Genevan Reformer Research Articles

Of Handbooks, Companions, and Essay Collections: Recent Multi-Authored Volumes on Calvin and Calvinism, the Genevan Reformation, and Global Protestantism

Readers of this journal will surely have noticed the remarkable proliferation in the past few decades of “handbooks” and “companions” devoted to major – and even obscure – topics, thinkers, and actors in religious history. The simultaneous appearance in 2021 of The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism and Brill's Companion to the Reformation in Geneva provides an opportunity to reflect on the character and value of such volumes, the conditions of their production, and the reasons for their recent proliferation. Also discussed here for purposes of comparison will be an ambitious collection of essays of a more conventional sort: Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, edited by Ulinka Rublack.1

Casaubon’s Ephemerides as a Companion of Calvinist Ascesis through Labour

The Hellenist Isaac Casaubon taught at Geneva’s Academy from 1582 to 1596. Invited to Montpellier’s University as the future restorer of Greek studies, after the tormented years of the French civil wars, he moved to the Midi of France. A few weeks later, Casaubon started to keep a diary. The psychological reasons of this decision and the nature of his journal are examined. Started as a sort of log-book, it is argued that its deep roots are to be sought in the difficulty to adapt himself to an environment so utterly contrasting with reformed Geneva, lacking sound and comfortable “religious safeguards”, and in the sudden solitude in which he fell, deprived as he was of the contact with his coreligionist colleagues and friends. Casaubon, Rousseau, Amiel, three authors deeply stamped by Reformation: it cannot be due to sheer coincidence if they all started very personal autobiographical writings, eventually worded as journal intime. The root of Capitalism and of Punctuality has been shown to be the Genevan Reformation, the author argues that the genre of the journal intime too developed under the new psychological relationship of persons to themselves which grew out of the unprecedented religious and moral context.

Geneva’s Use of Lies, Deceit, and Simulation in Their Efforts to Reform France, 1536–1563

AbstractThe Genevan Reformation was subjected to a trenchant ethical critique during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Radicals who identified both Calvin and Beza as unscrupulous, dishonest, and immoral. By contrast, modern scholars have paid little attention to such matters. They have either stated explicitly that both men were upright and honest in their lives and ministries or implied it. A handful of scholars have, however, alluded to dishonest conduct on their parts. The present article takes up this topic in detail, looking particularly at Geneva’s ministry to France. It contends that duplicity characterized Calvin and Beza’s French ministry between 1536 and 1563. It commences by examining their understanding of mendacity, which provides the standard for our analysis of their ministry. After outlining what Calvin and Beza did to support and strengthen Calvinist churches in France, the article sets forth and explains the system Calvin devised to hide their ministry from the French Catholic government and probably from the Nicodemites as well. This system depended on lies, deceit, and simulation.

The Relationship between Justification and Sanctification in the Structure of Calvin’s Soteriology: Toward a More Nuanced Approach

There is broad agreement among Calvin scholars that the Genevan Reformer recognized justification and sanctification as distinct and inseparable salvific benefits. Yet scholars disagree concerning the precise structure Calvin used to maintain the benefits’ distinction and inseparability. Is justification the cause of union and sanctification or do both graces obtain with equal priority because both are grounded in union with Christ? This article suggests a nuanced reading of Calvin, which distinguishes between definitive and progressive sanctification. With respect to Calvin’s architectonic structure, justification and definitive sanctification enjoy equal priority, as both depend immediately upon union with Christ. But with respect to progressive sanctification, justification enjoys a relative priority. It is hoped that this reading of Calvin satisfies the concerns of both sides, leading to a more accurate and versatile formulation of the Reformer’s soteriology.

Calvin and Canadian Protestantism: The Thought and Influence of W.W. Bryden

Abstract: Walter W. Bryden (1883–1952), the sixth principal of Knox College (1945–1952), was arguably one of the most important Calvinist theologians in the history of Canadian Protestantism. In light of the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's birth (1509–1564) in 2009, this article explores Bryden's thought and influence as a Reformed Protestant theologian and Church leader in the Calvinist tradition and legacy that shaped Canadian Presbyterianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bryden's own thinking about the significance of Calvin and Calvinism for the Presbyterian Church in Canada after Church union in 1925, especially in relation to the theology of Karl Barth, is explored in some detail. The Scottish theologian T.F. Torrance once remarked that Bryden was a truly remarkable theologian: “I can't help but think that he is more like John Calvin than anyone I've ever known.” This article tests Torrance's impression by offering a critical examination of both the Calvinist tradition in Canada and Walter Bryden's interpretation of that tradition. The article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century there were three quite distinct (and competing) interpretations of Calvinist theology in Canada. By the 1930s Walter Bryden had forged a fourth trajectory in Reformed theology, one that became dominant in Canadian Presbyterianism and influential in other parts of Canadian Protestantism. The article concludes that there were, to be sure, many problems and limitations with Bryden's Calvinism. Nevertheless, Walter Bryden championed the essential insights of the Genevan Reformer and was able to leverage them in the Canadian context in ways that were important for the identity of post-union Canadian Presbyterianism.

