The story of John Calvin’s reforming pastorate in the small city-state of Geneva is often told in terms of unremitting factional conflict followed by a triumph for the forces of reform. His first years in the city, 1536-1538, ended in exile, when he and his fellow-pastors refused to tolerate the city council’s control over contentious issues of church practice. Although Calvin returned from Strasbourg in 1541 after the Genevan authorities more or less agreed to the conditions he stipulated, this did not ensure a trouble-free resumption of his leadership of the city’s Reformation. It was not until 1555 that he could count on the support of a majority of the councillors. This was indeed a critical watershed in the progress of reform as Calvin and his colleagues won at last independent church exercise of spiritual and moral discipline, free from final determination by the civil power. Only thereafter, for less than the last decade of his life, was Calvin able to count on a largely unfettered implementation of the blueprint of a reformed church order, set out in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances drafted and approved soon after his return to Geneva in 1541.
The pattern, then, was one of lengthy struggle followed by success for the Reformers. This at any rate is how the tale has characteristically been summarized. It is writ large in what is still the most massive account of Jean Calvin: Les hommes et les choses de son temps, seven heavyweight volumes by Émile Doumergue (1899-1927). “John Calvin: The People and Circumstances of His Time” climaxes with volume 6 entitled simply La lutte, “The Struggle”, and volume 7, Le triomphe, “The Triumph”. Nor is this scripting of the history of the Genevan Reformation and of Calvin’s role in it without a genuine measure of justification. It was part of the genius of Calvin to secure a higher degree of reform of church polity and practice than was realized almost anywhere else in sixteenth-century Europe.
Yet it would be a grave mistake to suppose that Calvin passed his last years on a kind of triumphalist high. Apart from anything else, the chronicle of ill-health from which Calvin suffered most of his adult life is sufficiently daunting to fill most modern readers in the West, cosseted as we are by high-quality medical services, with a mixture of horror and amazement. This may seem an unexpected subject to introduce into this article, but none of us would dream of attempting to evaluate the career of a prominent contemporary without taking account of an almost lifelong catalogue of debilitating and even disabling afflictions.
The story is now almost definitively told by John Wilkinson in The Medical History of the Reformers (Handsel Press, Edinburgh, 2001), which deals also with Luther and Knox. Calvin’s final years appear to have been free of the migraine attacks which began while he was a student in Paris. At Geneva they sometimes kept him in bed for days—and were treated by starvation! Chronic digestive disorder with abdominal pain and constipation, points in Wilkinson’s judgement to what is now known as irritable bowel syndrome. Infective diarrhoea and roundworms were less serious than the haemorrhoids which later ulcerated and made horse-riding almost impossible. Kidney stones also caused excruciating pain in his last years, connected in turn to acute classical gout. The fits of haemoptysis— coughing up blood—which struck him in 1559 and the next years were linked to the breathlessness which increasingly restricted his activity and to the pulmonary tuberculosis identified by Beza, his colleague, successor and first biographer. Wilkinson concludes that it was the most probable cause of Calvin’s death. Together with chronic malaria it explains the repeated and sometimes extended febrile illnesses which laid him low.
Such a clinical diagnosis is of interest to the history of medicine. Charles Cooke has already considered the bearing of Calvin’s illnesses on Christian vocation (in John Calvin and the Church, ed. Timothy George, Louisville, 1990, 59-70). He stresses that these multiple ailments were more cumulative than sequential, so that “He was described several years before his death as a skeleton covered by skin” (66). Yet Calvin drove himself almost to the very end in unremitting perseverance in his vocation, preaching, writing, dictating, often being carried around, even into the pulpit. Such was the remarkable sense of commitment to the service of the Reformed gospel that kept Calvin pressing on in the face of fearful physical disability. Cooke appositely quotes from a dedication to his commentary on 2 Thessalonians: “My ministry … is dearer to me than life” (66).
