ARTICLES ON VIRET
Back to ArticlesPierre Viret and the Sovereignty of the Word of God
Over Every Aspect of Reality
Over Every Aspect of Reality
Author: Jean-Marc Berthoud
Excerpt from A Comprehensive Faith. Pages 93-106
The Church inescapably invited war by its very existence as a Christian institution. It broke radically with the old unitary and immanent concept of society. It shattered the humanistic unity of society by declaring itself to be the representative of a transcendental King and order, Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God. It held, moreover, that the State, and every aspect of society, is similarly duty bound to represent God’s order, not man’s. The Church therefore was more than new wine in an old wine skin; it was new wine demanding new wine skins, demanding that all things be mode new in terms of Christ.
- R. J. Rushdoony, Christianity and the State
The distinctive vocation of Rousas J. Rushdoony and the particular place he holds in the history of the church are characterized by a whole lifetime of persevering labor in the task of calling back God’s people to a renewed understanding of the significance, for every domain of life, of the written revelation, the Bible, and a summons addressed to the church to a renewed obedience to the whole counsel of God as at the same time law and gospel. This persistent call to repentance and faith, to spiritual understanding and thoroughgoing obedience, has resulted, as might have been expected, in much opposition and calumny both within the churches and beyond their walls. This has been specially true, unfortunately, in many circles which call themselves Reformed and openly adhere to the same doctrinal standards as Rushdoony. One aspect of this theological and ecclesiastical opposition to his teaching and influence has expressed itself in the accusation leveled against him of originality, of teaching things that the church has in the past not taught; of fomenting novelty by his insistence that man live by every word spoken by God in Scripture. Such an accusation must not be treated lightly. Within the church of God the concept of novelty is always closely linked to that of heresy, for it is our vocation to teach only those things which have always been taught from all time past in all faithful churches, and thus to maintain the unity and apostolicity of the church. Coming from various quarters we have heard: “Never has the church known such a fanatical determination to apply to every aspect of reality of every detail the revealed word of God.” In this short paper, by examining the contribution to the on-going growth of the kingdom of God of a little known French Swiss reformer, Pierre Viret, I shall briefly endeavor to refute such unfounded accusations.
Background
Pierre Viret was born in 1511 in the ancient Roman and Burgundian town of Orbe at the base of the Jura mountains in what is today the canton of Vaud in French-speaking Switzerland. His father was by profession a draper and both his parents pious Roman Catholics. After following the parochial school of his home town, his parents sent him in 1527 at the age of sixteen to Paris to further his higher education with a view to his entering the priesthood. There he followed the strenuous academic discipline of Montaigu College, famous for such students as John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Not only did Viret in these Parisian years begin to acquire the encyclopaedic knowledge which marks all his writings, but he advanced greatly in that apprenticeship of the ancient tongues which later made of him not only a fluent Latin scholar but a pastor familiar with Hebrew and Greek. Far more important, however, it was in this context of arduous study, lighted by the bonfires in which the first French martyrs of the Reformation were burnt at the stake, that Viret came to see the deadly errors of that Roman religion in which he had been reared and his need for a personal Savior to deliver him from the curse a holy God laid on his sins. After a very painful and difficult struggle, he at last came to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. For it was a time when all over the Kingdom of France, and more especially in Paris, the newly rediscovered gospel was being powerfully preached in a climate of dire persecution for any who dared question the established doctrines of a totalitarian religious and political order.
This persecution led Viret, seeking refuge, back to his native Orbe. It was here that he met his vocation. In the spring of 1531, Guillaume Farel, that intrepid preacher of the gospel and political agent of the newly Reformed authorities of the Berne Republic, called Viret (as he was to do with Calvin a few years later) out of the tranquility of his studies into the battlefield of the Reformation of the church and the implantation in his country of God’s mighty kingdom. At the age of twenty, Viret thus became the pastor of the small evangelical congregation of Orbe where he had the privilege of seeing his parents’ conversion under his preaching of the word of God. The following years saw him engaged in a growing itinerant ministry all over French-speaking Switzerland. In the Abbey town of Payerne, some thirty miles north of Lausanne, an irate monk violently refuted his preaching by running him through (in the back!) with a sword as he was crossing a field. In 1534 we find Viret at Farel’s side breaking the ground for the free entrance of the gospel in the city of Geneva. There again, murder was on his path, this time in the shape of a poisoned soup which, if it did not kill him, nonetheless left him with permanently ruined health. In 1536 the canton of Vaud was overrun by the Bernese army, ostensibly at war to defend Geneva from the threats of the Counts of Savoy, but effectively working for the aggrandizement of Bernese power. These temporal ambitions, in God’s merciful hand, opened up the whole region to the preaching of the gospel. After the famous Dispute de Lausanne in the same year, a public disputation where Viret (with Farel) bore the brunt of the debate, the young pastor, now age 25, became the minister of the Cathedral Church. Apart from a brief period (1541-1542) where he very ably assisted Calvin on his return to Geneva after his exile in Strasbourg, the twenty-three years between 1536 and 1559 saw Viret as the principal minister of the Reformed church of the Vaud canton where he exercised the ministry of God’s word under the heavy hand of the Bernese political and ecclesiastical power.
