Calvin in Geneva: The Reformer Van Drunen Doesn't Want You to Meet

You’re at the men’s breakfast meeting.

Eggs on the plate. The tea is all gone.

The man across from you, an elder for some years now, has just heard you say that Christ rules over the law courts. Over the schools. Over the laws of the land.

He leans back in his chair and emits a muted half-smile, half shakes his head. Then he says it.

The line.

“That’s not the Reformed position.”

“Calvin didn’t teach that.”

“Your ideas come from a much later innovation.”

“You’ve departed from the true Reformed tradition.”

And there’s a part of you that flinches. Because that man has read more books than you have. He’s been in church longer than you have. And he’s just told you, in front of the other men, that the Calvinist tradition is not on your side.

That’s a serious charge for a Reformed man.

And it’s the move Van Drunen makes in the academic literature too. The strongest rhetorical weapon in his arsenal. He doesn’t just argue Radical Two Kingdoms from the Bible. He argues it from Calvin. From the Westminster Confession. From the whole Reformed mainstream. And he says the men who want Christ to rule on Monday morning, men like me, are the revisionists. The novelty. The departure.

If he’s right, this whole series is novelty. If he’s right, you’re being catechised by a fringe loony bin.

But if he’s wrong, and the Calvin he’s quoting is a Calvin who never lived, then the man across the table isn’t speaking for the Reformed tradition. He’s speaking for a version of tradition that was made to measure.

And by the end of today, you’ll be able to tell the difference.

My name is Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk, and this is Exiles No More.

Let’s go.

What This Argument Will Give You

Here’s what we’ll cover.

First, the claim. Van Drunen’s case that Radical Two Kingdoms is the Reformed mainstream. Stated fairly, in his own framing, so you understand the weapon before we take it apart.

Second, the Calvin of Geneva. Not the Calvin of selected paragraphs. The Calvin of the actual city. What he did. What he wrote. What he enforced.

Third, Westminster. The Confession Van Drunen quotes from. We’re going to read the bits he doesn’t quote.

Fourth, the mainstream he doesn’t mention. The Puritans. The Scottish Covenanters. Kuyper. The men who built whole civilisations on the conviction that Christ’s law rules the courts as well as the church.

And by the end, you’ll have a question you can put to any man who tells you you’ve departed from the Reformed tradition. A question that exposes which Calvin he’s actually quoting.

Van Drunen’s Case From the Tradition

Let me state Van Drunen’s case the way he’d want it stated. He’s not making it up. He’s pointing at real men, real documents, real sentences from the Reformed tradition.

Here’s what he says.

He says Luther taught two kingdoms. Two governments. Two regiments. One spiritual, one civil. Different swords. Different jurisdictions.

He says Calvin taught the same thing. Book three, chapter nineteen of the Institutes. Book four, chapter twenty. A spiritual kingdom and a civil one.

He says the Westminster Confession stands in this stream. The Covenant of Works in chapter seven. The distinction between the church’s spiritual authority and the civil magistrate’s external power.

He says the whole Reformed scholastic tradition, Junius, Vermigli, Althusius, all of them, on his side. Natural law reasoning is bog-standard Reformed theology.

Now if that’s true, here’s what it costs you. It means the men who built modern Reformed theonomy and dominion theology, Rushdoony, Perks, Boot, North, are the latecomers. The revisionists. And you, sitting at that men’s breakfast with eggs going cold on your plate, are being led away from the true Reformed path.

That’s the claim. If you’re going to push back, you’d better know it. Because if you can’t say back to that older man what Van Drunen actually argues, you’ll look like you’re just upset. You’ll look like you’re reacting. And he’ll smile that small, sad smile.

So fix the claim in your head. Luther. Calvin. Westminster. Reformed scholasticism. That’s the witness Van Drunen calls to the stand.

Now, I’m not going to argue with Van Drunen about Luther today. That’s a different lecture. I’m going to do something more dangerous. I’m going to walk you into Geneva. And introduce you to the Calvin Van Drunen’s been hoping you’d never meet.

The Calvin of Geneva

Geneva. Fifteen-forty-one. A small city on a lake at the foot of the Alps. About thirteen thousand people inside its walls. And one man, just back from exile in Strasbourg, is about to spend the next twenty-three years of his life turning that city into a Reformed laboratory.

Watchmen at the gates. Lamps in the windows after dark. Sermons in the cathedral three or four times a week. Magistrates in their offices on the Hôtel de Ville. And one man writing law. Not just church law. Civil law. The law of the city.

His name is John Calvin.

And what he did in that city for the next two decades is going to make Van Drunen’s Radical Two Kingdoms Calvin look like a stranger who’s wandered in by mistake.

