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Home > Resources > Interdisciplinary > Theology > ReformedThe Legacy of the Geneva Liturgy
By Larry Sibley
Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
In order to talk about the congregation where I worship in the Philadelphia suburbs, I have to move back in history. There were two pastors working in the city of Strasbourg in 1538. They were among the leaders in the renewal of worship in the sixteenth century. They identified four elements, four central necessary practices, in the liturgy: the Word, prayer, the meal, and alms.
One of these pastors was Martin Bucer, who pastored a large German congregation. The other was John Calvin, leading a congregation of French Huguenot refugees. This is what Calvin said about worship in his Institutes, in speaking about Acts 2:42: "Luke relates in the Acts that this was the practice of the apostolic church, when he says that believers 'continued in the apostles' teaching and fellowship in the breaking of bread and in prayers.' " And then Calvin goes on, "Thus it became the unvarying rule that no meeting of the church should take place without the Word, prayers, partaking of the Lord's Supper, and alms-giving." 1 What Calvin did with this central norm was to develop a paradigm for the Sunday service. There were to be those four practices present in every worship service: the reading and the preaching of the Word in the language of the people, the prayers in the language of the people, the Lord's Supper, and the sharing of goods, principally through alms-giving in the service.
Bucer and Calvin fleshed this out in a liturgy that they shared: a German liturgy that had been developed beginning in 1524 and a French translation of that liturgy. When John Calvin moved to Geneva in 1541, he took that liturgy with him and adapted it to the local culture in Geneva. It became the Geneva Liturgy, which is the heritage of the Presbyterian and Reformed world. 2
In order to further his agenda in the late 1530s and early 1540s, John Calvin published four books in French. Normally, you would write in Latin in his day so that everyone in Europe could read whatever you wrote, but he targeted his writing for the French people and particularly the unschooled French people. In 1541, he published a French translation of the second, 1539, edition of the Institutes. That same year, before returning to Geneva, his Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord Jesus Christ (Petit traicté de la saincte Cene du nostre Siegneur Jesus Christ) came off the presses in Geneva. This was followed in 1542 by La Forme des prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques (The Form of Ecclesiastical Prayers and Songs). In 1545, the Catéchisme de Genève (Geneva Catechism) appeared. 3
The interesting thing is that they printed a lot more of these books than they could ever sell in Strasbourg and Geneva. These books went west, were smuggled into France, and were promptly banned in Paris. One intriguing way in doing this smuggling-they have a sample here in the Meeter Center-is an Italian version of the Geneva Catechism that is bound in the back of an Italian novel so that the censors, when it went across the border, would flip through the pages and say, "Oh, this is a novel," and in would go the catechism along with it.
In spite of that good start, Presbyterians have lacked a liturgical center since the middle of the 17th century. In a hundred short years, the Bucer-Calvin tradition was set aside and a directory approach was adopted, the Westminster Directory for the Public Worship of God (1645). Presbyterians now have in their book of governing documents a current version of the Directory. You'll find this used in all the Presbyterian denominations in one form or another. They're the great-grandchildren of the Westminster Assembly.
In the United States, to fast forward just a little, Presbyterian practice was influenced very heavily by frontier revival worship, which led to an order where everything leads up to the sermon. The Lord's Supper is infrequently observed in most Presbyterian churches; quarterly is the usual pattern. A few bold souls have moved to monthly observance, and a very few to Calvin's ideal of weekly celebration. Prayer and alms for the poor have similarly fallen on lean times.
In many situations today, Presbyterian churches, particularly the conservative ones that I know the best, are almost indistinguishable liturgically from the Evangelical church down the street except for a more obvious Calvinistic theology-and probably a little more stuffy style than the Evangelical congregation. Presbyterian worship today is more likely to be centered on getting people to make a decision-either for conversion or discipleship-than on people gathering to exercise the means of grace: the Word, the sacraments, and prayer.
One way to put it is that Presbyterians seem to be recovering frontier revivalists, struggling to get over that approach to worship, but not knowing where to go. In the last thirty years, one of the trends has been to deepen the frontier tradition through front-door evangelism and combining the Sunday meeting with an evangelistic agenda in varying degrees; following the road that Charles Finney laid out with his "new measures" during the revivals of the 1840s. 4
There is a countermovement, for instance in the congregation where I worship. We use an adapted version of the Geneva Liturgy. We've reached back to Bucer and Calvin and adapted their liturgy for the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. It's recognizably a child of that tradition. We observe the Lord's Supper once a month. Most recently in their Communion sermons, the pastors have been exploring several major facets of the Lord's Supper. These sermons have enabled the congregation to meditate not only on the great sufferings of Jesus, but also on the spiritual nourishment that is in the Meal, or on the fellowship around the table that's in the Meal, and how sharing with the poor through the deacon's offering is part of the meaning.
Presbyterians are in the midst of two contrasting movements: either to deepen the frontier tradition or to return to the Geneva liturgical tradition.
Larry Sibley is a lecturer in practical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia and a visiting professor at Baltic Reformed Theological Seminary, Riga, Latvia. He is the author of Spiritual Disciplines: The Tasks of a Joyful Life and Worship: Discovering What Scripture Says, published by Shaw Books. E-mail him at lsibley [at] wts.edu.
1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536 (trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 113; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559 (trans. Ford Lewis Battles;, London: SCM, 1960), 4.17.44; see also his Commentary on Acts (trans. Henry Beveredge; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), 126-8.
2. John Calvin, The Form of Church Prayers and Hymns (1542). Pages 197-208 in Liturgies of the Western Church (ed. Bard Thompson; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).
3. John Calvin, Institution de la religion chrestienne (4 vols, ed. Jacques Pannier; Paris: Société les Belles Lettres, 1936); Petit traicté de la saincte Cene du nostre Siegneur Jesus Christ (CO 5.429-60, see list of abbreviations below); La Forme des prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques (OS 2. 1-58; facsimile ed. Pierre Pidoux; Kassel: Barenreiter, 1959); Catéchisme de l'Eglise de Genève (CO 6.1-160). English translations: Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord and only Saviour Jesus Christ (ed, J.K.S. Reid, Calvin: Theological Treatises , LCC 22; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 140-66; The Form of Ecclesiastical Prayers and Songs (ed, Bard Thompson; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Catechism of the Church of Geneva (ed, J.K.S. Reid, Calvin: Theological Treatises, LCC 22; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1954), 83-139.
Abbreviations:
CO Corpus Reformatorum. Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia. Edited by G. Baum, E. Cunitz and E. Reuss, et al. 59 vols. Braunschweig: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863-1900.
LCC Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953-
OS Johannis Calvini Opera Selecta. Edited by Petrus Barth and Guilelmus Niesel. 5 vols. Munich: C. Kaiser, 1926-52.
4. Gordon W. Lathrop, "New Pentecost or Joseph's Britches? Reflections on the History and Meaning of the Worship Ordo in the Megachurches," Worship 72 (1998): 521-38.
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