The Freedom of the Church
Very early Viret came to hold a high view of the authority and dignity of the church. As a result, he came to demand, with a mild but unshakable persistence, that the church be free to exercise its ecclesiastical discipline independently of the overweening Erastian ambitions of the Bernese authorities. The government of Berne saw themselves as the heirs of the undivided rule of the Roman republic and were on no account prepared to tolerate any kind of real spiritual independence in the church. In his polemical writings, Viret was often to declare that the Bernese Pope in short frock (the absolute state) was a far worse enemy for the Faith than the old Pope of Rome in his long gown. The conflict was inevitable, long-drawn and brutally climaxed in February, 1559, when those Messieurs de Berne, as they styled themselves, demanded of the recalcitrant pastors of Vaud either total submission to their undivided authority or immediate resignation and exile. More than thirty opted for faithfulness and exile and this at the very moment when God, in his Providence, had opened the doors for a great expansion of his kingdom in neighboring France. Between 1559 and 1561 Viret exercised a much appreciated ministry in Geneva at the side of his great friend Calvin, but his failing health forced him to seek a milder climate in the south of France. His health partly restored, he was instrumental in bringing about a remarkable revival, first in Montpellier and Nîmes, then in the second city of the realm, Lyon. There he exercised a highly blessed ministry during the early years of the civil wars, ending a very fruitful and eventful life as Chief Pastor and Academic Superintendent of the Reformed Church of the Kingdom of Navarre where he died in 1571.
Viret’s Significance
Now Pierre Viret, Calvin’s most intimate friend, known under the name of the Angel of the Reformation, was by no means the minor or insignificant figure which most Reformed histories of the Reformation lead us to imagine. He had, in 1537, founded in Lausanne the first Reformed Academy. He gave much of his time to the teaching of theology to students who flocked from every corner of Europe. This Lausanne Academy (and not the Genevan, as is too often thought) became the model of all future Reformed Academies. By the time of the expulsion of Viret in 1559, the Academy had nearly a thousand students enrolled. For many years, the Principal was none other than the celebrated Greek scholar and poet, Théodore de Bèze. Amongst the students we find men of the stature of the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, Ursinus and Olevianus, ample proof of the quality of the teaching dispensed in Lausanne. In 1559 the whole staff of the Academy resigned and constituted the teaching base of the newly founded Genevan Academy.
But this mild and gentle Christian, a man of the highest spiritual mettle, was also one of the great preachers of the Reformation. Of Calvin Bèze wrote, “None have taught with greater authority”; of Farel, “None thundered more mightily”; but of Viret he said, “None has a more winsome charm when he speaks.”
His speech was so sweet that he would continually hold the attention and the interest of those who heard him. His style, which married strength to harmony, was so caressing to the ear and to the intelligence that even those of his hearers least interested in religious matters, those most impatient of other preachers, would hear him out without difficulty and even with pleasure.
Melchior Adam remarked of his preaching:
In Lyon, preaching out in the open, he brought thousands to saving faith in Jesus Christ. By the power of his divine eloquence he would even cause those passing by to stop, listen and hear him out.
Writings
But in addition to exercising such great gifts, Viret was in his own right a prolific writer, author of some forty books, some almost a thousand pages long. A number of these were translated into English during the sixteenth century,9 others into Dutch, German and Italian. If very few of Viret’s works have been reprinted, they nonetheless had a marked influence on Reformed thinking up to the time of that last great dogmatician of the Genevan school, Benedict Pictet, in the early years of the eighteenth century. Viret wrote a small number of treatises in Latin, but the immense majority of his books were written in French, in a familiar style and in the popular form of dialogues between clearly differentiated and attractive personages designed to reach a public privileged with little formal instruction. But if the style is pleasant, the matter is profound, the knowledge of the Bible impeccable, and the scholarship immense. The pattern of his dialogues: affirmations — objections — refutations — and finally the clear, authoritative and balanced doctrinal synthesis, harks clearly back, in a popular form but without the philosophical jargon, to the scholastic method of formal discussion learnt at the feet of the Scottish master of Philosophy and Theology at the Collège Montaigu, John Major.
Pierre Viret was undoubtedly (with Martin Luther) one of the finest popularizers of the Christian Faith in the sixteenth century. But his deep concern for the spiritual needs of the common people never led him (as is all too common today) to debase the content of his theological teaching. It is impossible, in the brief space assigned to this paper, to do proper justice to the astonishing achievements of this extraordinary Christian. If his good friend, John Calvin, was the consummate dogmatician and the prince of exegetes, Pierre Viret must be considered as the finest ethicist and the most acute apologist of the sixteenth century. His monumental Instruction chrétienne en la doctrine de la Loy et de l’Evangile et en la vraie philosophie et théologie, tant naturelle que supernaturelle des chrétiens (“Christian instruction in the doctrine of the law and the gospel and in true Christian philosophy and theology, both natural and supernatural”) is without doubt his major theological work and can well bear comparison, in its own domain, with Calvin’s Institutes. The first 248 pages of Vol. I (large folio pages, small print) comprises a treatise on the subject of God’s general revelation as manifested in creation. The refreshingly simple and direct character of Viret’s teaching on general revelation makes it clear that this work was written in a period prior to the philosophical insanity of Cartesian rationalism and of Kantian idealism. Pages 249 through 674 constitute a complete treatise on the detailed application of the Ten Commandments to every aspect of reality. It is the finest exposition of the law of God that it has been my privilege to read. The only work I know which in any way bears comparison to this masterpiece is Rushdoony’s The Institutes of Biblical Law. Not only do we find there a detailed application of God’s word to the practical problems of Christian living in every aspect of personal and social life, but this is done with an admirable sense of theological balance and of the delicate relation of dogmatics to ethics, together with the constant, implicit purpose of favoring the preaching of the gospel, of extending God’s kingdom, and of bringing all honor and praise to the Lord Jesus Christ. In the Preface Viret sets forth his central purpose with the utmost clarity:
My aim in this volume has been to produce an exposition of the Law of God, Law which must be regarded as the rule for every other law through which men are to be directed and governed.
and adds,
Every science, human prudence and all wisdom of men must be put into relation to God as a gift which proceeds from him.
Then Viret goes on to define his purpose more precisely:
Thus God has included in this Law every aspect of that moral doctrine by which men may live well. For in these Laws he has done infinitely better than the Philosophers and all their books, whether they deal with Ethics, Economics or Politics. This Law stands far above all human legislation, whether past, present or future and is above all laws and statutes edicted by men. It follows that whatever good men may put forward has previously been included in this law, and whatever is contrary to it is of necessity evil …. This law, if it is rightly understood, will furnish us with true Ethics, Economics and Politics. It is incomparably superior to what we find in the teachings of Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Cicero and like thinkers who have taken such pains to fashion the customs of men.
And Viret concludes his Preface with these words:
For as it can only be God Himself who is able to give us such a perfect Law by which we are truly enabled to govern ourselves, likewise it is only He who can provide us with Princes and Magistrates, Pastors and Ministers gifted with the capacity of applying this Law. Further, He is fully able to shape such men into adequate instruments for his service and to grant them the authority necessary for the accomplishment of the duties of their office. Thus armed they are enabled by God to maintain those over whom they rule (and of whose welfare they are accountable to God) in a spirit of due subjection. For, just as He has granted us this Law in order that we might clearly know what we lack, so he likewise grants us, through Jesus Christ his Son, the Holy Ghost by whom our hearts are renewed and through whom we receive those gifts and graces so necessary for the accomplishment of our vocation.
