Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007)
Article: An Early Doctrinal Handbook: Farel’s Summaire Et Briefve Declaration
Author: Robert White

WTJ 69:1 (Spring 2007) p. 21

An Early Doctrinal Handbook: Farel’s Summaire Et Briefve Declaration

Robert White

Robert White is a Research Associate in the Department of French Studies, University of Sydney, Australia.

It is the fate of forerunners to be speedily eclipsed by those whose way they have prepared. Guillaume Farel was one such forerunner. He is best remembered today, outside of Switzerland, as the energetic Reformer who, in July 1536, detained Calvin in Geneva and extorted from him the promise to assist in the work of church-building. Yet the Farel of 1536 was no neophyte. He already had a long and impressive career behind him as a gospel preacher, church planter, evangelist, educator, and Christian apologist, beginning with the Meaux reform movement of the early 1520s and followed by pastoral charges in Montbéliard (1524–1525), Strasbourg (1525–1526), and Aigle (1526–1530), where he served as the missionary agent of the Bernese government. The celebrated Lefvre d’Etaples, leader of the Meaux circle, had been his mentor; he knew Erasmus as an unforgiving critic; and he counted as friends Capito and Bucer in Strasbourg, Oecolampadius in Basel, and Zwingli in Zurich. He was present when Bern voted to adopt the Reformation in 1528, and played a decisive role in the introduction of the Reformation to Neuchatel (1530) and Geneva (1532 onward).1

It is not, however, these facts that interest us here. Our concern is rather with Farel’s efforts to formulate, in the decade preceding Calvin’s advent, a reasoned statement of Christian belief adequate to the needs of a burgeoning reform movement in France and French-speaking Switzerland. The statement in question is the amply named Summaire et briefve declaration d’aulcuns lieux fort necessaires à ung chascun chrestien pour mettre sa confiance en Dieu et ayder son prochain.2 No copy

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exists of the first edition, published by Lyons printer Pierre de Vingle in 1529, and condemned the following year by the Parliament of Dole. The oldest extant edition, from the presses of Simon Du Bois, of Alencon, dates from around 1533, although the title page bears a false address and date (“Turin, 1525”). It is this printing which, by default, forms the base text for a study of the Summaire.3

I. General Characteristics

The Summaire was written, on Farel’s own admission, at the instigation of Oecolampadius, whom Farel had known since 1524 and who, some time later, urged him to compose a work of instruction “in the common tongue, for those ...