Preface: Calvin is really cool.

John Calvin was born in Noyon, a small town in northern France, within a thoroughly Catholic social environment. His family was not poor; his father held a position within the local church administration and was well acquainted with how the church–bureaucratic system operated. This point is crucial: from an early age, the church Calvin encountered was not a mysterious community of faith, but a highly institutionalized organization closely tied to power and social advancement. His father did not intend for him to become a theologian. Instead, he hoped Calvin would follow a safe, respectable, upwardly mobile path—through education, into the church or the legal profession, and ultimately into the ranks of the institutional elite.

As a result, Calvin’s early educational trajectory was extremely “standard.” He first received a humanist education in Paris, systematically studying Latin, rhetoric, and classical literature, before turning to law and traveling to Orléans and Bourges to study Roman law. He underwent what was among the most rigorous legal training in Europe at the time: close textual analysis, logical reasoning, questions of authority, and institutional legitimacy. This training shaped his lifelong mode of thinking—calm, highly structured, and acutely sensitive to ambiguity and the abuse of authority. Up to this point, Calvin’s life direction was still that of a legal professional or an institutional intellectual, not a religious reformer.

The real turning point came in the early 1530s in France. Reformation ideas began quietly circulating among French intellectual circles, but the French monarchy and the Catholic Church were tightly bound together and maintained zero tolerance for any reformist tendencies. In 1533, Nicolas Cop, the newly appointed rector of the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne in the University of Paris, emphasized in his inaugural address “justification by faith” and the priority of inner faith over external institutions, while downplaying the church’s role as a mediator of salvation. Theologically, the speech was not radical; politically, however, it was extremely dangerous. It signaled that reformist ideas had penetrated the very core of France’s highest academic authority.

Calvin was closely associated with Cop, and scholars generally agree that he at least participated in shaping the ideas behind the address. From the Sorbonne’s perspective, this was already sufficient. The Sorbonne was not a forum for debating theological differences; it was an institution that determined orthodoxy and heresy. After the address, the Sorbonne quickly initiated investigations, royal authority intervened, and reform-minded scholars were systematically identified, scrutinized, and purged. Cop was forced to flee Paris overnight, and Calvin immediately realized that it was no longer possible for him to remain within the French institutional system.

It must be emphasized that Calvin did not leave France after a formal trial or public conviction. He chose exile proactively, before the purge fully unfolded. In sixteenth-century France, once a charge of heresy entered the judicial process, the outcome was often imprisonment, confiscation of property, or even execution. For a young legal professional, remaining in the country would have meant the simultaneous end of both his career and his life.

It was precisely in this condition of being expelled from the system that Calvin was forced into theology. He needed to answer an urgent question—for himself and for French Protestants alike: If both the Church and the state declare you a heretic, on what grounds can you prove that you are not? This was not a matter of personal spirituality, but of legitimacy. In 1536, while in exile, he completed the first edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This book was not written for ordinary believers; it was a highly rational, systematic defense of faith, one that can almost be read as a “Protestant constitution.” Using the methods of a jurist, Calvin constructed a logical framework, a source of authority, and a vision of social viability for Protestant belief.

Calvinism became the intellectual foundation of Puritanism not because it offered comfort, but precisely because it was extremely severe yet highly stable. It provided not emotional consolation, but a worldview capable of long-term operation, forming a closed circuit among faith, morality, and social order. John Calvin was able to turn doctrines as abstract as predestination and divine sovereignty into a system that was executable, governable, and sustainable precisely because he approached theology with a jurist’s mindset. He did not abandon law; he elevated legal method into a theological method.

First, Calvin’s point of departure was not personal emotional experience or religious enthusiasm, but the question of authority. This was closely related to his legal training. As someone educated in law, Calvin understood that any system must first answer the question of where final adjudicative authority lies. In his theology, the answer was singular: ultimate authority belongs to God alone. From this he established a clear chain of authority—God’s will as the ultimate source, Scripture as the authoritative text of divine revelation, and the church and tradition as agents of interpretation and execution, never as new sources of authority. This position recurs throughout The Institutes of the Christian Religion, and its direct consequence is the fundamental denial of the pope and the church as legitimate “legislators” of faith.

Second, in addressing predestination, Calvin’s reasoning displays a highly rational separation of causality. He insisted that salvation or damnation can only be explained by God’s eternal decree, not by human behavior, choice, or religious practice. In other words, the cause of salvation lies solely in God’s will, while human actions are merely the temporal outcomes of that will. This distinction logically severs any possibility that behavior could cause salvation and renders attempts to “exchange” rituals, good works, or moral performance for salvation theoretically untenable.

Third, Calvin’s critique of church institutions was not a simple moral denunciation, but a structural analysis of consequences. He repeatedly argued that if any portion of salvific authority were entrusted to human behavior or ecclesiastical administration, salvation would inevitably be institutionalized, monopolized, and transformed into a resource to be managed and distributed. Under such a structure, morality would cease to be a response to God and would instead degenerate into performance and exchange—not because individuals are necessarily corrupt, but because the system itself incentivizes such outcomes. In this sense, Calvin’s critique resembles an analysis of institutional risk rather than an emotional anti-church polemic.

Fourth, Calvin did not deny the importance of moral practice; instead, he fundamentally redefined its status. In his theology, good works are not conditions of salvation, but the result of faith and grace at work. Behavior cannot prove that a person is certainly among the elect, but a stable, disciplined life order and consistent moral practice are taken as outward manifestations of a living faith. This understanding later developed within Puritan society into highly stringent systems of moral oversight. Their attention to behavior was not about accumulating merit, but about maintaining logical consistency between faith and life.

