The Shift in Power Calvin and Geneva
The Shift in Power
By the mid-1530s, two major reforming movements had become established in western Europe. The first, increasingly referred to as “Lutheranism,” was geographically restricted to certain German territories and was primarily influenced by the catechisms of Martin Luther and the theological writings of Philip Melanchthon. The second, located in some of the southern German and Swiss cities and later to become known as the “Reformed” faction, adopted a program of reform that was in many ways more radical than Luther’s. No single individual had anything like the personal influence of Luther over this second movement. Writers such as Huldrych Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger (Zwingli’s successor at Zurich after his death in battle in 1531), and Martin Bucer were seen as influential, rather than authoritative, within the movement. Alongside these, various other movements, more radical and often quite small, jostled for influence and power.
Lutheranism faced a series of crises in the 1540s, not least of which was Luther’s death in 1546. His influence over the emergence and development of the Reformation in Germany had been immense. His death not only deprived the movement of its larger-than-life leader but threw open the question of the succession. On whom would Luther’s mantle descend? How could the movement survive without clear and decisive leadership when it was far from clear who its new leaders would be? Yet this severe blow to Lutheranism was soon accompanied by another that placed it in a very serious dilemma.
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France; Photo: Snark/Art Resource, NY
Engraving of John Calvin in his study. Anonymous.
In 1530 the Lutheran princes had presented their case for reform to Charles V at Augsburg. Determined to restore unity to his empire, Charles rejected the Augsburg Confession as a basis of faith and gave the princes until April 1531 to revert to Catholicism. The Lutheran princes responded by meeting at the Saxon town of Schmalkalden in December 1530 and creating a solemn Protestant League to oppose Charles V if he persisted with his threats.1 As support for this Protestant League grew, Charles realized that he faced internal threats to his authority at a time when the Turkish threat to the east was becoming increasingly serious. He offered a compromise: the Lutheran princes were permitted to exercise their religion freely within their territories until the matter could be properly resolved. While some later German historians viewed this league as the potential basis of a “Protestant German empire,” it was seen at the time simply as a temporary means of fending off imperial pressure.
Until 1543, it succeeded admirably. Under the leadership of Philip of Hesse and John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, Lutheranism was able to develop, virtually unchecked, within the territories of the sympathetic princes. By then, however, tensions within the league had emerged. Philip of Hesse’s bigamous marriage had created a scandal. Bucer, Luther, and Melanchthon were severely criticized for sanctioning it and bringing the Reformation into disrepute. As Charles V began to regain his military strength, he entered into private agreements with local princes throughout 1546, and Philip began to realize that Lutheranism was in serious danger. He urged the formation of an alliance with Swiss Protestants before it was too late. Yet nothing came of any such plans. The Schmalkalden War broke out, pitting Charles V against a reduced group of Protestant territories. Unusually, this war proved decisive.2 In June 1547, both Philip and John Frederick were captured and imprisoned in southern Germany. Within a year, Lutheranism had lost not merely its religious founder and leader but also its two most significant political supporters. It was a period of immense demoralization for the movement.
An iconic moment in this military defeat of Lutheranism deserves special mention. In 1547 the city of Wittenberg gave in to the inevitable and surrendered to imperial forces. Charles V entered the city personally on May 27 and rode to the Castle Church, where he stood for some moments by Luther’s grave. The last time he had encountered Luther was at the Diet of Worms. What thoughts went through his mind? Might he have reflected on how he might have stopped this movement in its tracks by more aggressive action earlier? We shall never know.3
Charles V moved quickly to impose religious conformity on the German Lutheran territories. As the Council of Trent had only begun to respond to the challenges of the Reformation, Charles demanded interim measures that would secure religious peace until Trent’s final report was published. The Augsburg Interim of 1548 allowed Lutherans to retain two of their most distinctive practices: clerical marriage and communion in both kinds.4 In other respects, the document took a robust traditional Catholic approach to church practice. The traditional Catholic mass was to be restored, with all its ceremonial. It was as if the clock had been turned back by thirty years.
Some Lutheran princes refused to accept the Augsburg Interim and adopted instead what came to be known as the “Leipzig Interim,” which was more Protestant in outlook.5 In responding to these challenges, Melanchthon emphasized adiaphora (“matters of indifference”), believing that it was possible to tolerate disagreement over certain matters. Yet Melanchthon’s attempt to develop a pragmatic approach, intended to safeguard as much of the Lutheran heritage as possible under the new circumstances, was regarded by many as tantamount to compromise and betrayal. His place as Luther’s leading interpreter was openly challenged by those who saw him as naively accommodating Luther’s vision to political expediency. Tensions grew within the movement, with the supporters of Melanchthon facing fierce opposition from a “Gnesio-Lutheran” faction that fought to retain the untainted, uncompromised doctrines of their movement’s much-revered founder.
