May 15, 2026

Following in John Calvin’s Footsteps Across Europe

By Clarke Morledge

John Calvin (1509-1564)

 

Aside from Martin Luther of Wittenberg, Germany, the name most associated with the Protestant Reformation is John Calvin, a Frenchman who lived most of his adult life in exile from his home country. Born in 1509, Calvin was a good bit younger than his other famous contemporary. When Luther appeared before Emperor Charles V to make his famous “Here I Stand” defense of his theology, John Calvin was only about 12 years old.

Calvin’s father had high hopes for his intellectually gifted son. He was able to send his son off to study at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when John Calvin was only about 13 years old. While Calvin was studying in the university, the humanist movement, with its cry of “ad fontes,” Latin for “back to the sources,” was in full swing.  Part of that movement was to go back to the original Greek text of the New Testament, which whetted Calvin’s appetite to learn more about what that crazy Augustinian monk in Wittenberg, Germany was making such a fuss about.

Many of his professors were opposed to Luther’s Reformation efforts. But as a student, John Calvin went the other way, being converted to Protestantism in 1534. The tension created a vocational crisis in this young man’s life. He was forced to flee Paris, in search of a new home and a livelihood.

In October, 2025, my wife and I took a trip on a river cruise down the Rhine River.  We got to visit several of the cities to which Calvin fled, including Basel, Switzerland and Strasbourg, France. We even made it to Paris, where the young Calvin first became exposed to the ideas of the Reformation.

Basel Cathedral, in Basel Switzerland, home to the Reformation movement in this Swiss city. Over the years, many leading Protestant figures attended this church, including Karl Barth and John Calvin. Calvin first came to Basel to flee the authorities in Paris, who were determined to wipe out the Protestant movement in France. My photo from October, 2025.

 

What we did not have time to do was visit where John Calvin spent most of his life, as a pastor in the Swiss city of Geneva. While Calvin was on the run from French authorities bent on silencing the Reformation in France, he made it to Geneva where he was only planning to spend one night, before making his way elsewhere.  But when a fellow Protestant serving as pastor in Geneva, Guillaume Farel, discovered that the brilliant young Calvin was in town, he made his way straight over to see the Frenchman. That evening proved to be a turning point in Calvin’s life.

Prior to traveling to Geneva, John Calvin originally intended to live in Strasbourg, wanting to live a quiet life there, pursuing his intellectual studies. Calvin had spent some time in Italy, gathering together some material related to his intellectual interests. So when Calvin was merely passing through Geneva for the night, in order to avoid a path through a nearby military conflict, the thought of staying in Geneva was far from his mind.

But Farel had rushed over and confronted Calvin, threatening him with the very judgment of God, pleading with Calvin to stay in Geneva and help to establish the Reformation there in that city. Shocked by Farel’s threats, Calvin canceled his plans to go to Strasbourg, and he stayed in Geneva, where he learned to become a pastor, a shepherd caring for the souls of church goers under his care.

It was a fateful decision. Aside from a brief move a few years later to Strasbourg, Calvin spent the rest of his life in Geneva, tending his spiritual flock, and building what would become a great training ground for Reformation thinkers, who spread many of Calvin’s ideas and teachings all throughout Europe.

But despite his vocation as a pastor in Geneva, Calvin managed to find the time and energy to pursue his most well-known intellectual interest of all, a literary effort to try to convince his fellow Frenchmen of the truth of the Protestant Reformation understanding of the Gospel. According to church historian Bruce Gordon, the Institutes of the Christian Religion first saw the light of day in 1536 as a Latin text. In the Institutes, Calvin addressed his work to the King of France, pleading the cause of the Reformation.

Over the decades, Calvin would revise the Institutes several times, with the final version being published (still) in Latin in 1559. Various revisions by Calvin were then translated by him into French, to try to reach his fellow countrymen. By then, after having several decades as an active pastor, preaching, counseling people, performing baptisms and funerals, he was able to combine his pastoral sensitivities with his crisp theological acumen to produce perhaps the single most influential written work to come out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation movement.

Bruce Gordon has written a wonderful book, just a bit over 200 pages, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography, which looks at the history and influence of Calvin’s most well-known work.  Gordon’s book is part of the “Lives of Great Religious Books” series, which focuses on the history and influence of numerous books like these, with brief summaries of the author’s life, along with greater attention to how such books have been received down the ages.

 

Calvin in Basel Switzerland: The First Draft of the Institutes 

Before Calvin made his fateful stop in Geneva, Switzerland, he spent some time in Basel, Switzerland, where he worked on that first draft of the Institutes. He most probably attended the city church there, the Basel Cathedral, which had become aligned with the Protestant movement over the previous decade.

As I stepped inside that cathedral, I tried to imagine what it might have been like for Calvin to seek spiritual refuge there in Basel, knowing that he may never be able to return to his native France. Nestled near the borders of France, Germany, and Switzerland, along the Rhine River, Basel has a special place in the history of the Christian movement.

Basel has had numerous connections to the Reformation movement over the years. This was the city where Huldrych Zwingli, the fiery Swiss preacher of Zurich, Switzerland had become first exposed to the ideas of Desiderius Erasmus and the humanist movement, as a college student. Erasmus was the Catholic scholar who produced the first major revision of the New Testament Greek text, based largely on newly discovered ancient manuscripts received from Eastern Orthodox scholars who had fled Constantinople, after it had been captured by the Turks in 1453. Erasmus’ work on the Greek New Testament was the intellectual fire which lit Martin Luther’s imagination, in his conflict with the Pope.

Erasmus himself spent his later years in Basel, though he remained a committed Roman Catholic his whole life. As a gesture of peace and reconciliation towards the Protestants, Erasmus was buried in the Basel Cathedral.

Fast forwarding to the 20th century, the great Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, spent most of his adult years in Basel, writing his Church Dogmatics, which in many ways mirrors the contribution Calvin gave to Christian readers, through the Institutes.

 

Calvin in Strasbourg, France, Where He Found His Wife

Going down the Rhine River from Basel, you eventually pass by the city of Strasbourg, on the border between France and Germany. Calvin’s first few years in Geneva had been pretty rocky. At one point, the city council became so infuriated with Calvin’s Reformation ideas that they kicked him out of the city. Calvin decided to join up with his friend Martin Bucer, who was serving as a pastor in Strasbourg. Calvin found a job as a pastor at Saint Nicholas Church, on the outskirts of the old city of Strasbourg.

Most of his parishioners were Protestant refugees from France, fleeing persecution there. Instead of shunning those who sought to escape state-sponsored violence, Calvin welcomed these sojourners who sought sanctuary from the French government. Some of these Protestants were actually involved in the more radical end of the Reformation movement, among the Anabaptists, which had its start in Zwingli’s church in Zurich.

In the early 20th century, Albert Schweitzer preached in Saint Nicholas Church, in Strasbourg, the same church the 16th century Protestant Reformer, John Calvin, preached in a few hundred years before. Calvin’s flock was made up of Protestant refugees fleeing religious persecution in France.

 

However, despite the hardships in Strasbourg, and being unable to return to both Paris and Geneva, Calvin’s life was set on a new course…. at least temporarily. One of those Anabaptists he encountered eventually cast aside those radical beliefs, and became his wife, Idelette de Bure.

