Calvin, strolling through the gate known as the Porte Neuve and into the walled city, thought of this as a short layover. But he soon found it was easier to get into Geneva than to get out, because Calvin met Guillaume Farel there.
Farel (1536-1538) had once been a protégé of the mild-mannered Jacques Lêfevre d’Etaples, but had gone on to become a fiery preacher of the gospel in French-speaking Switzerland. He had been the chief Protestant preacher in Geneva since 1532, when he first arrived in the city, to rant against the city’s Catholic establishment and advocate Protestant reform. When Farel learned that a capable young French scholar had ventured inside the city walls he turned his fire on him, urging him to stay and join his ministry in Geneva and warning him that God’s curse would follow him if he turned down the invitation. Calvin, who had in mind for himself a quiet life of scholarship, was reluctant to stay in Geneva. But he feared God’s curse. And probably Farel’s too. He accepted the invitation.
Geneva at the time was a newly independent republic. It had adopted the Reformation just a few months before Calvin’s arrival, at the same time that it won its political freedom. The revolution of 1535-1536 was the culmination of a decades-long quest for autonomy by some of its most prominent citizens. The bishop was put to flight and his executive power was taken over by a series of citizen-elected councils, headed up by the 25-member Small Council, whose members were known as the city magistrates.
When Geneva’s citizenry voted in May 1536 to adopt the Reformation, they sent out of the city all the Catholic clergy who could not live in the new religious climate. This left the city with a serious shortage of clergy, and effectively without a church, if by church we mean a functioning ecclesiastical structure. Part of the job of Farel and Calvin, as they saw it, was to build a church. Farel wrote a catechism that would be used for instructing the populace, especially children. Calvin set his hand to work on a church order — guidelines or rules for the functioning of the church. But these early years were complicated by the fact that the two preachers and the city magistrates had conflicting visions of the way the church should operate.
Both Calvin and Farel were completely inept when it came to courting persons with whom they found themselves in disagreement. They were both committed to designing a church in which the pastors would have a significant amount of control, especially over such things as church discipline and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The magistrates, on the other hand, having worked for some time to rid their city of foreign tyranny, were wary of giving their foreign pastors too much authority. According to them, the pastors would have to do what the magistrates told them to do. The church would be controlled by the state.
What ensued was disaster. Calvin and Farel were already unpopular with many Genevans for requiring that everyone attend worship services and refusing to serve communion to unrepentant sinners. When they dug in their heels and would not submit to the magistrates’ plan for a church under state control, the Small Council sent them packing. On Easter Sunday, 1538, Calvin was on the road again.
An interim in Strasbourg … and a second try in Geneva
He made his way to his original destination, Strasbourg, where (by his account) he spent a very pleasant few years as pastor to the French Reformed congregation, as a teacher in Strasbourg’s Latin school, and as a writer on behalf of the evangelical movement. He enjoyed the company of Strasbourg’s team of reformers, including Martin Bucer (1491-1551), Wolfgang Capito (1478-1541), and Jean Sturm (1507-1589), and learned a great deal from their ecclesiastical practice and scholarly example.
He also got married. Under pressure from friends and colleagues to do what every Protestant ought to do (the Catholic ideal of clerical celibacy now being regarded as unnatural, unevangelical, and impractical), Calvin agreed to marry the widow Idelette de Bure—when she consented to have him.
In 1541, after a political upheaval, the Genevan magistrates, now suspecting that they had been a little too hasty in giving him the boot, succeeded in luring Calvin back to their city. They agreed (in principle) to his condition that a system be set up for ordering the church along the lines he envisioned, but left the details of this to be worked out later. And so when Calvin returned to the city in September, he immediately set to work on a document, the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, that would serve as a constitution for the church. In Calvin’s design, church ministry would be exercised in four offices:
• Pastors would proclaim the word and administer the sacraments.
• Doctors would be responsible for the instruction of the faithful and the theological education of those preparing for ministry.
• Elders would have oversight of the moral life of the community. They would provide for Christian discipline by meeting regularly with the pastors in a church court called a consistory, the forum for reviewing all cases of irregular behavior.
• Finally, deacons would care for the poor and the sick, disbursing funds to the indigent in an early modern version of social welfare.