In the end, the crisis over the interims passed. The Protestants managed to regroup militarily, forcing Charles V to accept the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555), which settled the religious shape of Germany.6 Each territory would follow the religion of its ruler, which he could impose on his subjects. Those of his subjects who disagreed with his religious allegiance were to be free to migrate to other territories. In the imperial cities, both Catholicism and Lutheranism were to be permitted. Significantly, only these two religious options were envisaged. Anabaptism and the forms of Protestantism found in southern Germany and Switzerland were pointedly and deliberately omitted from consideration. This principle was encapsulated in the famous slogan cuius regio, eius religio (best interpreted as “whoever rules the region decides its religion”). Humiliated, Charles abdicated the following year. He had failed in his mission to restore Catholicism to Germany.
The Religious Peace of Augsburg gave Lutheranism a new sense of identity, partly rooted in its deep appeal to German nationalism. Yet its German moorings proved to be a major disincentive to expansion elsewhere in Europe. Lutheranism became landlocked, the prisoner of its own nationalist success. Apart from modest expansion into the Nordic countries, the movement’s future expansion would in future depend primarily on emigration, chiefly to North America.7
But what of the other Protestant movement? Would it suffer the same fate? After all, Zwingli and other Swiss Protestant reformers were strongly committed to a nationalist agenda, seeing the rebirth of what they regarded as authentic Christianity to be linked with the cultural and political renewal of their nation.8 Would this second form of Protestantism end up landlocked in the German-speaking cities and cantons of Switzerland, becoming, like Lutheranism, a territorial religion? Or could it develop a sense of identity, a core vision, that would allow it to transcend national boundaries and become a truly international movement? In the 1520s and early 1530s, it seemed to many that the Swiss reform movement was simply a regional religious movement whose history condemned it to a territorial future. Yet by 1560 it had become increasingly clear that this second form of Protestantism was capable of crossing political and social frontiers with ease. Something had happened to transform the movement, liberating it from such territorial limitations. But what?
The answer lay in an individual and a city, both of which played a critical role in the consolidation of Protestantism at this time—John Calvin and the city of Geneva.
THE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION AT GENEVA
During the 1520s, evangelical reforming movements achieved considerable success in the cities of Switzerland. Although the movement began in Zurich, by the late 1520s it had won over some of the leading cities of the area, including Basel and Berne. Yet these were all German-speaking cities. As the decade came to an end, interest began to develop in converting some of the French-speaking regions and cities to the west of Switzerland to the reforming cause—such as the Pays de Vaud and the cities of Neuchâtel, Lausanne, and Geneva. Many of these were already linked to Swiss cities by political and commercial treaties. As those cities turned Protestant, they began to bring subtle pressure to bear on their trading partners to follow suit.9
Yet the evangelical emphasis on preaching in the vernacular posed a serious problem. Most of the leading reformers of the region spoke German. Where might French-speaking evangelicals be found? Some turned to Guillaume Farel, a Frenchman who had studied at Paris and been involved in reforming activities in the French diocese of Meaux.10
Oecolampadius had welcomed him to Basel in 1524—a decision he was to regret bitterly. Farel was an abrasive, aggressive, outspoken debater who managed to alienate rather than persuade his opponents. No less a person than Erasmus himself demanded that Farel be expelled from Basel on account of the embarrassment he was causing to the great city’s reputation. Eventually, Farel managed to find some support at Berne, where he was able to establish a base for his reforming activities in the region.
His greatest triumph was in 1532, when his preaching in Geneva produced positive results, eventually culminating in a great public disputation in 1535.11 Having only won its freedom from the neighboring Duchy of Savoy that same year, Geneva was determined to mold its own future rather than be dominated by any of its neighbors. In August 1535, the city council voted that the Republic of Geneva would accept the principles of the Protestant Reformation and abolish the mass. Along with Pierre Viret, Farel found himself in charge of the direction of the religious reordering of the city.12 It was a task for which he was not suited. He needed help. But who was there to help him?
John Calvin was born in the French cathedral city of Noyon and had attended the University of Paris before going on to study civil law at Orléans.13 During his time at Paris, he had encountered at least some of the reforming ideas of Martin Luther, which were widely discussed in academic circles. When he returned to the city after graduating from Orléans, he became associated with reforming groups. Tantalizingly, we know very little about this period of Calvin’s life; his personal papers were confiscated when the police raided his lodgings in 1533. The rector of the University of Paris, Nicholas Cop, had preached a reforming sermon that was seen as highly inflammatory by the university and city authorities (however moderate it looks to its modern readers). A copy of this sermon exists in Calvin’s handwriting. Was he, many wondered, its real author?
