Theodore Beza

Calvin’s Successor at Geneva, 1519–1605

Theodore Beza was Calvin’s colleague, biographer, and successor: rector of the Academy of Geneva, counselor of the French Reformed churches, editor of the Greek New Testament, and for forty years after Calvin’s death the most respected voice of the Reformed world. A Calvinist of the second generation, he gave much of his life to guarding what the first had won.

Scholar and Poet

He was born on June 24, 1519 at Vézelay in Burgundy, the youngest of seven children of Pierre de Bèze, royal governor of the town. His mother died when he was three, and an uncle took him to Paris to be educated.1 At nine he was sent to Orléans to live and study under the Greek scholar Melchior Wolmar, who also taught the young Calvin. Beza later celebrated the day he entered Wolmar’s house as a “second birthday.”2 Writing of Calvin’s student days, he remembered Wolmar warmly: “he was my own teacher, and the only one I had from boyhood up to youth.”3 At his father’s wish he studied law and took his licentiate in 1539, but his heart was in letters. His Latin poems, the Juvenilia, made him famous in Paris, and he lived on church benefices while privately engaged to Claudine Denosse.4

Conversion and Exile

A serious illness brought the crisis. Convinced by the Reformers’ writings but unwilling to pay the price, he was brought low enough to think about eternity, and rose from his sickbed a changed man. He later wrote:

From the moment that I could leave my bed, I broke all the bonds that until then had enchained me. I gathered all my belongings and left my country, my family, and friends in order to follow Christ, willingly retiring to Geneva with my wife.5 Theodore Beza

He reached Geneva on October 23, 1548, and one of his first acts was to marry Claudine publicly in church. The Parlement of Paris condemned him as a heretic and burned him in effigy.6 At Pierre Viret’s invitation he taught Greek at the academy of Lausanne for ten years. In 1546 he had written a confession of faith for his own father, a summary of Reformed doctrine that Dennison calls “an abbreviated Calvin’s Institutes”:7

When we say then as St. Paul said that we are justified by faith alone … it is not to say that faith is a virtue which makes us righteous in ourselves before God (for that would be to set ourselves in the place of Jesus Christ, who alone is our perfect and entire righteousness).8 Theodore BezaConfession of the Christian Faith

Geneva and France

In 1559 the Council of Geneva installed him as rector of Calvin’s new Academy; Beza gave the inaugural address in St. Pierre on June 5, 1559, before some 160 students.9 At the Colloquy of Poissy on September 9, 1561, he set out the Reformed faith before the queen mother, the young Charles IX, and the cardinals: Scripture, justification by faith, the spiritual presence of Christ in the Supper, and loyalty to the king. One sentence, “We say that [Christ’s] body is as far removed from the bread and the wine as is heaven from earth,” brought cries of “Blasphemavit!” from the prelates.10 When the massacre of Vassy opened the wars of religion in 1562, Beza demanded justice for the Protestants from the King of Navarre and gave the Huguenots the saying they never forgot:

Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I am speaking, to endure blows, and not to strike them. But also may it please you to remember that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.11 Theodore Beza1562

Calvin’s Successor

Beza gave Calvin the Lord’s Supper on Easter Day 1564: “He received the Lord’s Supper from my hand, and sung the hymn along with the others, though with tremulous voice.” Less than two months later Calvin was dead, and Beza wrote his life, closing with this testimony:

Having been a spectator of his conduct for sixteen years, I have given a faithful account both of his life and of his death, and I can now declare, that in him all men may see a most beautiful example of the Christian character, an example which it is as easy to slander as it is difficult to imitate.12 Theodore BezaLife of John Calvin, 1564

For the next four decades he presided over the Company of Pastors, taught, preached, and counseled the French churches and their leaders, including Jeanne d’Albret and Henry of Navarre. He completed the French metrical Psalter begun by Clément Marot, which the Huguenots sang everywhere.13 His New Testament scholarship made him, in Kenyon’s words, the scholar “whose reputation stood highest among all the Biblical scholars of the age,” and the translators of the Geneva Bible took him as “their principal guide” in the New Testament.14 After the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day he wrote The Right of Magistrates (1574), which taught that lesser magistrates might resist a tyrant, while insisting on the claims of conscience:

As often as the Magistrate commands anything that is repugnant either to the worship which we owe unto God, or to the love which we owe unto our neighbor, we cannot yield obedience thereunto with a safe conscience.15 Theodore BezaThe Right of Magistrates, 1574

He taught until 1597. That year a young Catholic controversialist came to Geneva to win the old man back to Rome, and when argument failed offered him money in the pope’s name. Beza answered, “Go, sir! I am too old and too deaf to be able to hear such words!” He died peacefully on October 13, 1605, at eighty-six.16

Cautions

Reformation Heroes needs correcting at several points. It calls “Codex Bezae” Beza’s edition of the Greek New Testament; the Codex Bezae is an early fifth-century manuscript of the Gospels and Acts that Beza donated to Cambridge University in 1581, and his own editions and annotations are a different work. It says that he led “the last French Reformed synod in La Rochelle” (1571); in fact La Rochelle was the seventh national synod, and later national synods met, among them those of 1620 and 1623 that received the Canons of Dort. And it sets the “anvil” saying in a confrontation with the Duke of Guise, where Schaff, following Baird, places it before the King of Navarre.17 Beza also shared the conviction of his age that heretics might be punished by the magistrate; Eadie notes that Calvin’s part in the death of Servetus “was justified by Melanchthon and Beza.” It is an honest stain on a great name.18


Other Reformers   John Calvin

Sources

  1. Diana Kleyn with Joel R. Beeke, Reformation Heroes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2009), chap. 21, “Theodore Beza.” ↩
  2. James T. Dennison Jr., comp., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010), introduction to Theodore Beza’s Confession (1560). ↩
  3. Theodore Beza, “Life of John Calvin,” in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844). ↩
  4. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 2: introduction to Beza’s Confession (1560); Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 21. ↩
  5. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 21. ↩
  6. Ibid.; Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 2: introduction to Beza’s Confession (1560). ↩
  7. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 2: introduction to Beza’s Confession (1560). See Pierre Viret. ↩
  8. Theodore Beza, Confession of the Christian Faith, Fourth Point, art. 7, in Dennison, Reformed Confessions, vol. 2. ↩
  9. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 2: introduction to the Geneva Students’ Confession (1559). ↩
  10. Dennison, Reformed Confessions, 2: introduction to Beza’s Confession at Poissy (1561). ↩
  11. Philip Schaff and David S. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 8 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), §171, 858–62, quoting Henry Martyn Baird, Theodore Beza, 2:28. See The Huguenots. ↩
  12. Beza, “Life of John Calvin,” in Calvin, Tracts, vol. 1. ↩
  13. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 21. ↩
  14. Frederic G. Kenyon, “English Versions,” in James Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §27. See The Geneva Bible. ↩
  15. Theodore Beza, The Right of Magistrates (1574), quoted in David W. Hall, Calvin in the Public Square: Liberal Democracies, Rights, and Civil Liberties (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2009). ↩
  16. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 21. ↩
  17. Kleyn and Beeke, Reformation Heroes, chap. 21; Schaff, History, 8:858–62; Daniel B. Wallace, Textual Criticism Workbook (Credo Courses, 2013), lessons 15–16, “Famous Manuscripts: Majuscules”; David M. Whitford, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2012), pt. 2, “A Reformation ABC”, s.v. “Gallican Confession/Confession of La Rochelle.” The same corrections are noted on The Huguenots. ↩
  18. John Eadie, The English Bible (London: Macmillan, 1876), chap. 31. ↩