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Geneva had been under the rule of the House of Savoy, but the people of Genev triumphantly overrun the Savoys and the native bishop-prince of Geneva in the decline years of the 1520’s. However, the people of Geneva, unlike the citizens of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and other cities that became Protestant in the 1520’s, were primarily French speakers and did not knew German. Intrinsically, they did not have intimate cultural ties with the reformed churches in Germany and Switzerland. The Protestant subdivision of Bern, nonetheless, was resolute to see Protestantism spread throughout Switzerland.
Bern sent Protestant reformers to convert Geneva into a Protestant city in 1533 and after a considerable conflict, Geneva officially became Protestant in 1535. By that time Calvin was a successful lawyer. He was invited to Geneva to build the new Reformed church and due to Calvin’s efforts completely changed the face of Protestantism, for he straightly addressed issues that early Reformers didn’t know how or didn’t want to answer. His most significant work includes the organization of church governance and the social organization of the church and the city.
In fact, he was the first major political intellectual to exemplify social organization totally on biblical principles. In the beginning his reforms did not go over well. He orates the issue of church governance by making leaders within the new church. In it he himself formed evangelism intended to obtrude doctrine on all the members of the church. Together with Guillaume Farel he ordained a strict moral code on the citizens of Geneva which was derived from a literal reading of Christian scriptures. In response the people of Geneva though that they have thrown away one church only to see it replaced by an identical twin.
In reality they saw Calvin’s reforms as imposing a new form of papacy on the people, only with different names and different people. Therefore, the Genevans threw him out. Calvin and the Protestant reformers were exiled from Geneva in early 1538. Calvin moved to Strasbourg where he began writing commentaries on the Bible and completed his mammoth account of Protestant doctrine, The Institutes of the Christian Church. Calvin’s expositions are nearly boundless, but within these commentaries he developed all the central principles of Calvinism in his strict readings of the Old and New Testaments.
The aim of commentaries in Western arcane custom was to elucidate both the literary method and the difficult passages in literary and historical works. Calvin wrote expositions to evidently explain scriptural writings, but in actuality he, like theologians before him, used the expositions to argue for his own theology as he held was present in scriptural writings. In this context, these commentaries are less an explanation of the Bible than a topic by topic construction of his theological, social, and political philosophy.
Again, in 1540 new officials invited Calvin back to Geneva. And as soon as he arrived he resolved about reforming Geneva society. His much significant innovation was the annexation of the church into city government. After that he at once helped to reconstruct municipal government so that clergy would be involved in municipal decisions, especially in training the masses. He ordained a power structure on the Geneva church and started a procession of statute reforms to obtrude a strict and firm moral code on the city.