Such a view of the overarching authority and of the supreme wisdom of God’s law led Pierre Viret to an examination of the particular duties of men within the bounds of their specific vocations. To this task he more particularly addressed himself in a masterly treatise entitled Métamorphose chrétienne, faite par dialogue. The chapter titles of the sections of the first part entitled Man go as follows: 1/ The natural man. 2/ Man deformed. 3/ The transformation of souls. 4/ The true man, or man transformed. The second part concerns The school of beasts and is composed of the following sections: 1/ Economics, or good management. 2/ Politics, or the Republic. 3/ Military art. 4/ The Arts. 5/ Ethics, or moral behavior. 6/ Religion. 7/ Language and, finally, 8/ Prophesy or Theology. One can imagine the interest such a work provoked at the time it was written.
Finally, among his numerous writings in the field of apologetics (a good number of which were devoted to a running polemic with the errors of the Roman Church) we cannot pass without comment his satirical examination of the politics of his time and development of what we must call the theology of history, a book entitled, Le monde à l’empire et le monde démoniacle. This title, with its pun on the word empire (meaning both empire and to worsen), could be tentatively translated The corruption of the world’s empires and the world demonized. This work bears ample witness to the extraordinary prophetic insight granted to those who, like Viret, make it their business to see and understand every aspect of reality in the light of God’s law-word.
Viret’s Political Thinking
Here of great value is Robert T. Linder’s path-breaking study on Viret’s political thinking. After having described what for Viret was the normative rule of the word of God for both ecclesiastical and theological matters, Linder defines his thinking in these terms:
The Scriptures also contained statements concerning the state and, insofar as they applied to secular government, they represented God’s will for that institution. Thus the secular state was seen by Viret as a de facto creation derived directly from God himself but governed in harmony with the rules and precepts contained in the Holy Scriptures.
Linder adds:
God’s plan for men included a peaceful and orderly existence and the state was the means whereby this kind of life was assured. The rulers of the secular state were to legislate in accordance with the Bible and fulfill the office outlined for them in the Scriptures. Viret had to make the civil authorities see that all justice and law emanated from the sovereign will of God and that they were the dispensers of God’s justice and law. If they did not do this, these secular authorities were considered “wicked tyrants” and in danger of the judgment of Almighty God.
For, in Viret’s eyes,
The secular state was a direct creation of God and because of this was delegated a certain amount of authority directly from God himself. However, according to Viret, the Holy Scriptures not only described and confirmed temporal authority but also defined and limited it.
Viret felt that all laws affecting public morals and related to spiritual values should be drawn directly from the moral law of God. However, he believed that these absolute and eternal laws of God had to be geared to the times in which people lived and the national temperament of the country to which the laws were to be applied.
Further,
Viret made it plain that civil laws could be both good and bad. He believed that men had a certain amount of freedom in choosing the legal codes under which they lived. Nevertheless, he felt that “good laws” in a truly Christian state always would be based on the Ten Commandments of God found in the Holy Scriptures. According to Viret, unless human laws were built upon God’s moral law, men could not expect for them to be just and equitable. In this sense, all “good laws,” come from God himself for they are derived from God’s Word which is the written record of his will for mankind .…
Viret’s great emphasis was upon government under civil law, and particularly under civil law derived, as fully as possible within a given political context, from the moral law of God.
Linder states, moreover:
Viret’s notion that the prince was below the law is extremely interesting and very different from the absolutist theory placing the king above the law that Jean Bodin was to advocate in his De Republica in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The idea that the secular ruler was always subject to the law was one of several recurrent strains in Medieval political thought in Western Europe and was not a new concept.
Viret put it this way:
For prince and magistrate must be subject to the laws of the land and conform their rule to them. For they are not rulers of the law but servants thereof, as they are servants of God from whom all good laws proceed.
And Linder comments:
Viret stressed that in every instance the true Christian should subjugate the Justinian Code and all Roman Law to the Word of God.
Linder concludes:
Viret’s pattern of thought led him to advocate what would be called today the legislation of morals. For example, he favored the adoption of civil statutes against adultery, blasphemy and idolatry, and was a proponent of regulating certain economic activities on Sunday. In addition, he linked true Christianity with the support of such laws as those controlling public corruption and the purchase of public offices, against usury, against the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and legislation fixing ceiling prices and land purchases.
