. Now that which we hope for is not seen, the eye of man cannot attain unto it.
It follows, then, that in dying we must live; not only with one kind of death, but we must die daily, we must decay, as touching the outward man; as he says, sickness, poverty, shame, and such things, serve us to renounce this world and feel that our life is but a shadow, that it is nothing, yes, and that we receive so many messages of death when things do not go as we would have them.
And therefore let us note well that Paul meant here not simply that we must die once, and then live; but while we live that we are daily buried as it were; that we see death present as it were; that we are like sheep that have the knife at their throats. For it is not enough for us to die so, but we must follow the standard of the Son of God and look to his resurrection, which is sufficient to make the bitterness of death sweet to us. —Sermons
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John Calvin (1509 - 1584)
Was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where he published the first edition of his seminal work The Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536.Calvin's writing and preachings provided the seeds for the branch of theology that bears his name. The Reformed, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches, which look to Calvin as the chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world.
John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530. After religious tensions provoked a violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland, where in 1536 he published the first edition of his seminal work Institutes of the Christian Religion.
Calvin's writing and preaching provided the seeds for the branch of theology that bears his name. The Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, which look to Calvin as a chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world. Calvin's thought exerted considerable influence over major religious figures and entire religious movements, such as Puritanism, and some have argued that his ideas have contributed to the rise of capitalism, individualism, and representative democracy in the West.
Founder of Calvinism. John Calvin, a French scholar who became a leading preacher and dominant force in the Reformation of the 16th Century, studied at the University of Paris and at the University of Orleans. He became dissatisfied with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and allied himself with the cause of the Protestant Reformation in 1532.
When the king of France decided to settle the religious question in his country in favor of the Catholics, Calvin fled to Geneva, Switzerland, where his writings and lectures made Geneva the Rome of Protestantism. His institutes of the Christian religion became the basis for the Presbyterian way of thought and church life. Calvinism is the main doctrine of the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches.