ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Theology of John Calvin

Okay, so imagine you have a really good friend named John who loves to talk about God and how we should live our lives. John believes that God has a special plan for each person and that we can't do anything to change that plan. He also believes that God already knows who will go to heaven and who won't, no matter what we do.

This is kind of like what John Calvin believed too. He was a really smart man who lived a long time ago and wrote a lot of books about God and how we should live. His big idea was something called "predestination." That means that God has already decided everything that will happen in the world, including who will go to heaven and who won't.

In Calvin's theology, humans are born sinful and can't do anything good without God's help. He believed in something called "total depravity," which meant that everyone is basically bad and we need God to save us. He also thought that only certain people, who he called the "elect," would go to heaven. The rest of us would go to a bad place called hell.

Calvin also believed that God has already chosen who will be saved and who won't, no matter what we do. This is called "unconditional election." He thought that humans don't have any control over this - God just picks who he wants to save, no matter what.

So, in short, John Calvin believed that God has already decided everything that will happen in the world, including who will go to heaven and who won't. He thought that humans are born bad and can't change that on their own, and that only certain people will be saved. This is known as his theology.