Finally, the very mode of writing of The Institutes of the Christian Religion reflects Calvin’s legal mindset. It is neither a collection of sermons nor a book of devotional reflections, but a systematic theological argument that begins from first principles, unfolds layer by layer, responds to objections, and undergoes continual revision to strengthen its internal coherence. For this reason, the book could be repeatedly cited and used throughout the long controversies of the Reformation and came to be regarded as a foundational text of the Reformed tradition. This is not because it was written like a legal code, but because it possesses a kind of legal stability: it holds up under dispute and functions in practice.

The essence of predestination lies not in the idea that “God knows everything in advance,” but in a more radical claim: that a person’s salvation or damnation was determined by God before time itself began, without any causal dependence on human actions, choices, or even expressions of faith. This means that the church cannot distribute salvation through rituals, and individuals cannot “accumulate qualifications” through good works. Salvation is thus fundamentally detached from the logic of human exchange.

At first glance, this theory appears profoundly anti-human. If everything is already decided, why should anyone uphold morality, discipline, or live like one of the “elect”? This is precisely where Calvinism’s force lies: it does not abandon behavior, but completely transforms its meaning. Behavior is no longer a means toward salvation; it becomes the outward sign of a salvation that already exists. Put differently: one does good not in order to be saved, but because one may already be among the elect.

This creates a state of intense psychological tension. Believers can never be certain whether they belong to the elect, yet they are required to live out the order, self-discipline, and moral rigor expected of the elect. The result is not relaxation, but continuous self-examination, self-management, and self-restraint. This explains why Puritan society exhibited an almost obsessive moral discipline—not because Puritans believed behavior could purchase salvation, but because they feared that their way of life might reveal signs of not having been chosen.

At this point, Calvinism represents a complete rupture with Catholicism. Catholicism offers an “operable system of salvation”: through the church, the sacraments, confession, and good works, individuals can continually repair their relationship with God within an institutional framework. Calvinism abolishes this system outright. When salvation is no longer operable, the religious authority of the institution itself collapses.

This is the theological root of Puritan hostility toward ecclesiastical hierarchies. In Calvinist logic, concentrating spiritual authority within human hierarchies is itself an encroachment upon divine sovereignty. Episcopacy is not merely an organizational issue, but a theological one: it implies that some people are “closer to God” than others. In Calvinism, however, the distance between God and humanity is absolute; no position, office, or lineage can reduce it. Consequently, Puritans gravitated toward presbyterian governance, collective oversight, and mutual supervision. They were instinctively hostile to episcopal systems and spiritual aristocracies, favoring more egalitarian and decentralized forms of church governance. For this reason, Puritans were, in theological terms, overwhelmingly Calvinist rather than Lutheran, the latter placing greater emphasis on personal faith experience and exerting less pressure on institutional structures.

The reason this theological framework proved so “action-oriented” is precisely that it offers no certainty. One can never confirm one’s own salvation, and can only “live out a possibility” through sustained discipline, labor, and moral practice. This drove Puritans to place extraordinary emphasis on time management, vocational responsibility, family order, and public morality, and to embed their theological principles into social structures. Faith thus ceased to be merely an inner state and became an action-oriented ethic that permeated everyday life.

In the late sixteenth century, Puritans initially emerged as reformers within the Church of England; they did not begin with the intention of breaking away from the system. At this stage, they broadly divided into two orientations. One consisted of moderates who chose to remain within the Church of England, hoping to “purify” it by reforming doctrine, simplifying rituals, and weakening episcopal power. The other gradually adopted a separatist stance, concluding that the Church of England was beyond redemption in its structure and power relations and had to be abandoned entirely. This division was not a dispute over theological minutiae, but a fundamental judgment about whether one could still remain faithful to God within the existing system. The English crown was deeply wary of both groups, because under the established church system, ecclesiastical order itself was a pillar of royal legitimacy; any challenge to church structure amounted to a challenge to political authority.

In the early seventeenth century, during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, these tensions escalated into systematic repression. Puritan sermons were censored, nonconformist gatherings were banned, and ministers who refused to follow official liturgy were punished. Under such conditions, some Puritans gradually abandoned the possibility of reforming the English church from within and chose instead to leave Europe. The Puritans who sailed to North America aboard the Mayflower in 1620 were the most emblematic among them, though it must be stressed that they represented the separatist faction rather than Puritans as a whole.

In North America, New England was not merely the endpoint of passive refuge for the Puritans, but a testing ground for their social ideals. Centered on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they sought to build a “covenant society” in the New World, founded on a religious compact. In this vision, the church was the core structure of society, religious norms directly constituted law and public morality, and individual behavior was strictly subjected to communal moral oversight. This system was highly coherent, but also highly exclusionary. The Puritans showed little tolerance for heresy or dissent, including dissent from other Protestant groups. They did flee religious persecution, but they also reproduced and imposed new forms of religious repression in North America—an aspect that cannot be romanticized.

Over time, as the second and third generations emerged, the religious intensity of Puritan society began to decline. The once tightly stretched theological fervor gradually loosened, and Puritanism underwent a process of secularization. What ultimately remained was no longer a comprehensive theological system, but an ethical structure stripped of its religious shell: an emphasis on diligence, self-discipline, and restraint; a strong sense of covenant and public responsibility; and the priority of communal order over individual desire. These secularized Puritan ethics profoundly shaped the political culture of New England, influenced early American republican thought, and provided a powerful moral foundation for what would later be called “American exceptionalism.”