John Calvin will survive the test of time better than Calvin Klein

ALLOW me as the Presbyterian minister in Cork to make some comments on Steven King’s stimulating account of John Calvin (August 19).

Calvin may have been argumentative, but he was also self-effacing. By his instruction he was buried in an unmarked grave.

In highlighting the difficult issues of the execution of Servetus and of predestination, King does not make it completely clear that Roman Catholic authorities would also have regarded Servetus as a heretic and treated him in the same way. There is also a Catholic aspect to predestination – it was not invented by Calvin, he drew on the thought of Augustine.