Idelette had been recently widowed, leaving her with two children. Martin Bucer proved to be the matchmaker to put her and John Calvin together as a couple, and Bucer presided over the marriage in his home. Though Idelette bore Calvin several children in their marriage, none of those children survived beyond infancy. When the city council in Geneva decided to call John Calvin back to Geneva to become the city pastor again, Calvin came back with a ready made family.

Idelette eventually died before John Calvin did, and not long after she died, he wrote to his friend Pierre Viret:

I have been bereaved of the best companion of my life, of one who, had it been so ordered, would not only have been the willing sharer of my indigence, but even of my death. During her life she was the faithful helper of my ministry.

It was in those waning years in Geneva when Calvin put the final touches on the Institutes of the Christian Religion, with a last revision. Calvin died about 5 years later in 1564.

Our last stop in Europe at the very end of our trip along the Rhine River was after taking a bus ride to the city of Paris, where Calvin studied there as a young man at the Sorbonne.

The Sorbonne in Paris, part of the University system where John Calvin studied law and eventually became exposed to the ideas of the Protestant Reformation.

 

The Legacy of Calvin’s Institutes

Debates over Calvin’s legacy continue to generate ongoing discussion among today’s evangelical Christians. However, there is still a vigorous scholarly debate as whether or not John Calvin was even a “Calvinist.” Gordon admits this as much in observing that “Calvin never saw a tulip in his life” (Gordon, p. 9).

What is typically known as “Calvinism” today is a product of theological debates from the 17th century in the Netherlands, which eventually gave us the well-known T.U.L.I.P. acronym for the “five points” of Calvinism.  Calvin was already dead decades before Jacob Arminius, a theologian in the Netherlands, became the center of the controversy regarding “Calvinism.” Gordon reports that the actual “T.U.L.I.P” acronym itself, standing for “total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints,” entered the theological discussion much later, with the writings of  the Presbyterian theologian, Lorraine Boettner, in the early 20th century (Gordon, p. 154). John Calvin is probably most well known for his support for the doctrine of predestination, even though back in the 16th century this was only a minor theme in the Institutes.

Calvin’s Institutes were less about predestination and more about offering a defense of the Reformation, with an original preface pleading with the King of France to hear his case for Protestantism, and stop the persecution of Protestants. Calvin’s work evolved over the years to become more of a training manual for preachers, urging them to have a right view of “the word of God and rightful administration of the sacraments.”

By the time Calvin published the last version of the Institutes in 1559, his work took on the framework of the Apostles Creed, discussing theological matters ranging from the doctrine of creation to the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. Towards the end of the Institutes, Calvin addressed the topic of the relations between church and state, filled with ideas that eventually became incorporated into the Constitution of the United States, centuries later, which advocated for the freedom of religion.

Nevertheless, Bruce Gordon takes the position that Calvin’s Institutes not only upholds the doctrine of predestination, in the sense of God having “the card deck stacked in the believer’s favor,” an image I picked up in seminary, the Institutes also adheres to the concept of double predestination. Other reformers in Calvin’s day, like the Lutheran Philip Melanchthon and Huldrych Zwingli’s successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, accepted the former sense of predestination, but not the latter (Gordon, p. 26).

In double predestination, not only is the true Christian believer predestined to be saved, the first sense of predestination, those who are not true believers are predestined to be eternally separated from God. From a Scriptural perspective, what makes this so controversial is that the terminology of predestination is used in the Bible only in the former sense, and not the latter.  However, theologically and philosophically, it makes sense to some that if predestination works one way, it should also work the other way as well. The problem with the Institutes (see chapter 21) is that it is not altogether clear how Calvin connects the idea of predestination of the elect with the fate of the permanently lost. Does Calvin’s view of predestination assume a kind of symmetry, or asymmetry with regard to the eternal state, and what does that all mean?

While scholars debate over what Calvin himself really believed, it is quite clear that many of Calvin’s followers indeed have subscribed to the concept of double predestination. For even if Calvin was not a full-on advocate for double-predestination, many of Calvin’s contemporaries thought he was, and Calvin surely opened the door for many of his followers to embrace such a doctrine.

Gordon argues that Calvin picked up this idea for double predestination from his reading of Romans 9, particularly from the line in Romans 9:13: “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated,” though scholars debate whether or not Calvin interpreted the meaning of this correctly (Gordon, p.27). If indeed Calvin did embrace a full-on double predestination doctrine, it would help to explain why a number of scholars today, including the vocal, controversial, and strident David Bentley Hart views Calvin with such moral disgust (as in this New York Times interview from April 2026).

Bruce Gordon acknowledges that Calvin’s holding to the first sense of predestination had a positive pastoral motive behind it. In medieval Catholic scholastic theology, there was always some insecurity about the eternal fate of someone who claimed to be a Christian. For while God would certainly find a way to purge venial sins from the soul of the Christian through purgatory, a failure to confess a mortal sin in this life was altogether a different matter. An unconfessed mortal sin might indeed lead someone who was otherwise a faithful churchgoer to effectively lose their promise of salvation. How does one really know if their sins have been properly and fully confessed before taking their dying breath, such that they would avoid eternal separation from God?

Calvin believed that this anxiety-prone medieval theology undermined the concept of being saved by faith, and faith alone, and salvation by grace, and grace alone. Calvin instead held that to put the decision for one’s salvation in the hidden will of God provided a sense of comfort for the believer, granting an aspect of assurance regarding one’s saving faith. In Calvin’s view, the status of the Christian believer before God belongs in God’s hands, and not our own. Calvin fully believed that for genuine Christians “in turning to Christ, the people behold God’s love as in a mirror“ (Gordon, p. 27).

For Calvin’s detractors however, even among his fellow Protestant Reformers, Calvin’s association with double predestination brought shock and disdain. Gordon writes:

“For Calvin, that teaching was the message of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, but for his numerous opponents it was an appalling idea that made God the author of sin. Calvin’s God— they wrote, preached, and taught— was a capricious tyrant who created women and men in order to destroy them” (Gordon, p. 33).

Whether or not Gordon’s assessment is correct, Calvin’s reputation has often been thought of in this way.

Regardless as to how double predestination fits into Calvin’s own thinking, Calvin sought to hold the tension between the sovereignty of God and human responsibility together, though awkward that may sound to his readers, if not entirely despicable to his critics.  Elsewhere Gordon says:

One cannot blame God for sin, a point on which Calvin was adamant, though he was frequently attacked by detractors who believed that his arguments inevitably led to God as the author of evil. Calvin repeatedly repudiated that charge, pounding his fist on desk and pulpit, declaring that humans alone are responsible for their fallen state. (Gordon, p. 39).

For Calvin, the key to making sense of this tension is by emphasizing the role of conscience in making a person aware of their own rebellion against God. The Institutes make it a point that not only does the Bible help us know who God is, the Bible also helps us to know ourselves. Humans are discontent with themselves because they do not know themselves. The Christian faith enables the believer to truly know who they truly are, and that truth is the most liberating and exhilarating benefit of seeking after Christ.

The process of truly knowing ourselves is bound up in Calvin’s understanding of our mysterious union with Christ, as Christians. While the human proclivity towards sin is more treacherous than most people can ever imagine, the joys of knowing ourselves more and more as we learn to know more about God are priceless, beautiful, and beyond all measure.

Calvin believed with every fiber of his being that God’s goodness is so pervasive it is spoken in our ears and stands before our eyes even when we are neither listening nor looking (Gordon, p. 47).

