Stopped in Geneva for one night
Farel convinces Calvin to stay
Guillaume Farel is the fiery red-bearded reformer who has been trying to establish Protestantism in Geneva with the force of his considerable personality and limited success. He hears that Calvin — the author of the Institutes, the rising star of Reformed theology — is passing through the city.
He goes to see him.
Calvin explains that he is on his way to Strasbourg, that he intends to live quietly and devote himself to scholarly work, that he is not constituted for the conflicts of public ministry, that his health is poor and his temperament unsuited to leadership.
Farel does not accept this.
According to Calvin's own account, Farel threatened him with the curse of God — told him that if he refused Geneva in this moment of need, God would curse his desired quietness and ruin his scholarly retreat.
Calvin is terrified. He later writes that he felt as if God had seized him from above.
He stays.
He will spend the next twenty-eight years in Geneva — with one exile of three years in the middle — turning the city into what contemporaries call the Protestant Rome: a laboratory of Reformed church governance, a haven for Protestant refugees from across Europe, a publishing center that sends Reformed theology into France and Scotland and England and the Netherlands.
He will write the most influential systematic theology of the Reformation. He will train the pastors and the theologians who will carry the Reformed tradition into the next century.
He will hate almost every minute of it.
“I felt as if God had reached down and seized me.”
— John Calvin, describing Farel's confrontation, Preface to Commentary on Psalms, 1557 AD
“If I say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I can't contain.”
Calvin did not want Geneva. He wanted Strasbourg and his books.
Farel used a threat — the curse of God — to stop a man from running from his calling. This is not a recommended pastoral technique. But it worked, and Geneva became what it became, and the Reformed tradition is what it is, partly because a red-bearded man with a loud voice would not let a thin, reluctant Frenchman leave.
The calling that God has for you may not be the one you would choose. It may be the city you were passing through, the role you were not constituted for, the work that seems too large for who you are.
Farel's logic: you are here, the work needs doing, who else will do it?
Is there a Geneva you are trying to pass through? And is someone — or something — trying to stop you?