The Great Reformer

Geneva last week was a blaze of flags; trumpets sounded in the sun-drenched parks, and fireworks sprayed the night sky. Many a tourist assumed that the celebrations had something to do with the Big Four conference. But, at least to Genevans, this was something just as important: it was the 450th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, in Picardy, and the 400th of Geneva University, which he founded.

To the city that Calvin had made "the Protestant Rome" flocked church leaders from 75 Reformed and Presbyterian churches, representing 45 million Protestants who acknowledge Calvin as their spiritual father. Dutch Reformed mingled with Hungarian Calvinist; delegates from churches in Poland, Rumania, Australia and Madagascar exchanged greetings with delegates from the U.S. and from the Church of Scotland. Said Dr. Harrison Ray Anderson, pastor of Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church: "The Reformist and Presbyterian churches are still the most international of the Protestant groups."

All through Europe, televiewers watched Geneva's week-long series of ceremonies, commemorations and rededications. High point for Genevans was Switzerland's first "Son et Lumiere," a $60,000 pageant of colored spotlights and tape-recorded voices that ranged all over the Reformation Monument, the university and the old city walls to illustrate with real-life details the story of the Great Reformer.

Broken Journey. John Calvin was 27 and a thoroughly skilled philosopher-theologian on the July day in 1536 when he first arrived in Geneva--a tired, thin young man of middle height with a pale, finely chiseled face, a long nose and a pointed beard. On his way from Paris to Strasbourg, where he planned to settle down and study, he was detoured through Geneva by military operations, intended to stay in the city only overnight. But a red-bearded Protestant named William Farel, who was having his troubles advancing the Reformation in Geneva, had heard of the brilliant Frenchman's arrival and went to him at his inn to beg him to stay. Calvin declined. Farel roared at him: "You are simply following your own wishes, and I declare in the name of almighty God that if you refuse to take part in the Lord's task in this church, God will curse the quiet life you want for your studies!" Calvin was thoroughly frightened. "I felt," he wrote later, "as if God from heaven had laid his mighty hand on me to stop me from my course ... I did not continue my journey."

Within two years, he and Farel were expelled from Geneva for their extreme doctrines, but three years later the city's council called them back again. And until he died at 55, dyspeptic and exhausted, Calvin ruled Geneva with the same uncompromising rigor with which he ruled himself.

Mercy & Damnation. In Calvin's theology, the prime attribute of God is transcendent sovereignty, and man's chief end is to know and glorify him. But by Adam's fall, man inherited utter depravity and corruptness--not only as a punishment, but also as a kind of disease, creating a condition for which eternal punishment is merited and just. "It is certain," wrote Calvin, "that in our body and soul there is in the eyes of God nothing but repulsive filth." But in his mercy, God has elected to save some by giving them the grace to believe in Christ, and through that faith to be justified and raised to eternal life. This is all God's doing; nothing man or church can do can save one who is not among God's predestined elect.

Far from leading poor sinners into despairing hedonism, this stern doctrine had the opposite effect; Geneva became a city in which everyone was trying to prove himself chosen for salvation, and Calvin set up a city administration that was designed to keep Genevans on the straight and narrow. In groups of ten, Geneva's citizens were summoned to swear fealty to a 21-article confession of faith; church and state had separate powers, but in Calvin's theocracy no citizen of the state could be outside the authority of the church. The most famous of his opponents, Michael Servetus, was burned at the stake for his anti-Trinitarian views, though Calvin regretted the burning (he had wanted him beheaded).

No aspect of Geneva's life escaped John Calvin's strict control; he was consulted on every legal, political or economic question that came before the city's councils (he developed Geneva's cloths and velvet trade and even introduced an advanced system of sanitary regulations). Doctrine for him was never a speculative but a practical matter, and the waves of his theocratic thought rolled on through the centuries to reappear in Scottish Presbyterianism and New England Puritanism.

In modern Calvinism the stringencies of his teaching have been much modified --notably his doctrine of election, the role of civil authority as protector of the church, and the word-splitting intolerance of other Protestant doctrines. Today the churches of the Calvinist tradition are newly sensitive to the need for a united Protestantism. In an "Address to our Fellow Christians after 400 Years." 31 Calvinist leaders in Europe, Asia. Africa and the U.S. last week called for a new unity among the churches:

"All that we claim for the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches we would lay on the altar. We offer it all to our fellow Christians for whatever use it may be to the whole Church. With the whole Church we hold ourselves alert for the surprises with which the Lord of history can alter the tempo of our renewal, and for the new forms with which an eternally recreating God can startle us while he secures his Church. And we strain ahead toward the great day when the richness of our joined memories will be a small sign of the strength of our conjoined forces, and when each Church's anniversaries will be every Church's celebrations."

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