§15 Conflicts (part 4 of 4)
All that sounds amicable and clearly expresses the intention of actually restoring the preachers to Geneva. But in no circumstances did Calvin himself think of going back there half-justified, but also in humility half-confessing his faults. The findings were more an instrument of peace than a real account of the way in which peace could be achieved. The actual proceedings seem to have involved an effort to console and praise the two pastors on the one side but to tell them on the other that they must be more gentle. They, too, had made mistakes and were thus in part responsible for the disaster. Calvin can hardly have heard all these mild pronouncements without the most vigorous inward protest. How differently, of course, the situation can be interpreted may be seen from the fact that Kampschulte, correctly, I believe, at this point, writes that Farel and Calvin went back to Bern discontented, their hopes having been dashed (316), whereas Stahelin can say on the basis of the same material that with glad and thankful hearts the two preachers left the assembly with this decision and returned to Bern (160).!8 In any case, and at the latest at Bern, it must have become wholly clear to them that their situation was not good, that the fourteen articles in particular had not improved the opinion that the German Swiss had of them, and that Calvin had erred when he thought that on this occasion the German Swiss could perhaps endorse his wrathful enthusiasm (read Briefe, 121 = 22 in Schwarz).}9
17. Ibid.
18. Kampschulte, vol. I; Stahelin, vol. I.
19. CO 10/II, 202ff; R. Schwarz, Johannes Calvins Lebenswerk in seinen Briefen, vol. I (Ttibingen, 1909), 35ff. (new ed. Neukirchen, 1961, 70ff.).
Summer 1538
The man they now had to learn to know in Bern was Peter Kunz of Simmenthal. From the letters of Calvin and Farel we see that Kunz must have played the part of a truly furious Roland. Calvin tells us how, when they came to Bern, they were exposed to his downright crudities, insults, complaints, and outbreaks of anger, so that the other pastors and finally the council had at last to protect them almost bodily from his wildness. Especially dramatic is the account of a visit to Kunz in his manse at which they were kept waiting in an antechamber for almost two hours because the pastors were at work on ecclesiastical court matters, and then they were given a most unfriendly and ultimately stormy reception.?0
From all this we gather that in these tense moments a confrontation took place between two men of different races, the one from Noyon in Picardy, the other from the valley between the Stockhorn and Niesen. It is most unlikely that either of them could think quietly or rightly about the way they each expressed themselves. One thing at least is certain, namely, that on the basis of what he had learned at Zurich Kunz was quietly and firmly resolved for his part to oppose to the hilt all that Calvin was wanting and trying to achieve, and that on their return to Bern, even when Geneva was ready to put into effect the Zurich resolutions, he set out at once very openly to do this. What Calvin saw as fury was more an obstinate tenacity that almost drove Calvin and the like-minded Farel to despair. Kunz seems to have complained to the Genevans that with their reckless striving for innovation they were disturbing the German Swiss churches that had hitherto been so peaceful. He saw intolerable cunning in the fact that the articles were full of exceptions. The synod at Zurich had not approved of these articles in any sense.?! All such opinions were undoubtedly more than Calvin and Farel could find justified or accept. Sebastian Meyer, the other leading Lutheran in Bern, also held visibly aloof from the Genevans; and Erasmus Ritter, the one Zwinglian who remained after Megander’s departure, did not have enough influence to give them effective support. Finally, they had to find that the council was formally demanding that they renounce the fourteen articles and accept the fact that steps would be taken to restore them to Geneva only if they would unconditionally accept conformity.?2
20. CO 10/II, 203f.; Schwarz, 36 (71).
Die COON 04
22. Ibid., 205f.; Schwarz, 37 (73).
. First Genevan Stay
It is one of the riddles of Calvin’s life and character that in May 1538 he clung so tenaciously to the idea of a return to the Geneva that he had left so dramatically, but that then only a little while later he took up again his first view of the expulsion and consoled himself with the thought that things were best as they were, and that he neither wanted to return nor should do so. Remember his strong statement: “Well and good!” when the council bailiff came to tell him of his ejection.2? Remember his description of his mood that day as one of more joy than was seemly.?4 That was on April 23. But on May 20, at the conclusion of negotiations with the Bern council, he wrote that it seemed better to them to agree to any conditions rather than leave unexplored any way to further the cause of the church (Briefe, 119).29 Then two months later on July 10 he wrote to Louis du Tillet that as it was a divine vocation that had kept him there and consoled him, so now he felt that he would be tempting God if he were to take up again a burden that he had found to be too heavy (Briefe, 127)26
What did he really want, we might ask, when we see how energetically and even with an appeal to the supreme court he now took the one view of the matter and now the other, and always in a way that makes it hard for onlookers to follow him or to see why it has now to be the one way and now the other. We are perhaps forced up against Calvin’s concept of God if we are to explain, even if we cannot answer, the psychological question. In the later editions of the Institutes, in remarkable parallelism with Thomas Aquinas, Calvin developed the distinctive theory that divine providence constantly uses second causes, including the human will, to achieve its ends.?” Though he avoided mechanistic thinking, Calvin viewed the decisions of the will, whether his own or that of others, as guided, driven, and motivated by God, to whom we must constantly pay inner heed and whom we must always be ready to follow, so that we do not so much as lift a finger without a nod from him (Rom. 14 [v. 5]).28 Ideas of this kind — and his actual conduct both here and in many other cases was in keeping with them
— show us that Calvin was not so strictly doctrinaire as we often like to depict him, but that in daily life he would
23. CO 21, 226; see above, 360 n. 168.
24. CO 31, 25; see above, 360.
25. CO 10/II, 201, to Bullinger.
HG, Morel... 221.
27. dnst: In; 97 Os I, Qi ck Sl pilsqusedl2ay3 aie
28. CO 49, 259f. (Romans Commentary).
constantly decide and act in accordance with the situation, which included his own shall we say volatile disposition, naturally within definite ethical limits, yet in detail with an extraordinary and incalculable freedom that
we today
— who knows? — might regard as romantic caprice, but that for him had the significance of supreme divine necessity. We may perhaps think here of the Socratic daemon?? that stands in a similar half-light. We do not have here a solution to the riddle but a pointer to the direction in which to look if we are not content to remain standing blindly before the facts as such.
We were describing those days in the middle of May 1538 when Calvin's desire and will was still to go back to Geneva. The reason that he gave was always the welfare of the church, which he regarded as imperiled by the disorderly interruption of his tenure and the resultant situation. Better do and accept anything than let devout people be able to think we were to blame if things were not put right, he once wrote.?° It seems that he was not the only one to expect his restoration on the basis of the decisions at Zurich. A letter from Capito to Vadian (Briefe, 115) contains | the noteworthy report that no less a figure than Martin Bucer of Strassburg had a mind to go personally to Geneva to reinstate Farel and Calvin.?! Could this man who was so skilled a negotiator have succeeded in doing what even the powerful voice of Bern later failed to do? In fact the journey never took place. During the same period we have a letter from Grynaeus of Basel to Calvin and Farel (Briefe, 116) in which he seems to have thought that their return was certain, and with the gentle Christian friendliness that Basel in particular was showing to these friends who had come to grief in Geneva, he urged them to overcome all their adversaries with Christian mildness and humility and to take away from them any opportunity of blaspheming the gospel. The letter, which has this admonitory tone throughout, closes with the reminder how great a service it will be, and how true and solid will be their renown, if they can look only to Christ and totally forget themselves in this cause?” — a most appropriate wish at a time when both of them were very preoccupied with themselves and the rightness of what they had done.
They would not be given, however, the chance to act along such
29. Plato Apologia 31d; Phaedr. 242b + c.
30. CO 10/II, 205 (no. 121).
31. Ibid., 196.
32. Ibid., 197.
ie.
‘ First Genevan Stay
+
lines. As we have seen, the theologians of Bern treated them badly when they asked for support in carrying out the decisions of Zurich. They had better success with the council, which did not have the theological and personal objections against them that alienated a Peter Kunz, but had good political reasons for trying to do as they desired. The result of negotiations with this body was the appointment of envoys to go back with them to Geneva and to see to their reinstatement into office. If Calvin’s eagerness to return is puzzling,?> no less astonishing is the diligence and civility with which the Bern council now acted. It went so far as to abandon its objection to the fourteen more than audacious articles that Calvin had presented as peace proposals at Zurich. The envoys were to put these before the Geneva council in the presence of Calvin and Farel, who would thus have a chance to explain them.
