Theodore Beza Quotes on God
Theodore Beza (1519–1605), the French humanist who succeeded Calvin at Geneva and shaped the international Reformed tradition through the second half of the sixteenth century, gave Reformed theology one of its most distinctive doctrinal formulations in the Tabula Praedestinationis (1555) and the long subsequent polemical and exegetical works. The framework defends the supralapsarian ordering of the divine decrees — election and reprobation are conceptually prior to the decree to permit the fall — as the most rigorous expression of the absolute sovereignty of God over the eternal destiny of every rational creature, and Beza's institutional and theological work made Geneva the principal center of the international Reformed tradition for two generations.
Quotes
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Attributed to Theodore Beza:
“God's election is the foundation of every saving grace.”
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Attributed to Theodore Beza:
“Faith is wrought in us by the Spirit, not chosen by our will.”
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Attributed to Theodore Beza:
“The visible Church is to be ordered according to the rule of Scripture.”
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Attributed to Theodore Beza:
“Liturgy is the school of the heart.”
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“If we must put up with what this impious man [ Sebastian Castellio ] has vomited forth in his preface, what remains to us intact of the Christian religion? ... We must wait for another revelation.”
Letter to Heinrich Bullinger (29 March 1554), quoted in J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1928), p. 95 -
“Now you, the whole world's ornament, the Queen On whose behalf both winds and oceans fight, Rule on with God, far from ambition seen, And succour still the pious with your might, That England you, you England long hold dear, Whom good men love as much as wicked fear.”
To the Most Serene Elizabeth , Queen of England' (1588), quoted in Bertrand T. Whitehead, Brags and Boasts: Propaganda in the Year of the Armada (1994), p. 194 -
“I have always impugned the Roman hierarchy, but I have never had the intention of opposing the ecclesiastical polity of your Anglican Church. I wish and hope that the sacred and holy society of your bishops may continue and maintain forever the right and title to the government of the Church with all Christian equity and moderation.”
Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift (March 1591), quoted in John T. McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (1957), p. 315