B.A.-“We left off last week with discussing your father’s removal of you studying in the monastery school. At age nineteen you were studying Greek at the University of Bourges. While there, you sort of served as we Baptists would say ‘interim pastor’ at the stone church there. Many of your friends trace your conversion to Christ while preaching there, is this true?”
J.C.-(we imagine a perplexed look with the Baptist comment)-“I did preach the Psalms while at the stone church, and I experienced what I would call a ‘sudden conversion’ at the age of twenty.”
B.A.-“A year later you wound up in Paris?”
J.C.-“Yes. I desired to live a quiet life of study, research, and writing with some occasional lecturing. But a year later after my arrival, my father suddenly died, so I had to go back to Orleans. I did eventually finish up my schooling while studying Hebrew and finished my doctoral thesis and was headed to the quiet academic life that I craved.”
B.A.-“Why didn’t you have that kind of life in Paris that you dreamed?”
J.C.-“When I was twenty four, my good friend Nicholas Cop preached what you Baptists might call “a hell, fire, brimstone” of a sermon at the University of Paris. He was rector there and a dynamic speaker. His sermon called for modest reforms of the church based on the teachings of Martin Luther. The sermon caused a mild riot and less than a month later Cop was replaced. By December, an arrest warrant was given for Cop, but he was never found.”
B.A.-“Many believe that while he preached the sermon, you wrote it for him.”
J.C.-“Many believed that. And because of this I feared for my life. And so on a cold December’s night, I escaped Paris, climbing out of a bedroom window. I used bed sheets to climb down and disguised myself as an old vinedresser.”
B.A.-“Sort of a reenactment of the apostle Paul. Then what happened?”
J.C.-“I spent the next year in the south of France under the alias Charles d Espeville. But went back to Paris in October 1534 when some French Protestants were arrested for posting Protestant placards around the city and they were burned at the stake. Once again I was implicated, and so in 1535 left France altogether and settled in Basel, Germany under another alias assisting French Protestant refugees.”
B.A.-“You didn’t spend much time in Basel, but while there you did do a lot of writing?”
J.C.-“I wrote a foreword of the French translation of the Bible, and a foreword to an edition of Chrysostom’s sermons. And I released my first edition of “The Institutes of Christian Religion”.
B.A.-“What were the contents of that first edition?”
J.C.-“ It was a pocket sized companion to theology in 516 pages, expounding on the law, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments, and Christian liberty, all of which was designed to help the increasing number of Protestant Christians toward godliness in France.”
B.A.-“You decided to leave Basel for Strasbourg and remain there in quiet study for the rest of your life, how did you land in Geneva?”
J.C.- A local war prevented me from taking the most direct route from Basel to Strasbourg, so I had to detour for the night to Geneva. When I came into the city, I was recognized by one of the Christians and taken to meet Guillaume Farel, who had led the Protestant cause in the city for the previous decade. Farel, was a red haired Genevan with a temperament to match. I stayed at his house that night and he kept attempting to get me to remain in Geneva and help him in the ministry going so far to threaten me that if I dared leave the city and refuse to join him in the work of the Reformation, God would curse him. I was terrified and convicted by his words, so I heeded Farel’s pleas and apart from a brief exile from 1538 until 1541, I remained in Geneva until my death almost 30 years later.”
B.A.-“Geneva was a city of about 10,000 at that time. What were your primary ministries in those early years?”
J.C.- “The main thrust was the establishment of a church that took seriously the claims of the Bible as to its form and government. So I began by establishing daily gatherings for psalm singing and expository preaching, monthly administrations of the Supper although I desired a weekly Lord’s Supper but the magirstrates never agreed on this, and most important a church free to exercise its own authority over matters of discipline without the influence of the civil authorities or the undue influence of high society Genevans.
B.A.-“How was that received?”
J.C.-“ Many of the influential folk of the city and church attacked both Farel and myself as a having ideas of grandeur above our station. Relations between the civil authorities and ourselves steadily detoriarted during 1537, so much so that by Easter of the following year, a quarrel over the use of unleavened bread in the Supper led to a call from the ministers to leave. On the Tuesday following Easter, we were told to get out of the city immediately. I had been in Geneva barely 18 months.”
B.A.-“And you fled finally to Strasbourg. What was that like?”
J.C.-“Some of the happiest days of my life.”
these little "interviews" are funny and interesting! Thanks!
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