Did the council really read and understand them properly? When we consider that on account of them the furious controversy with Kunz had arisen, and that later everything would founder in Geneva because of them, we may well doubt this. Or was it that Bern knew the mood in Geneva so poorly that it seriously thought it could offer the city this solution? Hundeshagen (139) and Staehelin (161)34 write that the Bern government was denying itself at this point. I myself would hardly venture to say that; I suspect that Bern for its part had reason to evaluate the political peril in which Geneva then stood in a way that we cannot, and yet at the same time had illusions about the significance of the articles and the mood at Geneva that would quickly avenge themselves. At one point the council refused to give ground. It demanded that the two should return on the tacit understanding that the Bern ceremonies should be definitively adopted. Calvin wanted an authoritative resolution on the matter, since conformity had been violently imposed by the very people who had been as yet only ready to throw the preachers in the Rhone. Yielding here was obviously the extreme condition to which Calvin alludes in several letters.3° On this occasion he had no cause for complaint against the Bern politicians. The more surprising, then, was the blow that was finally received and the lesson that the help that Bern was ready to give had its limits.
The party left Bern on May 18. Erasmus Ritter, the last Bern Zwing-
33. Barth has Zuriickkehrte, a possible slip for Zuriickstrebte.
34, Stahelin, vol. I.
35. See n. 30 above; also CO 10/II, 201 (no. 119).
lian, who was well disposed to Calvin and was to act as the theological expert, went with Farel and Calvin, to be joined by Viret at Lausanne, and accompanied also by Hans Huber and Hans Ludwig Ammann as secular delegates from Bern. Directly before starting Calvin wrote to Bullinger: “We are now setting out on our way, may Christ prosper us. For we look to him in taking this path and lay the outcome in his hands.”36 Originally the Bern council had prudently arranged that the preachers should go only as far as the fourth milestone before the city, let the envoys go ahead to negotiate with Geneva, and wait until they came back to conduct them in. Calvin, however, had called this shameful “deprecation,” and at his urgent desire the program was changed. The envoys would lead them at once to the city and arrange an opportunity for them to speak (we remember how important this was for Calvin), so that when they had explained matters and been found without fault, and Calvin took this for granted, they would be reinstated.37
Things did not go at all as planned, however, for one of Calvin’s main foes in Geneva, Peter Vandel, who was often in Bern, had been there and secured secretly a copy of the fourteen articles. Calvin definitely asserted that it was the Bern pastor Peter Kunz who gave them to him. If that was so, it was a perfidious act on the part of this man from the Bernese Oberland. At any rate Vandel was right when he openly boasted that he carried “mortal poison” for the preachers in his pocket and that he did not fear in the least the arrival of the envoys from Bern.?8 He must have succeeded by his talk in fixing the mood in advance. When the company was still a mile away from the city on May 22 a messenger from the council met them with the strict order that they should not bring Farel and Calvin in with them until the city had decided what to do. In this way scandal could be averted.3? The two wanted to defy the order but were finally persuaded by the others to stay behind and await the result of their mission. Calvin later maintained that this decision saved their lives, since there had been an ambush close to the city gate and twenty gladiators were stationed at it.“° It is not impossible that
36. CO 10/II, 201 (no. 119). Barth’s date for this letter is wrong (it should be May 20); he was perhaps following Kampschulte, I, 317, though he (later?) corrected the error in his copy of Kampschulte.
37. Ibid., 205f. (no. 121).
38. Ibid., 207 (no. 121).
39. The MS has und here.
40. CO 10/II, 206 (no. 121).
4 First Genevan Stay
* in this regard an excited imagination depicted the situation as much worse than it really was.
