Sermons on Various Texts of Scripture for the Present State of the Church

Recueil de sermons sur divers textes de l'Écriture sainte, pour l'état présent de l'Église is a collection of sermons by Francis Turretin, published in 1686. Turretin was pastor of the Italian congregation in Geneva and a professor of theology at the Academy, best known today for his scholastic Institutio theologiae elencticae. The collection appeared in the year after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and stripped French Protestants of their legal protection. Reformed churches in France were being closed, pastors banished, and congregations forced to choose between conversion and flight. Geneva, a French-speaking city on the border, received a stream of refugees, and its pulpits were addressed to a church in visible crisis. The title announces its purpose plainly: these are sermons for the present condition of the Church.

The sermons take up a range of scriptural texts, and what unites them is pastoral rather than topical. Turretin is not treating persecution as a puzzle to be solved. He sets the suffering church within the long biblical pattern of affliction and deliverance, and he reads her trials as occasions for repentance, constancy, and trust in God's governance of history. The persecuted are not told that their sufferings are meaningless, nor that they are the fault of a hidden sin to be hunted down. They are told that God remains sovereign over the powers that afflict them, that faithfulness under pressure is itself a form of witness, and that the church's hope does not rest on the favor of princes. Those who stand safely outside the storm are addressed as well, called to compassion for the exiles and to self-examination while their own peace lasts.

The voice is that of the Reformed pulpit at its most disciplined: text-driven, doctrinally precise, and plain in application. The man who wrote the great systematic defense of Reformed orthodoxy here shows how that theology was meant to be preached to frightened and grieving people. The doctrine of providence is not an abstraction in these pages but the ground on which a congregation is asked to keep standing.

The collection remains a valuable witness to how seventeenth-century Reformed preachers spoke to a church under persecution, and to the pastoral side of a theologian usually met only in his dogmatics. Its questions have not aged: how to endure injustice without bitterness, how to hold fast when compromise would be easy, how to care for those driven from their homes for their faith.

Who should read this: readers who know Turretin only as a scholastic and want to hear him preach, students of the Huguenot crisis and its aftermath, and pastors or Christians living under pressure who want a model of sober, doctrinally grounded comfort. It is not for those looking for devotional brevity or a modern, therapeutic idiom; these are full Reformed sermons, built on exposition and argument, and they reward patient reading.