"Theodore Beza, (1519-1605) one of the lesser-known names of Reformation history in our day and age, was born in Vézelay, France in 1519 and would become one of the most important leaders of French Protestants during the critical period of the sixteenth century. Leaving behind the pleasures and security that come with a wealthy family of nobility, he chose to cast his lot with the persecuted people of God. After his conversion to the Gospel of Christ in 1548, he forsook his worldly education and career and left his native country for Geneva, Switzerland, where he was welcomed by John Calvin and became a Protestant preacher.
Beza also became a champion of the Huguenots as their foremost representative to King Charles IX
and the Catholic ecclesiastical leaders of France, risking his life in his travels as he plead the case of the suffering French Christians. They would turn to him time and time again for counsel and leadership during the dark days of civil war and brutal persecutions, including the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, 1572.
Beza also contributed greatly to the writing of the French Psalter, which fueled the fire of the Huguenot cause, and inspired their soldiers with courage as they faced the armies of Catholic tyranny on the battlefield.
Beza became John Calvin's successor at Geneva and labored tirelessly in preaching and in caring for the thousands of destitute, persecuted saints who fled to Geneva for refuge. He remained at Geneva for many years until his death in 1605.
....the three large volumes of his Theological Treatises (Tractationes Theologicæ), revised and republished by the author himself in 1582. Since his opponents were wont to reply, as best they could, to his arguments, Beza, unwilling to leave the last word to them, usually rejoined with a defense of his first position. Thus, we not infrequently find two or even three treatises bearing upon the same point and pursuing the same lines of thought, addressed to the same antagonist.
The very first position which Beza undertakes to establish is that "Papists, in place of the true God, worship a fictitious and imaginary divinity that is neither perfectly just nor perfectly merciful," for "that cannot be a perfect justice which approves of human acts of satisfaction, nor that a perfect mercy which only supplies the deficiency in man’s merit."
To the same class of general treatises belongs A Summary of the Whole of Christianity, with the alternative title, "A Description and Distribution of the Causes of the Salvation of the Elect and the Destruction of the Reprobate, Collected from the Sacred Scriptures." At the head stands a table or diagram, occupying a single page, wherein the author’s conception of the whole scheme of God’s dealings with the human race is presented to the eye. This is followed by a "Brief Explanation of the Foregoing Table," covering thirty-five pages chiefly taken up with proof-texts derived from Holy Writ, but introduced by sundry citations from Saint Augustine, indicating that the question about Predestination is not a question of mere curiosity or of little profit for the Church of God. This treatise is, ...published in 1555, ...is almost needless to remark that it closely reflects the influence of Calvin.
On the subject of Predestination, Beza crossed swords, as early as 1558, with Sebastian Castalio, in defending Calvin’s doctrine from the accusation of being contrary to natural affection on the part of God, as the Father of mankind, and from other similar accusations.
What Beza believed on the subject of the Lord’s Supper we learn well enough from his own utterances respecting it, both in his great speech before Charles IX at the Colloquy of Poissy, and on other occasions. While denying that the elements of bread and wine are in the Communion transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, according to the Roman Catholic view, or that the body and blood of Christ are present in, with, and under the bread and wine, according to the Lutheran view, he declined, on the other hand, to assert that the elements are mere signs and that the act of partaking is a mere commemoration, as was the Zwinglian view held in German Switzerland, but, with Calvin, believed that the worthy partaker, not in any carnal sense, but none the less truly, by faith feeds upon the body of Christ. He repudiated the notion that he would divorce Christ from the feast he had instituted.
Beza rendered to Huguenot devotion a service not less notable in another direction. The worship of God’s house could have been conducted in an orderly and impressive manner and with undiminished fervor without Calvin’s liturgy at all; but, deprived of the metrical psalms, the worship would have lost its most characteristic feature. Without those psalms, too, the very history of the Huguenots, civil as well as religious, would have been robbed of a great part of its individuality. In the long conflict that arose out of the effort to crush the Protestant doctrines and their professors in France, from the first outbreak of civil war in the middle of the 16th century down to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the 17th, and indeed far beyond that time, when the Reformed faith was supposed to have been annihilated, the psalms were the badge by which the Huguenots were recognized by friend and foe alike; they were the stimulus of the brave, the battle cry of the combatant, the last consolatory words whispered in the ears of the dying.
Beza found time to give a careful and final revision to the French version of the Bible in common use among Protestants.