Calvin's Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and the Emerging Reformed Church, 1536–1609. By Scott M. Manetsch. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 428 pp. $74.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Calvin's Company of Pastors: Pastoral Care and Emerging Reformed Church, 1536-1609 . By Scott M. Manetsch . Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 428 pp. $74.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesWhat was life of a reformed pastor like in sixteenth-century Geneva? This deceptively simple question is, as Scott Manetsch demonstrates, a crucial element in understanding trajectory of Genevan Reformation. While ideas of John Calvin and his colleagues have received immense scholarly scrutiny over centuries, contours of their lives as pastors have not. Manetsch address this lacuna with a thoroughly researched, lucid account of lives and work of reformed Genevan pastors from 1536 to 1609, with particular goal of comparing work of pastorate during Calvin's lifetime with its experiences after Calvin's death in 1564. His book is based on extensive work with records of Genevan Consistory and Company of Pastors, as well as personal correspondence, published writings, personal devotionals, catechisms, and sermons of reformed Genevan clergy. Using this wealth of sources, Manetsch reconstructs daily lives of Geneva's pastors during first seven decades of Reformation, thus forwarding ongoing efforts to examine how ideals of Reformation were put into practice.This book is, in a way, a group biography of Reformed pastorate in Geneva. One of Manetsch's main goals is to elucidate ideas and assumptions that shaped identity and self-awareness, (2) in order to better understand their interactions with Genevan laity and city authorities. He begins this exploration with an eloquent recounting of Genevan Reformation, followed by an analysis of Venerable Company of Pastors, including profiles of individual ministers, an overview of their recruitment and training, and discussion of structure and functioning of company. Particularly crucial to Manetsch's undertaking is chapter 3, Pastoral Vocation, which explicates reformers' understanding of office and examines how that concept undergirded their preaching, process of ordination, and struggles with city magistrates. He then constructs a detailed picture of pastors' domestic lives, providing a vital link between theology and practice. The following chapter explores duties, illustrating Manetsch's assertion that pastoral ministry in sixteenth-century was inseparable from rigorous study and regular proclamation of Christian Scripture (124).Having laid out broader patterns of pastors' activities, chapter 6 focuses on practice of preaching, including pastors' theological principles, preaching styles, and reception of their teachings. Here Manetsch examines ways that preaching did and did not change after Calvin's death, ultimately asserting that the pulpit stood at epicenter of controversy and change in reformed Geneva (146). Chapter 7, Ministry of Moral Oversight, provides an impressive compilation of statistics on consistory's activities both before and after Calvin's death--a goldmine of information for future studies of Genevan Reformation and consistories more generally. Manetsch's primary goal here is to demonstrate, rightly, that work of consistory was a core element in Genevan ministers' work of care. …

Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (review)

Reviewed by: Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality Timothy Hessel-Robinson (bio) Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. By Belden C. Lane. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $29.95. Belden Lane has spent much of his career interpreting the relationship between nature and Christian spirituality. In an earlier book, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (1988, revised and expanded in 2001), he examined the characteristics of sacred place. In that work he drew on cultural geography and phenomenology to offer a descriptive account of the experience of place and the sacred in such diverse communities as the Lakota Sioux, New England’s Puritans, the Shakers, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker House. In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (1998) he explored desert and mountain imagery in Christian apophatic mysticism, interweaving historical scholarship with reflections on his experience with his mother as she journeyed toward death in a nursing home. In both works, Lane demonstrated how to integrate rigorous scholarship, insightful theological reflection, and contemplative attention to personal experience in the development of a theme. His latest book follows the same pattern as he attempts to interpret the relationship between spirituality and nature in the Reformed tradition. Lane identifies the themes of beauty—nature’s and God’s—and desire running through the history of Reformed piety, and these themes hold the book together. As John Calvin, many Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards attest, the beauty of the earth mirrors the beauty and grandeur of God. Such beauty has the capacity to awaken desire in the human heart. When disciplined properly, desire mirrors the heart’s deep longing for God, our true desire, and leads to enjoyment of God. God allures us through the radiant splendor of creation, stimulates our desires, draws us toward God, and “ravishes” the soul with beauty. For Lane, this aesthetic-spiritual logic is the foundation of a Reformed ecological ethic. Calvin, the Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards are, as the author admits, not the first place most people look to find either a robust ecological spirituality or resources on beauty and sensuality. Calvin has long been caricatured as a severe, dry, humorless, polemical figure whose primary contribution to Christian history was a theory of predestination that consigns from birth most of the human race to eternal torment. This may be a distorting picture of Calvin, but it is not without some basis in his writings and from what we know of his life. The Genevan reformer could, as Lane notes, be ruthless in conflict and unbending when convinced he was right. Unfortunately, many of Calvin’s heirs have developed and emphasized some of the less savory aspects of Calvin’s thought. The harsh Calvin was the one Lane was introduced to as a boy growing up in a fundamentalist, Calvinist community in Florida, and he admits to having a long-standing “love-hate relationship with John Calvin” (45). However, Lane knows another Calvin—and another kind of Calvinism. Lane eagerly introduces us to a dimension of Calvin’s life and thought that is often neglected. Calvin delighted in the beauty of the world, and he employed great rhetorical flair when speaking of creation: to Calvin the world is a “mirror” of God’s beauty, a lovely garment by which God self-reveals, a “painting representing in stunning strokes the divine splendor” (47). Lane takes the title for his chapter on Calvin from the Reformer’s metaphor of the world as a “theater of God’s glory” in which God invites humanity into a shared communion of longing and performance [End Page 141] of praise through beauty. This chapter introduces the reader to the Calvin whom Lane loves: the one who experiences the glory of God in “undomesticated wildness” (45). This legacy finds its root in Jonathan Edward’s and Calvin’s seventeenth century Puritan heirs, who similarly have been misrepresented as suspicious of beauty, reluctant to indulge in pleasure, and fearful of sensuality. The Puritans experienced their desire for God in erotic desires and relationships, as well as in nature. Thus, desire for nature’s beauty and desire for conjugal love paralleled one another in...

