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Sixteenth-Century Reformed Perspectives on the Minority Church*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

David Wright
David Wright
Affiliation:
New CollegeThe Mound Edinburgh EH1 2LX
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Extract

If one may combine hypothesis and anachronism, I reckon that John Calvin would be highly uncomfortable in the pluralist society of the West at the end of the second Christian millennium. Even if we do not find him enunciating in so many words Zwingli's bold axiom that ‘a Christian city is none other than a Christian church’, nevertheless the central thrust of the reform in Geneva is clear – that the whole city be united in the honour and service of God. All children should be baptized, and no open dissent or defiance of the Christian order to which the city was corporately committed should go unchallenged. This, at any rate, is the conventional account of a fundamental platform of the Genevan Reformation, shared in large measure by Zūrich, Strasbourg and other cities, but not by Lutheran territories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 1995 , pp. 469 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1995

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References

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19 I owe my knowledge of this correspondence to Oberman, ‘Europa afflicta…’ (n.5 above), 97–8.

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30 Ibid. 5 (1:1–6).

31 Ibid. 10 (2:37).

32 Ibid. 157 (66:698).

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35 CO V, 245; ET Beveridge, vol. III, 367.

36 Eire, op. cit., 266–7.

37 Ed. Fraenkel, 5–6 (1:7–8).

38 Ibid. 8 (2:19). See Higman, art. cit., 650, and Matheson, art. cit., 156–7, 159, 169–70, on the importance of the theme of vocation.

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52 Ibid. 114.

53 ‘Europe afflicta…’ (art. cit.), 109.

54 Ibid. 110. For the place of the suffering minority in the Marian exiles' notions of ‘the true church’, see Dawson's, J. E. A. essay on ‘The Apocalyptic Thinking of the Marian Exiles’, in Wilks, M. (ed.), Prophecy and Eschatology (Studies in Church History: Subsidia X, Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar