Geneva March 1551.
It is over ten years since Calvin, now 42, has returned from his enforced exile in Bucer’s
Strasbourg, no doubt having learned much from the way Bucer organised things in
that city. Calvin is bent on cementing the work of Reformation in the church
and the society of Geneva. For him this involves the tricky and contentious matter
of distinguishing the jurisdiction of the church, which had to do with
spiritual matters, and of the magistrate, who is the ‘minister’ of the gospel
in civil affairs, charged with upholding and defending the one true
church. Where is the line between the
jurisdiction of each to be drawn?
The issue was soon
to be put to the test. Jerome Bolsec, an ex-Carmelite monk, now a physician, appears
in the city. He holds ‘certain mistaken opinions concerning free will and
predestination’, and is reprimanded by the pastors of Geneva (exactly whom, we
are not told). He is summoned before the Consistory three times. He openly kept
up his opposition to Calvin’s views. The story is that on the third of these
occasions Calvin came into the meeting, slipping in unnoticed at the back. As
soon as Bolsec had finished speaking Calvin stood up and offered a refutation,
quoting passages from Augustine verbatim, which lasted for an hour. And then Bolsec
was arrested. It appears that this was not what Calvin wanted, but rather that
the matter be quietly dropped. Even in prison Bolsec kept up his opposition,
slandering Calvin and the ministry more generally. The next we learn is of
Bolsec’s trial, in October of that year, on a charge of promoting civil
disorder, disturbing the peace by spreading his views in the city.
The theological issues
Bolsec denied Calvin’s
teaching regarding eternal predestination, saying that the doctrine made God a
tyrant. Instead he proposed that predestination is based on foreseen faith (and
reprobation on foreseen unbelief), and so neither was ‘eternal’, or ‘absolute’.
For on this understanding of the word, God
elects and predestines those whom he foresees will respond in faith to the
gospel. In the views of the pastors of Geneva, headed by Calvin, such
sentiments weakened the foundation of God’s sovereignty in the gift of his
grace and was contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture. Although Calvin had
private discussions with Bolsec before his trial, the significance of which
will emerge later, he does not appear to have published any rebuttal. But he
offered a written defence of the Genevan view in the form of an explicit
refutation of Bolsec’s claims, provided in the trial as evidence of the likely disruptive
effect of Bolsec’s public disputations.
Calvin focuses on
the charge that in eternal (or absolute) predestination God is the author of
sin, because in such predestination he
necessitates the sinner to sin. That is, Bolsec concentrates his attention not
so much on predestination as on reprobation. Calvin responds
To
begin with, this terminology that God necessitates is not my language but the
jargon of monks which I never use. But
it is also malicious impudence to say that I have applied the term sin to God
or to his will. What I have said is that the will of God, in that it is the
supreme cause, is the necessity of all things; but time and again I have stated
that God for His part disposes and controls all that He does with such equity
and justice that even the most wicked are compelled to glorify Him, and that
His will is neither a tyranny nor an irrational whim but is in fact the true rule
of all good. Moreover I have particularly stated and affirmed that men are
compelled to do neither good or evil, but that those who do good do so of a
free will which God gives them by His Holy Spirit, and that those who do evil
do so of their own natural will which is corrupted and rebellious. M Jerome is
thus shown at every point to be a slanderer who perverts good doctrine and the
pure truth of God.
A number of things
are noteworthy here. First, that Calvin himself is quite capable of drawing
fine distinctions. Here, he draws the distinction between God necessitating men to sin, which he denies, and the will of God being the supreme cause, and the necessity of all things.
What’s the difference? The difference is
that in sinning men act as men, of their own will. They have beliefs and
desires of their own, and are able to act in accordance with them, whereas if
God were to necessitate men to sin, this would obliterate their will. God necessitates all things – rocks, plants,
non-human animals, human beings, angels - in accordance with their various
natures. Also it is important to note that Calvin reserves the term ‘free will’
for the activities of the regenerated will, freed from the slavery of sin.
Those who do evil do so of their own natural will, that is a will that is
‘natural’ yet ‘unfree’ because unregenerate, in bondage to sin. ‘Freedom’ as it
applies to human action, is a moral and spiritual term for Calvin, as it was
for his mentor Augustine. Only the Son can make a person free. But Bolsec
denies the operation of such effectual grace. Calvin again
He
attempts, finally, to hide the wicked and disgraceful errors which are involved
in his doctrine, such as his assertion that God gives to all a heart capable of
obeying Him by faith, which implies that He does not give the will, but that
man of his own free will accepts, if he so chooses, the grace of the Holy
Spirit, so that our election and salvation are founded upon our merits. He
asserts, in fact, that man has not lost his free will and that if he did not
have free will, he would be a beast…..Again, the error of his assertion that
the grace of God is equal for all and that men decide for themselves whether
they are saved or damned, as though God does not elect by His free goodness
that whom it is His will to have for his children, and having elected them does
not reformed their hearts and affections in order to bring them to Jesus
Christ, as though, having brought them to Christ, He does not establish them
right to the end.
