Theologians of French-speaking Switzerland

John Calvin (1509-1564) is the central figure of Reformed theology and one of the most consequential minds of the sixteenth century. At Geneva he produced not only a theological summa but a functioning ecclesiastical order, which made the city the Rome of Protestantism.

Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva

Intellectual formation

Born at Noyon in Picardy, the son of an episcopal secretary and at first destined for the priesthood, Calvin read law at Orléans and Bourges between 1528 and 1531. His humanist training in Paris brought him into contact with the classical languages, with Erasmus and with Lefèvre d’Étaples. His conversion falls between 1532 and 1534; he described it as a subita conversio, a sudden conversion. Persecution drove him to Switzerland in 1534, and the first edition of the Institutio Christianae Religionis appeared at Basel in 1536, in Latin and in six chapters. Passing through Geneva on his way to Strasbourg, he was detained there by Guillaume Farel.

The Institutes (1536-1559)

The Institutes is the masterwork of Reformed theology. Its structure follows the Apostles’ Creed across four books: the knowledge of God the Creator; the knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ; the manner of receiving the grace of Christ, comprising faith, justification, sanctification and predestination; and the external means of grace, namely the Church, the sacraments and civil government. The edition of 1559 comprises eighty chapters.

Calvin’s Geneva

Calvin’s Geneva was not a theocracy; he distinguished clearly between civil and spiritual government. It was rather an experiment in coordinating the two, through the Consistory, in which ministers and lay elders exercised ecclesiastical discipline, and through the Academy founded in 1559, the oldest Protestant faculty of theology in the world and the ancestor of the University of Geneva. From it went out ministers trained for France, England, Scotland, the Netherlands and Hungary.

Karl Barth (1886-1968) is without question the most important Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. His work transformed evangelical theology by a radical concentration on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, against every form of natural theology.

Barth, the theologian of Basel

The turning point of 1914

Born at Basel and raised at Bern, where his father Fritz Barth taught theology, Barth studied under the great liberals, Harnack at Berlin and Herrmann at Marburg. He was a pastor in Geneva in 1909 and at Safenwil in Aargau from 1911 to 1921. The turning point came in August 1914, when ninety-three German intellectuals, his own teachers among them, signed a manifesto supporting the war policy of Wilhelm II. For Barth this was the collapse of a liberal theology that had identified God too closely with human culture.

The Epistle to the Romans (1919, revised 1922)

Barth’s commentary on Romans, especially in its second edition, was described as a bomb falling on the theologians’ playground. Its central claim is that God is wholly other, radically distinct from everything human. There is no continuity between God and the world, between God and religion, between God and culture. The gospel is not a religious experience but God’s judgement upon humanity.

Church Dogmatics (1932-1967)

Barth’s masterwork runs to thirteen volumes and some nine thousand pages, and remains unfinished: five parts were planned, and the doctrine of redemption is fragmentary. Its central thesis may be stated in one sentence: the one Word of God is Jesus Christ, the solus Christus made a methodological principle. Natural theology, understood as knowledge of God from creation, is radically refused. Election itself is christocentric: in Christ, God has said yes to humanity.

Barmen (1934)

When National Socialism threatened to capture the German Evangelical Church through the German Christian movement, Barth organised the theological resistance. The Barmen Declaration, substantially his own work, was adopted by the Confessing Church. Its first thesis affirms that Jesus Christ as attested in Holy Scripture is the one Word of God which we have to hear and to trust and obey in life and in death. It is a flat refusal to identify God with a people, or revelation with history.

Oscar Cullmann (1902-1999)

Born at Strasbourg, professor at Basel from 1938 to 1972 and at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1972, Cullmann served as an official Protestant observer at the Second Vatican Council. His theology is a theology of salvation history in which Christ is the centre of time. Against Bultmannian demythologisation he held the resurrection to be a historical and cosmic event rather than an existential decision.

Pierre Gisel (b. 1947)

Professor at the University of Lausanne. His principal themes are the question of God in the setting of the modern critique of religion, in Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Freud; the tension between theology and the sciences of religion; and the doctrine of creation. He represents the living francophone Reformed theology of the turn of the century.

Denis Müller (b. 1953)

Professor of ethics at the University of Lausanne. His contribution lies in the dialogue between Protestant theology and contemporary ethics, in bioethics, economic ethics and ecological ethics, articulating Reformed theology with analytic philosophy and continental hermeneutics.

The faculties today

The University of Geneva

Founded by Calvin in 1559 as the Academy, it is the oldest Protestant faculty of theology in the world and the ancestor of the University of Geneva, established in 1873. Its present emphases are ecumenism, the history of religions, biblical exegesis and ethics.

The University of Lausanne

The former Faculty of Theology and Sciences of Religion has become the Institute for the Social Sciences of Religion. The orientation toward the sciences of religion is pronounced alongside theology proper, and the links with the Reformed Church of the canton of Vaud are close. Its emphases are ethics, the sociology of religion and feminist theology.

The Revue de théologie et de philosophie

Founded at Lausanne in 1868 and issued quarterly, it is among the principal francophone theological journals. It publishes work in theology, philosophy and the sciences of religion in an ecumenical spirit and is indexed in the major disciplinary databases.