A refugee among refugees? A Reformed historical reading of reconciliation and its limits

In 1555, a mob gathered outside the council chambers in Geneva chanting for the blood of the French refugees who had come to outnumber the native-born citizens of the city. Into that crowd walked one of the refugees, a Frenchman named John Calvin, who offered his own life first. Four hundred and seventy years later, the questions Geneva raised about reconciliation and hospitality remain unresolved. In the Netherlands, a congregation kept a church service running without interruption for 3 months to shelter a family from deportation. In South Africa, an anti-immigrant movement marched under the conviction that hospitality for immigrants could be suspended. This article offers a Reformed historical reading of reconciliation and its conditions, using Calvin’s Geneva as its primary case and these two contemporary instances as illustrative examples. Drawing on Calvin scholarship and Reformed public theology, the article shows that Geneva’s welcome of the displaced was institutional rather than sentimental, theologically serious, and nonetheless slow to translate into shared power. Genuine welcome and its structural limits were not opposites in Calvin’s Geneva; they form part of the same story. The article argues that reconciliation, understood in Reformed terms, is neither an event nor a guarantee, but a durational, contested practice, sustained by institutions, tested by power and always vulnerable to reversal. Contribution: The article offers Reformed public theology a historically grounded account of reconciliation’s institutional conditions and durational limits, read through Calvin’s Geneva and tested against two contemporary Reformed-adjacent instances in South Africa and the Netherlands.