In 2009, a collection of late essays by the great Dutch Reformation historian Heiko Oberman (1930-2001) was published under the title John Calvin and the Reformation of the Refugees. The title essay argued that Calvin’s life and thought could be fruitfully understood through the lens of his status as a religious refugee, exiled from Catholic France, ministering to and alongside fellow exiles in Geneva.
Oberman did not live to further develop his thesis. But now, Kenneth J. Woo has published John Calvin, Refugee Theologian: Introducing a Reformer in Exile (Baker Academic, 2025). Woo elaborates on Oberman’s insight to deepen our understanding of Calvin’s theology, biblical exegesis, preaching, pastoral practice, and polemical engagements. Woo’s book arrives at a moment when refugees are at the center of many crises in our world, including here in North America. Does it offer a valuable perspective on both Calvin’s life and our own circumstances?
Woo’s own background makes the discussion and debate about refugees existential for him. All four of his grandparents were refugees from China after the Communist takeover, as he explains in his introduction. As a professor of church history at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a pastor in the Reformed Church of America, he might naturally harbor the desire to be more fully seen and understood within the American branch of the tradition that flows from Calvin’s Geneva.
However, the bulk of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of Calvin’s writings in order to ferret out and connect his many references to exiles and refugees, and to contextualize them within the turbulent religious and political history of the mid-sixteenth century. He notes, for instance, how Calvin’s teachings on providence and predestination might offer special consolation to exiles who struggled to belong. He observes that Calvin recurs again and again to biblical characters (Abraham, David) who lived faithfully in exile from their homelands.
Many of these observations are helpful for understanding Calvin. But how fruitful are they for understanding ourselves, especially those of us who are not refugees, yet who may be called upon to respond to others who experience exile or displacement? Calvin might encourage us to accept and protect refugees as he did. But that, of course, would mean refugees who were neither Catholic nor Anabaptist–not to mention Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist. Those Calvinian refugees might be French, English, Scottish, Polish, Italian, or Spanish, but they would all be European, not Haitian or Somali. And definitely no one named Michael Servetus!
I am not yet persuaded by Woo’s book that there is much in Calvin’s thought or practice that can help us broaden the scope of our stance toward refugees and exiled peoples, welcoming (or not) them. But inspiration might be found elsewhere in the Reformed tradition. The French Protestants in the village of Le Chambon, who risked their lives to hide Jews from the Nazis, spring to mind. The memory of their ancestors’ persecution was one of the factors that made this radical hospitality seem natural and intuitive to them. Perhaps in Minnesota today, we are seeing a revival of that spirit.
It doesn’t always work that way, of course; given the chance, the persecuted often make perfectly fine persecutors. But when it does work, it’s worth asking what it was in their inherited faith that bent the arc of their lives in the direction of welcome. Woo’s intent, as he makes clear in his final chapter, is to begin this discussion. It behooves us to continue it.