From all this it is clear that Viret’s great friendship for John Calvin (his elder by only two years) in no way prevented him from, on occasion, expressing divergent theological views whilst, of course, sharing on all fundamental points of doctrine the same Reformed convictions. The Reformation thus gives us a striking example of the way basic doctrinal unity is in no way exclusive of a certain theological diversity. It is the mechanical conformism of a narrow-gutted age which cannot stomach disagreements on secondary matters in the church. Thus, on the question of extent of the application of the detail of the Mosaic law to our present situation, Viret held a significantly different position from that of Calvin. This is how Linder defines this difference:
Viret, unlike Calvin, was ready to extend openly the authority of the Bible over the State.
One must here in passing draw the reader’s attention to the influence, on this particular point, of the teaching of Thomas Aquinas on the political and legal theology of John Calvin. On this point Viret’s position, though not explicitly theonomic, was far more consistently and thoroughly Biblical than that of his Genevan colleague who, in his application of God’s law to the body politic, ambivalently ranged between the affirmation of the existence of a natural law, a law of nations (nonetheless inspired, be it said by, Biblical principles) on the one hand in his Institutes, and, on the other, a more careful and precise coordination of the legal and political implications of Biblical law in his commentaries and in his sermons. It is enlightening to compare Viret’s and Calvin’s exegesis of specific texts. In his sermons on Deuteronomy, for example, we often find that Calvin, while not ignoring the detailed practical implications of the Mosaic law, nonetheless pays but scant attention to their application to the political and social problems of his time. He often rapidly passes from these practical ethical and social considerations to, in his eyes, more essential matters and goes on to draw out the doctrinal and spiritual implications of the text. Viret, on the other hand, while never minimizing the doctrinal aspect of his text, paid far more attention to the immediate literal meaning of the specific law under consideration and to its application for his own time. This may explain the fascination his preaching exercised even on those who were foreign to the Faith. But in spite of these different and complementary orientations we do not find the slightest indication of personal and theological tension in the friendship that united these two great Christians leaders in their common vocation to further the kingdom of God. In this they have much to teach us latter-day Calvinists who are all too often inclined to give way to that sectarian spirit which so banefully characterized the Corinthian church.
Viret’s Discernment
I would like to conclude this all too brief appreciation of one of the great figures in the history of the church (often unknown to those who consider themselves heirs of the Reformation) by showing the extraordinary lucidity and discernment by which his great respect for God’s law endowed Pierre Viret. In a book on the nature of the study of history in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the Marxist historian, Claude Gilbert Dubois, pays considerable attention to Viret’s Biblical vision of history and in so doing brings to light the remarkable economic discernment of our Swiss reformer. Dubois’ analysis is concentrated on the study of Viret’s masterpiece in apologetics, Le monde a l'empire et le monde de'moniacle. This book, says Dubois, could well be considered a treatise in economics written some two hundred years in advance of its time. Though in total disagreement with Viret’s theocentric conservatism, Dubois is nonetheless outspoken in his admiration of our author’s perception of contemporary economic currents. For Viret saw in the anarchical monopolistic capitalism developing before his indignant gaze a growing practical opposition to God’s law and the rise of a thoroughly anti-Christian society. Viret saw in the progressive attachment of many of his contemporaries to material wealth (a fascination severed from all sense of stewardship and of accountability to God for the use of one’s riches), a particularly vile form of idolatry where the rapidity of growth in opulence was in direct proportion to the loss of religion and morality. This is how Dubois expresses Viret’s preoccupations:
Behind the official public laws which are supposed to govern society one can discern the existence of those hidden perverse principles of our fallen nature that have now come to be officially accepted by society which imposes as the norm of a new morality the perverted rules of a chaotic nature.
Behind the official public laws which are supposed to govern society one can discern the existence of those hidden perverse principles of our fallen nature that have now come to be officially accepted by society which imposes as the norm of a new morality the perverted rules of a chaotic nature.
Viret’s indignation has a theological base — these Christians have betrayed that spirit of poverty which characterized the apostles; but it also bears a social character — this sterile and unproductive wealth provokes the economic enslavement of the poor to the newly enriched ruling class. What this 16th century economist reproaches the Roman Church for is that its accumulation of riches had the effect of freezing its wealth in unproductive activities rather than letting it circulate freely in the money market where eventually it would also come to benefit the poorer classes.
And he asks,
What is the true character of the social degradation Viret perceives in the history of his time? Its origin is theological in nature, linked as it is to human sin. It manifests itself immorally by the perversion of the created order. But it takes on the modern form of a specifically economic scandal: a perverted economic order, a unethical distribution of riches, provoked by the circulation of wealth in one direction only, its accumulation in the hands of a few. Such are the signs of the corruption that reigns in the world today.
