Calvin, Zwingli & the Reformed

The Reformation was never a single movement. Within three years of Luther’s ninety-five theses, a parish priest in Zurich named Ulrich Zwingli had started an independent reform movement that would become the mother church of the Swiss Reformed tradition. A decade later, a young French lawyer named John Calvin, reluctantly detained in Geneva, would organize what became the most influential Reformation city in Europe outside Wittenberg. Together with their successors — Bullinger, Bucer, Beza, Knox — they produced the Reformed tradition: Calvinism, the Huguenots, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Church of Scotland, English Puritanism, and ultimately most of colonial New England Congregationalism and American Presbyterianism.

For most American Protestants — including most Baptists, though we often forget it — the theology in the water you swim in is Reformed. The American Puritans were Calvinists. Jonathan Edwards was a Calvinist. Whitefield was a Calvinist. The First Great Awakening was mostly a Reformed revival. When we instinctively speak about God’s sovereignty, the depth of human sinfulness, the necessity of sovereign grace, and the whole-life claim of the gospel, we are speaking Reformed.

This lesson is about how two Swiss cities — one German-speaking, one French-speaking — produced that tradition in the forty-five years between 1519 and 1564.

In January 1519, two priests took up new pulpits in two German-speaking cities separated by 500 miles.

Were they coordinating? No. Zwingli had never met Luther and later resented the suggestion that he was a disciple of the German monk. Both men, independently, had been changed by Erasmus’s 1516 Greek New Testament. Both were reading the Bible anew. Both reached similar conclusions. But Zwingli’s Reformation grew from humanist exegesis and Swiss civic politics; Luther’s grew from Augustinian monastic crisis and imperial German law. The two streams would diverge on their Eucharist theology at Marburg in 1529 — a divergence that persists in every Reformed-vs-Lutheran distinction today.

Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), Zwingli’s successor at Zurich for 44 years, consolidated the Swiss Reformed tradition, wrote the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) — for a century one of the most influential Reformed confessions in Europe — and maintained a correspondence of some 12,000 letters with Reformed leaders across Europe. If Zwingli launched the Swiss Reformation, Bullinger is the man who kept it alive.

Philip of Hesse, a Protestant German prince, wanted to unite the Lutheran and Zwinglian Reformations into a single military and theological alliance. In October 1529 he summoned Luther, Zwingli, and their leading colleagues to his castle at Marburg for four days of theological discussion.

Luther, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Zwingli, Bucer, and others produced fifteen articles. They agreed on fourteen of them: the Trinity, Christ, original sin, justification by faith, faith alone, baptism, the moral law, confession, civil government, and so on.

They could not agree on the fifteenth — the Lord’s Supper.

The famous scene. Luther took a piece of chalk and wrote on the conference table Hoc est corpus meum (“This is my body,” Matt 26:26), covered it with a velvet cloth, and during every clash uncovered it and tapped it. Zwingli argued that a word like “is” can function metaphorically throughout Scripture (John 15:5 “I am the vine”; 1 Cor 10:4 “that Rock was Christ”). Luther replied that the plain sense of “this is” was non-negotiable.

On the last day, Zwingli, weeping, extended his hand to Luther. Luther, also weeping, refused to take it. “You have a different spirit than we do,” he said.

Calvin’s first Geneva residency was a near disaster. He and Farel tried to impose rigorous church order on a city that had only recently thrown off its bishop. They demanded a confession of faith from every citizen; they tried to institute church discipline with teeth; they wanted the civil government to subordinate itself to the consistory (the church’s disciplinary body). The city’s political party, the Libertines, opposed them at every turn.

On Easter Sunday 1538 Calvin and Farel refused to administer the Lord’s Supper because the congregation was, they judged, too riven with open sin. The city council, enraged, expelled them from Geneva within days.

Calvin spent the three years of his Genevan exile in Strasbourg, then a free imperial city in the upper Rhine and one of the great Reformation centers under the magnanimous Martin Bucer. These years were formative. Three things happened.

September 1541. Geneva, now chaotic without him, summoned Calvin back. He agreed reluctantly. He would spend the next twenty-three years there.

