In case you haven’t heard, and I seriously doubt that includes any of you out there, later this week the world is marking the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great French-exile lawyer and theologian, Jean Cauvin.  He is of course better known by his Anglicized name John Calvin and his majority residence in the Swiss city of Geneva.

For a couple of reasons I had originally planned to stay off this bandwagon and only make a passing reference on his birth date.  The reasons included the fact that it is a bandwagon and plenty of others are commemorating the occasion, the fact that I have a tremendous backlog of blog writing as it is and thought my efforts would be better spent there, and finally that what he is best known for – the “Five Points of Calvinism” that someone else actually put in that form – is related but somewhat peripheral to my blog’s niche.

But I changed my mind.  I changed it for one significant reason and that is the fact that in all the articles I have read I see little if any on the linkage of his theological ideas to his model of church government, a model that remains with us today in the Reformed and Presbyterian churches.  In my understanding of the Presbyterian system of church government the form is directly driven by Scripture and Reformed theology.

So I’ll go ahead and post a series of anniversary articles this week.  However, due to the limits on my time and the lack of formal training and experience in this area I need to be clear about a couple of things:  These are intended to be personal reflections and not scholarly dissertations.  Please accept them in that spirit but if I stray into inaccuracies or misrepresentations of Calvin’s work I do appreciate the gentle correction you offer.  Along those same lines these are not intended to be comprehensive but rather representative of how my ecclesiastical thinking has been shaped by Calvin’s ideas.

So hang on as we head straight into the Sovereignty of God and the Sinfulness of Humankind.