John Calvin arrived at his convictions concerning the need for a learned leadership honestly. In the first place, Calvin himself was a thoughtful and thoroughly educated minister. In addition to his training as a lawyer, he was steeped in the best of Christian humanist learning. And he was a reformer who understood the importance of education in consolidating the gains of the Protestant Reformation in Geneva. Above all else, he thought this meant that the people of God needed to know their Bibles. Catechizing, or teaching, became paramount because the Christian citizens of Geneva were expected to have more than a passing acquaintance with holy scripture and the doctrines of the Reformed faith.
That's why, when he returned to Geneva in 1541 to lead the church, Calvin began to make a case for theological education. According to The Ecclesiastical Ordinances there were to be four offices in the church: pastors (ministers or teaching elders), teachers (doctors), elders, and deacons. Candidates for the ministry “were to be examined in two main areas: on their doctrine and on their morals.”
In terms of doctrine (i.e. teaching), those who wished to become ministers had to have “a good and sound knowledge of scripture, an ability to communicate it clearly to people in an edifying way, and an understanding and commitment to the Reformed doctrines held in Geneva.”
How were they to acquire such knowledge? Well, between 1541 and 1559 in Geneva, the theological education of ministers took place primarily within the church, in three ways. First, students were expected to attend some or all of the 20 weekly services taking place in the city parishes. Secondly, they could attend the daily public lectures on the Bible offered by Calvin and other doctors in the cathedral church.
And third, they could participate in the weekly congregations or gatherings of ministers, teachers, and interested lay people, the so-called Company of Pastors. They were especially encouraged to be present at special monthly meetings when the group organized disputations to discuss and argue points of interpretation and doctrine.
In addition, of course, personal study was expected: the Old and New Testaments (in the original languages!), to be sure; but Calvin's handbook of theology, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, was also required reading. In fact, Calvin constantly revised his summary exposition of Christian doctrine with students for the ministry in mind.
For almost two decades that was the character of theological education in Geneva under Calvin's influence: it was intended to be comprehensive, communal, and continuing. In short, Calvin believed that it took a whole church to raise a competent minister!
The year 1559 marked two important milestones for Calvin's legacy in theological education. First, he published the final edition of The Institutes, which had by then become the primary textbook for theological study in many reformed churches. And second, the Academy of Geneva was inaugurated.
It would be wrong to say that the creation of the academy was a result of Calvin's work alone. It was, however, the fulfillment of a vision he had for the church and for the city: a first-class institution of learning committed to the training of reformed leadership.
From the start, the academy was full of students. And through a series of circumstances it was able to attract some of the brightest and the best to its teaching faculty from across Europe. As a result, the school cemented the best innovations of humanistic scholarship and teaching method into the Protestant consciousness.
As a theological school, the academy sought to bring together the discipline of theology with the practice of pastoral ministry. This distinguished it from many of the late medieval universities, which often had highly educated and sophisticated theologians, while the clergy were poorly trained elsewhere.
The academy was a remarkable achievement and it became a pattern for Protestant theological education in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and in Scotland – including St. Andrew's, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, after which our own Presbyterian theological schools in Canada were originally modelled.
All that being said, is there anything to be learned from Calvin as a theological educator for us today? Our time is different. We live after the scientific, industrial, and technological revolutions that have transformed Western ways of learning. We live in an increasingly secular, religiously pluralistic, and postmodern era, alongside people of different faiths and no faith at all. Church-state relations today look very different from the way they looked in Calvin's Geneva. And Christianity is now a global phenomenon – culturally diverse, with increasing sensitivities to issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
Nevertheless, there are lessons in Calvin. The most important is simply this: John Calvin affirmed the necessity of theological education. He believed in the need for a learned leadership at all levels, especially ministers and elders. He believed it was the responsibility of the church to see to it that the teaching elders were themselves taught, both prior to and during their ministries.
In our time, we often assume that it's easy to be a minister, and that anyone can do it. The temptation to dumb it down persists. But it is simply not true that you don't need to know very much in order to be a church leader. If anything, we are living at a time when the church desperately needs leaders who know more, who are wise about what they know, and who can articulate biblical faith clearly, credibly, and compellingly, especially in the public realm.
Theological education in the tradition of Calvin, then, builds on that firm foundation of faith and learning. It may not be everything – but it was, for Calvin, the essential on which everything else necessary for transformative leadership depended.
That, in sum, is Calvin's case for theological education. Five hundred years later it sounds simple, and yet rather compelling: teaching elders need to be taught the things of God.
