Jon Balserak argues that Calvin saw himself as a prophet raised up by God to reform the Church. Calvin's ‘prophetic self-identity’ (p. 8) was based upon his ability to provide authoritative interpretation of the Bible and was modelled on examples drawn from the Old Testament. Calvin's abilities as a prophet did not extend to mystical foreknowledge of the future or to declarations of an imminent apocalypse. Balserak contextualises Calvin's sense of the prophetic within medieval traditions and compares Calvin's thinking with that of rival early modern reformers. As in so many other areas, Calvin's views on prophets were in part shaped by reaction to the claims of Anabaptists and their misuse (according to Calvin) of the prophetic office set out in the New Testament. For Calvin, true prophets of God were those whose understanding of the Bible led them to call the Church to reform from its idolatry and corruption. Balserak returns here to the focus of his 2011 study of Calvin's lectures on the Old Testament minor prophets. We are guided through these sources to gain a vibrant sense of Calvin's assurance of his own authority to preach and to interpret the Bible. In the second half of this study, Balserak considers the potential impact of Calvin's prophetic voice on the Church in France. He suggests that Calvin's lectures to students in Geneva aimed to train a generation of French prophets. Calvin denounced Catholics and Nicodemites for standing in the way of the advance of God's kingdom. He also offered strident criticism of kings and princes who rejected his prophetic insight. Calvin's ‘unrelentingly strident, aggressive, and hateful’ (p. 155) attacks on magistrates who rejected reform offered legitimacy for those who took up arms against the crown in France. Quite what those on the front line in France made of Calvin's rhetoric, delivered from the relative safety of Geneva, remains the key question to any understanding of the emerging character of the French Reformed Church during the wars of religion.