ABSTRACT
In early 1559, Pierre Viret, the chief pastor of Lausanne, Switzerland, was banished from the city and the other territories governed by canton Bern. The city's other ministers, as well as nearly all of the professors and hundreds of students at the Lausanne Academy, followed Viret into exile. Viret's banishment ultimately for disobeying Bern's order to administer the Christmas Eucharist of 1558 as scheduled was the culmination of twenty years of debate between the ministers of Lausanne and the magistrates of Bern over the proper jurisdictions of church and state in enforcing moral behavior. For the magistrates, particularly in a city such as Bern that adhered more closely to Zwinglian thought, the regulation of moral behavior, just like all other behavior, properly belonged to the state. Key differences between Calvinist and Zwinglian eucharistic theology and ecclesiology underlay the excommunication debate in Lausanne.
