Scott Manetsch’s Calvin’s Company of Pastors is a rich contribution to the history of pastoral theology and care in the Reformation era. If you want a detailed, vivid portrait of the training and selection of Geneva’s pastors, their weekly schedules, the liturgies they performed and the resources they had available for preaching, their home life, the outworking of discipline, the on-the-ground differences between Catholic and Protestant cure of souls, Manetsch is your man.
His chapter on ordination reviews the early seventh-century struggle between Geneva’s Council and the Company of Pastors over the authority to appoint ministers. It is a fascinating local investiture struggle, which Manetsch explains within three larger contexts.
Both the magistrates and the pastors claimed interests in assigning ministers to particular parishes, but their interests diverged: “For the Company of Pastors, an overriding concern was to preserve the ministers’ prerogative to recruit, elect, and ordain ministers to pastoral posts.� Magistrates on the other hand “adopted a policy of intervention aimed at limiting ecclesiastical authority and restricting the ministers’ prerogative in recruitment and ordination� (94-5).
He sees the struggle as part of a “larger campaign waged by Geneva’s political authorities against traditional ecclesiastical rights and privileges in the first years of the seventeenth century.� The death of Calvin, then of Beza, left a leadership vacuum that encouraged the rise of “a new kind of spiritual-political leader in Geneva, embodied in magistrates such as Jacques Lect, who, having been formed by Calvin’s theological vision, attempted in their role as Christian magistrates to supervise and govern the affairs of the church as part of a single spiritual commonwealth� (95).
Most interesting, though, is Manetsch’s attempt to link this local power struggle with the larger movement of confessionalization. Confessionalization “modernized churches and transformed the clerical office in a number of important ways. Church life became more carefully regulated, supervised, and documented through the codification of confessions, catechisms, and church ordinances; the establishment of eccclesiastical bureaucracies; and the creation of disciplinary courts. . . . Likewise, the clerical office was increasingly professionalized with the establishment of formal educational requirements and more detailed guidelines for examination and ordination. In this process of modernization . . . clergymen emerged as quasi-agents of the state, serving as a crucial link for communication between political leaders and their subjects; supervising public discipline; and providing administrative resources for the state (such as maintaining baptismal, marriage, and death registers).� In Geneva in particular, “the Small Council’s campaign to gain control over clerical recruitment and election was indicative of a broader strategy to bring the city[s pastors in line with the political objectives of the governing authorities. The ministers were gradually transformed into quasi-agents of the state who were not only paid out of the state coffers but were also hired, supervised, and dismissed with significant involvement of the magistrates� (96).
