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Jean Calvin , né le 10 juillet 1509 à Noyon et mort le 27 mai 1564 à Genève, est un théologien français, un important réformateur, et un pasteur emblématique de la Réforme protestante du XVIe siècle, notamment pour son apport à la doctrine dite du calvinisme.

Après des études de droit, Calvin rompt avec l'Église catholique romaine vers 1530. Du fait des persécutions contre ceux qu'on appellera plus tard les « protestants » en France, Calvin se réfugie à Bâle, en Suisse, où il publie la première édition de son œuvre maîtresse, l'Institution de la religion chrétienne en 1536. La même année, il est recruté par Guillaume Farel pour aider à la réforme de l'église à Genève. À la suite d'un différend entre les pasteurs et le Conseil municipal, Calvin et Farel sont expulsés de Genève. À l'invitation de Martin Bucer, Calvin se rend à Strasbourg, où il séjourne entre 1538 et 1541, devenant pasteur d'une église de réfugiés français et wallons. De Strasbourg, il continue à soutenir le mouvement réformateur à Genève. En particulier lorsque les catholiques tentent d'y reprendre pied grâce à l’évêque Sadolet, Calvin rédige une réponse définitive. Il est finalement invité à revenir dans la cité genevoise en 1541.

Après son retour, Calvin introduit une nouvelle liturgie et des idées politiques novatrices malgré l'opposition de plusieurs puissantes familles de la ville qui tentent de s'opposer à son autorité, notamment lors du procès de Michel Servet. De nouvelles élections et l'arrivée de réfugiés favorables à Calvin lui permettent d'évincer ses opposants au Conseil municipal. Calvin passe les dernières années de sa vie à promouvoir la Réforme à Genève et dans toute l'Europe.

Calvin est un écrivain apologétique et un polémiste provoquant de nombreuses controverses. Il échange également une riche correspondance avec de nombreux réformés, comme Philippe Melanchthon et Heinrich Bullinger. Outre l’Institution, il rédige des essais sur la plupart des livres de la Bible, de même que des traités de théologie et des confessions de foi. Il prêche régulièrement à Genève et écrit pour soutenir les martyrs protestants qui attendent leur exécution. Calvin est influencé par la tradition augustinienne qui le pousse à disserter sur les concepts de prédestination et de la souveraineté absolue de Dieu en ce qui concerne la rédemption et donc aussi la damnation. Les écrits et les prédications de Calvin fondent la théologie réformée. Les églises réformées et presbytériennes ont depuis lors adopté la pensée calvinienne et l'ont largement répandue. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. juillet 1509 – 27. mai 1564   •   Autres noms جان کالون
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John Calvin citations célèbres

“Ainsi, ou nous arguerons l'histoire de mensonge, ou ce qu'on tient aujourd'hui de la vraie croix est une opinion vaine et frivole. Or, avisons d'autre part combien il y en a de pièces par tout le monde. Si je voulais réciter seulement ce que j'en pourrais dire, il y aurait un rôle pour remplir un livre entier. Il n'y a si petite ville où il n'y en ait, non seulement en l'église cathédrale, mais en quelques paroisses. Pareillement, il n'y a si méchante abbaye où on n'en montre. Et en quelques lieux, il y en a de bien gros éclats, comme à la Sainte-Chapelle de Paris, et à Poitiers et à Rome, où il y en a un crucifix assez grand qui en est fait, comme l'on dit. Bref, si on voulait ramasser tout ce qui s'en est trouvé, il y en aurait la charge d'un bon grand bateau. L'Évangile testifie que la croix pouvait être portée d'un homme.”

John Calvin

“Que donc les nonnains demeurent en leurs convents et en leurs cloistres, et en leurs bourdeaux de Satan: ie di mesmes encores qu’elles ne fussent point putains comme elles sont, comme il y a encores pis de ces abominations de Sodome, faisans des choses si enormes et si abominables que c’est une horreur: encores, di-ie, que toutes ces vilenies-là n'y fussent point, si est-ce que toute la chasteté qu'elles pretendent, n'est rien envers Dieu, au prix de ce qu'il a ordonné, c'est asçavoir que combien que ce soyent choses contemptibles, et qui semblent estre de nulle valeur, qu'une femme ait peine d'adresser son mesnage, de nettoyer les ordures de ses enfans, de tuer les poux et autres choses semblables, que tout cela sera mesprisé, qu’on ne le daignera pas mesmes regarder, ce sont toutesfois sacrifices que Dieu reçoit et qu'il accepte, comme si c'estoyent choses precieuses et honorables.”