This was the heart of Calvin’s message about our mystical union with Christ. If there was one primary takeaway that Calvin intended with the Institutes, it was this grand and beautiful vision of being one with Christ…. not predestination.

 

Haidplatz. In this building, off of this city square, the Diet of Regensburg was held in 1541. John Calvin attended a Colloquy (or “Diet”) here in 1541, where fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon sat down with Roman Catholic scholar Johann Eck, to see if some kind of resolution could be found to reconcile the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics.  While some progress was made, the participants found the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper to be the primary issue that could not be resolved. This meeting at Regensburg was probably the best opportunity for reconciliation, which was ultimately lost. .. I took this photo back in October, 2022, on a different trip to Europe.

 

The Influence of the Institutes Over the Centuries

After Calvin’s death, the Institutes established his reputation as perhaps the greatest of the Reformed authors of the 16th century. Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, became the primary interpreter for Calvin.

In the 17th century, Calvin and his Institutes became synonymous with the Reformed faith. Detractors of Calvin generally depicted him as a monster, the one most responsible for the cruel death of the anti-Trinitarian heretic, Michael Servetus, at the hands of civil authorities in Geneva. Calvin’s defenders, particularly in England, viewed as the father of the Puritan movement, hoping to purify the Church of England of papist bad habits and bad theology. Others like the Dutch theologian, Jacob Arminius, had a more cautious appreciation of Calvin’s legacy. I am confident that the earliest Puritans to settle in the American colonies carried copies of the Institutes with them.

By the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, Calvin’s emphasis on “true religion” in the Institutes became sidelined by a new generations of thinkers who began to view Christianity as merely one religion among many others. Faith founded upon reason superseded faith founded upon revelation. When Jean- Jacques Rousseau came to Geneva and published his Emile in 1762, Rousseau publicly denied original sin and the doctrine of the Trinity. Church leaders in Geneva were no longer required to adhere to doctrinal formulations once championed by Geneva’s most well-known preacher, John Calvin.

However, as Bruce Gordon reports, more moderate voices emerged making a positive appeal to Calvin’s Institutes as a source for challenging traditional norms. In the 18th century, Jacobus Capitein, the first African to study the Calvinist theology, found in the writings of Calvin a Christian basis for undermining the morality of slavery. Later in the 20th century, South African Calvinist Allan Boesak found a theological basis in Calvin for the cause of liberation against apartheid (Gordon, pp. 75ff). Boesak had been initially horrified by Calvin, thinking him to be an apologist for racial-based slavery. Yet after making a careful re-reading of the Institutes, Boesak changed his mind about Calvin, seeing in the Frenchman’s work the theological resources necessary to completely dismantle the South African regime of apartheid (Gordon, pp. 166). Again, we see how a fresh look at Calvin has helped theologians more recently make a distinction between the original Calvin and the “Calvinism” of later generations which took the legacy of Calvin in wrong directions.

In America, the legacy of the Institutes divided Protestant Christians in a complicated way. The great philosopher/theologian Jonathan Edwards, who knew the Institutes well, cited Calvin as an authority, but also noted that he did not always agree with the famous Genevan preacher. John and Charles Wesley found much in the Institutes regarding the doctrine of election to be revolting. Yet John Wesley appealed to the Institutes for a sound doctrine of justification. John wrote:

“I think on Justification just as I have done any time these seven-and-twenty years, and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him an hair’s breadth” (from a journal entry by John Wesley, quoted in Gordon, p. 84).

Ironically, Bruce Gordon argues that in the 19th century, the most influential reclamation of Calvin’s theology as put forth in the Institutes came from none other than Fredrich Schleiermacher, the father of Protestant liberalism. The fact that the Institutes could inspire both the conservative evangelicalism of a Jonathan Edwards and the Protestant liberalism of a Fredrich Schleiermacher illustrates just how diverse theological traditions find their home in the Institutes.

As Protestant liberalism in the late 19th century began to break the hegemony of the earlier conservative evangelical movement in the United States, the Princeton theologian of the early 20th century, Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, championed a revival of Calvin’s theology in a conservative effort to thwart the cancer of pervasive theological liberalism taking over the church.

Though not as conservative as Warfield, back in Europe, theologians like Karl Barth and Emil Bruner sought to revive Calvin’s theology for the modern world, in an answer to the growing decline of evangelical faith in Europe, precipitated by the rise of historical criticism, particularly in German liberal Protestantism. Gordon quotes from a 1962 Time magazine article, where Barth said:

“Calvin is in Heaven and has had time to ponder where he went wrong in his teachings. Doubtless he is pleased that I am setting him aright” (Gordon, p. 133).

The famous dispute concerning natural theology between Barth and Brunner revolved around how to best interpret Calvin’s Institutes. Dutch theologians who stood somewhere in between Warfield and Barth, such as the elder statesman Abraham Kuyper and his successor, Herman Bavinck, pioneered a kind of Neo-Calvinism based on the Institutes.

Gordon quotes from Bavinck that in the Institutes Calvin expressed “clear, deep and harmonious insight into Christian truth [such] as to render any subsequent modification unnecessary” (Gordon, p. 129).  Bavinck believed that John Calvin was the model pastor/theologian that any truly reformed evangelical pastor/theologian should seek to emulate. Bavinck himself was largely unknown in America, up until the last 25 years or so, when his Dutch works were finally translated into English, inspiring contemporary evangelical thinkers, such as the late Tim Keller.

 

The newly restored Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris, France.  John Calvin most likely worshipped in this church, near the Sorbonne, where he studied law in Paris. This photo shows the remarkable job restorers made after the recent tragic fire nearly destroyed this iconic landmark in Paris.

 

Calvin’s Influence Today

The problem of evil remains perhaps one of the most troubling questions which Christian apologetics have to deal with, in a world today beset by wars and other conflicts that were basically unthinkable in certain quarters a generation ago. John Calvin had his own solution to the problem of evil, but not every Christian finds the theology associated with his name satisfying as it was in 16th century Geneva, Switzerland.

For sure, Calvin’s legacy is still a hotly debated topic these days. Even AI creators on YouTube are writing heavy-metal/rap songs about Calvin the controversialist:

On the one side, the Institutes remains perhaps the most influential theological work articulating the basic ideas of the Protestant Reformation, particularly among today’s Protestant evangelicals. There are still some who view any criticism of Calvin as an attack on the very Christian Gospel itself.

On the other side are critics like David Bentley Hart, briefly mentioned above, the eminent and erudite Eastern Orthodox theologian, who has become perhaps the world’s most outspoken intellectual advocate for a Christian doctrine of universalism. Hart routinely characterizes John Calvin as perhaps the worst of all heretics, lumping Calvin’s theology in with the cancer of Gnosticism, the second century Christian heresy which sought to derail the orthodox faith of the early church.

Both of these views of Calvin are extremes, which at a minimum are unhelpful, if not outright distorting. I view myself as advocate of a “reformed” theology, but I would be careful to use a little “r” when speaking of being “reformed,” as opposed to a capital “R” as in “Reformed,” which seems to be more along the lines of an 18th century Jonathan Edwards approach to being “Reformed”  (Yet even Edwards offered some modest critique of Calvin). Put in contemporary terms, I am more like a little “r” “reformed” advocate, like the late Tim Keller, and less a capital “R” “Reformed” advocate, such as what I see in John Piper.

