He was born two hundred and sixty-seven years before the Declaration of Independence, yet historians credit him as a virtual founder of America. Fact is, few had a greater influence on the founding than . . . John Calvin.
Calvin taught that Jesus Christ is Lord of all things—earthly and heavenly—and that Scripture applies to politics, government, art, economics and education. At a 500th anniversary celebration of Calvin’s birth, Doug Phillips, president of Vision Forum, spoke of Calvin’s legacy:
Because of John Calvin, we have a common law system. Of course, Calvin didn’t develop the common law, but he emphasized the importance of applying the Word of God to law itself, such that in America our Founding Fathers believed that law should be based on transcendent principles, in other words, principles coming from God. And the pastors, the shepherds, the businessmen, the colonists that came over here, many of them brought the doctrines and the world- view of Calvin, which is why we can say that John Calvin was really in a real sense the virtual Founding Father of America.
One historian noted that two-thirds of the American colonists were trained “in the school of John Calvin.”* It was Calvin’s theology of resistance to tyranny that informed the Declaration of Independence. Representative government, capitalism, and American education can be traced back to the biblical principles articulated by Calvin.
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* Dr. Lorraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination
Quoted in The Book That Made America, p. 94.