Active negotiations now took place between the envoys and the council, the Council of Two Hundred, and finally the Conseil général. The climax came in a meeting with the Conseil général on May 26. It would seem that here Ammann and Viret in particular made some impression by what they said in favor of the ousted pastors on the basis of the Zurich decisions. But then Peter Vandel’s mortal poison was injected into the discussion. He drew the fourteen articles, which thus far the envoys had wisely left unmentioned, out of his pocket and read them publicly, arousing great ill-will. There were many outcries as he read, all kinds of spiteful comments were made on the individual points, the church discipline was called a tyranny, and some said they would rather die than have to listen to the speech of self-justification by Calvin that was being sought.4! When the envoys had been brought back in again and a vote was taken in their presence, it was seen that an impressive majority of the people favored upholding the expulsion. It was in vain that one zealous supporter of Calvin, as the minutes tell us, held up both hands in his favor. He and those like-minded with him were in a negligible minority. When the envoys saw this, they said they would tell their rulers and masters and asked that what they had tried to accomplish should not be held against them, since their rulers and masters had only sought to do what was best for an allied city. They were then thanked.42 That was the end of the matter. The envoys had no instructions to do more and they thus left. Noisy festivities marked the final winning of the victory.43 All the reformers could now do was to go back to where they had come from, to Bern. It seems that Calvin was offered a pastorate there. One has to ask again how things might have turned out if he had grasped this opportunity. But this time he had no mind to agree to coming under the leadership of Peter Kunz. He made use of a pretext, viewed by him as coming from the Lord, to leave Bern, and even to do so without saying farewell to the council.44 Provisionally the two went first to Basel. On the way by horse they had to cross the swollen Aare and were nearly drowned. But, said Calvin, they received more mercy from this river than from their own people. For the latter
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 231.
43. Stahelin, I, 162.
44, See n. 45 below; also Stihelin, I, 163.
wanted to destroy them contrary to all right and justice, but the river had to obey the grace of God to their deliverance. Very wet and tired they arrived at Basel.4> From this city, where they were welcomed by Grynaeus, Calvin sent in both their names the detailed letter to the Zurich clergy to which we owe the most thorough account of this whole episode, including a dramatic description of Peter Kunz and a terrible portrait of the three pastors who succeeded them in Geneva.*¢ If we want to study Calvin’s creatureliness, we should read this letter. After seven weeks Farel went to Neuenburg (Neuchatel), where he would find his definitive sphere of work. (The aged Courault had become the pastor of Orbe, but died in the fall of this year.) The joint life of the two such different friends had thus come to an end, and from more than one passage in letters we learn that their other friends were glad of this, for they were convinced that the two sharpened and spurred on one another, and plunged one another into ill-considered actions.4” Indeed, it is perhaps no accident that from this point onward more calm and stability came into Calvin's life. But by means of letters and reciprocal visits the friendship remained as strong as ever right up to Calvin’s death.
A letter of August 4 mentions for the first time an invitation that Bucer sent to Calvin to come to Strassburg (Briefe, 132).48 Bucer’s desire and readiness to draw him into the circle in that city had developed at once after the ejection from Geneva. Bucer had written to Calvin saying that if no other sphere of useful work were open to him, it had been an early desire of his people to have him in Strassburg. The congregation to which he would be able to minister was small (i.e., the French congregation), but it was a promising and needy one, and it might well be good for the situation in Geneva, too, if this call were accepted for the time being. Calvin’s participation in approaching religious discussions in Germany could also be very useful, but he could obviously play a part only if he were connected with a German church. For the rest, he must not bury his great talents in a napkin but use them to the advantage of those who both needed them so much and were so urgently asking for them.”
45. CO 10/II, 201f. (no. 120, Farel and Calvin to Viret and Courault).
46. See nn. 19ff., 35, 37£., 40f. On Kunz see above, 375 n. 20. For the new pastors at Geneva, see CO 10/II, 208.
47. See the postscript of Calvin to Farel 8.4.1538, CO 10/II, 230 (no. 132). Cf. ibid., 227 (no. 131), 236 (no. 136); also Stahelin, I, 166.
48, CO 10/II, 228-30.
49, Ibid., 219 (no. 126). Barth follows Stahelin closely here (I, 166), but cf. CO 10/II, 219.
At first Calvin treated this invitation with the same timid reluctance as that with which he had at first responded to Farel’s effort to woo him to Geneva. He asked whether, being French, he would really feel at home in a German city, also whether he could.with a good conscience accept responsibility for the specific relations there.*° But finally, as we see from the Psalms commentary, he saw himself again in the situation of Jonah,?! gave in, and made haste to Strassburg without even putting his affairs in order. He preached there for the first time on the second Sunday in September.>2
Before we discuss this third great episode in Calvin’s life I would like to share with you some passages from his letters at the period that help to illustrate the rather mixed mood in which Calvin looked back on what had taken place. At Basel on August 4 he wrote that when they saw that it was not without the Lord’s will that the people had cursed them, they did not doubt that God had his will for them. They were thus ready to humble themselves lest they should be in conflict with the will of God that purposed their humiliation. In the meantime they would await his day. For soon the crown of the drunkards in Ephraim would lose its luster (Briefe, 132).°3 In Strassburg in September he wrote that they certainly had to admit before God and his people that it was partly through their own inexperience, neglect, carelessness, and errors that the church that had been entrusted to them had become so sick. Nevertheless, it was their duty to uphold their innocence and purity against the church by whose deceit, malice, wickedness, and hostility the breach had come. Calvin would gladly admit, then, before God and all the pious that their ignorance and thoughtlessness deserved exemplary punishment. But he would never admit that it was their fault that the church had come to grief. For before God their conscience told them something different. Hence there could never be the acknowledgment of guilt that was asked of them with a view to reconciliation. It should be seen that everything could be had from them if only they were reinstated. But the Lord would, he hoped, open up for them a better way (Briefe, 140).54 Calvin was right. We might question in endless ways what he did in those years in Geneva. We have
