John Calvin and His Passion for the Majesty of God by John Piper & Gerald L. Bray

Author:John Piper & Gerald L. Bray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Biography, History
ISBN: 9781433501821
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Ministry Made by the Majesty of the Word 33

for three years Calvin served as the pastor to about five

hundred French refugees in Strasbourg, as well as teach-

ing New Testament. He also wrote his first commentary,

on Romans, and put out the second enlarged edition of

the Institutes.

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C h a P t e r f i v e

MarriaGe to idelette

Perhaps the most important providence during this

three-year stay in Strasbourg was finding a wife.

Several had tried to find a wife for Calvin, who was

thirty-one years old. Numerous women had shown inter-

est. Calvin had told his friend and matchmaker William

Farel what he wanted in a wife: “The only beauty which

allures me is this—that she be chaste, not too nice or

fastidious, economical, patient, likely to take care of my

health.”1 Parker comments, “Romantic love . . . seems to

have had no place in his character. Yet prosaic wooing led

to a happy marriage.”2 I think Parker was wrong about

romantic love (see below on Idelette’s death).

An Anabaptist widow named Idelette Stordeur was the

subject of John Calvin’s “prosaic wooing.” She and her

husband, John, had joined Calvin’s congregation. In the

spring of 1540, John died of plague, and on August 6, 1540,

Calvin and Idelette were married. She brought a son and

daughter with her into Calvin’s home.

Meanwhile, back in Geneva, chaos was making the city

1T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 70.

2Ibid., 69.

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