John Calvin |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
||||||
| A major leader in the 16th-century Reformation of the Catholic Church, John Calvin established a new religion with strict codes of belief and behaviour. Calvin taught the virtues of faith above good works and advanced the theory of universal priesthood, in which all Christians could practise their religion without the daily guidance of priests. Calvin also established the idea of the "Elect", a preordained group of people whom God chooses for Salvation. Through a network of preachers sent from Geneva to France, he was able to create the doctrine and the institutions of a distinctively French form of Protestantism that by the late 1550s had won many followers. | ||||||
|
||||||
| Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis | ||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
| Appears in these articles | ||||||
|
||||||
| French Wars of Religion; Calvinism; Calvin, John | ||||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| |
|||||||||||||||||||
© 2008 Microsoft
  |