Calvin returned to Geneva on 13 September 1541 and mounted the pulpit of St. Pierre the following Sunday. Legend says he began preaching at the exact chapter and verse he had last preached from three years earlier, without mentioning his exile.

The Ecclesiastical Ordinances (November 1541). Within weeks of his return, Calvin drafted a new constitution for the Genevan church. The city council adopted it with amendments. It created a four-fold ministry and a disciplinary body that would reshape Reformed church polity permanently:

This four-fold pattern, derived by Calvin from Ephesians 4 and 1 Timothy, is the ancestor of every later Presbyterian, Reformed, and Congregational church polity. The elders-and-deacons model of most American evangelical congregations is a Calvinist inheritance.

The Consistory. The weekly meeting of Geneva’s pastors and twelve lay elders became the visible expression of Reformed church discipline. Citizens were summoned for sins ranging from blasphemy to adultery to drunkenness to not attending sermons. The Consistory did not have civil power; it could warn, rebuke, or (as a last resort) excommunicate, which meant exclusion from the Lord’s Supper. Later legend exaggerates the severity — in most years, the Consistory’s primary work was reconciliation between quarreling neighbors — but the Geneva of the 1550s was, by the standards of its day, an exceptionally ordered Christian city.

Preaching. Calvin preached continuously through books of the Bible, usually twice on Sundays and several weekdays. He produced over 2,000 surviving sermons — most taken down in shorthand by stenographers and published posthumously.

The Geneva Academy (1559). Near the end of his life, Calvin realized Reformed pastors from across Europe needed formal training. The Académie de Genève (now the University of Geneva) opened in June 1559, with Calvin giving the inaugural address and Theodore Beza as its first rector. Within a decade it had trained John Knox, Marnix of St. Aldegonde (leader of the Dutch Reformed), Caspar Olevianus (author of the Heidelberg Catechism), Zacharias Ursinus, Andrew Melville (father of Scottish Presbyterianism), and hundreds of others.

His death (27 May 1564). Calvin had been ill for years with tuberculosis, gout, kidney stones, and migraines. He preached his final sermon on 6 February 1564 and died on 27 May. At his own request, he was buried in an unmarked grave in the city cemetery to avoid becoming an object of veneration. The unmarked location is still debated today.

The Institutio Christianae Religionis — the Institutes of the Christian Religion — is the most influential single theological book produced by the Reformation and the most influential systematic theology in Christian history after Aquinas’s Summa. Calvin revised it four times between 1536 and 1559. The final edition, in four books and eighty chapters, is the one every Reformed theologian still reads.

The structure of the 1559 Institutes:

Calvin’s signature line:

Reformed theology shares with Lutheran theology the five solas (see Lesson 15 Part 7). But the Reformed tradition developed its own emphases, some of them sharper than anything in Wittenberg:

Every honest account of Calvin has to name the execution of Michael Servetus. Servetus was a Spanish physician and polymath — a pioneer of research on pulmonary blood circulation — who also denied the doctrine of the Trinity. He published a book, Christianismi Restitutio (Restoration of Christianity, 1553), attacking both Catholic and Reformed Trinitarianism. The Catholic Inquisition at Lyon arrested him; he escaped and, for reasons still obscure, traveled to Geneva.

Servetus was recognized in a Genevan sermon Calvin was preaching. He was arrested. The city council, not Calvin personally, conducted the trial. Calvin testified against him for two months on points of doctrine. Servetus was condemned for anti-Trinitarian heresy and for blasphemy. On 27 October 1553 he was burned alive on a hill outside Geneva with a copy of his book chained to his wrist.

Calvin’s role. Calvin urged the council to condemn Servetus; he did not urge burning specifically. Calvin’s own preference was beheading — a faster death — which the council refused. A few days after the execution Calvin published his Defense of the Orthodox Faith justifying the execution on the biblical and Augustinian precedents. Sebastian Castellio, Calvin’s former colleague, replied with Concerning Heretics (1554) — one of the earliest Protestant arguments for religious toleration. The argument continues.

By Calvin’s death in 1564, the Reformed tradition was spreading across Europe more rapidly than the Lutheran had. Six major streams: