Une Epistre de Maistre Pierre Caroly docteur de la Sorbone de Paris, faicte en forme de deffiance, et envoiée à Maistre Guillaume Farel serviteur de Jesus Christ et de son Eglise, avec la response.

GLN-1378Bibl. Gebennensis, n° 43/12Bujanda (éd.), Index, t. 1, n° 325Cartier, Arrêts, p.415Gilmont, Farel, n° 10-1Higman, Censorship, B 61Higman, Piety and the People, n° F

The Council of Trent and the Augsburg \u3cem\u3eInterim\u3c/em\u3e

The Augsburg Interim (“Declaration of His Roman Imperial Majesty on the Observance of Religion within the Holy Empire Until the Decision of the General Council”) was adopted at the 1548 Diet of Augsburg, marking the victory of Emperor Charles V (r. 1516–1556) in the Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) by attempting to impose a religious reconciliation between followers of Martin Luther and the Catholic Church. Charles, also king of Spain, was beset by problems throughout his European possessions, stemming largely from the Reformation. The Interim was one effort to control these problems. The purpose of the document was to create a temporary compromise, to promote religious and political stability while waiting for a more definitive statement from the Council of Trent (which was in session at the time). The provisional nature did nothing to lessen Protestant fears of attempting to suppress dissent or to dampen concerns on the part of some Catholics that heresy was going unpunished; instead, it hardened divisions. Its failures contributed to a breakdown in Habsburg authority in central Europe

Calvin’s Friends: Farel, Viret, and Beza

John Calvin did not create the French Reformed movement alone. At every step of the way, he was assisted by close friends and allies. Guillaume Farel preceded Calvin and established many of the key doctrines and practices that would come to define Calvinism. Pierre Viret was perhaps Calvin’s closest friend and worked steadily to implement Calvin’s vision of reform first in Lausanne and later in France, while also popularizing Calvinist theology in his many vernacular dialogues. And Theodore Beza emerged as an important theologian in his own right before taking over as Calvin’s successor as head of the Geneva Company of Pastors, from which position he helped to guide the French Reformed churches during the Wars of Religion and to unify the Swiss Reformed churches behind a common theology

Trinitarian Controversies

Sixteenth-century Protestant reformers did not reinvent the Trinity; most preserved the medieval understanding of the doctrine of God, which the church agreed upon at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and revised at the Council of Constantinople in 381. The remarkable continuity of the medieval consubstantial Trinity during the Reformation became increasingly relevant to framing standard Reformed theology as certain minds began to fancy antitrinitarianism. The consensus among the magisterial reformers was that sixteenth-century nonconformist “heretics” endangered traditional Christology and therefore the traditional Christian doctrine of God. At the inception of Protestant dogma, reforming theologians were forced to assess an old question of the utmost relevance to the church: If Christ is not human and divine – what is Christianity? Thus, putting the relation of God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit into words from a scriptural perspective occupied the reformers as it had the early church fathers. The early reformers who revisited church doctrine should have enjoyed a period of trial and error. However, in the broader Reformation context, the sixteenth-century characters, who pushed the orthodox envelope beyond tradition, had by the mid-sixteenth century compelled the reformers to exacting linguistic precision, which subsequently became a distinctive trait of Reformed theology