Reformed Ideas

Abstract

Fraternal relations between Europe’s Reformed churches were grounded in broad agreement about the fundamentals of true Christian doctrine. There were strong similarities between the confessions of faith and catechisms which were adopted by different Reformed churches. Many churches also recognised the 1566 Second Helvetic Confession written by Zurich’s Heinrich Bullinger, and used the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism which was composed by Zacharias Ursinus from Breslau in Silesia and by Caspar Olevian from Trier. While it would therefore be incorrect to see John Calvin as the single, authoritative theological voice behind the European Reformed movement, his personal contribution to the emergence and development of Reformed theology was undoubtedly immense. Calvin’s ideas about the nature of God, the Church, salvation and the sacraments spread across the Continent through his published works. These texts included dogmatic works, polemic tracts, Biblical commentaries, and written versions of the sermons which Calvin delivered at Geneva on the books of the Old Testament during weekday services and his exegesis of New Testament passages on Sundays. Calvin’s intellectual authority within the Reformed world rested above all on his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin declared that this book was intended to help readers to understand the Bible correctly by providing them with an orderly ‘sum of religion in all its parts’. The first edition of the Institutes appeared in 1536, it was first published in French in 1541, and Calvin produced a final version of the text in 1559. The Institutes then appeared in 25 different published editions between 1559 and 1578 in Latin, French, and in Dutch, English and German translations. Calvin himself acknowledged that the Institutes was ‘received by almost all godly men with an acclaim which I would never have ventured to hope for’.1