My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I keep wanting the time to get my thoughts together and write a review worthy of this book. Not going to happen (Happily, Sean Lucas wrote a short but worthy review).
Thoughts at random.
Thank God we don’t live in the sixteenth-century.
Calvin may not have been a bishop, but he didn’t operate as a Presbyterian either. His “ruling elders” were state-appointed officers and his consistory was neither precisely a Presbytery nor a Session. It ssemed to function much more like a Family Services department in some ways.
Calvin was never “in power” the way we tend to think, though perhaps after 1555 he got close. When you can get killed and need to worry about being killed in a riot, you are not really in power.
Geneva itself was too small a city to matter as a “power.” Rather, Calvin and Geneva were constantly trying to make their friends happy (for protection) while still trying to save some independence.
“Nationalism” or immigration was an issue I had never realized affected Calvin’s ministry. Calvin found local pastors mainly inadequate, so he brought in talent from France (arguably, I should write “France” in scare quotes). So Genevans found their personal lives being run by foreigners. Not a welcome situation.
Calvin came to repudiate Bucer’s ecumenical attempts of the early 1540s. I had no idea.
Calvin spent much of his time trying to convince French Evangelicals to totally break from the Roman Catholic Church in France and suffer the consequences. Again, Calvin the divider.
Calvin later spent much of his time trying to convince French Protestants to willingly suffer rather than resort to violence and revolution. Weird since he owed his place in a city created by revolution. But it shows that any relationship between Calvin and political resistance is not the result of his own teaching on the matter.
France seemed at first like it would be open to Evangelicals (when Calvin still lived there). But with the break in Germany, French royalty came down on the side of the Roman Catholic establishment. Why? Because the same impulse that led the king to appreciate Evangelicals had led him to win concessions from the Pope that gave him control over the Church in his lands. Opposing the Papacy would make these concessions worthless.
Bullinger thought Calvin’s writings on predestination were over-the-top and could imply that God was the author of sin.
For a time Calvin’s writings were publicly burned in the Protestant city of Berne.
Calvin actively opposed an ecumenical movement in France in the 1550s because it was trying to use the Augsburg Confession. Though earlier in his ministry he had offended Bullinger by agreeing with it, now he saw it as a tool of Lutheran extremists who would try to hurt the Swiss churches and disturb the French Protestants who were not Lutherans.
…and much more…