When the magistrates ratified Calvin’s ordinances, it would seem that Calvin’s triumph in Geneva was complete. But nothing was quite that simple. Although Calvin had thought he had secured for the church the right to discipline its members without meddling from the civil government, some members of the Small Council had other views. Most (though not all) agreed that the consistory could discipline an obstinate sinner by barring him from the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. But could the magistrates vote to overrule the consistory’s decision? Many Genevans, especially those unhappy with their treatment by the consistory, thought they could. Many of the magistrates also believed they had this power. But Calvin was resolute and (as always) unyielding: church discipline was a matter for the church and not the state. The pastors and the consistory (in which Calvin himself was a prominent presence) controlled access to Holy Communion.
In addition to his political struggles, Calvin also experienced deep personal sadness. Idelette had a very difficult pregnancy, gave birth prematurely, and the baby, whom they named Jacques, did not survive. Idelette never fully recovered her health. After several years of decline, she died March 29, 1549. Calvin was devastated. It was “a very cruel thing for me,” he admitted, in the midst of praying for God to strengthen him. In keeping with the counsel he had given others, even in the face of this blow, he continued to trust that God “relieves the broken, strengthens the weak, and renews those who are weary.”i
The sailing was choppy in Geneva for Calvin.
He continued to butt heads with the magistrates and with elements in the population who resented his preaching and his policies. Shouting matches in Geneva’s narrow streets between Calvin and some person he had managed to offend were not uncommon in these years. The foreign pastor often acted in high-handed ways, without sensitivity to local customs or concerns. For many Genevans the abrupt shift from Catholic to Protestant practices, from the faith of their grandparents to a new religious outlook, would be a painful process that might require from the pastors some patience and understanding. Instead, Calvin viewed all resistance as willfulness and wicked obstinacy. Had he written a memoir of his Genevan ministry in this period, he might have entitled it How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Calvin, however, did not lose all support in Geneva. When persecution of Protestants in France led to an enormous wave of immigration in the 1550s, the influx of refugees from Calvin’s homeland bolstered his position in significant ways. But it also increased tension between local Genevans and the newly-arrived French. Already despised by some for what they took to be arrogance, suspected in some quarters of wanting to make himself bishop and rule in Geneva as the old bishops had, Calvin became the target of a good deal of anti-French feeling. Those who had argued that the church should be subservient to the state began to feel that the question of church-state relations was especially critical when virtually all the pastors and more and more of their neighbors were French! Suddenly the question was not simply, How will the church manage its affairs, but, Will free Genevans lose their freedom to the French?
Matters came to a head in 1555 when Calvin’s chief opponents struck out (awkwardly) against this state of affairs. Charged with treason and attempting to take power by force, they were arrested, tried, and punished severely (banishment for some, execution for a few). The event marked the evaporation of opposition to Calvin and his policies. Calvin had finally triumphed.
The victory of 1555 gave Calvin considerable authority in Geneva. But contrary to the expectations of some, he did not try to make himself bishop. And he never exercised civil power. Although he was greatly respected by those who served on the Small Council after 1555 and his advice was generally (though not always) heeded, he was never more than a pastor and the designated head of the Company of Pastors. Popular conceptions of Geneva as a theocracy and of Calvin as its dictator need revision.
Post tenebras lux
Calvin’s ministry in Geneva had many more features than is suggested by this account of his struggle for a disciplined church. He preached regularly (frequently as often as once a day). He had the usual pastoral visits. He lectured on the Bible. But his ministry as a whole was directed toward a project he called “reformation.”
At the end of his life he noted that when he arrived in 1536, there was no reformation in Geneva, even though the majority of citizens approved the evangelical faith. Reformation, in Calvin’s understanding, involved something more radical than a change in ideology. It could not be achieved simply with institutional tinkering. It was a matter of the whole of life and it extended to everyone in society. It was a complete reorientation of religious and civic life in accordance with what God discloses as God’s will in Scripture, the building of what later Calvinists would call “a holy commonwealth,” a “perfect school of Christ,” a “city on a hill.”
Calvin parted company with those who thought it enough to introduce the preaching of the evangelical message. In contrast to his Lutheran friends, who believed that a church existed wherever God’s word “is taught purely,” Calvin insisted that the word be “purely preached and heard.” The addition of the last two words meant that a truly reformed church had to have not only a competent preacher but an attentive audience, and an audience upon whom the word had an effect. This is one reason why Calvin expended so much energy trying to institute effective means of discipline in the church. Discipline was a tool pastors and other church leaders could use to gauge the effect of preaching and teaching, to make instruction more effective in people’s lives, and so to promote the building of a city of God.
