The 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin falls on July 10. How might we mark such a milestone? With a 24-hour ban on all kinds of fun, maybe? With a commemorative burning of heretics, at least in effigy? Or perhaps with separate events for the elect and for the reprobate?

In fact the anniversary is mostly to be celebrated with a series of academic conferences. Inevitably, some learned volumes will be published too. But an alternative might be to pour a glass of beer — brewed, perhaps, by the Geneva Artisans brasseurs Calvinus, promoted with the slogan “predestined to beer”— and raise a toast to this most maligned and misunderstood of theologians.

As a student studying Calvin’s theology in the 1990s, I became used to the flinch which greeted discovery of the subject of my doctoral thesis. Calvin? The tyrant of Geneva? That narrow-minded bigot and ruthless opponent of free speech? That warped and twisted originator of the doctrine of predestination? That repressive hyper-fundamentalist? That dour, ashen-faced killjoy?

Yet Calvin was none of these things. The associations which have accumulated around him are due mostly to developments in church history, decades (even centuries) after his death. The relation of Calvin to Calvinism is almost as vexed as the relation of Christ to Christianity.

The tyrant of Geneva? Hardly. Calvin was an impecunious refugee from France, who did not even enjoy the right to vote in Geneva until 1559. He first arrived in the city in 1536, en route to Italy. He was prevailed upon to stay and assist with its reformation, but fell out with the civic authorities and was banished from the city in 1538.

When he returned in 1541, it was at the invitation of the same authorities, and Geneva remained his exile home until he died in 1564.

It is true that in the last five years of his life, he enjoyed considerable influence not only over life in Geneva, but also over large parts of the burgeoning Protestant movement in Europe — but it was an informal, consensual influence, and not a despot’s iron grip.

A narrow-minded bigot and a pursuer of heretics?

It is true that while Calvin was in Geneva, the physician Michael Servetus (who played a role in elucidating the circulation of blood around the body) was burnt at the stake for what was regarded as a heretical view of the Trinity.

Servetus died for putting an adjective in the wrong place. At the climax of his trial, his accusers urged him to make an orthodox confession of faith: “Lord Jesus, Eternal Son of God, have mercy on me.” But Servetus insisted on repeating, “Lord Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have mercy on me.”

He believed that Jesus was Lord and Son of God; but not that he was eternal. For that he was condemned to death. It was, of course, a terrible act. But Servetus was the only person burnt at the stake in “Calvin’s Geneva”, while in the following five years alone, upwards of 60 “heretics” would be martyred that way in England. It was a bloody age.

Moreover, Servetus had already been condemned as a heretic by a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical court, and probably fled to Geneva for refuge: he viewed the city as his best hope, not his worst fear.