What is
interesting about this is the way that Calvin displays the implications of the
denial of eternal predestination. If Bolsec denies predestination in the way
that Calvin and the Genevan pastors (and Augustine) understood it, then he has
to say that God places all men, or some of all men, in a situation where his
grace makes them salvable. God grace is thus merely enabling rather that
efficacious. Men may by their wills freely cooperate with it, or they may freely
decide not to do so. So, as Calvin puts it, in such thinking man in sin has not
lost his free will, but may and must exercise it as a co-partner with God. And,
contrary to Bolsec, Calvin states that those whom God elects in Christ he
establishes ‘right to the end’. Election and predestination - the bondage of
the will to sin - efficacious grace – renovation – perseverance to the end, form
a web of ideas which stand or fall together.
So predestination
was not an obsession for Calvin, but a key component in the display and
deployment of an understanding of God’s grace for sinners. In defending it he
was defending the gospel of grace. And the lines of the future controversy of
the Calvinists with the Arminians were already beginning to be etched out, half
a century before it erupted. The so-called ‘Five Points’ are not all here, and
certainly they do not have the developed form they came to have later on, but
they are well on their way.
One oddity is the
way that critics of Calvinism such as Bolsec repeatedly attack the idea of
predestination (as they still do) when,
theologically, it is divine election that is the more basic. For predestination
is the divine ensuring that those who are elected to grace and glory in Jesus
Christ are brought first to grace, and then to glory. Election sets the goal,
and predestination is God’s achieving of it.
Still odder is the idea that predestination was Calvin’s invention, but of
course it is scriptural terminology and is prominent in the theology of one of
the great fathers of the church, St. Augustine, as well as others. Easier to
understand is the close intertwining in Calvin’s mind of predestination and
divine providence, since is through the workings of God’s providence that
predestination works as well.
Bolsec had requested
that his views be sent to the Reformed churches in nearby cities for comment, for he
seems to have thought that he would find allies there. They duly were circulated. The questions put
to Bolsec, his answers to them, and the rejoinder of the ministers of Geneva,
went out to Basle, Berne and Zurich. Calvin helped personally in preparing this
circulation. His name was at the head of
the sixteen signatories. The copy to Zurich, preserved there still, is in his
hand.
Calvin had mixed
feelings about the character of the responses of the churches, received in
November. He thought that from Berne was too timid, while Zurich’s pleased him.
Support arrived in the form of an unsought letter from Neuchatel, where William
Farel was a minister. Nevertheless, milder or stronger, all responses were
unanimous in viewing Bolsec’s teaching with disfavor. The reception of these
letters in effect brought the deliberations of the trial to a conclusion. The
findings were relayed to the Congregation by Calvin on 18th December 1551. They
were then ratified by the Council of Geneva.
‘On Thursday the
23rd of the month Maître Jerome was banished to the sound of the
trumpet from the territory of Geneva’.
The banishment
As I mentioned at
the outset, in the government of Geneva ecclesiastical and civil affairs were
closely intertwined, in a way that made tension between the two inevitable. For
the magistrate’s concern for civil affairs included the responsibility to curb disturbances
of the peace. It was one thing to discuss theological issues at a conference of
the learned, or by private correspondence, or by the publication of books in Latin.
It was judged altogether another thing to have unorthodox opinions visited upon
the ministry, or on the people at large. When Jerome Bolsec arrived in Geneva
he at once made himself into a pubic figure, though it has to be said that the
public authorities let him alone for a while. It was only when, in Calvin’s
words (in his letter to the ministers of Switzerland in October 1551), having
debated with the ministers of Geneva, he was imprisoned after he had ‘been
tumultuously haranguing the common people not to allow themselves to be
deceived by us.’