It was the Epistle of Paul to the Romans when young Louis Iselin, in 1581, wrote a letter to his uncle which has come down to us. Beza’s lecture hour alone was announced by the ringing of the bell of the cathedral of Saint Pierre, as if calling to a religious function, and precisely as it used to ring for the lectures of John Calvin before the university was instituted." by Henry Martyn Baird 1899
Beza also became a champion of the Huguenots as their foremost representative to King Charles IX
Beza also contributed greatly to the writing of the French Psalter, which fueled the fire of the Huguenot cause, and inspired their soldiers with courage as they faced the armies of Catholic tyranny on the battlefield.
Beza became John Calvin's successor at Geneva and labored tirelessly in preaching and in caring for the thousands of destitute, persecuted saints who fled to Geneva for refuge. He remained at Geneva for many years until his death in 1605.
....the three large volumes of his Theological Treatises (Tractationes Theologicæ), revised and republished by the author himself in 1582. Since his opponents were wont to reply, as best they could, to his arguments, Beza, unwilling to leave the last word to them, usually rejoined with a defense of his first position. Thus, we not infrequently find two or even three treatises bearing upon the same point and pursuing the same lines of thought, addressed to the same antagonist.
The very first position which Beza undertakes to establish is that "Papists, in place of the true God, worship a fictitious and imaginary divinity that is neither perfectly just nor perfectly merciful," for "that cannot be a perfect justice which approves of human acts of satisfaction, nor that a perfect mercy which only supplies the deficiency in man’s merit."
To the same class of general treatises belongs A Summary of the Whole of Christianity, with the alternative title, "A Description and Distribution of the Causes of the Salvation of the Elect and the Destruction of the Reprobate, Collected from the Sacred Scriptures." At the head stands a table or diagram, occupying a single page, wherein the author’s conception of the whole scheme of God’s dealings with the human race is presented to the eye. This is followed by a "Brief Explanation of the Foregoing Table," covering thirty-five pages chiefly taken up with proof-texts derived from Holy Writ, but introduced by sundry citations from Saint Augustine, indicating that the question about Predestination is not a question of mere curiosity or of little profit for the Church of God. This treatise is, ...published in 1555, ...is almost needless to remark that it closely reflects the influence of Calvin.
On the subject of Predestination, Beza crossed swords, as early as 1558, with Sebastian Castalio, in defending Calvin’s doctrine from the accusation of being contrary to natural affection on the part of God, as the Father of mankind, and from other similar accusations.
What Beza believed on the subject of the Lord’s Supper we learn well enough from his own utterances respecting it, both in his great speech before Charles IX at the Colloquy of Poissy, and on other occasions. While denying that the elements of bread and wine are in the Communion transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, according to the Roman Catholic view, or that the body and blood of Christ are present in, with, and under the bread and wine, according to the Lutheran view, he declined, on the other hand, to assert that the elements are mere signs and that the act of partaking is a mere commemoration, as was the Zwinglian view held in German Switzerland, but, with Calvin, believed that the worthy partaker, not in any carnal sense, but none the less truly, by faith feeds upon the body of Christ. He repudiated the notion that he would divorce Christ from the feast he had instituted.
Beza rendered to Huguenot devotion a service not less notable in another direction. The worship of God’s house could have been conducted in an orderly and impressive manner and with undiminished fervor without Calvin’s liturgy at all; but, deprived of the metrical psalms, the worship would have lost its most characteristic feature. Without those psalms, too, the very history of the Huguenots, civil as well as religious, would have been robbed of a great part of its individuality. In the long conflict that arose out of the effort to crush the Protestant doctrines and their professors in France, from the first outbreak of civil war in the middle of the 16th century down to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the 17th, and indeed far beyond that time, when the Reformed faith was supposed to have been annihilated, the psalms were the badge by which the Huguenots were recognized by friend and foe alike; they were the stimulus of the brave, the battle cry of the combatant, the last consolatory words whispered in the ears of the dying.
Beza found time to give a careful and final revision to the French version of the Bible in common use among Protestants.
It was the Epistle of Paul to the Romans when young Louis Iselin, in 1581, wrote a letter to his uncle which has come down to us. Beza’s lecture hour alone was announced by the ringing of the bell of the cathedral of Saint Pierre, as if calling to a religious function, and precisely as it used to ring for the lectures of John Calvin before the university was instituted." by Henry Martyn Baird 1899
That chant to the sound of the viol,
and invent to themselves instruments of musick, like David;
Amos 6:5
