PREVIEW

Pierre Viret: Forgotten Giant of the Reformation by Berthoud (Book/ Paperback)

Product Overview

This little book bears with it a grand subject: the historical and literary resurrection of one of the major figures of the Reformation, the long forgotten Reformer of French-speaking Switzerland, Pierre Viret (1511-1571). Viret was a life-long companion of the better known figures of Guillaume Farel and John Calvin. After his studies in Paris where, amid the bonfires of the first martyrs of the French Reformation, he was won over to the renewed Evangelical Faith, Viret returned to his native country of Switzerland. Before the coming of John Calvin, Viret labored with Farel to establish the Reformation in Geneva. However his main ministry was for some twenty-three years in Lausanne. There he founded the first properly Reformed academy, later to be the model of the Genevan seminary. In 1559 he was exiled by the Bernese sovereign over Vaud for his defense of the local church’s disciplinary autonomy from the State. He then undertook a fruitful ministry in France, completing his life in Béarn where, under its famed queen, Jeanne d’Albret, he reorganized the nascent Reformed churches and established a new theological academy.

Viret, a man of great mildness and persistence – he was called “the Angel of the Reformation” – was a renowned preacher, evangelist, and theologian. A prolific author, his abilities in the fields of ethics, apologetics, and symbolic and pastoral theology puts him in lithe company with the great Reformers. His massive Christian Instruction in the Doctrine of the Law and the Gospel contains the finest exposition of the Ten Commandments brought out by the Reformation. His apologetics, based on the authority of God’s Word on every aspect of creation and the certitude that the meaning of all reality was given by God and revealed in His written and incarnate Word, leads his writings to have an incomparable freshness and present applicability.

Indeed, as this book briefly shows, Viret’s careful application of God’s Law to the economic realities of his day sheds light even on the financial issues of our troubled times.

The present renewal of interest in Pierre Viret’s indefatigable labors for the advancement of the Kingdom of God comes indeed at its proper time!

About the Author(s)

Jean-Marc Berthoud was born in 1939 in South Africa from Swiss missionary parents and lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is married to Rose-Marie, and they are the parents of five children and six grandchildren. He holds Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Arts with Honours degrees in History and English literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in the Republic of South Africa. Between 1960 and 1964 he undertook research in Colonial History (on the first modern genocide of five million Africans killed in the Congo basin between 1880 and 1914) at the Sorbonne and the University of London. Jean-Marc was stopped abruptly by God on the platform of the Neuchâtel Railway Station in the Spring of 1966, and came to Christ as a direct result of reading The Treatise on Scandals by John Calvin, out of an enthusiastic interest in the great Reformer’s French style! His conversion led to the immediate abandonment of a promising academic career. To earn his living and raise a large family, Jean-Marc worked first as a gardener (for five years), then as a railroad porter (for ten years), and finally as a part time manual postal employee (for twenty-three years). Since 2004 he is professionally retired. He is the editor of the review Résister et Construire and of Documentation Chrétienne, is the president of the Association Vaudoise de Parents Chrétiens and of the Association Création, Bible et Science, director of a collection of books, Messages, for the Éditions L’Age d’Homme, and runs a Christian bookshop, La Proue. Together with others he is currently working on the first republication since the sixteenth century of the works of the great French Swiss Reformer, Pierre Viret. He is currently working on a new publication: The Government of the Lord Jesus Christ.