A reformer tried to build religious community by preaching the word of God and subjecting the town and territory to the pastoral oversight of evangelical clergy. To preach and reorganize, the reformer needed a bible that recounted events and narratives written down for an explicit purpose: the regeneration of individual and society. The reformer was sensitive to threats to the bible’s purpose. Any time textual fact and regenerative purpose seemed to drift apart, its purpose could seem to be compromised. Fact and purpose could drift apart in two ways. Historicizing the text, taking the book as the artifact of a distinctive, remote culture or as ancient fiction, could seem to nullify the text’s power as divine speech in the present. Equally problematic was the suggestion that spiritual readings of the text were divorced from historical facts. These two challenges to the bible, one historicizing and another spiritualizing, first appeared as an intellectual dilemma in the Reformation. This chapter illustrates that first appearance by examining two controversies in the life of the Reformation’s most celebrated literalist, John Calvin. The first example is Calvin’s conflict with his friend Sebastian Castellio. The second is Calvin’s conflict with the so-called “libertines.”

The third chapter illustrates the nature of the second through fifth chapters. Each seeks to explore Calvin’s engagement with and use of tradition in different contexts. The third chapter takes up Calvin’s polemics with other thinkers and confessions. Through an odd quirk in the historiography surrounding Calvin, this chapter aligns most with the mainstream of Calvin interpretation. Almost every Calvin scholar or early modern analyst will admit that Calvin and other Reformers used tradition in their polemics – but it frequently is stated either as the exception that proves the rule that Calvin depended only upon scripture, or that it is a case where he and other Reforming writers had to adopt the methods of their foes. But the analysis of the material demonstrates that Calvin turned to tradition whether his foes were orthodox or heretical, Protestant, Radical, or Catholic. Calvin’s dependence on tradition and traditional sources undercuts the customary consideration of this area of his activity.

This chapter describes the earliest stirrings of religious dissent in the Low Countries during the period 1520–1540. Reformist ideas coming out of the Holy Roman Empire and Swiss cities, especially the protests of Luther and Zwingli, followed continental trade routes to circulate in the Netherlands by 1520. Combined with long-standing humanist criticisms of the church, these reform ideas quickly gained a small but significant audience among the urban, literate populations of the region, first among clergy and intellectuals and then among the broader middling sort. By the mid-1520s a vocal minority was espousing religious ideas the Catholic Church deemed heretical. By the 1530s an even more radical evangelical movement, Melchiorite Anabaptism, found a broad following, especially in the northern provinces. This radicalism climaxed in 1535 with the Anabaptist kingdom of Muenster and Anabaptist attempts to overthrow the government of Amsterdam. By this time Charles V had instituted a new judicial apparatus of laws and courts to suppress heresy. This judicial regime proved at least temporarily successful in staunching the spread of heresy in the region after the Muenster debacle.

The unhappy encounter between Anabaptists and Reformed in Wismar in 1553 is a striking example of how confusing the sixteenth-century religious landscape was. In the early 1550s a group of Anabaptists under the leadership of Menno Simons managed to live peacefully in the small German Hanseatic town Wismar. They met informally in the private homes of members of their community. Apparently Wismar’s authorities turned a blind eye toward this group of Anabaptists. This mode of peaceful coexistence between a predominantly Lutheran population and a minority of Anabaptist refugees came to an end when a group of Dutch Reformed refugees arrived in the city. Unlike the Anabaptists, these Reformed refugees were unwilling to compromise. They endeavored to establish their own ecclesiastical organization and claimed their own church building to worship God in a pure Reformed manner.

John Calvin, like all Protestant reformers of the 1520s and 1530s, was born into a Roman Catholic society and baptized as an infant, according to Catholic practice. When Calvin began to work with Guillaume Farel to lead the Reformation in Geneva, they were interacting with a community of individuals who had all received Catholic baptisms, whether at a baptismal font by an ordained priest, or in the birthing room by a midwife. Those late medieval rites of baptism reflected a number of theological concerns and assumptions, including the teachings that the sacrament of baptism was essential to salvation and that infants who died without baptism would be consigned to limbo. At the same time, traditional baptismal practices also embodied a series of social and familial priorities, including the importance of godparents in building and solidifying social networks and the desire to honor those godparents in the name of a child. As a result, Calvin’s understanding of baptism challenged core beliefs and social traditions with which both he and his Genevan followers (both enthusiastic and reluctant) had been raised, complicating the implementation of his ideas and shaping the development of his teachings across the mid-sixteenth century and well beyond Geneva.