It wasn't just Calvin. John simply had the high seat among the rest, to a point where he was dubbed the 'Pope of Geneva'. Many people even put him above Martin Luther, who was the very first in his time to speak against the Roman Church.
The Diet of Worms is where it really began- the cutoff between Luther and the rest of the reformists from the Catholic Church.
The reason Calvin took the cake is because of Luther's unwillingness to do away with certain Catholic doctrine, which the rest of the reformers saw was required to necessitate predestinarian theology. The way it was seen, was that if you took away sovereign election, you took away justification to break communion with the Pope.
And Luther stayed on the fence, being half protestant and half catholic. That is why today the Lutheran churches are barely protestant at all despite being a mother church of the Reformation.
Calvin wasn't the only author of Calvinist ideology, he was the authority of it. It was something all the reformists were in on. Now if you're wondering where Arminians came from- it is actually very simple: Arminius was a student of Calvin's, and he condemned Calvin on hinging to Saint Augustine's theology (which was heavily predestinarian), calling it Stoic paganism.
And if you're wondering where Methodism came from, who hold to free will and which are the contrary, inverted church to the Presbyterians, that is simple as well: they broke communion with the English Church in the 1700's.
So there you have it, in a nutshell
lain:
Maybe now you can see why Reformed Christians take offense- it is because virtually all these people ran off with Calvinist notions and revised them to their liking- and then have the nerve to come back around calling us the heretics.
What a ridiculous thing that is!
So you may want to check
your demeanor.
