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Elvis Fu - You were way off on the Martin Luther Calvinist bent back on page one. Martin Luther and John Calvin - the Father of Calvinism disagreed enough to decclare each other false prophets and heritics.
Here is a brief synposis of John Calvin ...
John Calvin (1509-64)
Born to an upper middle class family in France, John Calvin (the Latinized form of his birth name, Jean Cauvin) emerged as one of the most important figures of the Reformation. Having studied for the priesthood at Paris in his youth, Calvin turned his attentions to civil and canon law in Orleans when his father became disaffected with the clergy.
Calvin showed an early predilection for theology and for the study of Greek and Hebrew. Exposed to the ideas of Luther while he was still in Paris, Calvin's writing indicate that he had definitely moved into the Protestant camp by 1533. On November 1 of that year, he delivered a speech in which he attacked the established church and called for reforms.
Calvin's ideas, rather than bringing about the reforms he sought, elicited a wave of anti-Protestant sentiment that forced him to flee for his own safety. During the next few years, he sought refuge in various cities, most notably Basel, Switzerland. It was also during this period that he began work on his Institution de la Religion Chrétienne, the voluminous work that would consume a good deal of his energy for the next three decades.
During Calvin's flight, he happened to pass a night in Geneva with a man named Farel. Farel attempted to persuade Calvin to remain in Geneva working in support of the Protestant cause there. Reluctantly, Calvin agreed. In 1541, pro-Protestant forces gained control of the city. For the remainder of his life, Calvin stood as the dominant figure in a Geneva that became a point of refuge for persecuted Protestants from all over Europe.
Despite Calvin's work in Geneva, his chief claim to an enduring legacy is found in his theology, which has been greatly influential in many Protestant denominations. The primary tenets of Calvinism include a belief in the primacy of the scripture as an authority for doctrinal decisions, a belief in predestination, a belief in salvation wholly accomplished by grace with no influence from works, and a rejection of the episcopacy.
and another...
Perhaps even more so than Martin Luther, Calvin created the patterns and thought that would dominate Western culture throughout the modern period. American culture, in particular, is thoroughly Calvinist in some form or another; at the heart of the way Americans think and act, you'll find this fierce and imposing reformer.
Calvin was originally a lawyer, but like Zwingli, he was saturated with the ideas of Northern Renaissance humanism. He was dedicated to reform of the church and he got his chance to build a reformed church when the citizens of Geneva revolted against their rulers in the 1520's.
Geneva had been under the rule of the House of Savoy, but the Genevans successfully overthrew the Savoys and the local bishop-prince of Geneva in the waning years of the 1520's. The Genevans, however, unlike the citizens of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and other cities that became Protestant in the 1520's, were not German-speakers but primarily French-speakers. As such, they did not have close cultural ties with the reformed churches in Germany and Switzerland. The Protestant canton of Bern, however, was determined to see Protestantism spread throughout Switzerland. In 1533, Bern sent Protestant reformers to convert Geneva into a Protestant city; after considerable conflict, Geneva officially became Protestant in 1535.
Calvin, by now a successful lawyer, was invited to Geneva to build the new Reformed church. Calvin's efforts radically changed the face of Protestantism, for he directly addressed issues that early Reformers didn't know how or didn't want to answer.
His most important work involved the organization of church governance and the social organization of the church and the city. He was, in fact, the first major political thinker to model social organization entirely on biblical principles. At first his reforms did not go over well. He addressed the issue of church governance by creating leaders within the new church; he himself developed a catechism designed to impose doctrine on all the members of the church. He and Guillaume Farel (1489-1565) imposed a strict moral code on the citizens of Geneva; this moral code was derived from a literal reading of Christian scriptures. Naturally, the people of Geneva believed that they had thrown away one church only to see it replaced by an identical twin; in particular, they saw Calvin's reforms as imposing a new form of papacy on the people, only with different names and different people.
