Francois (Francis) Turretin

(1623-1687)

Child of the Luccan diaspora, Genevan Reformed theologian and minister, known for his influential Institutes of Elenctic Theology and contributions to Calvinist scholasticism.

Turretin was born in Geneva on 17 October 1623, the fourth of seven children, to Bénédict Turretin, a professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva, and Louise Micheli Turretini. His family had moved to Geneva in the late sixteenth century after his grandfather, Francesco, a silk merchant who had been converted in the Luccan circle influenced by Peter Martyr Vermigli, joined the flight of many Luccans to escape persecution for converting to Protestantism.

Turretin’s father, who died in 1631, when Turretin was only eight years old, had been granted bourgeois status in 1627, giving his children the same status from birth. In 1637, Francis began his theological education at the Academy of Geneva. He went on to study throughout Europe, including in Leiden, Utrecht, Paris, Saumur, Montauban, and Nîmes. During his studies, Turretin learned from a variety of scholars, such as Pierre Gassendi and Moses Amyraut, and was exposed to a wide range of theological ideas. At the University of Leiden, where he studied under theologians such as Friedrich Spanheim, André Rivet, and John Polyander, he defended his thesis, De verbo Dei scripto in specie et eius origine [On the written word of God in particular and its origin]. At the newer Academy of Utrecht under Gisbert Voetius he had access to Aristotelian philosophy and scholastic methods taught by people such as Johannes Hoornbeek, and Anna Marie van Schurman. In Paris he stayed in the house of the Amyrautian, Jean Daillé, and connected with Charles Drelincourt and Jean Mestrezat; he met the historian David Blondel and was introduced to the study of astronomy by Pierre Gassendi. At the Academy of Saumur, he was exposed to "hypothetical universalism" under theologians such as Louis Cappel, Josué de la Place, and Moses Amyraut himself, but remained unconvinced as to its coherence as a theology. At the Academy of Montauban, attached to 'the mother church of Southern France', he studied under Antoine Garrisoles, who was the chair of theology, and Paul Carolus. In Nimes, he had the advantage of the reputation of his father, Bénédict Turretin, who had previously been in Nîmes, "pacifying the Protestant church of that city."

In 1648, Turretin was assigned to the Company of Pastors without an official congregation. In the same year, he was called to be the pastor of the Italian church. He was ordained as a minister in Geneva in December 1649, a time which was marked by theological disputation. He served as minister and member of the Vénérable Company of Pastors. In 1652, he was invited to minister at the church in Lyon. He was recalled to Geneva in December of that year.

In February 1653, Turretin took on the chair of theology at the Geneva Academy, and in March of the next year, he was elected rector of the Academy for the first time. In May 1661, Turretin travelled to the Netherlands, stopping in Basel to solidify relationships that would become intrinsic to his time as professor and rector at the Academy. In the Netherlands, he advanced the cause of Geneva and declined an offer of a pastorate. Over his time in Geneva, Turretin grew to become a significant figure in the development of Reformed orthodoxy. He is best known for his Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679–85), a comprehensive work of systematic theology that essentially laid the basis for the whole genre of Calvinist systematic theology for centuries thereafter. Other works included De satisfactione Christi disputationes (1666); De necessaria secessione nostra ab Ecclesia Romana (1687) and his contributions to the Helvetic Consensus of 1675.

On 23 September 1669, Turretin married Elizabeth de Masse. They had four children, but only one, Jean-Alphonse, survived infancy.

Turretin died on 28 September 1687, following a sudden illness. His nephew, Bénédict Pictet, succeeded him as professor of theology. Though his theology was widely rejected by eighteenth-century Geneva, his Institutes of Elenctic Theology became highly influential in Reformed theology, particularly in Scotland and America, and his work was used by later theologians such as Charles Hodge and Herman Bavinck. He sought through his teachings and works to unify the Reformed community and to defend it against both internal and external challenges. The categories he laid out in his Institutes certainly achieved that over the longer term, regardless of the opposition they may have sparked in his own day. Those criticisms remain among those few historians who have taken Turretin seriously. Armstrong for instance dismissed Turretin's scholasticism for having altered Reformed theology to the point that predestination became the central dogma of post-Calvin Reformed theologians, while Eamon Duffy described the theological environment of Geneva and Switzerland in the seventeenth century as, “locked in the scholastic straight-jacket of the Formula Consensus, committed to the infallibility of the medieval pointing of the received text of the Hebrew bible, and to a horrific form of the doctrine of predestination.”

Sources

Cumming, Nicholas, Francis Turretin (1623–87) and the Reformed Tradition (Brill: Leiden and Boston, 2020)

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