Putting “God's Honor First”: Truth, Lies, and Servants in Reformation Geneva

AbstractThis article begins to examine the role of servants in the implementation of the Genevan Reformation in the 1530s–1560s by looking at the Genevan Consistory records and city legislation as recorded in the Sources du Droit, as well as considering John Calvin's stance on the absolute importance of truth in a godly society. It contrasts official efforts to inculcate the principle of truth-telling among servants with employers' expectations that servants would lie in order to protect family honor and reputation. It argues that, as a result of these potentially conflicting obligations to employers and to the principles of Geneva's reforming church and city authorities, servants were at one and the same time vital to the enforcement of the Reformed system of discipline and the consistory's pursuit of truth and frequent obstacles to that enforcement.

Calvin und die verfolgte Kirche unter dem Kreuz

Also as a Genevan Reformer, Calvin ever looked to the persecuted Protestants in France. He summoned them, on the one hand, to persevere in their testimony without compromising, even then when this entailed martyrdom. He attended them pastorally on the other hand, and he exhausted all diplomatic means to actively support them.

Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation

Devotion to relics, declared the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin in an unusually scurrilous tract translated into English in 1561, was a most ‘execrable sacrilege’, a ‘filthy polution the which ought in no wise to be suffered in the church’. He spared not an ounce of withering contempt and acerbic wit in cataloguing the vast reservoir of counterfeit bones, blood, shirts, caps, and assorted other ‘baggage’ and ‘geare’ that filled the churches of Europe and was cunningly manipulated by the devil and the papists to pervert the simple. Among ‘the seae full of lyes’ he sought to expose was the brain of St Peter, which was actually a pumice stone, and the improbable proliferation of relics of Christ’s Cross and Mary’s milk: if a man gathered together all the splinters of the former that were said to exist ‘there would be inough to fraighte a great ship’, while the quantity of the latter could scarcely have been produced ‘if the holye virgyne had bene a cowe’ or a wet nurse throughout her life. Had it not been for her assumption into heaven, ‘they woulde have made the world beleve, that she had a body sufficient to fell a great poudryng fatte’. As for the morsel of broiled fish presented to Jesus by one of his disciples after his resurrection from the dead, Calvin commented cuttingly, this must have been ‘wel spiced’ or ‘merveylously well soussed’ to have been preserved for such a long time. The ease with which the populace had been deceived by these tricks was itself a just punishment from God for its gullibility and natural addiction to ‘this most perverse kinde of superstition’ and to a carnal religion that revolved around visible, physical things. 1

Jean Calvin dans l'école italienne: Analyse de quelques manuels en adoption dans les lycées italiens

This is a comparative, analytic study of eight history text books used in Italian state secondary schools with respect to the presentation and image of John Calvin that is found in them. While very variable, the overall minimalist and often mediocre quality of the account of Calvin (as well as of the Reformation) is considered. There is understandable marginalization due largely to little lasting impact of Calvin in Italy. Further, it is concluded that any evaluation of the Genevan Reformer in these school books relates more to traditionally perceived Calvinist ‘culture’ than to the actual life, work, and thought of Calvin, and so is somewhat inadequate in the context of modern Italian education. The situtation also reflects a regrettable lack of coordination between the school teaching of history and extensive progress made in research.