Calvin fled before he could be arrested, eventually making his way to the Swiss city of Basel, now a bastion of Protestantism, where he sought refuge. The situation in France had deteriorated. The cause of reform had been severely injured by the “affair of the placards”: anti-Catholic posters entitled “True Articles on the Horrible, Great, and Insufferable Abuses of the Papal Mass” were displayed in public places throughout Paris in October 1534. The author of the placards was unknown; many, however, believed that Guillaume Farel was involved.14 If so, it was a political misjudgment that was typical of Farel. Francis I, once sympathetic to the cause of French reformers, was alienated overnight and became an implacable opponent of the Reformation. The Anabaptist takeover of Münster also made Francis I regard anyone interested in reform of the church as potentially seditious.
Calvin was appalled at this development. Might something be done to restore the balance? Having time on his hands while in exile in Basle, he penned a little book that set out the basic elements of the Reformed view of the Christian faith that he personally espoused. In addition to setting out his views on the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, Calvin wrote a preface, addressed to Francis I, pleading for toleration of this moderate evangelical form of Christianity and distinguishing it from the excesses and violence of Anabaptism. The Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in May 1536, would eventually become one of the most influential publications of the sixteenth century—not on account of its gracious preface, but because of its lucid, systematic, and persuasive account of the basic elements of Reformed Christianity.15 It is generally agreed that Calvin drew on both of Luther’s catechisms of 1529 and his treatises on The Freedom of the Christian and The Babylonian Captivity in writing this book.
Having returned to Noyon to settle some family affairs, Calvin proceeded to Strasbourg, breaking his journey along the way. In the summer of 1536, he paused at Geneva, intending to stay only a night before moving on. Farel recognized Calvin and demanded that he stay in the city and help consolidate the reforms he had introduced. Calvin met Farel’s needs in three ways: he spoke and wrote fluent French; he had just published an excellent primer in Christian doctrine, which pointed to his ability as an educationalist; and he was a graduate in civil law, able to help Geneva draft its civil ordinances. Reluctantly, Calvin agreed to stay in Geneva, where he assumed the office of “reader” (lector) of Holy Scripture.16 He was never “ordained” in any sense of the term.
His rise to prominence began in September 1536. The city of Lausanne was debating whether to follow Geneva and accept the principles of the Reformation. Farel and Viret traveled to Lausanne, bringing Calvin with them, to take part in the public disputation that was now an invariable part of the decision-making process.17 They were pitted against the local clergy, who were not noted for their academic distinction. The debate was not going well for Farel and Viret, who found themselves severely challenged by some of the questions they were forced to address.
One of those questions went to the heart of the reforming program at Geneva and raised the specter of Anabaptism. Were not Viret and Farel allowing people to interpret the Bible as they pleased, without taking the views of early church writers seriously? It was a moment of tension; the debate was in the balance. The credibility of the reformation at Geneva would be permanently damaged if any association was made with the radical cause and the social instability it was widely believed to engender. Calvin rose to answer.
Apparently quoting early Christian writers from memory, Calvin insisted that he and his colleagues took them with the greatest of seriousness and saw them as authorities of significance. The audience was dazzled by the brilliance of Calvin’s presentation: he quoted the third-century writer Cyprian of Carthage to the letter (“in the second book of his letters, the third letter”) and the fourth-century theologian and preacher John Chrysostom even more precisely (“the twenty-first homily, about halfway through”). By the time Calvin sat down, everyone was clear on two things: the Genevan Reformation was about the renewal and continuity of the church, and a new star had arisen in the Protestant firmament. Lausanne was won over to the Reformation, while Geneva was won over to Calvin.
Yet the relationship between Calvin and Geneva was far from relaxed. Farel was not the easiest of people to work with. More significantly, the city of Geneva, having just thrown off the political power of the Duchy of Savoy and the religious power of the papacy, was in no mood to submit itself to new strictures—especially compulsory attendance at somewhat lengthy sermons. Farel, never the most politically astute of operators, alienated so many people in Geneva that an anti-Farel faction was able to win control of the city early in 1538. In April, Farel and Calvin were expelled from the city. Calvin’s correspondence suggests that he was devastated by this development. What should he do? Where could he go? In the end, he simply picked up where he had left off in the summer of 1536. He packed his bags and continued to Strasbourg, hoping to continue his work there.
