On May 21, 1536, the council of all the heads of city households voted the following motion, drafted by Farel: “With God’s help, we want to live according to the evangelical law and the Word for God as it is preached to us, forsaking all masses, other ceremonies and papal deceits, images, idols and live united and obedient to God’s justice.” Geneva was now officially and democratically a Reformed city. In God’s providence, only two months later, a promising twenty-seven-year-old Frenchman, John Calvin, passed through the city. The rest is history. 

Guillaume (William) Farel is mainly remembered today for that famous encounter with John Calvin in 1536, when he convinced his compatriot to stay in Geneva and work alongside him. Like many other French-speaking Reformers, Farel has been overshadowed by Calvin. He is often described as a mere “fiery preacher,” more gifted at tearing down than building up. The reality, however, is far more complex, and he deserves to be better known. 
Farel was born in 1489 in the French Alps, only six years after Luther and twenty years before Calvin. He died in 1565 at age seventy-five, outliving Calvin by about a year. He received a classic education in humanities in Paris and was converted to the new “Lutheran faith,” as it was then known, sometime in 1521. He was soon compelled to leave France for Switzerland, where he would live as an exile for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1527, he exercised an itinerant preaching ministry under the protection of the city of Bern and then ministered in Geneva from 1533–1538. During that period, Farel’s ministry was akin to what we would call “church planting,” which is unique among the first-generation Reformers.
Farel started evangelizing the city of Geneva in December 1533 and was instrumental in convincing the whole city to embrace the Reformed faith. He preached the Word tirelessly in the streets, and later, when the priests and monks left the city, in church buildings. He convinced several other men to join him, notably Pierre Viret. He also engaged in several successful public disputations against Roman Catholic opponents.
He wrote a few books that are forgotten today but were the first resources in French about the new Reformed faith: a short summary of the Reformed faith first published in 1529, a brief Reformed liturgy in 1533, and a short commentary on the Lord’s Prayer (largely inspired by Luther).
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Through hundreds and then thousands of these sermons, we realize that our minds have been renewed in a substantial way, our hearts have been transformed in an encouraging way. God works through his Word, as long as we conform ourselves to the process and don’t give up too soon.

We are people in a hurry. We live fast-paced lives in a fast-paced culture. We can never go quick enough to keep up, never do enough to complete every task, never accomplish enough to satisfy ourselves or others. But still we try, still we hurry on.
Yet the Christian life has a way of challenging us, of cutting against our haste. It challenges us that the ordinary state of affairs when it comes to spiritual growth is slower than we’d like it to be and slower than we thought it would be. It challenges us not to expect shortcuts, but to accept slow gains. It challenges us to have confidence in the process.
As individuals, we grow in our understanding of the ways and works of God not by reading the Bible once, but by reading it a hundred times. We read it, and little by little, day by day, we come to understand and apply its truths. We don’t give up after reading it once through or after reading it for only one year. Rather, we maintain our confidence in the long process, and over the course of years and decades we come to know it and to be be changed by it.
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Written by Christopher W. Parr |
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
As a Protestant, Witherspoon understood that the sure foundation for a Christian civilization is not an established state church imposing generic morals on a population; it is the presence of actual Christians with converted hearts and minds.