Calvin’s approaching death could be foreseen months in advance, and his last letters speak of it openly. We also have a record of his farewell messages both to the city fathers of Geneva and then the following day to his fellow-pastors, about a month before he died. Death-bed utterances no doubt vary enormously, from an unusually clear-sighted authenticity to rosy-eyed romanticism or sepulchral melancholy. Calvin’s last words to the ministers contain some oft-repeated sentences, for example on his first arrival in Geneva in 1536:
When I first came to this church, I found nothing in it. There was preaching and that was all. They would look out for idols, it is true, and burned them, but there was no reformation. Everything was in disorder.
As his mind turned over the years in Geneva, he reflected on his return from Strasbourg after exile. “I would never accept the ministry until [the city council] had taken an oath respecting these two points: namely, to preserve the catechism and discipline”—that is, the confessional basis and the ordered polity of the church, laid down in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances. Yet, although these two fundaments had indeed been preserved, Calvin’s farewell address breathes no note of satisfied achievement. “All I have done has been worth nothing. The ungodly will greedily seize upon this word, but I say it again that all I have done has been worth nothing, and I am a miserable creature.”
Well, we may beg to differ! Calvin was indeed confident enough to claim one achievement: “though I am nothing, yet know I well that I have prevented three thousand tumults that would have broken out in Geneva.” He is conscious of having “lived here amid continual bickerings.” Even after his recall “I had no less trouble when I wished to discharge my duty than heretofore.” And so he warns those who will carry the torch after him:
Thus I have been amid combats, and you will experience that there will be others not less but greater. You [Genevans] are a perverse and unhappy people, and though there are good folk in it the people is perverse and wicked, and you will have troubles when God shall have called me away.
To the very end, Calvin remained acutely conscious of the fractious course of events in Geneva. He departed not in splendid triumph nor in the warm glow of sunset, but with a sharp awareness that the conflict would survive him, and might thereafter intensify. This was a note that Calvin sounded repeatedly in writings of his middle and latter years in Geneva. It was by no means the unwarrantably bleak perspective of a human spirit approaching the death-pangs of his decrepit body.
In his lectures on the Minor Prophets, published in 1559, the beginning of Zephaniah prompted Calvin to comment on the reforming king Josiah.
Although Josiah made use of all means to revive the true and unadulterated worship of God in Judea, yet he did not attain his objective. We clearly learn how hard were the trials he sustained, since he effected nothing, though at great hazard he attempted to restore the worship of God. When he found that his efforts were in vain, he no doubt had to contend with great difficulties, and this we know by our own experience. When hope of success shines on us, we easily surmount all troubles, however arduous our work may be. But when we realize that we are striving in vain, we become dejected, and when we see that our efforts succeed only for a few years, our spirit grows faint. Josiah overcame both these difficulties.
Josiah’s example can be directly applied to the present day, when “God now appears to the world in the full light” of the gospel.
Yet very few there are who submit themselves to his Word, and of this small number fewer still there are who sincerely and without any dissimulation embrace sound doctrine …. Since then the perversity of the world is great enough to depress the minds of God’s servants a hundred times, let us learn to look to Josiah, who … when he saw that he was achieving little or nothing, still persevered and with firm and invincible strength of mind, persisted in his course.
It is a mistake, says Calvin, to regard ours as a golden age simply because a proportion of the population profess the true worship of God. Too many treat almost like angels any whose words attest their acceptance of the gospel.
The sacred name of Reformation is at this time profaned when anyone who indicates merely by a nod of the head that he is not wholly an enemy of the gospel is immediately hailed as a person of extraordinary piety.
Among the crowds who evince some regard for religion are hidden numerous hypocrites. There is indeed much chaff mixed with the wheat.
How difficult it is to restore the world to the obedience of God, and totally to eradicate all corruptions, even though idols are removed and superstitious practices abolished.
Yet Josiah stuck to his last, and carried on undaunted.
Later on in this series of lectures, the opening verses of the prophecy of Haggai evoked a similar reflection from Calvin. The people were saying that it was not yet time to rebuild the house of the Lord—while they enjoyed living in their fine panelled houses. They failed even to erect a tent for God, content to sacrifice to him in the open air.