A toolbox for reformation
Calvin devised other tools to contribute to the project of the reformation of life and for propagating a Reformed movement, tools that would serve not only Geneva but the church beyond — in France, elsewhere in Europe, and (in time) even in the New World. Some of the most important of these include:
Tool 1: Reformed catechesis, worship, and church structure
Calvin helped to create a culture of Reformed religion through his many writings. Some of the most influential of these were the writings intended to instruct the laity. Calvin wrote the hugely successful Genevan Catechism in 1542. It became the main vehicle for introducing Protestants to the Reformed faith not only in Geneva but in all French-speaking areas.
He also shaped Reformed worship. His liturgies were widely used and he assisted the collection and publishing of translations of the Psalms in verse form. The Genevan Psalter was one of the most popular songbooks of the sixteenth century and served as the hymnbook for virtually all Reformed congregations.
A Reformed culture was also advanced through Calvin’s pioneering means of structuring the church. The Genevan system of deliberative bodies (a consistory, a company of pastors) and practices of mutual admonition and support were adapted for use in larger territories (such as France, Scotland, and the Netherlands) where the hierarchy of church courts that typifies a Presbyterian system of church government first emerged (with congregational consistories or sessions, regional classes or presbyteries, and a national synod or general assembly).
Tool 2: Developing pastors
The task of reforming all of life was also served through cultivating and training strong candidates for ministry. Calvin tried to attract the most able pastors to Geneva. He also raised the standards of ministerial preparation and introduced a high quality of theological education. Through his own lecturing and by establishing the Genevan Academy of higher learning, he saw to it that Reformed ministers would have a strong, liberal education, gain the skills necessary to read the Bible in its original languages and interpret it using the best philological techniques, and be adequately grounded in the Christian theological tradition. Forming capable pastors was to be a significant part of reforming the church and spreading Calvin’s vision of reformation.
Tool 3: Aiding the interpretation of Scripture
For the able Reformed pastor, but also to aid the general Christian reader, Calvin tried to model the best approaches to interpreting the Bible in his many published commentaries on the biblical books. Calvin was first employed in Geneva as a Bible lecturer and he saw his production of commentaries as the very heart of his calling. By most accounts, he was a gifted biblical interpreter and expositor. Calvin, the humanist, approached the Bible believing that tools supplied by what we would call the human sciences (chiefly philology and history) were critically important in getting at its meaning. The text had to be read in its original language and placed in its original context. Sometimes this approach yielded startlingly new understandings of the text; Calvin was not at all timid about breaking with traditional readings of biblical passages. The most important thing, he believed, was to get at the genuine sense of a passage, and to avoid forced or “subtle” interpretations that only served to conform the text to one’s own theological prejudices. With these convictions, Calvin helped pave the way for modern, historical critical and literary approaches to biblical study. Calvin regarded the Bible not simply with antiquarian interests — for him it was a living document through which God continues to speak. His commentaries dwelled not only on original meanings but also on implications for his own time. The experiences of his contemporaries, especially the harrowing trials of the underground faith communities he addressed, were always an important element in his reflection on the biblical text.
Tool 4: A guide to theological understanding
Of all his productions, Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion probably had the greatest impact on the development of the spreading Reformed movement. It was the work of his life and it largely accounts for his ongoing theological legacy. The short text he published in 1536 was just the beginning. He made major revisions and expansions of the book in 1539, 1543, 1550, and 1559. In its final form the work had grown from the initial six chapters to a total of 80 chapters in four books! The Latin version of the Institutes quickly became the most widely used theological textbook for Reformed students, while the many vernacular translations spread Calvin’s influence among a lay audience that extended far beyond Geneva.
The message of the Institutes is as complex as Calvin’s enigmatic personality and as rich and many-layered as the whole of his theology. It is an expression of his own reading of the Christian faith. And so it reflects the particularities and idiosyncrasies of this sixteenth-century life, the perspective of the French humanist and the Genevan reformer of the church who looked out from Geneva’s walls with a sense of responsibility for the destiny of the whole of his world.
Christopher Elwood is professor of historical theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky.
i See the account in Richard Stauffer, The Humanness of John Calvin (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971), pp. 43-46.