Christian Political Action at America’s Founding
Introduction
In October of 1753, John Witherspoon wrote a discernment blog. What the anonymous Ecclesiastical Characteristics lacked in the pugnacity and inaccuracies of today’s discernment blogs,  it made up for in its pointed satirical critique of the leaders of his own Church of Scotland (the Kirk). Having been a pastor for eight years in “North Britain,” Witherspoon (1723-1794) was jumping into the fray of denominational and political conflict in a Kirk divided into two warring factions. He was a leader in the Popular party of evangelicals who affirmed the faith of the Westminster Standards and prioritized personal regeneration. His opponents in the Moderate party, who made up Scotland’s theological and philosophical elite, defined Christianity as the pursuit of ethical ideals and rhetorical excellence which could lead their provincial nation into enlightened greatness. These theological battles would prepare Witherspoon for his second career as the president of what would become Princeton University, where he would train many younger American founders including Aaron Burr, Henry Lee, and James Madison. The only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence, he set forth a uniquely Protestant understanding of the American Revolution, insisting on personal regeneration for the war’s success and the new nation’s public virtue.
The same Moderate theologians with whom Witherspoon battled throughout his ministerial career led the burgeoning Scottish Enlightenment. Many adopted the views of Francis Hutcheson, who proposed an enlightened natural law theory in which all humans possess a pre-rational moral sense which guides them toward virtue and sociability. In such a system, natural depravity and the need for individual regeneration take a backseat to societal improvement through cultural refinement. Rather than trusting in the common morality of all people to cultivate civic cohesion, Witherspoon and his compatriots in the Kirk preserved a heritage of confessional Calvinism which reached back to the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant. Because of the ravaging moral effects of human depravity, Witherspoon insisted, moral improvement was not sufficient to bring about Scottish national flourishing; regeneration of human hearts by the Holy Spirit was essential.
Witherspoon’s first career as a pastor raises the question as to why ehe used the terminology and categories of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers (including Hutcheson) as a part of his teaching and political advocacy. Examining Witherspoon’s corpus of undergraduate lecture notes, sermons, and congressional addresses, most recent scholarship has posited that Witherspoon underwent a “sea change” after his move to America. Historians such as Mark Noll, Douglas Sloan, and Jeffry Morrison previously asserted that Witherspoon served as a transmitter of a positive view of man’s nature and capacity for moral action, and that this was  significant in paving the way for American independence.
Gideon Mailer’s John Witherspoon’s American Revolution, published in 2017, questions the decades-long assumption that Witherspoon was “a simple conduit for enlightened sensibility in America.”1 An Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Mailer is an accomplished historian of the early modern Atlantic World. In an extensive study of both Witherspoon’s writings and his intellectual and political contexts on both sides of the Atlantic, he proposes that Witherspoon continued to believe in the necessity of personal conversion for Christian faith and civic virtue throughout his time at Princeton, eventually applying his reformed orthodoxy to the political debates surrounding the American Revolution.
Having experienced Parliament’s overreach in Scottish church life, Witherspoon worried, Mailer writes, “that the civic realm would impose barriers to the Kirk’s encouragement of spiritual salvation” (4). Later, perceiving the potential turmoil of the American Revolution, Witherspoon persisted in his conclusion that Hutcheson’s sensory natural law was insufficient to preserve American democracy’s moral convictions: personal faith in Christ was required. By examining the theological currents in Scottish and American Presbyterianism, as well as the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, Mailer presents a Witherspoon who is concerned for theological fidelity in a New World more open to the spread of the gospel than an Old one paralyzed by theological controversies and political obstacles.
Witherspoon the Enlightened Philosopher?
In chapters on the various intellectual challenges that  Witherspoon faced, Mailer attempts to demonstrate how Presbyterian orthodoxy influenced his positions. While Chapter 1 and part of Chapter 2 lay a groundwork describing the state of the Kirk in the mid-eighteenth century, the book’s title indicates its American-centeredness. In his adopted country, Witherspoon sought to transform Princeton into a modern institution that could contribute to a developing  political theology for the new nation. In both of these, Mailer convincingly demonstrates that Witherspoon lost none of his Scottish confessional fervor. The perceived conflict between the philosophical idealism of Jonathan Edwards, Princeton’s president ten years prior, and Witherspoon’s affinity for Thomas Reid’s common sense realism has long confounded scholars. But Mailer suggests that Witherspoon’s realism aided his theological vocabulary: “a philosophical language that focused on sentiments and perception helped Witherspoon explain how individuals might come to terms with their sin through a passionate religious conversion and how a new sense of revealed morality could be implanted through grace in the regenerated heart” (147). While Edwards and Witherspoon disagreed on the philosophical principles of realism and idealism, both were theologically committed to the necessity of conversion.
As one of the most prominent religious leaders in colonial America, Witherspoon supported the Revolution with theological caveats not emphasized in either New England Puritanism or Lockean liberalism. Whereas many founders such as Benjamin Franklin used Hutchesonian moral sense theory to defend the superior virtue of the patriots against their British oppressors, Witherspoon maintained that all people, regardless of their nation, are naturally in bondage to sinful depravity. Thus, personal regeneration is essential to beneficial civic religion and public virtue (a note Witherspoon would sound again and again throughout his American sermons and political writings).
Further, just as he disliked Parliament’s meddling in the ecclesial affairs of his native Scotland, he supported the provincial desire of Americans to live apart from heavy-handed British rule, which he saw as limiting the free spread of Christian evangelism. After the 1707 Act of Union, which brought Scotland under the control of the British Parliament, ministerial appointments would be made by the  local nobility who tended to prefer Moderate, enlightened ministers in their parishes. For this reason Witherspoon would spend much of his time in Scotland challenging the “patronage controversy,” and the way it prevented the Kirk from focusing on the important work of evangelism.
Witherspoon Among the Moderates
Throughout the book, Mailer explains the historical context behind the era, places, and people which influenced Witherspoon. While these diversions are occasionally drawn out, they almost always provide essential nuances to Witherspoon’s intellectual influences, which other works do not adequately acknowledge. Chapters 1 and 2, “Augustinian Piety in Witherspoon’s Scotland” and “Kirk Divisions and American Prospects at Midcentury,” explain how an orthodox, popular minister like Witherspoon interacted with a Scottish intellectual culture which was rapidly changing  during the Enlightenment.
Most twentieth century treatments of Witherspoon’s moral philosophy merely highlight the similarity between his statements in Lectures on Moral Philosophy, delivered at Princeton, and ideas developed by Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and other Moderate philosophers. However, John Witherspoon’s American Revolution begins by noting the great diversity in Scottish higher education when Witherspoon was a student at the University of Edinburgh. Future Moderate ministers like Alexander Carlyle, a classmate and future fierce opponent of Witherspoon, would claim years later that his friend had abandoned the Moderate, refined education they received. However, Mailer notes that the Augustinian theology of the Westminster Standards, with its skeptical view of human nature, maintained a strong hold on some Scottish divines well into the eighteenth century. Samuel Rutherford’s regency a century earlier and the transmission of Reformed scholastics like Francis Turretin and Benedict Pictet through Dutch professors into Scotland ensured continuity with continental Reformed convictions.
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