He was also a predestinarian.:>)
Yes, but even the RCC could see their way around that:
"Thus our Doctors, without detracting in the least from the sovereignty and justice of God, have risen to the highest idea of His goodness: that God so sincerely desires the salvation of all as to give absolutely to all, immediately or mediately, the means necessary for salvation, and always with the desire that man should consent to employ those means. No one falls into hell except by his own fault. Even infidels will be accountable for their infidelity."
Now, obviously Biblical Christians would have mighty disagreements with the RCC over "the means necessary" and Who (vs. what organization) is in control of those "means", but at least in this one respect the RCC finds itself closer to the Gospel of Christ than the construct of the Calvinists (to which the CE quaintly quotes a French protestant as describing "the boldest defiance ever given to reason and conscience").
Strangely, we still read of that 'bold defiance to reason and conscience' each day on FR.
He was also a predestinarian.:>)
He also believed salamanders could live in fire and that there were people in the world who had no mouths and derived their nutrition from the air, and many other superstitious notions, many of which he introduced into Christianity, as all the synchrotistic doctrines borrowed from the Manichees, like a sinful nature.
(Mom, I know your busy just reading Calvin. But, read just some of Augustine and you will be surprised by how much of what he believed is pure superstition, and common to many cults today. I'm not judging him, he was only a man, but I find all those who put great faith in his teachings troubling.)
Hank