The Reformation Era · 1519-1650 · Swiss lands, then Europe
The Reformed Cities - Zurich & Geneva
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You can sit down with this tradition now.
About This Movement
Two Swiss city-states, a generation apart, worked out what a whole town would look like if its church were rebuilt from Scripture: Zurich under Huldrych Zwingli from 1519, which stripped images and the Mass out of its churches. And Geneva after 1536 under John Calvin, whose Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541 gave the city pastors, teachers, elders and deacons, and a consistory that met every week. Geneva's consistory registers survive, and they are startlingly ordinary — quarrels between neighbours, absent husbands, people who had not been to church. Which makes this one of the best pictures anywhere of what a church actually did about the daily conduct of ordinary people. From these two cities the Reformed pattern travelled: Scotland, France, the Netherlands and English Puritanism all trace back here.
In Its Own Record
Formed From
- Latin Pastoral-Congregational Christianity — Calvin's Institutes draws explicitly and heavily on Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings (De Praedestinatione Sanctorum, Contra Julianum) for total depravity, unconditional election, and irresistible grace -- Calvin named Augustine his primary authority next to Scripture itself. A direct theological line across eleven centuries with no institutional continuity -- influence, not identity.
Sources
- The Zurich leg: Zwingli's writings (Sixty-Seven Articles 1523; On True and False Religion 1525; LCC Zwingli and Bullinger), disputation records, the Prophezei and Zurich Bible (1531) (primary)
- Calvin's corpus: Institutes (1559; trans. Battles, ed. McNeill, LCC 1960), Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541), Geneva Catechism, sermons and letters (primary) — Teaching-and-order layer, kept distinct from the discipline texture.
- Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, vol. 1: 1542-1544 (ed. Kingdon, Lambert & Watt, trans. McDonald, Eerdmans, 2000) (primary) — Minutes kept by the very body doing the disciplining — an institutional record, not a neutral one.
- The Genevan Psalter as lived piety: Marot and Beze metrical psalms (complete 1562), La Forme des prieres (1542), psalm-singing practice (primary) — The movement's ordinary devotional voice.
- Scott Manetsch, Calvin's Company of Pastors (OUP, 2013), with Bruce Gordon, Calvin (Yale, 2009) (secondary) — Current standards, the first built on the registers.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 6 (Kingdon, Calvin/Geneva), with ch. 5 (Blickle) and ch. 7 (Greengrass) (reference) — Reference author is also the registers' editor.