In my view, John Calvin got his view of the sacraments, particularly regarding the Lord’s Supper, about as correct as you can get. Calvin’s idea that we are saved by faith alone, but that faith is never alone; that is, genuine faith is always accompanied with good works, hits the mark as well.

In fact, aside from Calvin’s particular emphasis on our mystical union with Christ, the other broadly predominant themes in the Institutes includes his doctrine on the sacraments, particularly on the Lord’s Supper, and the work of the Holy Spirit. One does not need to be a “Calvinist” to appreciate Calvin’s very practical theology aligned with these themes. Interestingly, some of the most excited supporters of John Calvin today are evangelical baptists, who completely disagree with Calvin on the topic of infant baptism, which he firmly supported!

Calvin is also one of greatest and most influential Christian apologists for capitalism. We have Calvin to thank for his reading of the usury texts in the Bible, where the idea of lending money to others, as long as the interest charged is not excessive, is within the permissible ethical framework of the Bible. It is hard to imagine how the modern banking system which has enabled countless millions to obtain affordable housing through mortgages would have been possible apart from Calvin’s view of lending money at modest interest rates. In other words, if you own a house by possessing a mortgage, you might want to thank John Calvin for enabling that to happen.

My greatest gratitude for Calvin comes from his theory of divine accommodation, whereby in Holy Scripture, God condescends to us by speaking at our level. As Calvin writes in the Institutes (1.13.1):

“Who even of slight intelligence does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, God is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us? Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.”

This idea of divine accommodation often gets misunderstood, but positively and rightly understood, it helps us parse through what the Bible actually teaches versus the particular cultural and human limitations of the author. Instead of being a hindrance, the sum of the particular cultural and human limitations of each writer of Sacred Scripture are used by God to be the vehicle by which we come to know God’s truth.

Most importantly, Calvin’s insistence on the sovereignty of God, that God knows better than what we think we know, is perhaps his most influential contribution to Christian theology. Calvin obviously was not the first to think of this, but his name in church history is often tightly linked with the doctrine of God’s “hidden decree.”

For if I was given the task of writing the Bible, there are plenty of things I would put in differently than what we find in the Bible. But the Bible is the authoritative book the sovereign God has given us, so I need to learn to trust that God knows what he is doing with the Bible, particularly when I am not so sure about some of the things I read about in the Bible.

God’s providential care over us in our world is meant to provide us comfort, when things do not always make sense to us. This can be applied any number of issues any Christian can run into in living the Christian life; whether it be struggling with some type of difficult teaching we read in the Bible, or the question of why we or someone else we care for is suffering, or anything having to do with the vexing problem of evil. I can trust that the sovereign God of the universe knows what he is doing, even when I am befuddled about my own circumstances. More than any other theologian, I have Calvin to thank for this insight.

On the other hand, I am not sure yet that Calvin got his view of penal substitutionary atonement right (at least Calvin’s critics think he is wrong here), something that I am trying to work out for myself this year. Furthermore, if Bruce Gordon is right and the Institutes does teach a form of double predestination, then I am not on board with Calvin on this. But I am not completely convinced that Calvin was really a “Calvinist” as much as Gordon suggests he was (I am not the only one who thinks this way …I have good company).

Either way, Bruce Gordon’s wonderful book on the Institutes maps out the history of how the Institutes has influenced the Christian movement, for both good and for ill. My trip last year visiting several of the cities where Calvin lived has served as a helpful reminder of the mark Calvin’s influence has made on the Christian church.

 

You probably know what I am standing in front of!!  The seeds of Calvin’s conversion to Christ were germinated in this city when Calvin was a student.

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May 1, 2026

The Russian Revolution: A New History … Some Reflections Upon Visiting Europe

By Clarke Morledge

The Cathedral of Trier, Germany, with its mix of Gothic and Baroque architectures, built with bricks dating back to the Roman era. A grand symbol of Christianity which towered over the home of Karl Marx’s youth, just a few blocks away.

 

From the Christianity Along the Rhine blog series….

My elderly Scottish friend was looking a bit agitated, after she came walking back from viewing the statue of the (in)famous author of The Communist Manifesto…

My wife and I were waiting for our bus to pick us up after taking a walking tour of Trier, Germany. It was our last stop on our week-long cruise down the Rhine River, in October of 2025, which included an extra day or so traveling up the Moselle River, which flows into the Rhine. Trier is located up the Moselle River, close to the border with Luxembourg.

Trier is a very ancient city, going back to Roman times. Emperor Constantine, of the 4th century, spent a good bit of time there. Since Constantine, the influence of Christianity can be felt in Trier, with several large churches and a cathedral rising prominently above the city. As we left the plaza where the city cathedral was, we made our way to find our bus near the Porta Nigra, a wonderfully well preserved Roman gate to the old city.

While waiting for the bus, our tour guide pointed out an unassuming storefront with what looked like an apartment above it. Our tour guide told us that Karl Marx had lived in this apartment in the 19th century, until he was about 17 years old.

Who would have thought that one of the greatest masterminds of social change in the modern era grew up above a storefront like this one….

 

Karl Marx’ childhood home in Trier, Germany. Across the street from Porta Nigra, one of most well preserved architectural artifacts dating back to the Roman era.

 

Karl Marx infamously remarked that “religion was the opiate of the masses.” I do wonder if Marx’s experience living in Trier, with its massive cathedral only a few blocks away, had influenced him somehow to have such a negative view of Christianity. Marx’s parents were nominally Jewish when they grew up, but Marx’s father converted to Lutheranism just before young Karl’s birth, not because the father had a genuine faith experience, but rather because it allowed the father to retain his career as a lawyer in a predominantly Christian city.

Just down the street from Porta Nigra, I spotted an interesting statue about a block away. We had about fifteen minutes before our bus would arrive, so I went to check out this statue.

I passed a member of our group walking back from the statue, a sweet older lady from Scotland. My wife and I enjoyed several dinners together on our Viking longship with this lady and her Scottish husband during our week together on the Rhine River.

Her pace was brisk as I stopped her to ask about the statue. She told me that it was a statue of Karl Marx, but once she saw it, she immediately lost interest. Quickly, she took up her pace again, swiftly making her way back to wait for the bus. Clearly, her speech was dripping with disdain for the controversial intellectual, whose theories of economics and religion in the 19th century plunged the 20th century world of Europe into decades of chaos and the turmoil of the Cold War. Obviously, my Scottish friend lived through several of those decades as the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe were at odds with one another.

While Karl Marx never lived to fully realize his dreams of a utopian society free from the supposed shackles of Christianity, he had his followers. The most significant figure was the Russian political theorist Vladimir Lenin, the chief architect of the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia was really where the communist social experiment unfolded for the first time. But the seeds of the Russian revolution were germinated in coffee shops, universities, factories, newspaper printing shops, and apartments all over Europe in the era before the Great War (World War One).

A quick glance at Lenin’s biography indicates that he traveled extensively across Europe, outside of the watchful eye of the Russian government. London, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, and Bern, Switzerland were all cities where Lenin developed his ideas for radical social change, based on his reading of Karl Marx’s work. Having spent several weeks in Europe in October, 2025, it gave me an opportunity to think about how the legacy of Marxist/Leninist ideology had its beginnings.

