John Calvin on his 500th Birthday

John Calvin has been reviled and vilified for most of the last 500 years yet he is unquestionably one of the most influential and praiseworthy people of the entire millennium. His genius was his ability to understand systematize, and organize Biblical doctrine and apply it to every facet of life. According to John Piper he breathed the impulse of freedom into modern history. He believed everything that happens is the work of God so we must say that God, through John Calvin, revolutionized the Christian religion, introduced the concept of human liberty, set the world on its course to democracy and accelerated the self-destructive course of the Catholic Church from which it has not recovered to this day. His life, his writing and his work make one of the most compelling stories ever told.