John Calvin

John Calvin: Citations en anglais

“The wicked do not fear God from any unwillingness to offend him, provided they could do so with impunity. … But believers, as has been said, dread the offense even more than the punishment.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 27, p. 480
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“We must resist wandering thoughts in prayer. Raising our hands reminds us that we need to raise up our minds to God, setting aside all irrelevant thoughts.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book III Ch. 20 First Rule, para. 1 and 2.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“I have already spoken of the effects which the solitary and ascetic life of the early monks produced upon their imagination. The same thing took place amongst the recluses of the convents, but particularly nunneries. “The imaginations of women,” says a celebrated author whom I have already quoted, “as their feelings are more keen and exquisite, are more susceptible and ungovernable than those of men; more obnoxious to the injurious influence of solitude; more easily won upon by the arts of delusion, and inflamed by the contagion of the passions.” Hence we may account for the rapidity with which in orphan houses, cloisters, and other institutions, where numbers of the sex are [122] intimately connected with each other, the sickness, humour, habits, of one, if conspicuous and distinguished, become those of all. I remember to have read in a medical writer of considerable merit, that in a French convent of nuns, of more than common magnitude, one of the sisters was seized with a strange impulse to mew like a cat, in which singular propensity she was shortly imitated by several other sisters, and finally, without a solitary exception, by the whole convent, who all joined at regular periods in a general mew that lasted several hours”

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John Calvin

Source: A Treatise of Relics (1543), p. 93

“If we follow our divine calling, we shall receive this unique consolation that there is no work so mean and so sordid that does not look truly respectable and highly important in the sight of God”

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John Calvin

Coram Deo!
Gen 1:28; Col 1:1ff
Page 94.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“The whole life of Christians ought to be an exercise of piety, since they are called to sanctification. It is the office of the law to remind them of their duty and thereby to excite them to the pursuit of holiness and integrity. But when their consciences are solicitous how God may be propitiated, what answer they shall make, and on what they shall rest their confidence, if called to his tribunal, there must then be no consideration of the requisitions of the law, but Christ alone must be proposed for righteousness, who exceeds all the perfection of the law.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book III Ch. 19 sect. 2.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“For he [David] confesses that prosperity had so stupefied and benumbed his senses that he disregarded the grace of God on which he should have depended, relied on himself instead, and imagined that he could not fall.”

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John Calvin

Page 50.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“Depraved custom is just a kind of general pestilence in which men perish not the less that they fall in a crowd.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Prefatory Address, p. 23
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“The one condition for spiritual progress is that we remain sincere and humble. Let us keep our end in view, let us press forward to our goal. Let us not indulge in pride, nor give in to our sinful passions. Let us steadily exert ourselves to reach a higher degree of holiness till we shall finally arrive at a perfection of goodness which we seek and pursue as long as we live, but which we shall attain then only, when, freed from all earthly infirmity, we shall be admitted by God into his full communion.”

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John Calvin

Page 23.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“For what accords better and more aptly with faith than to acknowledge ourselves divested of all virtue that we may be clothed by God, devoid of all goodness that we may be filled by him, the slaves of sin that he may give us freedom, blind that he may enlighten, lame that he may cure, and feeble that he may sustain us; to strip ourselves of all ground of glorying that he alone may shine forth glorious, and we be glorified in him?”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Prefatory Address to King Francis as translated by Henry Beveridge, p. 16.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“The denial of ourselves which Christ has so diligently commanded his disciples from the beginning will at last dominate all the desires of our heart.”

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John Calvin

Page 28.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“Helvidius has shown himself too ignorant, in saying that Mary had several sons, because mention is made in some passages of the brothers of Christ.”

