Catholic and Protestant cities. When Geneva finally asserted its autonomy as a republic in 1536, it did so under the banner of Protestantism, for obvious practical and economic no less than spiritual reasons, and managed to maintain its independence as a city-state against prevailing trends.
Calvin would arrive in Geneva the year of its establishment as a Protestant republic, and – except for a period of exile from 1538 to 1541 – he would stay there until his death in 1564. Born in France in 1509 as Jean Cauvin, he began his career as clerk to a bishop; intended for the priesthood, he studied philosophy in Paris, but then gave up the Church for the study of law. At the University of Bourges, he came under humanist influences. The exposure to humanism clearly played a major part in his religious conversion; and like other humanist reformers, he would soon abandon the Catholic Church. On his return to Paris, caught up in conflicts between the reformers and the orthodox Catholics, he was compelled to flee and in 1535 settled for a time in the Protestant city of Basle.
It was during his stay in Basle that Calvin, in 1536, published the first edition of his major life’s work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a catechism of his faith and the principles of reformation to which he subscribed. Written first in Latin, it would later appear in French editions, which would have an enormous influence not only on theology but also on the French language. He would continue to edit and amplify this work throughout his life. On his return to Paris from Basle, finding his reforming views unwelcome in his native France, he set out for the free imperial city of Strasbourg; but, forced by circumstances to take a detour, he arrived in Geneva, and there he would remain.
Calvin settled in Geneva at the urging of another Frenchman, who invited him to join in reforming the Church. Their proposals for ecclesiastical reform, undertaken at the behest of civic authorities, were immediately accepted by the city council. Although Calvin would find himself in conflict with the council in 1538 and yet again forced into exile, the civic authorities of Geneva invited him to return in 1541 to carry on his project of reform. In November of that year, the council amended and passed the Ecclesiastical Ordinances drafted by Calvin, which spelled out the organization and functions of the Church in what amounted to a blueprint for a division of labour between civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in governing the city. The Ordinances struck a difficult balance between separating the functions of Church and state, allocating each its proper domain, and at the same time establishing a partnership between them in governing the city according to the principles of the reformed religion. There would be other moments of conflict and danger for Calvin, especially when some Genevan notables challenged the Ordinances, in opposition to the strict discipline imposed on them by both civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. But in the end, the so-called libertines were defeated and their leaders banished or executed.
It is difficult to disentangle Calvin’s theological development from the evolution of his political consciousness. His first book, a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, which he began writing while still a law student, was not a work of theology but a humanist essay on a classical text. Seneca’s work, addressed to the emperor Nero, has been called a forerunner of what would become the humanist genre of ‘mirrors for princes’. While it would be too much to say that Calvin’s commentary was intended as a comparable lesson to Francis I, some of the essential principles of his later views on civil government already make an appearance here. There is, for instance, a significant note citing St Paul’s Romans 13 to demonstrate that Christianity requires obedience to princes; and there are several references to princes as the vicars or delegates of God, an idea that would play a central part in his mature political theology. By the time he wrote the first edition of the Institutes after his conversion, his theological principles were already bound up with his views on civil government; and, whichever came first, Calvin’s political ideas are securely grounded in the most fundamental tenets of his theology. The inextricable connection would be firmly sealed by his career in Geneva.
The first edition of the Institutes was introduced by an epistle dedicatory to Francis I of France, which presents the catechism that follows as a defence of the reformed religion against threats faced by French Evangelicals. In his effort to demonstrate that the reformed faith poses no threat to the king’s authority, Calvin proceeds on two fronts: he seeks to show that the Roman Church, in its usurpations of temporal power, represents a more sinister challenge to the monarch’s authority, while at the same time the theologian opposes radical reformers, notably the Anabaptists, who deny the legitimacy of civil governance. The book ends with a long chapter on civil government, which may be read as a continuation of his letter to the king; but it also confronts a different set of questions, posed not by the threat of the Catholic Church but by the distinctive relations between civic authority and a reformed Church within the free Protestant city.
It has been said that Calvin’s theology, like that of Zwingli and Bucer, is ‘the result of the Reformation message filtered through the actuality of the free city’.7 It is true that the very specific relationship between secular and spiritual spheres that characterized the Protestant cities, where civic and ecclesiastical authority were both separate and intertwined in such distinctive ways, posed different problems for theology than those that preoccupied Luther. When Calvin wrote the first edition of the Institutes, he was certainly concerned with the fate of French Evangelicals under threat from the Catholic Church; but he was also compelled to address a very different set of questions, which did not have to do with the rival claims to temporal authority in conflicts between kings or German princes and the Holy Roman Empire or the papacy. While maintaining a distinction between secular and spiritual realms, he could not rely, as Luther did, on denying any jurisdiction to the Church; but nor could he simply assert the authority of secular government over the Church. He was obliged to explain the division of labour between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, both of which had an essential role in sustaining the reformed faith and both of which played a central role in governing the earthly city.
Political life in a city like Basle or Geneva thus placed a special burden on Protestant theology. For Luther, in a different context, it was enough to confine the functions of the Church to preaching the Word and administering certain sacraments, while asserting the exclusive jurisdictional claims of secular government against ecclesiastical pretensions, yet asking little more of earthly government than that it rein in a sinful humanity. His theology achieves this effect by stressing the simultaneous duality of sin and justification: God’s loving grace ‘justifies’ humanity as a free and unearned gift, even while the sinfulness of human beings, their implication in the devil’s ‘kingdom’, requires submission to secular government, which is divinely ordained.
Calvin may have been more reluctant to give secular governments a dominant authority over the Church; but within its own domain he demanded more of secular power than did Luther, and his views on civil government therefore required a different theology. He certainly shares the principal tenet of Lutheranism, the doctrine of justification by faith; but his emphasis is less on God’s loving grace than on his total sovereignty.8 While justification remains an unearned gift, which is not a reward for virtue, good works, or freedom from sin, the godly life of the Christian community is not just a matter of service and good works freely undertaken by the Christian faithful in answer to God’s loving grace. It follows from God’s unconditional will that Christians must in this world live a life of godly discipline.
Calvin’s theology underwrites a partnership between secular and spiritual authorities, in which both, equally under the sovereignty of God, exercise temporal jurisdiction. This not only restores to the Church its own temporal authority but also elevates the role of civil government. Its function is not simply to maintain civil peace and good order among sinful human beings but, in a joint project with the Church, to impose a godly discipline on the Christian community in recognition of God’s total sovereignty. Civil government, in other words, is not just a divinely ordained institution to cope with the ‘kingdom’ of the devil as it manifests itself in human sinfulness. Civic authorities act together with the Church in the fulfillment of God’s sovereign will. This means that, even while the Church ministers to the soul as civil government takes care of more mundane concerns (which include defending the true faith), there can be no clear distinction