Having arrived in Strasbourg two years later than he had intended, Calvin began to make up for lost time. In quick succession, he produced a series of major theological works. He produced a revised and expanded second edition of the Institutes (1539) and a French translation of the first edition (1541). As pastor to the French-speaking congregation in the city, Calvin was able to gain experience of the practical problems facing Reformed pastors. Through his friendship with Strasbourg’s leading reformer, Martin Bucer, Calvin was able to develop his thinking on the relation between the city and the church, as well as the intellectual foundations of his reforming program. Calvin was clearly influenced significantly at points by the experienced reformer of Strasbourg, whom he playfully dubbed the “Bishop of Strasbourg.” By 1541 he had gained considerable practical experience of church management and given much thought to the nature of a reformed church, especially in relation to issues of civil polity and discipline. The influence of Bucer is especially evident on these points. The reformed church and community that had existed only in Calvin’s mind at Geneva in 1538 were now concrete realities. Abstract theory and pure speculation had given way to practical experience. Calvin was ready to begin all over again—but this time he was determined to get it right.
The invitation to return to Geneva finally came in the fall of 1541. In his absence, the religious and political situation had deteriorated. The city appealed to him to return and restore order and confidence. The Calvin who returned to Geneva was a wiser and more experienced young man, and far better equipped for the massive tasks awaiting him than he had been three years earlier.18 There were tensions and controversies, not least relating to the Servetus affair, in which Calvin played a relatively minor role in securing the conviction and execution of Michael Servetus, a noted Anabaptist. Yet even this event must be seen in context: in this age, human life was routinely taken in order to maintain public order. Although Calvin would still find himself quarreling with the city authorities for more than a decade, it was from a position of strength. Geneva needed him. Finally, opposition to his program of reform died out. For the last decade of his life, he had virtually a free hand in the religious affairs of the city.
To understand Calvin’s immense strategic importance to the shaping of Protestantism, we must turn to consider the book for which he is best known—the Institutes of the Christian Religion—and the religious system it embodies.
CALVIN’S INSTITUTES AND THE INTELLECTUAL MOLDING OF REFORMED CHRISTIANITY
The printed book was one of the most significant factors in molding intellectual opinion across sixteenth-century Europe. Books were easily transported, could cross national frontiers undetected, and found their way to private libraries, where they were eagerly, if secretively, devoured. The printed word was integral to the spreading of the ideas of the Reformation across the religious and political boundaries of Europe. Martin Luther never visited England, yet his ideas were brought there through books that were smuggled in through eastern ports such as Ipswich and pored over in nearby Cambridge University. Calvin’s distinct and greatest contribution to the consolidation and diffusion of the Reformed variant of Protestantism was a book that transformed the fortunes of that movement, liberating it from its earlier geographical and cultural imprisonment. The book? Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Institutes immediately became a best-seller and went through numerous, expanded editions in Latin (1539, 1543, 1550, 1553, 1559) and French (1541, 1545, 1551, 1560).
As we noted earlier, the first edition of the Institutes was published at Basel in 1536.19 Modeled on Luther’s influential catechisms of 1529, its six chapters included commentaries on the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and some disputed matters of theology. Calvin revised the work substantially during his time in Strasbourg. It was the second edition that established the work as one of the most important Protestant works of the era. Completely restructured, the work’s seventeen chapters set out a clear, accessible account of the basics of Christian belief, including the doctrine of God, the Trinity, the relation of the Old and New Testaments, penitence, justification by faith, the nature and relation of providence and predestination, human nature, and the nature of the Christian life. Calvin’s distinctive emphases on the sovereignty of God and the authority of the Bible are evident from even a cursory reading of the work and would remain central as it underwent development in later editions.
What is so striking about this edition of the Institutes is not so much that it is a work of theology, but that it is a work of pedagogy, based on careful reflection on how to communicate and commend ideas.20 The work offers a clear and immensely readable account of ideas that might otherwise be inaccessible and unintelligible. This concern for effective communication with a lay audience is especially evident in the French translation of the Institutes (1541), which shows Calvin adapting his ideas and language to his intended audience. Greek words and references to Aristotle are left out, and a healthy dose of French proverbs and idioms have been added. This translation is regularly hailed as a model of pedagogical clarity.
Yet it was not simply the many educational and presentational virtues of the book that propelled it to prominence. It addressed head-on the central weakness of Protestantism up to this point: the problem of the multiplicity of interpretations of the Bible. How can one speak of the Bible as having any authority when it is so clearly at the mercy of its interpreters? Calvin presents his Institutes as an authoritative guide to the correct interpretation of scripture. “My object in this work,” he wrote, “is to so prepare and train students of sacred theology for the study of the word of God that they might have an easy access into it, and be able to proceed in it without hindrance.”
Calvin established the credentials of his interpretations of the Bible, not by an assertion of his personal authority or wisdom, but by careful engagement with biblical passages, informed by a good knowledge of how these passages had been interpreted by well-regarded older Christian writers, such as Augustine of Hippo.21 Readers of the work found themselves presented with reasoned, defended, and superbly presented accounts of central Christian teachings, firmly rooted in the Bible. Calvin presented and critiqued alternatives, reassuring readers of the plausibility of his own preferred interpretations in the face of these rivals. He did not merely defend his ideas; he showed how he derived them in the first place.
