William Farel

Overview

William Farel (Guillaume Farel, 1489-1565)¹ was a French evangelist and reformer of French-speaking Switzerland, remembered above all for confronting John Calvin in Geneva in 1536 and compelling him, against his own wishes, to take up the work of reforming the city.²³ Farel and Calvin were later expelled from Geneva together in 1538 and corresponded closely during Calvin’s exile in Strasbourg, a relationship documented in Calvin’s own surviving letters to him.¹

Life and Ministry

By 1536 Farel had become the leading figure of the Reformation in Geneva.² That year, John Calvin, then a young scholar traveling from Basel toward Strasbourg to live a quiet life of study, was forced by a war between Charles V and Francis I onto a detour through Geneva and intended to stay only a single night.²³ Learning that the author of the Institutes of the Christian Religion was in the city, Farel went to Calvin and demanded that he stay and serve as his assistant.² Calvin resisted, pleading his youth and unfitness for public work, but Farel would not accept refusal, warning him that God’s curse would fall on him if he put his own studies ahead of the Lord’s work.³ The nineteenth-century church historian Philip Schaff, quoted at length by Loraine Boettner, records the confrontation:

Farel at once called on Calvin and held him fast, as by divine command. Calvin protested, pleading his youth, his inexperience, his need of further study, his natural timidity and bashfulness, which unfitted him for public action. But all in vain. Farel, “who burned of a marvelous zeal to advance the Gospel,” threatened him with the curse of Almighty God if he preferred his studies to the work of the Lord, and his own interest to the cause of Christ. Calvin was terrified and shaken by these words of the fearless evangelist, and felt “as if God from on high had stretched out His hand.” He submitted, and accepted the call to the ministry, as teacher and pastor of the evangelical Church of Geneva.³

Calvin stayed, and he and Farel worked together to reform the Genevan church, including pressing for a strict system of ecclesiastical discipline.⁴ That effort provoked the city council, which had recently thrown off the authority of the pope and was unwilling to submit to new religious leaders, and in May 1538 both men were forced out of Geneva.²⁴ Calvin settled in Strasbourg while Farel went to pastor the church in Neuchâtel, and the two kept up a close correspondence throughout Calvin’s three years of exile.¹ Calvin’s letters to Farel from this period, collected in his Tracts and Letters, range from theological reflection and requests for counsel to personal confession and even, at Farel’s own prompting, discussion of prospective wives for Calvin.⁵ Farel did not spare Calvin correction: in October 1540 he accused Calvin of having grown too comfortable in Strasbourg and too easily flattered by the attention of his French refugee congregation and of Martin Bucer, and pressed him to return to Geneva and face its unresolved conflicts.⁵ In 1541 a change in the composition of Geneva’s city council led to Calvin’s recall, and he wrote to Farel that August submitting the decision to the Lord’s providence and to the counsel of those, Farel included, through whom he believed God would speak.⁶ Calvin returned to Geneva with greater authority than he had held before, while Farel continued his own ministry based in Neuchâtel, and the two remained in correspondence for the rest of Calvin’s life.¹⁴

Theological Contribution

Little of Farel’s own systematic writing is engaged in the sources behind this article; what they preserve instead is his insistence, in two separate episodes decades apart, on firm ecclesiastical discipline over pastoral caution. The first was the 1538 dispute in Geneva itself.⁴ The second came in 1553, when Calvin, prosecuting the heresy trial of Michael Servetus in Geneva, wrote to Farel that he hoped Servetus would be condemned to death but wished the sentence spared the cruelty of burning.⁷ Farel’s reply pressed the opposite case:

I do not greatly approve that tenderness of heart… in wishing that the cruelty of the punishment of Servetus be mitigated, thou art acting as a friend towards a man who is thy greatest enemy. But I pray thee to conduct thyself in such a manner that, in future, no one will have the boldness to publish such doctrines, and to give trouble with impunity for so long a time as this man has done.⁷

Historical Significance

Philip Schaff, writing about the 1536 meeting, judged that Farel “instinctively felt that Calvin was the man to complete and save the Reformation in Geneva.”³ Whatever the wider truth of that judgment, the meeting itself is well attested: it put Calvin’s theological work at the service of a specific church rather than the scholar’s life he had intended for himself.²³ The 1553 exchange over Servetus shows Farel and Calvin taking different positions on the same case: Calvin sought a swifter death by the sword and opposed burning, while Farel warned him against letting any tenderness toward “his greatest enemy” soften the church’s response to published heresy.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Christopher Osterbrock, “The Spiritual Utility of Calvin’s Correspondence during the Strasbourg Years,” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 89. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Jared H. Moore, “A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 90. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Philip Schaff, The Swiss Reformation, 348, quoted in Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 289. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 294. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Osterbrock, “The Spiritual Utility of Calvin’s Correspondence,” 90. ↩ ↩²
Osterbrock, “The Spiritual Utility of Calvin’s Correspondence,” 91. ↩
Émile Doumergue, Jean Calvin: les hommes et les choses de son temps, quoted in Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, 300. ↩ ↩² ↩³