The following material on John Calvin in Geneva was excerpted from two articles on this website, which are designated as John Calvin I and   John Calvin II.           

    In 1533, Bern sent Protestant reformers to convert Geneva into a Protestant city; after considerable conflict, Geneva officially became Protestant in 1535.

   Calvin, by now a successful lawyer, was invited to Geneva to build the new Reformed church. Calvin's efforts radically changed the face of Protestantism, for he directly addressed issues that early Reformers didn't know how or didn't want to answer.

   His most important work involved the organization of church governance and the social organization of the church and the city. He was, in fact, the first major political thinker to model social organization entirely on biblical principles. At first his reforms did not go over well. He addressed the issue of church governance by creating leaders within the new church; he himself developed a catechism designed to impose doctrine on all the members of the church. He and Guillaume Farel (1489-1565) imposed a strict moral code on the citizens of Geneva; this moral code was derived from a literal reading of Christian scriptures. Naturally, the people of Geneva believed that they had thrown away one church only to see it replaced by an identical twin; in particular, they saw Calvin's reforms as imposing a new form of papacy on the people, only with different names and different people. So the Genevans tossed him out.

    In 1540 a new crop of city officials in Geneva invited Calvin back to the city. As soon as he arrived he set about revolutionizing Genevan society. His most important innovation was the incorporation of the church into city government; he immediately helped to restructure municipal government so that clergy would be involved in municipal decisions, particularly in disciplining the populace. He imposed a hierarchy on the Genevan church and began a series of statute reforms to impose a strict and uncompromising moral code on the city.

Upon his return, armed with the authority to craft the institutional form of the church, Calvin began his program of reform. He established four categories of offices, with distinct hierarchy:

• Doctors held an office of theological scholarship and teaching for the edification of the people and the training of other ministers.
• Pastors were to preach, to administer the sacraments, and to exercise pastoral discipline, teaching and admonishing the people.
• Deacons oversaw institutional charity, including hospitals and anti-poverty programs.
• Elders were 12 laymen whose task was to serve as a kind of moral police force, mostly issuing warnings, but referring offenders to the Consistory when necessary.

Critics often look to the Consistory as the emblem of Calvin's theocratic rule. The Consistory was an ecclesiastical court consisting of the elders and pastors, charged with maintaining strict order in the church caste and among its members. Offenses ranged from propounding false doctrine to moral infractions, such as wild dancing and bawdy singing. Typical punishments were might be required to attend boring public sermons,catechism classes, floggings or torture.

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   By the mid-1550's, Geneva was thoroughly Calvinist in thought and structure. It became the most important Protestant center of Europe in the sixteenth century, for Protestants driven out of their native countries of France, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all came to Geneva to take refuge. By the middle of the sixteenth century, between one-third and one-half of the city was made up of these foreign Protestants. In Geneva, these foreign reformers adopted the more radical Calvinist doctrines; most of them had arrived as moderate Reformers and left as thorough-going Calvinists. It is probably for this reason that Calvin's brand of reform eventually became the dominant branch of Protestantism from the seventeenth century onwards.