Renaissance/Early Modern
John Calvin
1509–1564
“We are all sinners by nature; therefore we are all held under the yoke of sin. Now, if the whole man be subject to the dominion of sin, the will, which is the principal seat of it, must necessarily be bound with the firmest bonds.”
John Calvin was a French Reformer who organized church and civic life in Geneva after training in law and theology. His restates Christian doctrine from Scripture and places the absolute sovereignty of God's will at the center of theology. What God wills is righteous because he wills it. That claim is the hinge. Predestination and particular providence follow from it. Later moralists and philosophers had to answer him when they spoke of justice, human freedom, and the character of God.
In the Conversation
3 of the Great Ideas
Theology & Metaphysics
God
God is not bound by anything outside himself, and what he wills is good because he wills it, so that the creature's part is not to measure the divine decrees by its own sense of justice but to acknowledge the sovereignty from which all justice flows.
Sin
The fall has corrupted every power of the human soul, so that no faculty remains from which a good can proceed apart from the grace of God, and the image of God in man is not merely damaged but effaced, leaving man wholly dependent on a redemption he cannot begin of himself.