Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 28:1 (NA 2023)
Article: The Reformation As Revival: The Historical Vision Of Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné
Author: Mark Sidwell

DBSJ 28 (2023) p. 81

The Reformation As Revival: The Historical Vision Of Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné

Mark Sidwell1

In the 1850s, Swiss historian Jean Henri Merle d’Aubigné was showing a French pastor the sights of Geneva. Coming to the building where he and other divinity students had met with Scottish preacher Robert Haldane in a series of Bible studies, Merle pointed to the apartments and said, “There is the cradle of the second Reformation of Geneva.”2 That Merle should commemorate the location where he commenced his evangelical Christian experience is not surprising, but why did he refer to the revival of his youth as “the second Reformation of Geneva”? An examination of Merle’s writing shows that this description was not simply a literary flourish but is in fact bound up in his view of the Reformation and of history in general.

Merle’s Background

Merle was born in 1794 in Geneva to a leading commercial family of Huguenot descent.3 Encouraged by his widowed mother, he entered

DBSJ 28 (2023) p. 82

the theological school in Geneva less because of religious interest than in hopes of avoiding military service in the Napoleonic era. During his studies, Merle was one of several divinity students who met in Bible studies with visiting Scottish evangelical Robert Haldane in 1816–17, a formative event in the Réveil (awakening) that affected Europe in the early nineteenth century. The Scottish minister impressed the students by his ready grasp of Scripture, particularly when he would point out answers to their questions directly from the Bible, saying, “Look here—how readest thou? There it stands written with the finger of God.”4 Merle recalled how he heard Haldane reading from Romans “about the natural corruption of man,—a doctrine of which I had never before heard.” He said to Haldane, “Now I see that doctrine in the Bible.” Haldane replied, “Yes, but do you see it in your heart?” Merle said that the question “came home to my conscience” and “was the sword of the Spirit” that showed him “that I can be saved by grace alone.”5

One should note that a key element in Merle’s conversion was his reliance on Scripture, because his Bible-centered viewpoint and appeal to doctrinal truths influenced not only his Christian life but also his writing of history. “I had been seized by the Word of God,” Merle recalled. “I had believed in the divinity of the Saviour, in original sin, the ...