Viret writes:
The greatest evil that can be imagined is when the public purse is impoverished and individual men wealthy. This is an evident sign that the commonwealth is in an unhealthy condition, that public policy is in weak and incapable hands and that the state is under the domination of thieves and bandits who make of it their prey.
For Viret such a cultivation of sterile wealth represents nothing less than an iniquitous pact with the Prince of this fallen world. It is nothing less than idolatry, the cult of the creature and the forgetting of the Creator. Such an egotistical cumulative concentration of wealth runs completely counter to the Biblical doctrines of stewardship, of charity, and of personal sacrifice. In itself it is a clear indication of the decadence of a society and calls forth future purifying social disasters and divine judgments. For the economic mechanisms which lead to such an unfruitful concentration of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy prepares the way for those social and political catastrophes which will inevitably destroy such an amoral and irresponsible ruling class. For this infernal cycle of economic injustice must of necessity breed revolution. Economic oppression has as direct origin an inordinate desire for the accumulation of wealth but, in the long run, it must produce popular impatience. And such a feeling of social frustration, when it becomes conscious, ends in revolt. For Viret very lucidly perceived, and here the Marxist Dubois parts ways with him, that sedition cannot be constructive. Viret saw very clearly that this new oligarchy made abundant use of its monopolistic domination of the apparatus of the state to appropriate the riches of the whole nation by disrupting the natural circulation of wealth in the usual channels of production and exchange. For Viret, this stifling of the economic blood flow of industrial production and commercial exchange by a parasitical oligarchy must be broken if an equitable distribution of wealth is to be reestablished and the economic health of the society restored. In spite of his explicit opposition, both to Viret’s social and political conservatism and to his Christian pessimism as to the benefits to be drawn from revolutionary action, Dubois at the close of his analysis of Pierre Viret’s diagnosis of the economic evils of his time (and ours!) exclaims:
Is it not indeed extraordinary that Viret, taking as his point of departure a number of vague theological propositions, … should manifest such a sure sense of historical judgment, such precision in his economic analysis of the trends of his time and so marvelous a perspicuity in his analysis of the new economic mechanisms which were transforming society before his very eyes?
But Viret’s vague theological propositions are not as sterile as Dubois imagines. We here see the wonderful practical and intellectual wisdom that comes from a long-standing meditation of God’s law, particularly, in this instance, with regard to the law’s economic implications. And if Viret sees all too well, in the outworking of the principles of evil the judgments of God towards a rebellious and ungrateful world, he on the other hand, shows us all the more clearly the blessings which flow from faithful obedience to God’s commandments. Speaking of the blessings and judgments being so clearly worked out before his attentive gaze, he writes:
If we but consider what the grace of God has in our time manifested through the renewed revelation of his Holy Gospel and the restoration of letters and of every excellent discipline that has followed, we can without hesitation call our age, the age of gold and affirm that, since the time of the Apostles, none have been so blessed as we are today. But if, on the contrary, we oppose our malice and ungratefulness to God’s abundant goodness and to the grace he so generously offers us, then we can certainly call this age, an age of iron and consider ourselves the most miserable of men who have ever lived under heaven’s implacable dome.
This brief evocation of the astonishing life and labors of Pierre Viret, that faithful servant of Almighty God who all his life labored to bring every thought of his contemporaries captive to the obedience of Jesus Christ and of his word, makes it absolutely plain that R. J. Rushdoony stands squarely in that Biblical tradition which manifests to the world what is without a doubt the most vigorous and the most fruitful heritage of the church of the living God.
Jean-Marc Berthoud, who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) in the Republic of South Africa. He is the editor of the review Résister et Construire, President of the Associaton vaudoise de Parents chrétiens in Switzerland, and of the Association Création, Bible et Science and is the author of numerous articles and a number of books.
Book available: Chalcedon Foundation: www.chalcedon.edu
(Jean-Marc Berthoud, A Comprehensive Faith, pages 93-106)
Author Bio:
Jean-Marc Berthoud (behr-tū) was born in 1939 in South Africa from Swiss missionary parents and lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. He holds Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Arts with Honors degrees from the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the editor of the review Résister et Construire, president of the Association Vaudoise de Parents chétiens in Switzerland, and of the Association Création, Bible et Science, and is the author of numerous books.
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