Distinction Is Not Separation

Hear me carefully on this. Calvin did distinguish between the spiritual and the civil. I’m not going to pretend he didn’t. He talked about a spiritual kingdom that touches the soul, and a civil government that touches the body and the outward life. That distinction is in the Institutes. It’s plain.

But here is the difference between Calvin and Van Drunen.

Calvin distinguishes. Van Drunen separates.

Calvin says there are two governments under one God. Van Drunen says there are two kingdoms under two different laws.

Calvin says the magistrate is God’s servant, accountable to God’s revealed Word, with his Bible open on his desk. Van Drunen says the magistrate is on natural-law autopilot, with his Bible closed in his briefcase for the weekend.

That’s not a distinction. It’s a divorce. And the real Calvin never filed those papers.

The Ecclesiastical Ordinances

In November fifteen-forty-one, Calvin sits down with the magistrates of Geneva. And together they draft a document called the Ecclesiastical Ordinances.

Now stop right there.

Why is the man writing church order sitting in a room with civil magistrates? If Calvin is a Radical Two Kingdoms man, what’s he doing in that room? If the church runs the church and the city runs the city, why is the man writing the church’s constitution working hand in glove with the men who run the streets?

Because he doesn’t believe what Van Drunen says he believes. He believes the magistrate has a duty before God for the religion of the city. And he’s there to make sure the magistrate discharges it.

The Ecclesiastical Ordinances regulate worship. The sacraments. The discipline of citizens. Marriage. Which days the people can dance and what they can wear to it.

That’s not the limited, modest, hands-off, separate-realms civil authority of Van Drunen’s common kingdom. That’s the civil sword sitting under the law of God.

Both Tables of the Decalogue

Now, Van Drunen will tell you Calvin distinguished between the spiritual and the civil. I just told you he did. But what Van Drunen quietly leaves out is what Calvin thought the civil government was for.

Open the Institutes. Book four, chapter twenty, section two. Calvin says civil government is appointed not only “to provide for the common subsistence of men, to cherish common peace and tranquillity,” but, and I’m quoting, “that humanity be maintained among men”, and that “the public manifestation of religion may exist among Christians.”

The public manifestation of religion. Among Christians. By the civil magistrate.

And section three, same chapter. Calvin says the civil magistrate’s duty is to “prevent idolatry, sacrilege against God’s name, blasphemies against His truth, and other public offences against religion from arising and spreading among the people.”

Read that one more time. Idolatry. Sacrilege. Blasphemy. Public offences against religion.

Now you tell me. Is that natural law? Is “thou shalt not make a graven image” (Exodus 20:4) a precept the unaided pagan conscience can deduce from the structure of the cosmos? Is “put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy” (Colossians 3:8) written on the heart of every secular humanist who walks through Westminster?

No.

Those are the territory of the first four commandments. The first table of the Decalogue. Our duty to God. And Calvin assigns the civil magistrate the duty of enforcing them.

Where do we find Calvin teaching Radical Two Kingdoms? Not in book four, chapter twenty. Not in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances. Not in his work with the magistrates. Not in his treatises on civil government.

The Radical Two Kingdoms Calvin lives in a footnote that Van Drunen has elevated into a paragraph. The actual Calvin lives in twenty-three years of legislation.

Both tables. Duty to God, and duty to neighbour. The very thing Van Drunen says the common kingdom can’t do. Calvin had the civil magistrate doing it. For twenty-three years. In one city. In plain view of God and man.

Servetus

Now, I have to bring up Servetus. It’s the most controversial moment in Calvin’s whole career. But you can’t talk about Calvin in Geneva and skip the man who got burned at the stake for heresy.

Fifteen-fifty-three. Michael Servetus. A Spanish physician. A brilliant mind. And a heretic on the Trinity and on infant baptism.

He’s already been condemned by the Catholic authorities in Vienne. He escapes. He comes to Geneva. He attends a sermon Calvin is preaching. He’s recognised. He’s arrested by the civil magistrates of Geneva. Tried by the civil magistrates of Geneva. Executed by the civil magistrates of Geneva. Twenty-seventh of October. Burned at the stake. For heresy.

Now here’s what matters for our argument. Calvin didn’t strike the match. Calvin didn’t pass the sentence. The civil magistrate did. But Calvin approved. He testified at the trial. He wrote in defence of the execution afterwards. He thought it was just.

Now you and I might think that was a tragic overreach. You might think Geneva got it horribly wrong. I’ll leave that to one side, because that’s a different conversation.

But here’s the question you cannot dodge. What kind of theological framework lets the civil magistrate execute a man for heresy?

Radical Two Kingdoms doesn’t. It says religion is the church’s business, not the magistrate’s. It says the magistrate runs the streets by natural law. It says the spiritual sword and the civil sword don’t intersect on questions of religious doctrine.

