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Abraham Calov

IUS) (1612-1686. German theologian. Born at Mohrungen, he was largely self-taught in his youth, but graduated from the University of Königsberg. Here he taught for a time, moving later to Rostock and Danzig, and in 1650, at the invitation of the elector, to Wittenberg, where he spent the rest of his life. A strenuous defender of rigid Lutheran orthodoxy, he attacked the Syncretistic School of Helmstedt and his Königsberg followers, and later wrote against Calixtus* and his school. He assailed Roman Catholicism, Arminianism, Socinianism, Pietism, and Calvinism, even intervening in the internal controversies of the Calvinist divines. He drew up the Consensus repetitus fidei verae Lutheranae in an attempt to exclude all Syncretists from the Lutheran Church, but the state authorities were by now tired of controversial divinity and imposed a silence so thorough that Calovius's own account of the Syncretistic Controversy (1682) was published anonymously. He wrote against the liberal critical views of Grotius* in Biblia Illustrata (1672-76) and against Boehme* (1684). Calovius always maintained that he deplored controversy and preferred constructive theology-and indeed his great twelve-volume Systema locorum theologicorum (1655-77) ranks with the work of Gerhard* as the leading expression of seventeenth-century Lutheran scholasticism.