Statue of Karl Marx in Trier, Germany, the city of Marx’s youth. The statue remains as a testimony to the secularization in recent centuries of Europe, which was once the heart of the Christian world.

 

Historian Sean McMeekin wrote The Russian Revolution: A New History, published on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in 2017, chronicles the story of the revolution, where Lenin had taken the theories of Marx and sought to put them into practice, towards the end of World War One. The book had come recommended to me by an evangelical Christian historian, Thomas Kidd. After visiting Trier, and walking around Marx’s statue there, I decided it was time to learn about the Marx-Lenin legacy.

The story of the book is a wild ride through the history of Europe a little over a hundred years ago. By the late 19th century, modern revolutions against traditional monarchical governments had shaken up Europe. The tsarist kingdom of Russia was no exception. A young Vladimir Lenin had grown up witnessing the conflict for himself.

Lennin’s older brother had joined a revolutionary group while studying at university. This older brother became involved in a plot to assassinate the tsar, but the plot was foiled before the attack could take place. Lenin’s brother was executed for this act of treason in 1887. Lenin would never forgive the tsarist government for killing his elder brother.

When Lenin himself went to university, he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, and it changed his life. By the last decade of the 19th century, and after recently getting married, Lenin had been arrested and sentenced to exile in Siberia. The tsarist government had given him a light sentence, as they did not view Lenin as being a serious threat, so Lenin was given a large measure of freedom during his exile. After serving his sentence, Lenin left Russia to wander around Europe. In city after city, Lenin would try to find other like-minded revolutionaries who had read Karl Marx’ writings, hoping to inspire them to come up with plans to achieve their utopian goals.

The Bloody Sunday massacre of starving Russian peasants by the tsar’s army in 1905 sparked a whole series of events which forced the tsar to allow for some reforms. Lenin thought these reforms were not enough, being completely sold on a vision of radical reform, based on violent overthrow of the government. Lenin moved back and forth, in and out of Russia, looking for an opportunity to put his plans into action.

Finally, the crisis of World War One served as the eventual opportunity to realize his dreams of a utopian world. Lenin was a brilliant strategist, and his Bolshevik party established the Soviet government. Part of Lenin’s apocalyptic vision was that once Russia would embrace communism that the rest of war torn Europe would follow suit shortly thereafter. While the full apocalyptic vision of Lenin was never realized, he did manage to trigger an intense civil war, with a bloody end leaving his revolutionary government with absolute power.

Porta Nigra is one the best preserved Roman gate to the city of Trier, Germany. The gate dates back to 170 CE, before Christianity had thoroughly spread across the Roman Empire. I took this photo from the sidewalk in front of Karl Marx’s boyhood home (at least for a time), an apartment above a retail shop.

 

McMeekin takes the reader on the journey, with all of its twists and turns. While the book never dives too deeply into the theological beliefs of the leading figures of the Bolshevik Revolution, including Lenin, it does make one think how such an ideological vision of a political utopia, bent on trying to destroy Christianity, could have wrecked so much havoc on the world of the 20th century. The main drawback of McMeekin’s work is that he focuses primarily on secular and political matters, without going enough into the reasons why Bolsheviks like Lenin were motivated to do what they did.

The big takeaway from McMeekin’s work I got was that Lenin managed to pull off a massively successful bait-and-switch tactic to obtain power in Russia. World War One was not going so well, forcing Tsar Nicholas to abdicate his throne in the spring of 1917. But the Russian liberals who succeeded Nicholas did not fair much better, and Lenin seized the opportunity culminating in the October Revolution later that year. Lenin campaigned on a peace platform for getting Russia out of the war with Germany, only to focus his energies on fighting an intense civil war, between the Red and White Russian armies, all in the name of Marxist ideology. The Reds ultimately won, but at a terrible cost. Many more Russians died during the Russian civil war than during the war with Germany, mostly due to disease and starvation.

As I stood staring at that statue of Karl Marx in Trier, Germany, it made me wonder if Marx ever really imagined that his theories of political utopia would lead to the deaths of millions of people. At one point during the Bolshevik rise to absolute power, the new government was so short of cash that gangs of Bolshevik thugs raided and looted Russian Orthodox churches, looking for treasures of chalices and artwork that could be sold on the black market, murdering devout Christians who stood in their way. McMeekin puts the number of deaths related to the Russian revolution at over 20 million people.

I never made it to Russia when my wife and I went to Europe in October, 2025…. probably could not even get there now, even if I wanted to. Much has changed since the late 1980’s collapse of the Soviet Union, which was built upon the ideologies of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, but Russia’s place in the world today has been severely complicated by its military invasion of the Ukraine. It makes me wonder how much the Marx-Lenin legacy still lingers on in Putin’s Russia.

After finishing Sean McMeekin’s book, The Russian Revolution: A New History, I fully understood why my older lady friend from Scotland, whom my wife and I met on our river cruise down the Rhine River, never wanted to learn any more about Marx’s statue once she spotted it. Now I know why she looked so agitated, as she briskly walked away from viewing Marx’s statue. As someone living in Europe, in the shadow of the 20th century conflict resulting from the terror introduced by Marxist-Leninist ideologies, she knew enough already.

 

The Russian Revolution: A New History, by Sean McMeekin.

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April 17, 2026

Martin Bucer: The Failed Protestant Peacemaker of Strasbourg

By Clarke Morledge

From the Christianity along the Rhine travel blog series….

Being a peacemaker is not easy. While the current conflict with Iran absorbs the headlines, it overshadows another long standing conflict: Just ask President Donald Trump, who since the beginning of his presidency has been trying to find a peaceful solution to the Russia/Ukraine conflict for well over a year.

Such was also the case in the 16th century in Europe, when theological giants, like Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Pope, spread their influence across the land. With the exception the Holy Roman Emperor himself (Charles V), the Pope was the most prominent leader in Western Europe, whereas Luther was a seminary professor, with a sharp wit and stinging rhetoric, who knew how to use the printing press, the rough equivalent to today’s social media platforms on the Internet. The Reformation did not only result in a split within the medieval Catholic church, it also divided Protestants trying to forge a united movement in attempts to reform that medieval Catholic church.

The Protestant Reformation was not simply a theological, religious dispute. It had far reaching ramifications impacting kings, princes, and emperors, and the millions of subjects who served them. Within a century after Luther, the religious conflicts of the 16th century became intertwined with political conflicts, resulting in the Thirty Years War, where roughly one out of four Europeans died due to violence and (mostly) disease spread by the war.

Into the mix was another Protestant Reformer from Germany, Martin Bucer, who was just a few years younger than Luther, a man that most Christians have probably never heard of. Unlike Luther, Bucer was more cautious and reserved. Yet Bucer became a leading voice among the Protestants, trying to forge a “third way” through various theological conflicts, particularly in the city of Strasbourg, along the Rhine River, bordering France and Germany.

Back in October of 2025, my wife and I went on a river cruise on the Rhine River, and we spent a day in Strasbourg. I got to visit some of the sites where Martin Bucer lived much of his life.

In front of Martin Bucer’s home in Strasbourg, France. It was in this home where Bucer officiated the marriage between John Calvin and Idelette de Bure, a former Anabaptist. Calvin had been forced out of Geneva, Switzerland for several years. Bucer helped to arrange for his friend Calvin to move to Strasbourg, to get a job as a pastor for French Protestant refugees living in the city. It was a bit of a cloudy day in Strasbourg, when I took this photo in October, 2025.