So whose framework was Calvin operating in? Not Van Drunen’s.

Calvin was operating in a framework where the magistrate has a duty to suppress public heresy, because the magistrate is accountable to God for the religion of the city. That is the opposite of Radical Two Kingdoms. That is theocratic in the broad sense. And it’s the Calvin of Geneva. The actual man. In the actual city. In the actual year.

Well, guess what. I’m not talking about burning anyone. That’s not on my agenda.

But I am saying this. You cannot take the historic Calvin and claim him for Radical Two Kingdoms. The framework will not stretch that far.

You’ve just watched the Calvin of Geneva fall on Van Drunen. But that’s only one witness. Van Drunen has a second one. A bigger one. And there’s a paragraph in it he doesn’t quote.

The Westminster You Weren’t Shown

The Westminster Confession of Faith. Sixteen-forty-six. The most influential Reformed confession in the English-speaking world.

Van Drunen leans on it. He says chapter seven, on the Covenant of Works, supports his two-Adams framework. And he’s right that the Confession teaches a covenant of works. Fine.

But then he stops quoting.

Because if you keep reading the same Confession, you run into chapter twenty-three. Of the Civil Magistrate. Section three. And it reads like it was written specifically to refute Radical Two Kingdoms.

I’m going to read it slowly. The original sixteen-forty-six version, before the American revisions of seventeen-eighty-eight watered it down.

It says, of the civil magistrate:

“He hath authority, and it is his duty, to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered, and observed.”

Now I’m going to ask you something. Is that Radical Two Kingdoms? Is “suppressing blasphemies and heresies” something the unregenerate conscience can deduce from common moral awareness? Is “settling, administering and observing the ordinances of God” a job description for a religiously neutral civil power?

No. It is not.

It is the civil magistrate operating as a servant of God under God’s revealed law, with explicit duties toward the church and toward true religion.

And the Westminster Larger Catechism, question one hundred and twenty-nine, lists among the duties of superiors, including civil magistrates, the preservation of true religion and justice. By the magistrate. In the same confessional documents Van Drunen claims for his side.

That is exactly what Van Drunen says the civil magistrate cannot do. But the Westminster divines gave him the duty in black ink on white paper.

So you have two choices. Either the Westminster divines were Radical Two Kingdoms men, in which case they wrote the opposite of what they believed. Or they were not. You pick.

And it gets sharper. Because the Westminster Assembly didn’t meet in a vacuum. It met under the Solemn League and Covenant. A document signed by the English Parliament and the Scottish Estates in sixteen-forty-three, in which they pledged, before Almighty God, to reform the religion of three kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland, into “the nearest conjunction and uniformity” with the Word of God.

Three kingdoms. Covenanting together. To bring their civil, ecclesiastical and national lives into line with Scripture.

That is not two kingdoms. That is one kingdom, with three nations under it, all bowing to King Jesus. Whether they liked it or not.

That is the air the Westminster divines breathed. And Van Drunen claims them. That’s like claiming John Knox for the Council of Trent. That math ain’t mathing.

The Mainstream He Doesn’t Mention

So when Van Drunen tells you Radical Two Kingdoms is the Reformed mainstream, here’s what he has to leave out.

He has to leave out the New England Puritans. The men who founded Massachusetts and Connecticut on the assumption that civil law would be drawn directly from God’s revealed Word. John Cotton’s Moses His Judicials, a proposed legal code for the colony built from the case laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy.

He has to leave out the Scottish Covenanters. Men who covenanted, with their own blood at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog and Airds Moss, that the law of Christ would rule both kirk and crown. Samuel Rutherford and Lex, Rex, “the law is king”, in which the civil magistrate is held to account by Scripture itself.

He has to leave out Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, and John Owen, his chaplain and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, who would have laughed at the idea that the civil sword can be wielded without reference to God’s revealed Word.

He has to leave out three centuries of Dutch Reformed politics. He has to leave out Abraham Kuyper. Reformed theologian. Reformed politician. Prime Minister of the Netherlands. The man who declared that over every square inch of human existence, Christ cries “Mine!”

That isn’t a quiet little side stream. That is a continent of Reformed tradition. And Van Drunen has to hide it. He has to leave out an entire civilisational tradition to get his Calvin to stand up straight.

So when you hear him say “transformationists are the revisionists”, what he really means is, transformationists have departed from a thin little academic strand of two-kingdoms thinking that he has chosen to elevate as the mainstream. He’s hidden the actual mainstream behind the curtain.

The actual mainstream of Bible-believing Christians that built civilisations. Universities. The common law. Hospitals. The abolition of chattel slavery. The free press. The independent juror.

These were not produced by men sitting in coffee shops doing natural-law reasoning with their secular neighbours. These were produced by men who believed Christ rules the courts and the schools and the laws of the land.