So by this stage
Bolsec had become not only theologically awkward to the ecclesiastical
authorities, but a civil nuisance, not because he was threatening violence, but
because he was determined to keep up his opposition in the most public way,
haranguing ‘the common people’. This in the eyes of the magistrates of Geneva
was an issue of civil order, an aspect of which involved the maintenance the
good standing of the Christian faith in
its Reformed understanding. Hence the theological character of the court
proceedings which were designed to prove that
(despite Bolsec’s protestations) his errors were serious, and that it
was against good order that ‘the common people’ should be exposed to his
teaching and incited to disloyalty. Calvin says in one of his statements that
he ‘had besought Messieurs [the magistrates] with tears that the matter might
not be taken any further‘. What this would have meant in practice is not made
clear. Perhaps it was that Calvin wished the affair to remain a purely
ecclesiastical matter, though as Bolsec was not a citizen of Geneva he could
not have been excommunicated, nor could he have been banished from Geneva
without the active support of the magistrate. The complications of church-city
relations in Calvin’s Geneva are all too apparent.
The first of three controversies
While attending to
Jerome Bolsec, Calvin was also reading a newly-published book by the Roman
Catholic theologian Albertus Pighius of Louvain, Ten Books on Human Free Choice and Divine Grace, published in
August 1542, before the onset of the Bolsec affair. In the book Pighius
criticized the 1539 edition (the second)
of Calvin’s Institutes, on free will,
the bondage of the will, and predestination. Calvin was anxious to rebut Pighius’s
errors on the will as speedily as possible, and writing in great haste he
produced The Bondage and Liberation of
the Will, in time for its dissemination at the 1543 Frankfurt Book Fair.
Later. In 1552 (Pighius in the mean time having died) Calvin published the
other half of his rebuttal of Pighius’s
views, Concerning the Eternal
Predestination of God. This book has become the standard account of Calvin’s
views on the topic, besides the treatment to be found in the 1559 Institutes. So while the Bolsec affair unfolded Calvin was
also giving more formal, scholarly attention to the topic. Perhaps he was spurred on by his concern over
the public stir that Bolsec was trying to make. This was the second of his
public debates on the subject.
The third
controversy concerned a man whom Calvin had befriended, Sebastian Castellio, a
skilled linguist. At one stage Calvin had found him a job, but Castellio later
became disenchanted with his theology, and began speaking and publishing
against him, not only on theological questions, but on how Calvin had behaved
in the Servetus affair. Calvin’s Brief
Reply in Refutation of the Calumnies of a Certain Worthless Person was published
in 1557. In that year, undeterred, Castellio anonymously circulated Fourteen Articles or ‘calumnies’ on Calvin’s views of providence and
predestination, accompanied by a provocative letter. Beza persuaded Calvin to
take up his pen again. The result was a fuller work against Castellio (though
he is not mentioned by name), A Defence
of the Secret Providence of God (1558), which despite its title was
concerned with the theme of predestination as much as with providence. For in
Calvin’s view the two were intertwined.
So predestination,
though not for Calvin a theological axiom from which the main elements of the
Christian faith can be deduced, plays a key role in understanding various
important aspects of Calvin’s career. We might think of it in this way. Calvin
came by a ‘sudden conversion’ to be captured and captivated by God’s sovereign
grace to sinners through Jesus Christ. Predestination was woven into the fabric
of this gospel. But predestination above all the themes of the Christian
gospel, became an object of scorn and derision to various people, such as Bolsec
and Castellio. Calvin defended it, often with an outspokenness which had the
effect, if not the intention, of stoking up opposition to it still further. In
this way the idea came to have a prominence that Calvin never intended it to
have. We must bear this in mind the next time we are tempted to associate him
with this one single idea. Nevertheless,
studying his responses to critiques of
it provides one window into his mind and heart, as well as revealing the uneasy
alliance between church and magistrate in Geneva, and offering an introduction
to some of the most significant of Calvin’s
publications.
.
Sources
The chief source
of information regarding the Bolsec affair is The Register of the Company of Pastors in Geneva, edited and
translated by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Grand Rapids Mich., Eerdmans, 1966), from
which most of the information about the response to Bolsec has been taken. This
gives full documentary evidence of the trial. See also the Letters of Calvin ed. Bonnet for 1551. Calvin’s work on
predestination against Albertus Pighius (1552) is translated into English by
J.K.S. Reid as Concerning the Eternal
Predestination of God, (London, James Clarke, 1961). The latest translation
of Calvin’s early work on Castellio is contained in Calvin: Theological Treatises translated by J.K.S Reid (London,
Library of Christian Classics, XXII, SCM Press, 1954). The most recent English
translation of his main work against Castellio, A Defense of the Secret Providence of God, (1558) (which includes the text of the Fourteen
Articles) is by Keith Goad, edited by Paul Helm, (Wheaton, Crossway, 2010).
