Calvin's Geneva and the Reformed tradition
In Geneva the French exile John Calvin builds a disciplined Protestant city and a theology that spreads to Scotland, the Netherlands, Hungary, England's Puritans and, later, America and Korea.
- Calvin — Bruce Gordon, Yale University Press (2009)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
The Reformation was never only Luther’s. In Zurich, from 1519, the priest Huldrych Zwingli went further than Luther in stripping churches of images and treating the Lord’s Supper as a memorial; he was killed in battle against Catholic cantons in 1531. The next generation’s leader was a French lawyer, John Calvin, who published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and that same year was persuaded to stay in Geneva.
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
- Calvin — Bruce Gordon, Yale University Press (2009)
Expelled in 1538 and recalled in 1541, Calvin made Geneva a model Protestant city, with pastors, elders and a consistory that disciplined morals, and an academy that trained preachers for France and beyond. His theology stressed God’s sovereignty, including predestination, and worship stripped to sermon, psalms and sacraments. From Geneva his followers took the “Reformed” faith to France’s Huguenots, to Scotland under John Knox, to the Netherlands, Hungary and the Palatinate, and through the Puritans to New England.
- Calvin — Bruce Gordon, Yale University Press (2009)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
Calvin recovered the Bible's vision of a sovereign, gracious God, simplified worship to what scripture commands, and taught that all of life, work, family and politics, is to be lived to God's glory.
- Calvin — Bruce Gordon, Yale University Press (2009)
- Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 — Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane (2003)
Calvin's Geneva was also a place of intrusive moral policing, and it executed the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus in 1553. The doctrine of predestination has troubled many Christians, including other Protestants, ever since.
- Calvin — Bruce Gordon, Yale University Press (2009)
- Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World — Alec Ryrie, Viking (2017)
Why it matters today
Presbyterian, Reformed and Congregationalist churches, and much of evangelical theology, descend from Calvin and the Swiss reformers. Ideas linked to them, from the sovereignty of God to elected church elders and a suspicion of concentrated power, shaped Scotland, the Netherlands and the United States, and Reformed churches are now growing fastest in Africa and Asia.