If Van Drunen wins his historical argument, those men were all confused. Their whole civilisation was a category error. The Christendom that produced your common law, your university, and the hospital your grandmother died in, all of that was confusion.

I don’t believe that. You shouldn’t either.

The American Test

And here’s the test. Where did Van Drunen’s natural-law tradition actually end up in real history? Because it did get tried. In the American founding.

Men sincerely believed they could build a republic on a “shared” natural law that Christians and deists and rationalists could all agree on. It seemed humble at the time.

But how long before the “shared” natural law became a not-shared natural law? How long before “we hold these truths to be self-evident” became “we deny these truths in defence of our preferred autonomy”?

Less than two centuries. Less than three lifetimes.

The natural-law tradition Van Drunen wants you to inherit has already been weighed in the balance of history. It produced the secular West. That is the receipt.

The natural-law project failed. Not because its defenders weren’t sincere. But because the unbeliever always sets the terms of what “natural” means once the Christian vacates the field.

What You Do This Week

I’m not leaving you with five hundred years of theology and no instructions. Four things. Specific. For this week.

Step One. Read Institutes Book Four, Chapter Twenty

In your own copy of the Institutes. If you don’t have one, find one. Library. Kindle. Free PDF from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Calvin. Book four. Chapter twenty. “Of Civil Government.” About fifteen pages. Read it twice. Once with Van Drunen’s reading in mind. Then read it again with Geneva in mind. Ask yourself, does this man sound like he thinks the magistrate is religiously neutral?

He doesn’t. He explicitly assigns the magistrate the duty to maintain “the outward worship of God” and to “defend sound doctrine.” You’ll see it with your own eyes.

There’s a quiet authority that comes from having read the primary source. You stop being a man whose theology depends on second-hand summaries. You become a man who has read the document. That changes how you stand at the breakfast table.

Step Two. Memorise Westminster Confession 23.3

The original sixteen-forty-six version. Not the American revision. You don’t have to memorise the whole paragraph. Memorise the central claim.

“He hath authority, and it is his duty…”

Because that one phrase is a hammer. When the elder at the men’s breakfast tells you Westminster is on his side, you say, “section twenty-three, paragraph three. Let’s read it.”

Watch him hedge. Watch him reach for the American revision. Watch him explain why the divines didn’t quite mean what they wrote.

Now you’re not the one looking like you’ve departed from the tradition. He is.

Step Three. Read One Reformed Primary Source

This week. One source. Could be Samuel Rutherford’s Lex, Rex. Could be John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet, for the title alone, frankly. Could be Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism.

Pick one. Open it. Read for thirty minutes.

Because Van Drunen is counting on something. He is counting on the fact that ninety-nine percent of Reformed men have never read these documents. They’ve read the summaries. They’ve heard the sermons. They’ve absorbed the vibe. That’s how a curated tradition gets built. By making sure most people don’t go to the source.

And while you’re reading, ask yourself this. Where have you fallen for the curated version? Where have you accepted a half-quote because it was given to you by a man you respected? Where have you trimmed your theology to fit a tradition you’ve never actually read?

Don’t blame the elder at the breakfast. Mirror first. Become a man who has read the actual texts.

Step Four. Sit With the Next Question

Here it is. We’ve taken Van Drunen’s historical pillar away from him today. But he has another pillar. A bigger one. A biblical pillar.

He says the Noahic covenant of Genesis nine is the formal charter of the common kingdom. He says that’s where God set up a separate, non-redemptive arrangement governing all human civilisation by natural law until Christ returns.

That’s a biblical claim. And it deserves a biblical answer.

So this week, do this. Open Genesis. Read chapter eight. All of it. Pay special attention to the very last verses. Verse twenty. Verse twenty-one. Notice what Noah does before the covenant of Genesis nine. Notice how God responds.

And ask yourself this question. If the Noahic covenant is the charter of a “common” kingdom, a non-redemptive arrangement governed by natural law, why does the whole thing begin with an altar? Why does it begin with a burnt offering? Why does it begin with the smell of atoning sacrifice?

Sit with that. Because next, we’re going to follow that smoke all the way up. And we’re going to find out that Van Drunen’s common kingdom has a redemptive foundation he never told you about.

The Last Word

Let me leave you with this.

Van Drunen says you’re the revisionist. He says the Reformed tradition is on his side.

But the Calvin of Geneva, the actual man, in the actual city, executed a heretic, wrote the law of the streets, and held the civil magistrate to both tables of God’s commandments.

He didn’t separate Sunday from Monday. He made Monday answer to Sunday’s God.

So the next time someone tells you you’ve departed from the Reformed mainstream by wanting Christ to rule on a Tuesday afternoon, ask them whose mainstream.

Because it wasn’t Calvin’s.