So what are the central ideas that Calvin developed? The most important is the fundamental assertion that a consistent and coherent theological system can be derived and defended on the basis of the Bible. Calvin’s greatest legacy to Protestantism is arguably not any specific doctrines but rather his demonstration of how the Bible can serve as the foundation of a stable understanding of Christian beliefs and structures. In particular, Calvin held that the New Testament lays down a specific, defensible church order. Calvin’s theology is similar to Luther’s at many points, while taking a theologically subtle and diplomatic view on the issue that had caused such a furious row between Luther and Zwingli—the question of the real presence.
The growing importance of the Institutes led Calvin to revise and expand the work; the result was the definitive edition of 1559, consisting of eighty chapters arranged in four books. The final Latin edition was five times larger than the first. This massive expansion of the work reflects Calvin’s practice of adding material relating to important controversies that had emerged since earlier editions. It must be said that some of these later additions are rather less elegant and more acerbic than earlier parts of the work and do not reflect Calvin at his best. Where Calvin earlier addressed ideas and assessed them on the basis of their intrinsic merits, he now shows a marked tendency to abuse and vilify his opponents. Calvin is believed to have suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, usually the result of stress, and this may have been the reason for this unhappy development. This final edition, however, shows a marked improvement over previous editions in that the work has been completely reorganized, allowing the inner coherence of Calvin’s approach to be appreciated, while at the same time making it easier to find specific discussions.
The success of Calvin’s 1559 Institutes gave rise to a series of publishing spin-offs designed to enhance still further the work’s pedagogical excellence. In 1562 Augustin Marlorat published a set of indexes to the work that made it easy to find specific topics and questions. In 1576 Nicolas Colladon, one of Calvin’s early biographers, produced an edition that included brief marginal summaries of the contents of significant passages, largely to relieve the burden on hard-worked theological students. Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot refugee who became one of London’s more important religious publishers, printed two study guides to the Institutes. Edmund Bunny’s Compendium (1576) offered simplified accounts of Calvin’s main arguments. In 1583 Guillaume Delaune (a Huguenot refugee who Anglicized his name as William Lawne) produced a summary of the Institutes that included flowcharts and diagrams to allow readers to follow the intricate structure of the work.
Despite Protestantism’s emphasis on the importance of the vernacular, Latin remained the preferred language for theological publications. Calvin’s Institutes could be read by academics throughout Europe. However, Calvin’s decision to translate the work into French showed a particular concern to communicate with the grass roots of faith. Calvin’s growing appeal is evident from the appearance of vernacular translations of the Institutes, such as translations into Dutch (1560), English (1561), German (1572), and Spanish (1597). The impact of these translations was significant. Coherently expressed and carefully justified radical reforming doctrines had become available in a language that everyone could understand.
The response to the French translation of 1541 was noteworthy. Within a year, the Parisian authorities were insisting that all works containing heterodox doctrines, especially Calvin’s Institutes, be surrendered to the authorities. In 1542 a martyr died at Rouen with a quotation from this work on his lips. The extent of the market for Calvin’s writings can be gauged from the 1545 banning of 121 French-language titles, almost half of which were printed in Geneva. Parisian booksellers were outraged and protested vigorously: they would be ruined if they were prohibited from selling such books.
Calvin’s growing appeal within many sections of Protestantism lay not in his institutional authority—he was, after all, nothing more than a pastor at Geneva, a small city by the standards of the time—but in the growing perception of his widening readership that he was serious, reliable, and trustworthy. It is generally agreed that one of the most important factors contributing to this growing reputation was the Institutes.
THE CONSOLIDATION AND EXPANSION OF CALVINISM IN EUROPE
Calvin’s growing influence led to Geneva becoming the epicenter of the Reformed world during the second phase of Protestant development.22 Zurich had once been that epicenter, on account of the major influence of the movement’s original reformer, Zwingli. His successor, Heinrich Bullinger, did much to maintain Zurich’s political and theological influence over the Reformed wing of Protestantism. However, political influence ebbed away from Zurich to the more powerful city of Berne in the early 1530s, before decisively relocating to Geneva in the 1550s.23
The term “Reformed” gradually became the preferred term for the form of Protestantism that emerged from this powerful crucible of ideas—partly to emphasize the movement’s commitment to “reform itself according to the Word of God” and partly to distinguish itself from a rival vision of Protestantism now increasingly known as “Lutheranism.” Although the term “Calvinism” is often used to refer to this type of Protestantism, on account of Calvin’s influence on its emergence and consolidation, the term “Reformed” is preferred by some scholars and is widely encountered within the learned literature.