 

Martin Bucer Becomes a Protestant

Not much is known about Martin Bucer’s early life. Born in 1491, Bucer joined the Dominican order perhaps in his late teenage years, and ended up studying theology in Heidelberg in 1515. But this was the era when the humanism of Desiderius Erasmus came to the foreground, particularly with Erasmus’ pivotal Greek New Testament, which helped inspire Martin Luther in Wittenberg, Germany to post his famous Ninety-Five Theses, reportedly on the Wittenberg church door.

Bucer’s family had encouraged him to join the Dominicans, which he did, but he was never wholly enthusiastic about it. Bucer heard Martin Luther in a disputation at Heidelberg, and that changed his life. Bucer’s interest in the humanism of Erasmus pretty much sealed his fate with the Dominicans, and he began the painful process of trying to be released from his monastic vows. He then sought to find some gameful employment outside of his world of being a Dominican monk. In 1522, Bucer married a nun, Elizabeth, who was forced out of her monastic order, for breaking off her celibacy vow. The penniless couple eventually made their way to Strasbourg, along the Rhine River.

Strasbourg

Ah, let me tell you about Strasbourg.

Strasbourg is a fascinating city, having gone back and forth between German and French control, over the centuries. They call it the “Alsace” region of France, the land “in-between,” I was told, or the land of a “foreign domain.”  Because of its unique position sandwiched between Roman Catholic France and Lutheran Germany, Strasbourg played a pivotal role in the Reformation controversy of the 16th century.

With a newly pregnant wife, Bucer and his family were forced to move in with his parents until he could find a job. At that point, Bucer was not unlike a typical twenty-something today, still living on mom and dad’s car insurance and cell phone plan. At first, Bucer offered to be a tutor for students interested in the humanism of Erasmus. That helped to feed his family, but it still was not enough. He was finally able to secure a decent job as a chaplain, getting out on his own, spending most of his years in Strasbourg.

Unfortunately for Bucer, he wrote a book defending the Reformation instigated by Luther, and his intellectual hero, Erasmus, heard of this and rejected Bucer’s thesis. Erasmus wanted reform within the medieval church, but he thought Bucer and Luther had gone too far in their criticisms of Rome.

Anabaptists, fleeing persecution in both Roman Catholic and Reformation controlled areas of Europe, soon made their way to Strasbourg, and so Bucer found himself fighting a multi-sided theological and intellectual war, with Roman Catholics on one side and the Anabaptists on the other. Yet Bucer was optimistic, hopeful that dialogue with such factions would eventually yield some peace, without compromising core convictions. In the midst of this, Bucer sought to find an irenic approach which could bridge the differences between these various theological camps.

Bucer was also hopeful that a rift between the Swiss Zurich reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, and the German Wittenberg reformer, Martin Luther, could be healed at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529, regarding the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. However, Luther believed that Bucer was just as intransigent and wrong-headed as Zwingli regarding the Eucharist, and reconciliation was not achieved.

However, despite this failure at Marburg, it did not keep Bucer from trying to be a peacemaker. Bucer traveled across the German-speaking land meeting with different followers of Luther and Zwingli, looking for areas where different parties could find some common ground, and even resolving conflict with Rome. Bucer’s list of friends reads like a “Who’s Who” of the Reformation.

Street in the old part of Strasbourg. Martin Bucer lived in a house on the left hand side of this street (just to the left of where the two people on the street are walking). To keep automobile traffic out of the old part of the city, during certain times of the day, a column is raised and lowered to keep vehicles out so that tourists like myself could wander around and take photos…. and not get run over!!

 

Martin Bucer in the Crucible of Life

Sadly, the year 1541 proved to be the most challenging year for Bucer. A meeting at Regensburg, Germany between Protestant leaders like Philip Methlancthon and Roman Catholic theologians like Jonathan Eck, was envisioned as an effort to bridge the gap between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics. A coalition of moderates on both sides of the controversy had high hopes for this meeting. However, the colloquy at Regensburg turned out to be a last ditch effort at theological unity which failed to satisfy either Luther or the papal authorities.

Also, during that year just after the meeting in Regensburg, Bucer’s wife, Elizabeth, died of the plague, along with three of their children. Bucer’s close friend and colleague, John Calvin, was forced by the plague to move back to Geneva, not too long after the city fathers of Geneva asked Calvin to return to the Swiss city and be their pastor again. With his wife dead and his close friend Calvin gone from Strasbourg, Bucer had suffered great loss.

A few year earlier, Bucer had gained a friendship with another Protestant moderate, Johannes Oecolampadius, who pastored a church in Basel, Switzerland, further up the Rhine River. Oecolampadius had died ten years earlier, leaving a widow, who in turn became married to a colleague in Strasbourg, Wolfgang Capito. However, Capito himself died of the plague himself, leaving his wife to be widowed yet again.

Bucer was in a difficult situation, with no wife and several surviving children to care for. Bucer quickly remarried Oecolampadius’ and Capito’s widow, Wibrandis Rosenblatt.  The now thrice-married Wibrandis Rosenblatt found a faithful husband in Bucer, and partner in raising children. However, Bucer was criticized by other reformers for remarrying too soon.

Nevertheless, other reformers looked to Bucer as a trusted friend, who believed he was able to intercede and tone down the often-violent rhetoric of others. For example, when Martin Luther in 1543 wrote his most unfortunate tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, a letter was written on December 8, 1543, from the Zurich reformed preacher, Heinrich Bullinger, to his friend, Bucer, urging Bucer to try to persuade Luther to come back to his senses:

“Luther has written in a way that is utterly indecorous and entirely without moderation — plainly scurrilous, not serious. He writes against the Jews, and what might have been a fortunate and persuasive argument he renders offensive — indeed, even ridiculous — by his vile insults and crude invective, which befit no one, least of all an aged theologian.

This may someday bring great evil upon the Church. Perhaps you, his close friend and brother, could restrain him as a teacher — so that he may remember himself and his modesty, and write and act with greater humility, purity, and circumspection. Many pious and learned men are offended by his arrogance, which is excessive beyond measure.

A theologian should embody modesty, prudence, piety, and gratis. However, the example of his audacious impudence has spread and has now infected many church ministers” (Referenced by John Dickson, author of Bullies and Saints, reviewed here on Veracity. Original Latin source).

Sadly, Bullinger was prophetic, as Luther’s anti-Jewish sentiments were picked up and amplified by the Nazi party movement of 1930’s Germany. I am not aware of any evidence that Bucer was ever successful in intervening with the great Martin Luther, before the latter’s death in 1546.

Alas, Bucer’s position was precariously unstable in Strasbourg, and within a few years the pressure got the best of him. The setback at Regensburg, the continued vitriol leveled by Martin Luther against Huldrych Zwingli’s successor at Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger,  and the returning fire from Bullinger against Luther, along with the personal losses in 1541, began to zap at Bucer’s energy. If strife among his Protestant colleagues was not enough, the defenders of medieval Catholicism were constantly seeking to have him ousted from Strasbourg, including the Emperor Charles V himself.

Bucer was effectively in a theological (and political) “no man’s land,” which ultimately forced him out of Strasbourg in 1549.

Martin Bucer pastored this church, St. Thomas, in Strasbourg, France, until he was forced to leave the city in 1549.