What is the situation at the present time? We see that through a remarkable miracle of God the gospel has shone forth in our day, and we have emerged, as it were, from the nether world. Yet who now of his own free will erects an altar to God? On the contrary, all are concerned only for their own advantage, and while they are taken up with their own interests, the worship of God is cast aside. There is no care, no zeal, no concern for it. What is worse, many are profiting from the gospel, as though it were a lucrative business.
It was the kindly providence of God that Haggai’s rebuke should be preserved, so that he might be a preacher to Calvin’s generation also, “to reprove our torpor and ungrateful indifference. The building of the spiritual temple is deferred whenever we become devoted to ourselves.”
Ten years earlier, in his lecture-based commentary on Isaiah 8:14-15, Calvin includes the Protestant communities in his verdict that “in the whole Christian world the state of religion has almost collapsed …. Even among those who have had the pure service of God restored to them, very few embrace the gospel of God with integrity.” And yet Calvin was not tempted to throw in the towel and revert to the quiet life of the scholar, which had been his original avocation and for which to the end he believed himself temperamentally suited.
The tortured personal struggles that fidelity to his Genevan calling entailed for Calvin are nowhere more evident than in the extensive correspondence of the years of exile about the possibility of his return to the city. To take the full measure of these exchanges it is essential for readers to bracket off modern assumptions about the easy mobility—translatability—of ministers from congregation to congregation, let alone from one ordered church system to another. The use of “denomination” in this context would be wildly anachronistic, and the setting up of new churches on a “free” or independent model was the province of the Radicals of the Reformation movement. For Calvin it was a question of the reformed and reforming church catholic of Geneva—the old Roman Catholic Church in the city under new ownership, we might say—or nothing.
The question of returning to Geneva raised itself almost immediately after Calvin and Guillaume Farel had shaken the dust of the city off their feet in late April 1538. Apart from anything else, the other Swiss Reformed churches, especially Zurich under Heinrich Bullinger, were rapidly on to the diplomacy to ensure their recall. Calvin was not slow to expose his own sentiments, ten weeks after leaving Geneva.
On looking back and considering the perplexities which surrounded me from the time when I first went there, I dread nothing more than returning to the charge from which I have been released. For when I first entered upon it I could discern the calling of God which held me fast bound and consoled me, but now on the contrary I am fearful of tempting him if I resume so great a burden which has already been felt to be insupportable.
He is aware that in their absence the exiles’ reputation is being torn to pieces at Geneva. Calvin’s comment reveals a great deal about his stance throughout the many months ahead.
If we know that they cannot calumniate us except in so far as God permits, we also know the goal God has in view in granting such permission. Let us humble ourselves, therefore, unless we wish to strive with God when he would humble us. Meanwhile, let us wait upon God.
After settling in Strasbourg in September 1538, Calvin discusses in a letter to Farel, now ministering in Neuchatel, the apportionment of blame for the breach in Geneva. One of the city leaders had proposed that an apology from Calvin and Farel would smooth the path to reconciliation.
We willingly acknowledge before God and all the faithful that our unskilfulness, and our carelessness, deserved to be chastised by an example of this kind. But I will never admit that that unhappy church fell into such utter disorder through our fault. We know in ourselves that it is far otherwise in the sight of God.
In any case, if they took the proposed route back into the Genevans’ good books, everyone would immediately hold them up to scorn—“These pastors will stick at nothing to get their jobs back!” Calvin soon sent the church of Geneva a long pastoral letter, partly of consolation, partly of reassurance that, although the Genevans’ own faults had incurred this divine scourging, God would grant an outcome that served their salvation.
Fresh endeavours rapidly consumed Calvin’s energies at Strasbourg, but he found time to respond to an enquiry whether Genevan believers should receive the Lord’s supper from the pastors imposed in the exiles’ place. Calvin reported what he had agreed in discussion with Wolfgang Capito, one of Strasbourg’s ministers.
Among Christians there ought to be so great a dislike of schism that they may always avoid it so far as lies in their power …. Whenever therefore it happens, by the Lord’s permission, that the Church is administered by [ministers of the word and sacraments], whatever kind of persons they may be, if we see there the marks of church, it will be better not to break the unity. Nor need it be any hindrance that some points of doctrine are not quite so pure, since there is scarcely any church which does not retain some remnants of former ignorance. It is sufficient for us if the doctrine on which the church of God is founded be recognized, and maintain its place.