Calvin’s influence and reputation led to Geneva becoming a magnet for wealthy and once-powerful religious refugees, often from France, who were determined to use their skills and wealth to advance his ideas. Printers such as Robert Estienne, lawyers such as Germain Colladon, and businessmen such as Laurent de Normandie made their home in Geneva. Calvin’s position at Geneva was somewhat ambiguous in the early 1550s, owing to hostility between him and some senior members of the city council. Following the elections of 1555, in which Calvin’s supporters gained a clear majority, the city of Geneva became increasingly committed to advancing the programs associated with its most famous religious leader. A significant period of expansion resulted.
One of the most obvious results of this commitment was the surge of Calvin’s influence in France.24 Calvin had been significant for French reforming movements since the appearance of the French translation of his Institutes in 1541. Initially, his impact was limited to his personal advice and support. Yet the burgeoning French evangelical communities needed more than this. The political and institutional support they craved was something that only the city of Geneva could offer. Prior to 1555, the city was decidedly cool about such ventures. It had no interest in becoming embroiled in Calvin’s religious adventurism. Yet the city council elections of that year changed everything. In 1557 the council agreed to support Calvin’s programs of reform abroad, including the infiltration of pastors into hostile parts of Europe, so long as such support could not be traced back to them.
That final clause proved to be a wise decision. In January 1561, a courier arrived in Geneva from the court of Charles IX, the new king of France, to report that the king had discovered that recent disturbances in France were linked to preachers sent from Geneva. He demanded that Geneva’s agents be recalled and that no more be sent under any conditions. The council replied, truthfully, that it had sent no such individuals into France. (They saw no need to qualify this claim by adding that it was the Genevan Company of Pastors, a private ecclesiastical organization, that had done so.) A serious rupture between Geneva and France was thus averted through what was little more than a fiction.
Geneva now supplied Reformed pastors and preachers to cities and congregations throughout France. The entire operation was conducted in the greatest secrecy. Safe houses, complete with hiding places, were established in the deep valleys of Provence, set a day’s journey apart. An underground network—similar to the one employed by the French Resistance during the Second World War—allowed pastors from Geneva to slip across the ill-defined frontier into France. By 1562 the number of fully established Reformed congregations in Calvin’s native France had risen to 1,785.
By that time, Geneva’s influence was being felt in other regions of Europe as well, including Germany. The Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) had recognized only two religious options within the German territories—Lutheranism and Catholicism. Yet this compromise was shattered when the region of Germany known as the Palatinate, which included the city of Heidelberg, became a center of Reformed church life in the 1560s.25 The area had originally converted to Lutheranism in the 1530s. However, Otto Henry, who held the office of elector from 1556 to 1559, died childless. As a result, the title passed to Frederick, Duke of Simmern. When a controversy broke out in 1559 over the real presence, Frederick decided to resolve it by holding a public dispute between representatives of Lutheranism and of the Reformed position. Frederick found himself persuaded by the latter, and in 1561 he set about enforcing the Reformed position in the region, assisted by theologians such as Caspar Olevianus and Zacharias Ursinus. Images of the saints, vestments, baptismal fonts, and organs were removed from the churches.
To consolidate the Reformed faith in this region, Frederick requested that a public confession of faith be devised that could be used to instruct the people in the new version of Protestantism. The result was the “Heidelberg Catechism” (1563), widely regarded as one of the finest documents of its kind.26 Calvin’s influence is everywhere apparent in this document, which did much to consolidate his influence beyond Geneva. Around this time, the term “Calvinism” was used by its opponents to refer to the Reformed type of Protestantism as a means of emphasizing that it originated from outside Germany. The term appears to have been introduced around 1552 by the Lutheran polemicist Joachim Westphal to refer to the theological, and particularly the sacramental, views of the Swiss reformers in general, and of John Calvin in particular.27 Once introduced, the term rapidly passed into general use in the Lutheran church. In an increasingly nationalist region of Europe, it conveniently emphasized that this religious movement was foreign—unlike Lutheranism, which possessed an impeccable German pedigree.28
The introduction of the Reformed variant of Protestantism in a region that had hitherto been Lutheran caused major repercussions throughout Germany. Lutherans had regarded their religion as territorially sacrosanct. Now it seemed that another form of Protestantism was competing for influence within the region. The Lutherans moved to have the intruder suppressed. The crisis abated to some extent with the death of Frederick in 1576. His elder son, who succeeded him to the title, was a devout Lutheran and undid most of his father’s changes. However, by then, Calvinism—as the movement was now known—had made headway.
