July 10, 2009 will mark the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth. Dr. David Hall, senior pastor of Midway Presbyterian Church in Powder Springs, Georgia, is executive director of a group called Calvin 500, which is planning an elaborate tour of Paris, Strasbourg, and Geneva next summer to commemorate Calvin's life and ministry. Here is a link to the group's Web site.
It would be difficult to overstate the impact that Calvin has had on all phases of American life, not just theologically. In his new book, The Legacy of John Calvin, Dr. Hall writes something that is quite timely considering today's economic crisis. "Wherever Calvinism spread, so did a love for free markets and capitalism." However, Hall writes:
The common but mistaken caricature of Calvin as a crass capitalist should be contrasted with the prayer he suggested using before beginning work and which is included in the 1562 Geneva Catechism. In that prayer, he led the people in asking God to bless their labor, noting that if God did not bless it, "nothing goes well or can prosper." He prayed for the Holy Spirit to aid workers in this calling so that they would work "without any fraud or deception, and so that we shall have regard more to follow their ordinances than to satisfy our appetite to make ourselves rich."