In June 1539 Calvin addressed another long letter to the Genevan church, which again revealed how theology, that is, an ordered understanding of the ways of God with his people, determined his counsel.
Although that change which took place upon our departure may have been brought about by the subtlety of the devil, so that whatever followed that change may justifiably be suspected by you, nevertheless in it the remarkable grace of the Lord is to be acknowledged by you. He has not left you altogether destitute, nor let you fall back again under the yoke of antichrist (i.e. Rome), from which he has once rescued you already. Instead he wished both that the doctrine of the gospel should still exist and that some appearance of a church should flourish among you, so that with a quiet conscience you might continue there. We have always admonished you to acknowledge that overturning of your church as the visitation of the Lord sent upon you, and necessary for us also. Nor should you direct your thoughts so much against corrupt people and Satan’s instruments as toward personal and individual sins, which have deserved no lighter punishment, but indeed a more severe chastisement.
The impressive attempt to woo the Genevans back to the Roman allegiance by Jacopo Sadoleto, the reform-minded bishop of Carpentras, elicited from Calvin on Geneva’s behalf one of the most admirable fruits of his evangelical theological genius. In the same autumn of 1539, the tergiversations of Pierre Caroli, now recommended by Farel, no less, to Calvin’s renewed favour, induced in Calvin such paroxysms of rage that he could not trust himself in polite company.
More hopeful news in the spring of 1540 that the Genevans had resolved to put a stop to their internal wrangling brought Calvin face to face with the issue of return. “They have begun to be curable, even though not yet fully restored to health.” As for the contested ministers, “I do not care by whom the work of the Lord is carried forward, provided that it is well done.” As for Calvin himself, “I am horrified at the mere mention of a recall …. The farther I proceed the more distinctly I perceive out of what a whirlpool of danger the Lord has delivered me.” Calvin smiled when Pierre Viret recommended Geneva on health grounds. Why not the cross instead, for “it would have been far preferable to perish once for all than be tormented in that place of torture.”
By the autumn of 1540, following the emergence of new city officers in Geneva, Calvin confronted a formal invitation to return. He protests his regard and concern for the Genevan church, “such that I would never be wanting in her time of need to do whatsoever I could to help her.” But he is in “singular perplexity,” on the one hand desirous of meeting the Genevans’ wishes and of “wrestling with all the grace that God has given me to bring their church back to a better condition,” but on the other hand committed to a charge in Strasbourg—and about to accompany Bucer and others to a colloquy of wide-reaching significance with Catholics at Worms. He is consulting with the chief pastors of Strasbourg. To Farel he expressed his mind in much starker terms and greater length.
Whenever I call to mind the wretched state in which my life was spent when there, how can my very soul avoid shuddering when any proposal is made for my return? …. I know indeed by experience that wherever I turn, all sorts of annoyances are thrown in my way, that if I would live to Christ, this world must be to me a scene of trial and vexation, for the present life is appointed as a field of conflict. But at the same time … pardon me if I dread that place as having about it somewhat of a fatality in my case.
While still in Geneva, bound hand and foot, he preferred to suffer to the uttermost extremity rather than entertain thoughts of moving elsewhere. But once delivered thence by the favour of God, who would not excuse his reluctance to plunge again into that gulf and whirlpool which he had found so destructive? Weighing with him was the consideration Farel had mentioned that the battle which I shall have to fight will be altogether tougher and more difficult with my colleagues than with those outside.
The peaceful pastorate of Strasbourg, serving the self-selected refugees of the French congregation and teaching the highly motivated students in the college, had slackened his zeal and skills for dealing with the mixed multitude of Geneva.