50. Stihelin, I, 165.
Spills (CO) Bil, HSPs.
52. Stahelin, I, 166; CO 10/II, 246 (no. 140).
53. CO 10/II, 229, to Farel.
54. Ibid., 246f., to Farel.
to agree that his friends in Basel, Zurich, and Strassburg were right to object to his actions. We have even to admit that occasionally the Genevans were right to reject so bitterly and frivolously what he was doing. Nevertheless, we cannot fail to see that basically what the accused on all sides was wanting to do also had right on its side in a way that the accusers never suspected. Aware of this higher right, he could seek a new home with a good if afflicted conscience. bar said iyi nels wimea wise oie atafi
bile ont Gb we:
saeaktinid a Hueare
of ‘ae sea ira tiene a
poeroten ese Legaltligs
—% Aiiee = Sane
Fhe 7 7" Se
a 5 rte oe
re
ay. ceatany
is a | “TR: pists
bate
ae otrat’ Ao ae bat
7s6. Sahel: ipeoen
nett Senn et peg ine % siege’ ae
tar pat het Rech ree sett eine”
fet > gk
Mi erpiL ance inet
al Nepalis Haecbessiiek cm, raTRe te ea! "a yn SRS Oe ebaaneenaiingals
VSTGEM here 4ull tie Aiea
5 eS i;
¢
“e ‘pp: Ce sage
a G Shite”
:
Strassburg Stay, 1538-1541
In the short space of time now left we must speed things up by no longer following events chronologically but freely selecting various points in the period that were important and that characterize the whole life and theology of the reformer. (I would ask you not to be upset that in discussing the previous period I went into more detail than you expected of me. You will recall that at the“beginning of the semester I painted with a larger brush. But I think I would have failed to fulfill my purpose of presenting Calvin to you if I had not studied at least one period more closely and thoroughly in order to show you what manner of man he was in the great problems of his historical existence that have often enough caught at least my breath. We may now treat ourselves to a few leaps in conclusion.)
For our purpose there is not a great deal in the Strassburg years that calls for notice. Outwardly they were a turning point in Calvin’s life, the translation from young manhood to maturity, from a tentative effort to the true establishment of his life’s work. We might turn once again to the Institutes, which he published in a much altered edition in 1539.1 We might learn to know Calvin as a poet in his Epinicion [song of victory] Christo cantatum of 1541.2 We might analyze his work on the Lord’s Supper written in the same year,> and I would remind you that nowhere can you perhaps study the distinctiveness of Calvin so well as in his
1. CO 1, 255-1152.
2. OS I, 495-98.
3. OS I, 503-30.
Strassburg Stay,. 1538-1541
eucharistic teaching. We might perhaps look at his efforts in Strassburg to give shape to the liturgy and to congregational life, which later found expression in the-forme des priéres et chants ecclésiastique avec la maniére d'administrer les sacraments et consacrer le mariage selon le coutume de l'Eglise ancienne that he published after returning to Geneva in 1542.4 To give depth to our psychological understanding of Calvin we might take a little glance at the strange way in which he became a married man in Strassburg. All this, and his growing contacts with all kinds of contemporaries both in person and by letter, are things that unfortunately we can only mention and greet from afar. (For material cf. vols. 1, 5, 6, 10/II, 11). The three matters that I want to select for further study out of the abundant topics are the exposition of Romans in 1539, the part played by Calvin in the German religious conversations, and the exchange of letters with Cardinal Sadolet, which would be not the least occasion for the calling of Calvin back to Geneva.