Calvin's Geneva
The city as a laboratory of reform
Geneva under Calvin is one of the most unusual experiments in Christian governance in history — a city-state attempting to organize its entire civic life around Reformed Protestant principles, with the church and the civil government in uneasy but functional partnership.
The Consistory — a body of pastors and lay elders who oversee moral discipline in the city — meets weekly. It deals with everything: domestic quarrels, blasphemy, dancing on the Sabbath, gambling, failure to attend church, adultery, doctrinal error. The records survive and they are extraordinary — a window into the texture of ordinary life in a city trying to be holy.
Geneva becomes a haven for Protestant refugees: French Huguenots, Scottish Protestants, English Marian exiles who flee when Catholic Mary Tudor takes the English throne. They come, study, and go back — carrying Reformed theology with them.
John Knox is one of them. He calls Geneva the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles.
Others are less enthusiastic. The city that expels Calvin twice — and once he returns, accepts the discipline he imposes — is not uniformly delighted by his governance. The Libertine party opposes his moral rigor. The Servetus affair — Calvin's role in the execution of the anti-Trinitarian theologian Michael Servetus in 1553 — casts a long shadow over his legacy.
Calvin himself writes, in his final years, that he has accomplished almost nothing.
“I have been assailed on all sides and have scarcely been able to enjoy any quiet. Everything possible has been done to overthrow me.”
— John Calvin, letter near the end of his life, c. 1563 AD
“I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.”
Calvin thought he had accomplished almost nothing. He had helped build a tradition that would produce the Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregationalist, and Baptist streams of Christianity — hundreds of millions of believers across five centuries.
He planted. He watered. He could not see the growth because he was too close to it and too honest about the failures.
The person who sees their work clearly almost always underestimates it. The work we do — faithfully, in the conditions we have, with the tools available — is seen whole only from a distance we cannot reach while we are doing it.
Do your work. Plant what you can. Water what grows. Leave the growth to God.
You will not see it rightly from where you stand. That is not a failure of vision. It is the nature of the work.