Theodore Beza

b. 1519; d. 1605.

John Calvin's successor in Geneva, who became an influential voice in the Reformed Protestant movement afterwards.

Trained as a lawyer, Beza fell through a period of physical illness and spiritual crisis in 1548, abandoned his Catholic faith in which he would brought up, and became a convinced Protestant. He went to Geneva, where he publicly married the women to whom he had been married secretly in Paris. A chance meeting with Pierre Viret led to his appointment as a professor of Greek in Lausanne, and became deeply involved in the reformation movement, as well as writing extensively. In 1558 he was invited by John Calvin to Geneva, where he was named the rector of the academy established by Calvin the following year. Two years later he left to help advise the Reformation movement in France, before returning to Geneva in 1563, and a year later, when Calvin died, assumed the mantle of leadership there.

Though a man of wide interest and great energies, publishing works of great influence, Theodore Beza's "strong defence of double predestination, biblical literalism, church discipline, and other Calvinisitc ideas did much to harden the movement, and to begin the period of Reformed Scholasticism" (R. Schnucker, s.v., NIDCC, 126).