“Yet all of these considerations are of no avail to prevent my acquiescence in the call. The more I feel disposed to turn away with abhorrence from that sphere of labour, the more inclined I am on that very account to suspect myself.” So Calvin will hand the matter over to trusty guides and friends, which meant first and foremost Martin Bucer and other Strasbourg preachers. He told the Genevan senate in November 1540 that, although in the special love which he bore to their church he was ever obliged to seek her welfare and prosperity, he was not free to leave his present responsibilities in Strasbourg, nor could he say when he would be, because the decision was not his. Meanwhile, from a distance he was ready to assist Geneva in any way he could. Participation in the series of colloquies with reformist Catholics in Germany, which reached its climax at Regensburg in the spring of 1541, provided Calvin with sufficient grounds to keep the Genevan representations at bay. In the meantime, to Viret he poured out all the dreads and forebodings that the prospect of a resumption of ministry at Geneva summoned up. Viret was urging a speedy return. “The more experience I have, the more clearly I realize how arduous a charge it is to rule in the superintendence of a church.” Calvin protests his disinterestedness; he is not flinching from the call but only consulting the best way forward for the Genevans. By his hasty action they would not want to risk a second disruption.
By May 1541, while still at Regensburg, Calvin is committed to returning to Geneva, but the timing is still to be resolved. He ran through the whole saga in a long letter to the pastors of Zurich. They would not credit it were he to relate to them a tiny part of the miseries he had had to endure for a whole year in Geneva. “Not a day passed in which I did not ten times over long for death.” But he did not dwell on the circumstances which stood in the way of his return—“the ignominy to which I was subjected, the savage treatment, and the like.” But return he did, being back in Geneva in mid-September.
It is time to venture some reflections on Calvin’s career-long participation in the church struggle in Geneva. History cannot dictate to us, not even church history, but it can instruct us by its example. North America, and the West as a whole, in the twenty-first century is a far cry from the small city-state of sixteenth-century Europe. Nor is John Calvin as widely appreciated, nor for that matter as widely known, as used to be the case in the Reformed family of churches. Those who are not ashamed to be known as Calvinists are bound to be selective in the aspects of his theology, exegesis and activity which they sign up to.
Yet all of us who stand unashamedly in the Reformed tradition of Christianity cannot escape major indebtedness to the achievement of Calvin. The Reformed tradition has other roots than Geneva, to be sure—Zurich in particular, and Basel and Strasbourg, and secondary channels such as France and of course Scotland. Yet the place of Calvin’s Geneva as the mother-church of the Reformed world is secure, and it is impossible to evade the extraordinary contribution of Calvin himself. That contribution was made at enormous personal cost—that much should be inescapably clear from this article. Part of the hardship is attributable to the limitations of medical knowledge and of other dimensions of urban existence in early modern Europe. Other facets of his experience have a more perennial ring about them. Can it plausibly be maintained, for example, that at the outset of the third Christian millennium we are any better at conflict resolution than Calvin’s generation? Not so, to judge by the number of Presbyterian churches in Reformed strongholds like Scotland, the USA and Korea.
Where Calvin’s example powerfully instructs us is first in the rigour of his sacrifice and obedience. As he prepared to leave Strasbourg to travel back to Geneva he wrote to his closest confidant, Farel, “When I remember that I am not my own, I offer up my heart, presented as a sacrifice to the Lord.” “I am not my own” –the phrase recalls that wonderful section in Institutes 3:7, entitled “The Sum of the Christian Life: the Denial of Ourselves,” through which “We are not our own” runs like a key refrain. It is worth remembering, in an age when questions of vocation often get submerged in the muddy waters of self-fulfilment and self-expression, that Calvin’s preferred way of life might well have looked more like the Erasmian than the Lutheran model. We might judge that his most lasting accomplishment proved to lie in the realm of Christian scholarship, biblical and theological, but it would be a gross misjudgement to imagine that, without the stormy and demanding Genevan pastorate, the biblical commentaries and the Institutes would have been just the same.
