How John Calvin Shaped Modern Seminary Education
from the Summer 2025 issue of The Forum Magazine
When the still-youthful Christian Reformed Church (founded in 1857) decided to establish a theological academy in 1876 to train young men for pastoral ministry, why did they choose to call the new institution Calvin Theological Seminary? After all, they could have named it after Dutch Reformation leaders from the sixteenth century onwards: Gijsbertus Voetius, Wilhelmus a Brakel, Petrus van Mastrict and more.
Instead, denominational leaders chose to go further back in time and steer away from the Dutch orbit. They turned to the sixteenth century Reformation, naming their new school after the Genevan Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564).
In making this choice, the nascent denomination signaled strong connections with Reformed teachings as articulated by John Calvin. Yet may I suggest that the connections go deeper, in that many of the educational aims and the challenges facing Calvin Theological Seminary throughout its 150-year history were already live issues in the Genevan Academy, set up by Calvin and his fellow pastors in Geneva in 1559. By looking back at the Genevan Academy and its training for future pastors, we can bring to light the enduring issues that seminaries face, but also explore how some of these questions have been addressed in past generations and learn from these.
It is worth pointing out that John Calvin’s direct influence in the Genevan Academy was relatively limited, since he died in 1564, a scant five years after the Genevan Academy opened its doors. Yet even before the Academy was established, Calvin signaled his own commitment to the importance of theological education by offering public lectures on Scripture, helping laypeople, current pastors, and future pastors learn how to understand the Bible and interpret its meaning. In fact, Calvin’s first position in Geneva after his arrival in the city in 1536 was not as pastor but as lecturer in Holy Scripture.
Calvin and his fellow pastors were also the driving force behind the fund-raising campaign to get the Academy established, asking the city magistrates to apply the proceeds from fines to the Academy’s building fund, and encouraging the city’s lawyers to remind those making wills to remember the Academy through legacies and gifts. He also worked tirelessly to recruit the first professors in the Genevan Academy in 1559. All these efforts led the first Rector of the Genevan Academy (Calvin’s friend and fellow pastor Theodore Beza) to exclaim in the preface to the Genevan Academy’s statutes, “God in his goodness has granted to this republic a privilege which very few have had before her, namely to have the same city as mother of its learning and of its faith.” So Calvin and his fellow pastors, like the Christian Reformed clergy in the 1870s, understood the urgent need for education to prepare future pastors as leaders of the church, and were willing to invest time and money to achieve this goal. Today, Calvin Theological Seminary continues to proclaim its story and invest in its mission of “preparing individuals for biblically faithful and contextually effective ministry of the Word.”
Both then and now, questions remain as to the most appropriate avenue for this training to take place. For instance, one fundamental and recurrent concern is to weigh the relative importance of calling (internal and external) versus formal education in preparing pastors. Do future pastors need to study Greek and Hebrew? Do they need to learn systematic theology, church history, apologetics, and exegesis over the course of several years? Or if someone provides evidence of their internal calling to ordained ministry and their spiritual leadership gifts and experience, backed up by support from their community, is that sufficient for ordination? These are not new questions.
Already in the sixteenth century, Calvin and his colleagues had to respond to individuals’ requests to be ordained without any period of study or assessment of their academic qualifications. They also had to respond to the urgent need for pastors to serve a burgeoning number of church plants in areas where Reformed communities were growing fast. This combination of congregational requests for pastors and candidates who wanted to serve in ministry without lengthy study was a major challenge. In the end, Calvin and his colleagues stood firmly on the side of a careful vetting of the capacities and abilities of pastoral candidates. As Calvin said in one of his letters about a candidate who wanted to be admitted to the pulpit without any period of study beforehand, “First, our Lord has given us a written rule, that we cannot contravene, namely that we may not receive any man into the ministry without first having properly and carefully approved him. This rule has to be kept in its entirety if we want to have good order and procedures in the church.” Like Christian Reformed leaders in the nineteenth century and Calvin Theological Seminary today, Calvin and his fellow pastors held that a period of formal study and a structured vetting were absolutely necessary before granting access to the pulpit.
In Calvin’s day, candidates for ordained ministry had to go through a multi-stage process. They had to commit to a course of study that focused primarily on learning Greek and Hebrew, Scriptural exegesis, and preaching practice, and gained practical experience in Reformed worship by faithfully attending Geneva’s weekly worship services. The Genevan Academy also began offering courses in systematic theology by the end of the sixteenth century. One of the key ways that students honed their skills was through weekly theological disputations, during which students had to argue for and against specific doctrinal propositions. Because the Genevan Academy did not offer formal degrees, students simply worked their way through the courses and then presented themselves for examination before a mixed group of faculty, pastors, and representatives from the city council. The examiners assessed a candidate’s knowledge of doctrine and Scripture, and reviewed the record of his behavior during his studies. Professors and pastors could provide personal testimony as to the student’s character because of their close contacts: many of the professors and pastors housed students in their own homes, and could therefore monitor and measure their spiritual and moral development. Candidates then had to present sermons on assigned passages of Scripture, and could be sent back for further study if any part of their assessment revealed major weaknesses. Calvin Theological Seminary today still follows similar assessment practices, including having students undergo assessed preaching practice during their seminary studies and passing comprehensive exams in the final year of their MDiv program.
In Calvin’s Geneva, the training and assessment of future pastors focused primarily on formal instruction and classroom work. Internship placements or vocational formation in ministry during one’s studies were not part of the curriculum. A number of students were given placements in rural congregations around Geneva to hone their pastoral skills, but this practice was not consistent, nor were there sufficient slots for all future pastors to gain this practical experience. What’s more, some churches in other countries, especially in France, pushed Geneva not to examine or ordain future French pastors, because the French churches wanted to be the ones doing the assessment and the subsequent placement of these new pastors.
These jurisdictional conflicts caused difficulties for the Genevan Academy, as did pressure from individual congregations to foster certain qualities among student pastors. For instance, one of the most desired characteristics for a sixteenth-century pastor was to have a good loud voice – indeed, soft-spoken pastors trying to preach in churches without sound systems faced an uphill struggle in their ministry. One church in France even wrote to Geneva to say that a particular candidate’s noted academic prowess was of little use to them unless they could be sure that he could make himself heard. This example may seem amusing, but it does highlight the disconnect that can occur between churches and seminaries, one that can only be bridged by regular two-way communication and mutual trust.
So where can we see evidence of John Calvin’s ongoing influence at Calvin Theological Seminary? We can see it in the continued importance of the languages and content of Scripture, in the persistent commitment to providing a seminary education that prepares future pastors with the best possible training for ministry, and in the Seminary’s deep desire to be of service to the church, including the emphasis on vocational formation. I think John Calvin would be pleased to see how his thoughts and theological legacy are honored today at the seminary bearing his name.