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John Calvin

Bernard Leeming, "Protestants and Our Lady", Marian Library Studies, January 1967, p.9.

“Moreover, a true Christian will not ascribe any prosperity to his own diligence, industry, or good fortune, but he will acknowledge that God is the author of it.”

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John Calvin

Page 43.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“The apostle denies that anyone actually knows Christ, who has not learned to put off the old man, corrupt with deceitful lusts, and to put on Christ.”

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John Calvin

Page 20.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“When we recognize the rod of a father, should we not show ourselves docile children rather than rebelliously desperate men who have been hardened in their evil doings?”

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John Calvin

Page 56.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“No one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength of his own to press forward with a due degree of watchfulness, and the great majority [of Christians] are kept down with such great weakness that they stagger and halt and even creep on the ground, and so make very slight advances.”

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John Calvin

Page 22.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“But it must be admitted that our heart is never seriously inclined to wish for and to mediate on the future life unless it has first thoroughly learned to forsake the vanities of the present world.”

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John Calvin

Page 69.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“If all are born and live for the express purpose of learning to know God, and if the knowledge of God, in so far as it fails to produce this effect, is fleeting and vain, it is clear that all those who do not direct the whole thoughts and actions of their lives to this end fail to fulfil the law of their being.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 1, Chapter 3, p. 52
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vices are always bubbling up form it to bespatter and stain what is otherwise pure…. We should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only but are buried in innumerable impurities…. all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement…. they are always spattered and befouled with many stains…. it is certain that there is no one who is not covered with infinite filth.”

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John Calvin

In John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, 1989, William J. Bouwsma, Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN 0195059514 ISBN 9780195059519, p. 36. http://books.google.com/books?id=ADdQiBaLW_kC&pg=PA36&dq=%22We+take+nothing+from+the+womb+but+pure+filth+%22&hl=en&ei=iu9lTJbUNsL48AbKt92DCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20take%20nothing%20from%20the%20womb%20but%20pure%20filth%20%22&f=false

“There is deliverance in store only for the man who gives up his selfishness, and whose sole aim is to please the Lord and to do what is right in his sight.”

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John Calvin

Page 29.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church.”

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John Calvin

Commentary on Ephesians 1:23.
Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, 1854, Rev. William Pringle, tr., Edinburgh, p. 218. http://books.google.com/books?id=i3o9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA218&dq=%22reckons+himself+in+some+measure+imperfect%22&hl=en&ei=sHrpTcfgN4fX0QH2hMSSAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22reckons%20himself%20in%20some%20measure%20imperfect%22&f=false
Epistles of Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians

“If we are minded to affirm Christ's Kingdom as we ought, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who is plotting its ruin.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Institutes of the Christian Religion, edited by John T. McNeill p. 174
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.”

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John Calvin

Page 32.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“But a faithful believer will in all circumstances mediate on the mercy and fatherly goodness of God.”

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John Calvin

Page 45.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“We should not insist on absolute perfection of the gospel in our fellow Christians, however we may strive for it ourselves.”

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John Calvin

Page 21.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“Scripture points out this difference between believers and unbelievers; the latter, as old slaves of their incurable perversity, cannot endure the rod; but the former, like children of noble birth, profit by repentance and correction.”

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John Calvin

Page 57.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“Where is our acknowledgement of God if our thoughts are fixed on the glamour of our garments?”

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John Calvin

Page 85.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“In short, knowing that whatever may happen is ordained by the Lord, he will receive it with a peaceful and thankful heart, that he may not be guilty of proudly resisting the rule of him to whom he has once committed himself and all his belongings.”

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John Calvin

Page 46.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“It is easy to see how superstition, with its false glosses, mocks God, while it tries to please him.”

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John Calvin livre Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 1, Chapter 4, p. 54
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“Warned by such evidences of their spiritual illness, believers profit by their humiliations. Robbed of their foolish confidence in the flesh, they take refuge in the grace of God. And when they have done so, they experience the nearness of the divine protection which is to them a strong fortress”

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John Calvin

Ps 30:6-7
Page 51.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

“When we hear any mention of our mystical union with Christ, we should remember that holiness is the channel to do it.”

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John Calvin

Page 17.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

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