The undisputed leader in Geneva as John Calvin's successor. While his spiritual hegemony was unmarked by significant departures from Calvin's direction, Beza did differ in particular ecclesiastical emphases.
Born in Vezelay, Burgundy, into a well-to-do family, Beza early displayed academic ability and was sent to study under Melchior Wolmar, a crypto-Lutheran professor in Orleans. He became recognized as a major Latin poet after publication of a collection of humanistic poems, Juvenalia. His conversion followed a critical illness, after which he became identified with the Reformation movement.
Beza served as professor of Greek at the Academy of Lausanne from 1549 to 1558, when he was called to the post of both rector and professor at the newly formed Academy of Geneva. Being also an ecumenist he served tirelessly to bring about a united Protestantism.
Beza's chief contributions to the Swiss Reformation were securing Calvin's gains in Geneva and solidifying the Presbyterian system. He freely borrowed from both Calvin and Martin Bucer. In his pivotal doctrine of the church Beza, following Bucer, distinguished three marks of the true church: the word of God, the twofold sacraments, and discipline. He viewed the church as the company of the elect. However, election was not the central focus of Beza's ecclesiology. Rather, following Calvin, he treated election under the rubric of the person and work of Christ. Yet Beza created tension in this doctrine by treating it elsewhere in a scholastic manner along rather rigid supralapsarian lines.
Beza posited presbyterian church government as the only acceptable NT polity. He adopted Calvin's view that this order comprises pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons, but he applied this system in the various synodical and local levels more rigidly than did Calvin. Beza's doctrine of the church may be found in his three-volume collection Tractationes Theologicae, especially in his Ad Tractationem de Ministrorum Evangeli... Responsio, where he takes Anglican prelacy to task.
Other key scholarly works are his 1582 edition of the Greek NT and his three-volume Histoire ecclesiastique des eglises reformees ...de France. Concern for the welfare of the church prompted volumes of sermons, commentary, a French translation of many psalms for the Huguenot Psalter, a joint translation with Calvin of the French NT, and an influential confession of faith.
J. H. HALL