In Scotland, Calvin’s ideas were aggressively propagated by John Knox, who had fled to Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor. Although Knox had been converted to the cause of the Reformation in Scotland around 1545, it was during his time as pastor to the English congregation in Geneva that he developed his distinctive approach to Protestantism, one that was clearly grounded in the approach then prevalent in Geneva. Knox is perhaps most famous for his 1558 work First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which is by far his best-known work. (The word regiment here means “government.”) In this work, he appeals to the Bible and the church fathers to argue that “to promote a Woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion, or empire above any Realme, Nation or Citie is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance.”29
On his return to Scotland in 1559, Knox was instrumental in the production of the First Book of Discipline, which can be seen as an attempt to adapt the Protestant paradigm established at Geneva to the specifics of the Scottish situation.30 Yet Knox went further, transferring to the political sphere ideas that Calvin had limited to the sphere of church government. Taking the idea of representative government characteristic of Calvin’s Reformed churches—that is, communities led by elected elders or “presbyters”—Knox applied this democratic principle at the political level—locally, regionally, and nationally.
This amounted to a virtual inversion of the traditional top-down, hierarchical model that had hitherto prevailed. Thus, the local councils (“presbyteries”), regional councils (“synods”), and national councils (“general assemblies”) that presided over the faithful were made up of the people themselves, rather than representatives of the political rulers. This important transition reflected the broader impact of the ideas of the Republic of Geneva; some scholars suggest that those ideas underlay the English Civil War of the seventeenth century.
Calvin’s form of Protestantism also became a significant movement in the Netherlands, at that time a Spanish province. Charles V regarded the Spanish Netherlands as an important ally in his struggle to contain Protestantism in Germany. However, Charles’s abdication in 1555 began to create something of a power vacuum. The ending of the Habsburg-Valois conflict in 1559 allowed greater social mobility throughout the region, with the result that Reformed preachers were able to secure footholds in the region, most notably among the lower gentry who were angered at the state of the Catholic church. Yet at this stage, the religious views of most educated people in the region were closer to those of Erasmus of Rotterdam than those of Luther or Calvin.
Things changed when Philip II, the successor to Charles V, decided to take a strongly pro-Catholic stance in the region and enforce the decrees of the Council of Trent. His actions offended many, even the Catholic William of Orange. By 1566, Reformed Protestantism was gaining increasing support, partly as a protest against the perceived authoritarianism of Philip. Yet they needed more support. Critically, the Lutheran princes of Germany declined to become involved, having no interest in advancing the fortunes of the alternative form of Protestantism that was causing them such difficulties in their own part of the world following events in the Palatinate. Acting on Philip’s instructions, the Duke of Alva marched nine thousand men from Milan to the Netherlands and set about enforcing Catholicism with a ruthlessness that outraged even its supporters. By the 1580s, much of the north of the country had adopted the Reformed faith.31
The fine details of this conflict are important, not least to the Dutch. For our purposes, two points about the emerging shape of Protestantism are thrown into sharp relief by this development. First, the German Lutherans declined to support the Dutch Calvinists precisely because they saw them as a potential religious threat rather than as allies with a shared faith. At this time, “Protestantism” was simply not understood as something that transcended the national and religious differences between German Lutherans and Dutch Calvinists, who were seen as two separate religious groups in competition (as events in the Palatinate indicated), and possibly even in conflict.
Second, there was significant international involvement in the Dutch revolt. French Protestant—or “Huguenot”—militias were of no small significance in the Dutch revolt against the Duke of Alva. The rise of these militias was the direct outcome of growing Calvinist influence in France. Whereas Lutheranism remained landlocked in Germany, seemingly pursuing a policy of splendid isolation, those supporting Calvin’s alternative vision of Protestantism perceived an international dimension to the conflict. Calvinists shared a sense of loyalty that was not limited by political frontiers. It is an important indication of the growing capacity of Calvin’s vision of the reformed Christian faith to transcend national boundaries.
The importance of this point is reinforced when it is appreciated that there was another nation that gave significant covert support to the Dutch rebellion. In 1585 England provided a force of four thousand men under the Duke of Leicester to support the rebels. England was now no friend of Spain; three years later, the island nation would face invasion from the Spanish Armada. Troops would be transported from the Spanish Netherlands to invade England and force the removal of English troops from the Netherlands. Without their support, the revolt would collapse.
CONFESSIONALIZATION: THE “SECOND REFORMATION”
At the beginning, it was all so simple. There were Lutherans, and there were Catholics, a simple binary opposition that shaped most aspects of religious life in Germany. The Council of Trent, the Catholic church’s response to the Reformation, engaged seriously with Lutheran theory and practice at many points during the late 1540s; interestingly, scant attention was paid to the other form of Protestantism then consolidating itself in Europe. But once Calvin’s vision of Christianity expanded beyond its original geographical limits in the 1560s and became a serious presence in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, things began to change.