It was the peculiar genius of Calvin to transcribe his biblical and theological understanding into an ordered church life—which was more extensive than church order precisely understood. We must go further and talk about an ordered Christian society also. In both church and society praxis, in the sense of practice informed by theory, that is, theology, and of theological reflection on practice, holds its importance for Reformed Christianity to a major extent because Calvin, to a greater degree than any other sixteenth-century Reformer, successfully enacted the Reformation in Geneva. Why did the city elicit John Knox’s eulogy as “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles”? It was not the rediscovered gospel, for “In other places, I confess Christ to be truly preached. But manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any other place.” And this on the human level has to be ascribed to a man driven by a commanding sense of vocation which he never sought or dreamed of but whose inexorable demands he refused to evade, even from the congenial pastures of Strasbourg. His was a life of good, old-fashioned personal sacrifice. My student generation was reared on heroic exemplars like C.T. Studd (1862-1931), one of the famous “Cambridge Seven” and pioneer missionary to China and Central Africa. His most famous statement was: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him.”
This oft-quoted utterance is an apt transition to the second main aspect in which we may be instructed by Calvin’s example—the theological control of human and churchly experience. Not every element in Calvin’s constructive theology may satisfy a stringent biblical critique, but at least he teaches us by his refusal to read the world, humanity and the church except in terms of God’s purposes. His was an irreducibly theological mind, and his world was one in which God was forever doing all manner of things. He thus presents a fundamentally important corrective to much of the broad mainstream of the old denominations in the West, and perhaps also to segments of established evangelicalism, for which God does very little in the world today. The reigning theological ethos is pervasively Deist. God does nothing through preaching, he does not answer prayer, he never acts in judgement. We conduct our church assemblies and committees with a perfunctory initial prayer and perhaps a closing benediction but these tell one very little about the expectations and the basic instinctive convictions of what happens in between. God converts no one, and we would not be so simple as to believe that he heals anyone. God is not to be feared, we need not worry about impugning his honour, nor whether our worship conforms to his will and pleases him. He has nothing to do with any of the adversities of life. He does not chastise, rebuke, humble, afflict, raise up or cast down. (How do we sing the Magnificat?) When Calvin comments on his crippling gout, “God has bound my feet fast with fetters,” we smile indulgently.
A church whose preachers and teachers fail to help Christian people to interpret their life and their world theologically—which means also of course Christologically and pneumatologically—is aiding and abetting radical secularisation. It is not for me from distant Scotland to venture to speak to North America under the shadow of September 11, 2001—and perhaps speechlessness is the only appropriate response. But dare we say nothing about God in it all? Perhaps we need to turn to the imprecatory Psalms, which are distinguished by their resort exclusively to divine and not human action.
John Calvin had clear theological markers by which to steer through the disordered church life of Geneva. They helped him to face up to the insistent summons of his interrupted calling to minister to the gospel there, in a place of such fearful memories. They also helped him to be more generous about the ministry of others than some of his brethren were inclined to be. They represented, of course, some prioritising between first-order and second-order issues, and in their focus on the declaration of the gospel and the two sacraments of the gospel they could tolerate but not condone some corruption of discipline, which Calvin persistently refused to make a third mark of the church. One sharp difference between the churches of the Reformation and of today lies in the plethora of para-church bodies in which it is possible for so much of Christians’ time and energies to be spent. This latitude can scarcely avoid a devaluation of church. In Geneva all communal Christian activity was encompassed in the church itself.
Finally, Calvin’s theology could cope with the exceeding deviousness and perversity of humanity, individually and in the mass. I am not aware if anyone has studied the place of the devil and Satan in Calvin’s works. Mentions occur in the letters quoted earlier in this piece, but it is my impression that Calvin generally fastens not on diabolical agency but on the inscrutably manifold complex of evil that is the human heart and mind and will. It is generally said that it was the horrific carnage of World War I which sounded the death-knell of optimistic liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Dare I ask what impact September 11, 2001, might have on theological anthropology? The church of course is part of humanity. Calvin at least knew that only a realistic doctrine of human sinfulness enabled one to make theological sense of the Genevan church struggle.
One brief tailpiece: for Calvin this earthly life was not the whole story. He seems to have assumed it would always be a theatre of conflict. He could no more escape it than he could opt out of human and churchly life altogether.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 7, No. 5 (Sep/Oct 2001).