 

Martin Bucer’s Final Years…. In Cambridge, England

Charles V finally found enough leverage to get Bucer kicked out of Strasbourg. Bucer and his family found refuge in England. Bucer was assigned a teaching post at Cambridge, by another English reformer and moderate, Thomas Cranmer, who received him warmly as a colleague. Thomas Cranmer is most well known for crafting together the Book of Common Prayer, for the Church of England, as well as being a martyr for the Reformation, under the persecution of Queen “Bloody” Mary. Cranmer’s temperament mirrored that of Bucer, and most English speakers unwittingly feel Cranmer’s influence today through his translation of the Lord’s Prayer, which many memorize  (“forgive us our debts” versus “forgive us our trespasses“).

But Bucer’s exile in England made him a very unhappy man. The colder northern climate in Cambridge did not help his health, either. Hopes for trying to resolve the differences between Rome and Reformers like Luther ultimately left him alienated from both sides. Conflicts with others wore him down, and within two years of being in England, in 1551, Bucer died.

Despite his death, Bucer’s troubles would haunt beyond the grave. In 1555, the new English monarch, the Roman Catholic Mary (the Queen who had Cranmer burned at the stake), had the bones of Bucer dug up and had him ceremonially burned as a heretic. It was not until Queen Elizabeth, a Protestant, took the throne that in 1560, Bucer was given a second burial with full honors.

 

Life Lessons from Martin Bucer

Martin Bucer embodied what it meant to wear a Union top along with a Confederate bottom. Bucer got shot at from all sides.

In many ways, in our day when so many Christians feel divided from one another, we can learn something from the Dominican monk turned Protestant reformer. From a book entitled Common Places, which features extracts from Bucer’s writings, Bucer believed the church was united in…..

“the unity of the Spirit, of love, the word of God, Christ, the sacraments, and the sharing of gifts, that we may aspire together to the same goal, and hold and express the same beliefs.”

And….

“It is essential that we hold completely in common everything instituted for the building up of the Church.”

That desire to always seek common ground among believers, without compromising essential Christian distinctives, is a virtue which is in short supply today.

Bucer believed that the medieval Roman Catholic Church was in desperate need of reform. Yet he concurred with other reformers that the Bible was indeed the written Word of God, and it was authoritative for all believers. This placed Bucer firmly in the Protestant camp, though his efforts to form a unified coalition among his fellow reformers were frustrated.

Martin Bucer’s most significant theological contribution was in defining a concept called “double justification.” He combined Luther’s theology of “imputed righteousness,” which lined up with Luther’s ideas about justification, with a Roman Catholic theology of “inherent righteousness” (or “imparted righteousness”), emphasizing growth in sanctification over time, as part of a second element of justification, a life well-lived full of good works as one follows Christ. This idea of “double justification” was thought to strike a middle-way between Roman Catholicism and the Reformation tradition of Martin Luther.

But as is so often the case, such “middle-way” theologies tend to be rejected by opposing parties in such discussions. The more extreme voices in a conversation tend to dampen voices of moderation.

Ah, such is the life of a peace maker!!

 

As my wife and I wandered around Strasbourg, we enjoyed (well, at least, I did!) passing by several sites associated with Martin Bucer, such as his home and the church where he served as a pastor. I had just finished reading Martin Bucer: An Introduction to His Life and Theology (Cascade Companions), written by Donald K. McKim and Jim West, a short book that filled in many of the above details about Bucer’s fascinating life. So, if you ever want to read more about Bucer, Martin Bucer: An Introduction to His Life and Theology (Cascade Companions)  is a nice investment, at only 164 pages.

Martin Bucer: An Introduction to His Life and Theology (Cascade Companions), by Donald K. McKim and Jim West. The whole Cascade Companions series is a collection of short biographies of leading Christian figures in church history. This was the first book I read in the series, and it was a good read: short and sweet.

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April 3, 2026

Martin Luther in the Hot Seat at Worms and Heidelberg

By Clarke Morledge

From the Christianity along the Rhine blog series….

Martin Luther once delivered a sermon on Good Friday, where he said this:

“Until the present we have been in the Passion week and have celebrated Good Friday in the right way …. Cast your sins from yourself upon Christ, believe with a festive spirit that your sins are His wounds and sufferings, that He carries them and makes satisfaction for them…..Press through all difficulties and behold His friendly heart, how full of love it is toward you, which love constrained Him to bear the heavy load of your conscience and your sin.” 

A lot of ink has been spilled on Martin Luther… and I have read a few pages of it!

One of my closest friends from high school, Thomas Coyner, died a few years ago due to a debilitating life-long illness. Eight years before Thomas died, his father, Boyd Coyner, a retired professor of history at the College of William and Mary (where I work as an IT engineer), died as well.

The Coyner family loved books.

When Dr. Coyner died, my friend Thomas gave to me his dad’s collection of books on Martin Luther. It was a bunch of books! Thomas’ dad was apparently an expert on the life of Martin Luther, the famous German Protestant reformer of the 16th century. This made sense in that Dr. Coyner had grown up in a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, named after Martin Luther himself.

I have heard it said that there are more books written about Martin Luther than any other figure in Western history.  I can believe it! Some of Dr. Coyner’s collection are tomes, including Martin Brecht’s three volume set, with some 1400 pages total…. and that is not counting the endnotes!!

I deeply treasure these books on Luther, though I confess that I hardly have read them all. The standard, recommended biography of Luther, which is nicely short and compact, is Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Bainton’s book got me hooked on Luther, not just as a pivotal Protestant theologian, but as a shaper of Western culture more broadly.

So, when my wife and I embarked on a cruise on the Rhine River, in October, 2025, I was determined to check out some of the spots where Luther made his mark in Germany, during those crucible years of the Protestant Reformation movement. A day-long bus tour scratched my church history itch.

The Reformation Monument in the city of Worms, Germany, where Martin Luther (statue in the middle) made his famous “Here I Stand, I Can Do No Other” speech before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. I had to navigate around the Japanese tourists who surrounded the monument, to get my friend to snap a photo of me!

 

Walking the Streets of Worms, Germany

First up was a visit to the city of Worms. As a seminary professor still in his thirties, Martin Luther had been summoned to Worms to appear before Charles V, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, in the year 1521.

Historians call this the “Diet of Worms,” which has nothing to do with some sort of creepy health fad to help you lose weight. A “diet” is an antiquated reference to a meeting of a legislative body, and “Worms” is simply the name of the city where this meeting was held.  So, it was at this “Diet of Worms” where Luther uttered (at least, it is commonly told that way) the famous saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”

Four years earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther had published a criticism of the medieval practice of the sale of indulgences, which crudely put would allow a dead relative to lessen their time in purgatory, if a living relative were to hand over some cash to the medieval church authorities. This got Luther into some hot water with the church establishment, which only emboldened Luther to publish criticisms of other medieval Catholic practices and doctrines.

At the Diet of Worms, Luther had been asked to recant his writings. What prompted Luther to get into so much trouble?

Back in 1453, the great Christian city of Constantinople had finally fallen to the Turks. Intellectuals from that city fled towards the West, bringing ancient copies of the New Testament with them. Luther had been impressed by a newly researched version of the Greek New Testament, published by the Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, who spent several years researching some of those ancient copies of the New Testament from the East. From that version of the New Testament, Luther had felt compelled to challenge the Western medieval doctrine of purgatory, among other doctrines, putting his ideas into book form.