The terms “confessionalization” and “the Second Reformation” are widely used to refer to the new religious situation in Germany in the 1560s and 1570s. Confessionalization is best seen as interlocking religious beliefs and practices with the objectives of the state. Central to this process was the notion of a territorial religion based on an authorized declaration of doctrines (usually referred to as a “Confession”), which would be binding on all subjects and enforced by an established church accountable to the prince or the magistrates.32 This led to growing demand for a legally defined and enforceable system of beliefs and practices.
During this period, forms of Protestantism emerged that were largely defined by the social conditions of this part of Europe at this specific time.33 The emergence of “state churches,” defined by confessional documents, led to greater social cohesion and, in the opinion of many, the emergence of the early modern absolute state. In many ways, this can be seen as a redevelopment of the medieval idea of Christendom, now implemented at the regional, rather than continental, level. Each region was a Christendom governed by its own particular understanding of Christianity.
Many religious beliefs and practices that earlier had been considered “matters of indifference” (adiaphora) were now treated as criteria of demarcation between the emerging Protestant confessional churches. The need to distinguish the two confessional churches of the age—Lutheranism and Calvinism—led to a quest for differences; once identified, these differences were given an emphasis that reflected a need for social demarcation. The result was that differences in theology, liturgy, or church government became explicitly politicized as the early modern state sought to impose greater social control within its sphere of influence.
By the 1590s, there seemed little doubt as to which of the two major forms of Protestantism was gaining the ascendancy in western Europe. By 1591, Calvinism seemed to have made irreversible gains throughout Europe. The German Calvinist Abraham Scultetus (1566–1624) wrote in near-ecstatic terms of the sense of achievement, even of destiny (which Calvinist writers tended to speak of in terms of divine providence), which pervaded the movement at this time:
I cannot fail to recall the optimistic mood which I and many others felt when we considered the condition of the Reformed churches in 1591. In France there ruled the valiant King Henri IV, in England the mighty Queen Elizabeth, in Scotland the learned King James, in the Palatinate the bold hero John Casimir, in Saxony the courageous and powerful Elector Christian I, in Hesse the clever and prudent Landgrave William, who were all inclined to the Reformed religion. In the Netherlands everything went as Prince Maurice of Orange wished, when he took Breda, Zutphen, Hulst and Nijmegen…. We imagined that aureum seculum, a golden age, had dawned.34
Yet the process also affected issues of doctrine. The rise of Calvin’s vision of Protestantism forced Lutheranism to define and defend itself against two rivals instead of its traditional single opponent—Catholicism. Both Lutheran and Reformed communities now defined themselves by explicit and extensive doctrinal formulations. This can be seen as the inevitable outcome of a quest for self-definition on the part of two ecclesial bodies within the same geographical region, both claiming to be legitimate outcomes of the Reformation. At the social and political level, the communities were difficult to distinguish; doctrine therefore provided the most reliable means by which they might define themselves over and against one another. The notion of a core concept of “Protestantism,” with two major branches, became difficult to sustain given the embittered hostility between the two factions and their open competition for territory and influence.
Perhaps more importantly, given the central role of the Bible for Protestantism, this new trend meant that the Bible tended to be read through the prism of “confessions”—statements of faith that frequently influenced, and sometimes determined, how certain passages of the Bible were to be interpreted. This shift was a contributing factor to the rise of “proof-texting”: citing isolated, decontextualized verses of the Bible in support of often controversial confessional positions. Paradoxically, this development actually lessened the influence of the Bible within Protestantism, in that biblical statements were accommodated to existing doctrinal frameworks rather than being allowed to determine them, and even to challenge them.
As a result, pressure grew to avoid confusion by finding ways to distinguish clearly between the two forms of Protestantism. As the intellectual warfare between Lutheran and Calvinist polemicists intensified, two areas of doctrine emerged as potentially reliable demarcators: the doctrine of predestination and the concept of the “real presence.” In each case, there was a clear distinction between the Lutheran and Calvinist positions.
The emergence of state churches was a response to the situation in Germany in the 1570s. Whatever the benefits of such institutions, a link was created between the church and power that would prove problematic in years to come. Protestant churches were now part of the establishment, with vested interests that might easily compromise their integrity. State churches may well have helped achieve political and social stability in the short term; in the longer term, however, they created the conditions for wars of religion, precisely on account of the interconnection of religion and natural identity, the church and the state. Theology now became a matter of political importance in that a link had been forged between theological beliefs and the state.
A further consequence of this development should be noted. When Protestant communities began to emigrate from Europe to North America, they carried with them certain apparently self-evident assumptions about how churches relate to the community at large. These assumptions, however, had been molded by forces specific to sixteenth-century Europe. The result, as we shall see later, was that American Protestantism tended to replicate the structures and habits of its European context, despite the very different social context in which it now found itself.
Having considered the three forms of Protestantism traditionally termed Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anabaptism, we now turn to consider the emergence of another, quite distinct vision of Protestantism in England.