So the Genevans tossed him out. In early 1538, Calvin and the Protestant reformers were exiled from Geneva. Calvin, for his part, moved to Strasbourg where he began writing commentaries on the Bible and finished his massive account of Protestant doctrine, The Institutes of the Christian Church. Calvin's commentaries are almost endless, but within these commentaries he developed all the central principles of Calvinism in his strict readings of the Old and New Testaments. The purpose of commentaries in Western literary tradition was to explain both the literary technique and the difficult passages in literary and historical works. Calvin wrote commentaries to ostensibly explain scriptural writings, but in reality he, like theologians before him, used the commentaries to argue for his own theology as he believed was present in scriptural writings. They are less an explanation of the Bible than a piece by piece construction of his theological, social, and political philosophy.
In 1540 a new crop of city officials in Geneva invited Calvin back to the city. As soon as he arrived he set about revolutionizing Genevan society. His most important innovation was the incorporation of the church into city government; he immediately helped to restructure municipal government so that clergy would be involved in municipal decisions, particularly in disciplining the populace. He imposed a hierarchy on the Genevan church and began a series of statute reforms to impose a strict and uncompromising moral code on the city.
By the mid-1550's, Geneva was thoroughly Calvinist in thought and structure. It became the most important Protestant center of Europe in the sixteenth century, for Protestants driven out of their native countries of France, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all came to Geneva to take refuge. By the middle of the sixteenth century, between one-third and one-half of the city was made up of these foreign Protestants. In Geneva, these foreign reformers adopted the more radical Calvinist doctrines; most of them had arrived as moderate Reformers and left as thorough-going Calvinists. It is probably for this reason that Calvin's brand of reform eventually became the dominant branch of Protestantism from the seventeenth century onwards.
and perhaps one more on differences between Calvin & Luther - with a little bit of the Scottish that Konstantine offered to apoligize for (thats ok buddy - I grew up a Presbyter as well)
Calvinism originated in John Calvin, a French theologian who moved to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1536, where he published his Institutes of Christian Religion. Calvin's theology was similar to Luther's, yet the two diverge on the main thrust of Calvinism: predestination. Calvin held strongly to the belief that God had already determined who was and who was not going to be saved, that all things are under the direct control of God-man does not have free will per se, since he "fell" into sin. Only God's grace can lead to salvation for man. His belief system caught on, and Geneva soon became a Calvinistic theocracy. Calvinism was soon carried to other countries: John Knox, from Scotland, lived in Geneva for awhile in the 1550s and carried Calvinism back to Scotland; by 1560, the Presbyterian church had been formed as a result and became the national church of Scotland. The Calvinistic theology also impacted many of the English to the south of Scotland: the group known as the Puritans soon emerged as the Calvinistic church in England. Many of these Puritans fled England in the 1610s and in 1620 ended up in the colonies in America, where they would create a theocracy in Massachusetts. During this time period, Puritanism gained political power with the execution of Charles I of England and the establishment of the Commonwealth; the Puritan churches in America were at this time given the label of "Congregationalist," since each congregation governed itself, while Calvinism in England and Scotland tended to be governed by presbyteries. This label holds to this day. Finally, around the same time as the Puritan voyage to America, in 1628, a group of Dutch Calvinists came together and created the Reformed church.
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Variants
The three main branches of Calvinism today are the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ (the UCC; known informally as the Congregational churches), and the Reformed churches, in America called the Reformed Churches of America. The differences began as cultural and doctrinal, with the Presbyterians as Scots (or the English "Puritans" in the seventeenth century) desiring a system of episcopal oversight by elders ("presbyters"), the Congregationalists as English desiring congregational autonomy (the "Puritan Separatists"), and the Reformed as Dutch; today, these cultural distinctions are still existent, but many theological differences have sprouted. The Presbyterian church today denies limited atonement, that Christ died only for the sins of a few. The Presbyterian, and especially the United Church of Christ, is known today for a "historically critical" interpretation of the Scriptures, believing that the message must be understood in its first-century context, and both attempt in many ways to distance themselves today from some of the teachings of Calvinism, from Calvin himself and many of its adherents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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eter, aka 
usty 
halk