The printed book, using the newly acquired technology of the printing press in Germany, was like the Internet of the 16th century. Luther was a master in using this 16th century form of “social media” to broadcast his ideas to the world. The likes of Taylor Swift may rule the world of Instagram today, but in the 16th century, it was Martin Luther dropping a stack of papers at the door of the Wittenberg printing shop, to be converted to movable type, which shook up the medieval world.

 

A statue in Worms, Germany, of Martin Luther, the hero of the Reformation…. and a thorn in the flesh to the medieval church establishment. My photo, October, 2025.

 

Luther had set off a firestorm of controversy, engulfing his whole life, thus starting a conversation which set the intellectual course of the West for the next 500 years. Along the way, millions have experienced spiritual joy resulting from his fresh look at the basic essentials of the Christian faith, and what it means to be a Christian. Nevertheless, on the downside, thousands, if not millions of people have tragically lost their lives through wars and persecutions, partly related to the controversy which Luther ignited.

Luther himself dodged the fate of almost certain death, by the hands of authorities, in the wake of his appearance before Charles V. After refusing to recant his writings, Luther was able to leave Worms safely, before being kidnapped by those who sought to protect Luther’s life. Luther would go on and translate the Bible into the common language of the German people.

Ancient city wall of Worms, Germany, built by the Romans, about the time of Christ. A moat surrounded the city, fed from the waters of the Rhine. But now it is just a sidewalk and a city street. My photo, October, 2025.

 

Worms, Germany, is a remarkable city to visit. During the period of the ancient Roman empire, Worms had been an outpost along the Rhine River. What is weird today is that the Rhine River is actually a few miles away from the city now. The Romans had built a wall around the city at the shore of the Rhine, to protect against Germanic invaders. For centuries, the Rhine was marshy and difficult to navigate, particularly for larger boats.  In the 19th century, the Rhine was dredged to make for a deeper, straighter channel, thus eliminating the more marshy areas.

The city had been mostly flattened during World War 2, as Americans chased the German army out of the city. The oldest cathedral in the city was spared the artillery barrage of the Americans. Nearby that cathedral is the spot where Luther appeared before Emperor Charles V, to make his bold defense of the Reformation, just less than 400 years before American tanks entered the city. The layers of history across the centuries in Worms makes anything in America look rather piddly!

The area around the cathedral in Worms, Germany, not long after the American bombing raids towards the end of World War 2. Photo preserved inside the cathedral, where I took a snapshot of it.

 

From Worms, Germany, to Heidelberg

Thankfully, there was a restroom near where the bus stopped to pick our group up. This was one of the few restrooms that did not cost me a Euro coin to use it!

Europe travel tip: Keep a few Euro coins in your pocket as you travel across the continent. They will come in handy.

After visiting Worms, the next stop was in the city of Heidelberg, at the eastern edge of the Rhine River valley. Heidelberg is known for its great castle, looking over the Neckar River. A good part of Heidelberg, including part of the castle, was destroyed by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV of France, in the late 17th century. For decades after World War 2, the American military had a significant military presence there, as the city was largely spared of the destruction from the war.

The old bridge crossing the Neckar River, in Heidelberg, Germany, with the famous castle above.

 

But my main interest with Heidelberg was in finding the spot where Martin Luther participated in the “Heidelberg Disputation,” a defense he made of his theology in 1518 at an Augustinian seminary, where the University of Heidelberg is located today. Luther managed to persuade at least some of his Augustinian monastic colleagues of the validity of the theological principles he championed at Wittenberg, where he served as a professor of the Bible. This was just three years before his fateful meeting before Emperor Charles V in Worms.

It was at this Disputation in Heidelberg where a young Dominican monk, Martin Bucer, heard Luther speak for the first time. Bucer became a follower and friend of Luther, and a pivotal figure in his own right, though his influence today is overshadowed by theological giants like Luther and later, John Calvin. The life of Martin Bucer will be a topic of a future Veracity blog post.

The spot where Martin Luther delivered his Disputation in Heidelberg before fellow Augustinian monks, in defense of the Reformation.

 

An Educational Dinner Conversation at a Wedding Reception…

One more little anecdote….

At a wedding reception a few years ago, I sat next to Philip Cary, a theologian at Eastern University in St. David’s, Pennsylvania. Cary has done several recorded classes for The Teaching Company, as he is an expert on both Saint Augustine and Martin Luther. It was an unexpected surprise to be at a sit-down wedding reception, having dinner with a world-class scholar like Philip Cary.  The Bible-geek in me enjoyed the conversation just as much as the food! I kept Dr. Cary talking so much with all of my questions, I do not think he ate hardly anything!

Cary believes that Augustine and Luther are the two most influential thinkers in the Protestant Christian West ( I have written two blog posts about Augustine earlier this year). Interestingly, Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk, about the time he triggered the revolution of the Protestant Reformation.

Martin Luther has been one of my theological heroes (as well as Augustine), but like Augustine, he had his faults, too. Luther’s legacy is enduring, but it has been tarnished by some of his anti-semitic writings of his later years, prompting a deficiency in Protestant thinking which is being corrected by scholars over the last few decades. I will be writing more about this in the future. In the meantime, it is worth celebrating the man’s positive side, as Luther pretty much gave us the Five Solas of the Reformation:

  • Sola Scripture (Scripture alone)
  • Solus Christus (Christ alone)
  • Sola Fide (Faith alone)
  • Sola Gratia (Grace alone)
  • Soli Deo Gloria (Glory to God alone)

Luther’s Good Friday sermon focused on the cross, but he also reminded his listeners about the resurrection:

“If we deal with our sins in our conscience and let them continue within us and be cherished in our hearts, they become much too strong for us to manage and they will live forever.  But when we see that they are laid on Christ and He has triumphed over them by His resurrection and we fearlessly believe it, then they are dead and have become as nothing.”

On this Good Friday, as we remember what Jesus accomplished for us and our salvation on the cross, it is good to recall the message of the Gospel that Martin Luther risked his life to guard, to protect, and to proclaim to the whole world.

My favorite podcast (still) is The Rest is History, narrated by historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. Here is the episode where they talk about Martin Luther’s encounter with Charles V at Worms, nearly 500 years ago. Standing in that spot where Luther uttered his memorable defense really brought the story alive to me!!

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March 21, 2026

Cambridge House at W&M Annual Spring Lecture: Wednesday, March 25, 7pm

By Clarke Morledge

Friends of the Cambridge House at the College of William and Mary!!

Join Cambridge House Christian Study Center for their Spring Public Lecture on Wednesday March 25th at 7PM in Tucker Hall on the William & Mary Campus. They welcome Professor Norman Wirzba, Distinguished Professor of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. His lecture is entitled “Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World”. Learn more at the Cambridge House event page.

This year, the College of William & Mary is all about the “Year of the Environment,” reminding us that we are stewards of the earth. The Cambridge House would like to add a distinctively Christian voice to the conversation, noting that the Book of Genesis reminds us that we are stewards of the earth because God created humanity in God’s image, so that we might steward God’s creation of the world well, particularly in view of “Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World,” the topic of Dr. Wizrba’s presentation.

Spread the word, and invite others to come, as this is Cambridge House’s annual public spring lecture for the campus and greater Williamsburg community. All are welcome!

 

 

 

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