Oh John!

John Calvin was a missionary idealist. In the two-plus decades he spent in Geneva, he sought to “Christianize” the populace, bringing to them the true faith that had been obscured by medieval Roman Catholicism. Geneva was to be laboratory for this project of cultivating true Christians, and its success would (or so Calvin hoped) expand and extend into the rest of Europe and ultimately the world. 

With this in view, Calvin and the Genevan consistory (think ’session’) left no aspect of their parishioners’ lives free from their purview. Moral regulations and standards of public conduct (manner of dress, speech) were strictly enforced. Church attendance was tracked. Children had no choice but to be catechized. Even saying the names of ’saints’ aloud was criminal. There’s a humorous account of a Genevan parent wanting to name his child Claude, but the consistory rejected that name in that a St. Claude was formerly a revered patron saint of the region. (The ministers pushed the family to name the child “Abraham”). Marriage proposals had to be approved; divorces were not easy to come by. (Only 26 divorces were registered in Geneva in Calvin’s 22 years there). The function of the consistory as Calvin set it up was to eliminate unchristian behavior and doctrine from Geneva.  

One wonders…did it work? Yes, according to some. John Knox in 1556 called Geneva “the most perfect school of Christ that was ever in the earth since the days of the Apostles.” But Calvin could not bring himself to agree. He suggested that only 5% of Genevans were serious about God’s word, and the rest seemed never to have even heard of it. And on his deathbed, he was still calling Geneva “a perverse and unhappy nation”. 

Lest anyone think I’m posting this to confirm the stereotype of Calvin as a rigid, stern, judgmental old curmudgeon, return to the first sentence of this post. His discontent had nothing to do with his personality or some latent misanthropy. It had everything to do with his audacious missionary aims. If Geneva was to be a laboratory for how to bring about and organize a society of true Christians, its success was paramount! Geneva had to “work” in order to be worthy of emulation. Calvin was forever an idealist, and his disappointment in Geneva’s failure to live up to his ideals was a constant source of consternation during his tenure there.