Calvinism
Christianity
Main
the theology advanced by John Calvin, a Protestant Reformer in the 16th
century, and its development by his followers. The term also refers to
doctrines and practices derived from the works of Calvin and his
followers that are characteristic of the Reformed churches.
While Lutheranism was largely confined to parts of Germany and to
Scandinavia, Calvinism spread into England, Scotland, France, the
Netherlands, the English-speaking colonies of North America, and parts
of Germany and central Europe. This expansion began during Calvin’s
lifetime and was encouraged by him. Religious refugees poured into
Geneva, especially from France during the 1550s as the French government
became increasingly intolerant but also from England, Scotland, Italy,
and other parts of Europe into which Calvinism had spread. Calvin
welcomed them, trained many of them as ministers, sent them back to
their countries of origin to spread the Gospel, and then supported them
with letters of encouragement and advice. Geneva thus became the centre
of an international movement and a model for churches elsewhere. John
Knox, the Calvinist leader of Scotland, described Geneva as “the most
perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of
the Apostles.”
Calvinism was immediately popular and was appealing across geographic
and social boundaries. In France it was attractive primarily to the
nobility and the urban upper classes, in Germany it found adherents
among both burghers and princes, and in England and the Netherlands it
made converts in every social group. In the Anglo-Saxon world, Calvinist
notions found embodiment in English Puritanism, whose ethos proved
vastly influential in North America beginning in the 17th century. It
seems likely, therefore, that Calvinism’s appeal was based on its
ability to explain disorders of the age afflicting all classes and to
provide comfort by its activism and doctrine.
It is important to note that the later history of Calvinism has often
been obscured by a failure to distinguish between Calvinism as the
beliefs of Calvin himself; the beliefs of his followers, who, though
striving to be faithful to Calvin, modified his teachings to meet their
own needs; and, more loosely, the beliefs of the Reformed tradition of
Protestant Christianity, in which Calvinism proper was only one, if
historically the most prominent, strand. The Reformed churches consisted
originally of a group of non-Lutheran Protestant churches in towns in
Switzerland and southern Germany. These churches have always been
jealous of their autonomy and individuality, and Geneva was not alone
among them in having a distinguished theological leadership. Huldrych
Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zürich and Martin Bucer in Strasbourg
were also influential throughout Europe. Their teachings, especially in
England, combined with those of Calvin to shape what came to be called
Calvinism.
Developments in Geneva are illustrative of the fate of Calvinism
elsewhere. In 1619 they reached a climax at the Synod of Dort in the
Netherlands, which spelled out various corollaries of predestination, as
Calvin had never done, and made the doctrine central to Calvinism.
Although the synod was provoked by a local controversy, it was attended
by representatives of Reformed churches elsewhere and assumed universal
importance.
Calvinism underwent further development as theologians, apparently
dissatisfied with Calvin’s loose rhetorical writing, adopted the style
of Scholastic theologians and even appealed to medieval Scholastic
authorities. The major Calvinist theological statement of the 17th
century was the Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1688; Institutes of
Elenctic Theology) of François Turretin, chief pastor of Geneva.
Although the title of his work recalled Calvin’s masterpiece, the work
itself bore little resemblance to the Institutes of the Christian
Religion (1536); it was not published in the vernacular, and its
dialectical structure followed the model of the great Summae of Thomas
Aquinas and suggested Thomas’s confidence in the value of human reason.
The lasting significance of this shift is suggested by the fact that
Turretin’s work was the basic textbook in theology at the Princeton
Theological Seminary in New Jersey, the most distinguished intellectual
centre of American Calvinism, until the middle of the 19th century.
Historians of Calvinism have continued to debate whether these
developments were essentially faithful to the beliefs of Calvin or
deviations from them. In some sense they were both. Although they
abandoned Calvin’s humanism, there were precedents for these changes in
the contrary aspects of his thought. They were untrue to Calvin,
however, in rejecting his concern to balance contrary impulses. These
changes, moreover, suggest the stage in the development of a movement
that Max Weber called “routinization”—the stage that comes after a
movement’s creative beginnings and, as a kind of reaction against the
disorderly freedom of individual creativity, represents the quite
different values of order and regularity. It is also relevant to
explaining these changes in Calvinism that they occurred during a period
of singular disorder, caused among other things by a century of
religious warfare, which generally produced a longing for certainty,
security, and peace.
William J. Bouwsma