Law, religion and the covenanted community: the impact of the Zurich Reformation on the early Cape settlement, 1652-1708

The Zurich Reformation was actively supported by the Dutch East India Company in its care for the religious, political and legal needs of the early Cape settlement. Not only the promotion of the Reformed religion by the Classis of Amsterdam but also the political and legal interests of the settlement were advanced on the basis of the Zurich reformation and its emphasis on the covenant. It was Huldrych Zwingli and his successor Heinrich Bullinger whose idea of the covenanted community served as the blueprint for the activities of the Sick Comforters, the proceedings of the Council of Justice and the decisions of the Council of Policy, rather than the influence of the Genevan reformer John Calvin. The so-called Calvinistic roots of the early settlement at the Cape, flowing from Calvin's doctrine of predestination, must therefore, be thoroughly revisited. Keywords: South African history, 1652-1708, Law & religion, Zwingli, Bullinger, Suid-Afrikaanse geskiedenis, Wet & godsdiens Acta Theologica Vol.22(1) 2003: 150-174

:Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation

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Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation.

Factionalism - the Genevan disease Calvin and his colleagues Calvin and the magistrates - the first crisis Geneva - hospitality and xenophobia the pastors - ministers or masters? Calvin and the magistrates - the final crisis Calvin triumphant.

Sixteenth-Century Reformed Perspectives on the Minority Church

If one may combine hypothesis and anachronism, I reckon that John Calvin would be highly uncomfortable in the pluralist society of the West at the end of the second Christian millennium. Even if we do not find him enunciating in so many words Zwingli's bold axiom that ‘a Christian city is none other than a Christian church’, nevertheless the central thrust of the reform in Geneva is clear – that the whole city be united in the honour and service of God. All children should be baptized, and no open dissent or defiance of the Christian order to which the city was corporately committed should go unchallenged. This, at any rate, is the conventional account of a fundamental platform of the Genevan Reformation, shared in large measure by Zūrich, Strasbourg and other cities, but not by Lutheran territories.

Calvin and the consolidation of the Genevan Reformation

Calvin and the consolidation of the Genevan Reformation

Twee kategismusse uit die 16de eeu: ’n spieël van aksentverskuiwing

Although 17th-century Calvinism intended to be faithful to Calvin its theology reveals some significant changes from the thought of the Genevan reformer. These differences manifest themselves not only in dogmatic and ethical expositions, but also in catechisms. To illustrate this, the catechisms of Calvin and Perkins are compared with regard to certain aspects - in particular as regards the doctrine of God the Creator. It is argued that even late 16th-century theology had started to change the course of development towards its modern direction in which the importance of the human factor has gradually increased with the result that theology eventually can be seen as part of anthropology. In conclusion a few reasons for this development are suggested.

Exegesis and Double Justice in Calvin's Sermons on Job

Medieval exegetes contributed distinguished commentaries on the Book of Job that had far-reaching influence. When, in 1554, Calvin ascended the pulpit in Geneva to deliver a series of sermons on Job, his listeners heard not only the Genevan Reformer but echoes of that medieval tradition. In Job's story Calvin saw a God whose providence held sovereign sway over nature, history, and Satan. Having undertaken these sermons, however, Calvin soon confronted Job's question: Why do the righteous suffer? Calvin did not answer Job alone. He turned to both medieval Joban commentaries and Scotist-nominalist categories to resolve this book's central issue of divine justice. But we will see that despite all these resources the exegetical difficulties posed by the text itself forced Calvin to realize that his central hermeneutical device brought with it implications with which he was ultimately uncomfortable. That device was double justice.

John Calvin: Biblical Preacher (1539–1564)

Calvin is often seen as ‘larger than life’ by his disciples and his enemies. This contention animates a recent article by William Bouwsma, whose forthcoming Oxford monograph is titled,John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait. One must be cautious in obtruding the historical Calvin over against the theologian, thereby contending that for the Genevan Reformer theological questions were primarily a way of life. For Calvin hisInstitutewas also a response to contemporary theological questions. One such question elicited Calvin's response in 1555 to Laelius Socinus on the merits of Christ. Calvin warns against ‘certain perversely subtle men’ who obscure God's mercy in Christ. Socinus asked whether the death of Christ which won merit for all persons was also meritorious for Christ himself. To set Christ's merit against God's mercy ‘is no less stupid curiosity than their temerity in making such a definition’. Calvin inserted that letter into the 1559Institute. Concurrent with Bouwsma's article, Alister McGrath points to Calvin's response to precise questions raised by thevia modernaschool of theology at Paris under the Scot John Major in which human merit and that of Christ rest on divine good pleasure alone. Calvin's solution is continuous with the voluntarism which he encountered while in Paris.