One of the great lacunae of the English-speaking Evangelical memory relates to France. For far too many English-speaking Evangelicals assume that after the Reformation France was a monolithic Roman Catholic bastion. But, for example, when John Calvin died in 1564, there were nearly 2 million Evangelicals in France, 10% of the entire population. And these believers and their churches had a rich hist-ory in the years after Calvin’s death.
Historians know this Christian tradition as the Huguenots and they produced some remarkably fine Christians and preachers. Consider, for instance, the preacher Jean Claude (1619–1687), the quarter-centenary of whose birth is this year and who, in his own day, was considered a model of preaching excellence and compared to John Chrysostom in the Ancient Church.
Claude was born to a pastor, François Claude, and his wife in the village of Le Sauvetat-du-Dropt in south-western France, about55 kilometres north of Agen. With his father’s encouragement, Claude obtained a Master of Arts degree from the Protestant school of Montauban and then studied for a further three years in that school’s faculty of divinity. A year or so after his graduation from Montauban in 1645, Claude accepted the pastorate at the town of St Affrique. He ministered here until 1655, when he was called to serve in the large congregation of Nîmes in Languedoc.
Teaching at Montauban
Claude was banished from Nîmes in 1661, when a synod over which he was presiding firmly rejected a suggestion from the Governor of Languedoc, Armand de Bourbon, a dabbler in mysticism, that the Protestants of the province reunite with the Roman Catholic Church. After a brief stay in Paris, where he unsuccessfully sought to get his banishment from Nîmes overturned, Claude accepted a ministerial post at Montauban, where he pastored from 1661 to 1665. This period of ministry, which Claude later considered as ‘the sweetest and happiest period of his life’, ended abruptly when once again he was forbidden to preach in the city where he was ministering. The main reason behind this second banishment was Claude’s emergence as a skillful apologist for the Reformed Faith. Between 1665 and 1673 he penned four important defences of biblical Christianity.
Pastoring at Charenton
By the time that Claude wrote these two works he had been called to pastor the great Huguenot Temple at Charenton, near Paris. The pulpit ministry at Charenton was very demanding, but Claude still found time to draw up polemical replies to a number of Roman Catholic authors. Among the most important events of this period at Charenton was a public debate that Claude had in February 1678 with Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who was the most renowned French Catholic preacher and polemicist of the day. The main lineaments of this debate were subsequently published a decade or so later. Regretfully, the demands of the pulpit ministry at Charenton and Claude’s involvement as an apologist for the Protestant cause meant that very few of his sermons were published.
In 1681, Claude received an offer from the University of Groningen in Holland to assume a professorship of divinity there. It was a very tempting offer, especially in view of the fact that the situation for Protestants in France was increasingly precarious in the early 1680s. However, Claude chose to remain at Charenton, giving aid to his fellow Protestants in the extremely difficult days leading up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (a law that had guaranteed freedom for the Huguenots to practice their faith) in October of 1685. When that turning-point in the history of French Protestantism took place, while most Protestant leaders were given 15 days to make arrangements to leave the country, Claude was given but 24 hours to quit France. This singling out of Claude speaks volumes for the way that his Catholic adversaries regarded him as a key voice for the Protestant cause that had to be silenced. Soon after leaving France, Claude published a work documenting state atrocities against the Protestants.
In exile in Holland
Since Claude’s only son, Isaac, was the minister of the Walloon congregation in The Hague, the French pastor made his way there. Claude was warmly welcomed by William of Orange and his wife Mary, later William III and Mary II of England, who gave him a considerable pension to live on. Owing to his son being the main preacher of the Walloon congregation, Claude did not get to exercise his calling as often as he wished. A final sermon, on Luke 1:30–33, was preached on Christmas Day, 1686. The following day Claude fell ill and, after a brief illness, died on 13 January 1687. In these final days of his life, Claude affirmed his life-long conviction that the Reformed Faith ‘was the only good religion which was to be followed; that it was entirely found in the word of God; [and] that this was the fountain from whence it was to be derived’.
