Part I
Part II
Part III
After Luther, probably the most famous and most influential of the sixteenth-century Reformers, the Frenchman John Calvin (1509-1564), is regarded as arguably the greatest theologian in church history by many Calvinists like myself.
Making the argument that some knowledge of God is instinctively present in all human beings throughout all ages, suppressed only by their own depravity, he writes:
Certainly, if there is any quarter where it may be supposed that God is unknown, the most likely for such an instance to exist is among the dullest tribes farthest removed from civilisation. But, as a heathen tells us, there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God. Even those who, in other respects, seem to differ least from the lower animals, constantly retain some sense of religion; so thoroughly has this common conviction possessed the mind, so firmly is it stamped on the breasts of all men.
The heathen cited by Calvin is the Roman philosopher from the first century BC, Cicero, who wrote in his De Natura Deorum (Book II.4),
it is clear that among all nations, the gods are present in the minds, as if naturally engraven thereupon.
Calvin interprets and casts this rather simple and mild claim of Cicero in a way that commonly would be referred to today as “racist”, referring to races characteristically “brutish” and differing little from the lower animals. There can be no doubt about it: by the modern standards of cultural Marxism, John Calvin was indeed a racist. He believed that some races were in some respects inferior to others. He does not explicitly mention the race to which he refers, but he notes that there is a race (or races) within the family of mankind, who are not only duller than his own white race, but in fact differ little from even the lower members of the animal kingdom.
Kinism is Calvinism consistently applied.
Part V: Ulrich Zwingli, Swiss Nationalist
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