Calvinism

The religious doctrines of John Calvin, emphasizing the omnipotence of God and the salvation of the elect by God's grace alone.

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Calvinism, the creed of Jean Calvin (1509-64), was largely as formulated in his Institutes, published 1536. Calvin was greatly influenced by St Augustine in inferring predestination from divine foreknowledge, and he therefore presumed that the elect, chosen for salvation, were known to God from before the creation. Free will was an illusion. Church organization followed from that basic premiss, that the chosen of God—the elect—should share government with the ministers.

Taken into Scotland from Calvin's Geneva in 1559 by John Knox, Calvinism became the national creed and was recognized as the established church in 1690. In England it struggled first to influence Anglicanism, then to overthrow it. After 1660 it was at first the most powerful of the dissenting sects but lost ground rapidly to the baptists and congregationalists and in the early 18th cent. was infiltrated by socinianism and unitarianism.

Calvinism, a Protestant persuasion based on the views of J. Calvin (1509-64), which became influential during the Counter-Reformation (see Gegenreformation). The rulers of the Palatinate and of Brandenburg turned Calvinist and these two states became places of refuge for the Huguenots (see Hugenotten). Calvinism was the most puritanical and also the best organized of the Reformation movements, but it was not recognized until the Peace of Westphalia (see Westfälischer Friede).

The rigorous form of Protestantism founded by the French reformer and theo-logian John Calvin (1509-64) distinguished by belief in the Bible as the rule of faith, denial of human freedom since the Fall, and particularly emphasis on the arbitrary predestination of some to salvation and others to damnation. Calvinism was the creed of the Huguenots, and found congenial soil in Scotland. See also elective affinity, Protestant work ethic.

Calvinism, in its broadest sense, is the entire body of conceptions arising from the teachings of John Calvin. Its fundamental principle is the conception of God as absolutely sovereign. More than other branches of Protestantism, Calvinism emphasizes the doctrine of predestination, the idea that God has already determined whom to save and damn and that nothing can change his decision. The 1618–1619 Synod of Dort produced five canons that defined Calvinist orthodoxy: total depravity, the belief that original sin renders humans incapable of achieving salvation without God's grace; unconditional election, that the saved do not become so as a result of their own virtuous behavior but rather because God has selected them; limited atonement, that Christ died only to redeem those whom God has already chosen for salvation; irresistible grace, that individuals predestined for salvation cannot reject God's grace; and perseverance of the saints, that those whom God has chosen for salvation cannot lose that grace. The statement of Calvinism most influential in the United States was the Westminster Confession of 1647. New England Congregationalists accepted its doctrinal portion and embodied it in their Cambridge Platform of 1648. American Presbyterians coming from Scotland and Northern Ireland were sternly Calvinistic. The Synod of Philadelphia, the oldest general Presbyterian body in the United States, passed the Adopting Act in 1729, which required all ministers and licentiates to sub-scribe to the Westminster Confession. Other Calvinistic bodies in the United States are the Dutch and German Reformed churches and all Presbyterian bodies.

Bibliography

Cashdollar, Charles D. A Spiritual Home: Life in British and American Reformed Congregations, 1830–1915. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

Hirrel, Leo P. Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

Howard, Victor B. Conscience and Slavery: The Evangelistic Calvinist Domestic Missions, 1837–1861. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990.

Pahl, Jon. Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630–1760. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

—William W. Sweet/A. E.

Traditionally placed after Lutheranism as the second major part of magisterial Protestantism, "Calvinism" is now used by experts as a somewhat old-fashioned shorthand for something they prefer to call the Reformed theological tradition, which spawned a cluster of different but doctrinally related churches scattered across several disconnected parts of Europe and its colonies; it included many other Protestant theologians from several European countries, including places where this type of church never flourished. The Reformed tradition preceded John Calvin (1509–1564), who was simply its single most influential exponent; indeed, "Calvinist" was an insult coined in 1553 to describe Protestants who were willing to burn other non-Catholic Christians as heretics. Therefore, this entry will describe some of Calvin's achievements in his adopted city of Geneva, which certainly deserves its nickname of the "Calvinist Rome," and examine the various fates of Calvinism not only where it became the established religion (as in Scotland, New England, and the Netherlands), but also where it enjoyed only limited success, as in Calvin's native France, the German Empire, and England. Calvinism's enduring reputation as an unusually austere and highly disciplinarian form of Protestantism, notorious for an obsession with the problem of double predestination, seems at least partly justified.

Experts often prefer to begin the history of Calvinism not with Calvin himself, but with Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and the early Reformed tradition in Switzerland. By the time Calvin became a Protestant theologian and reached Geneva, the Protestant movement begun in Zurich by Zwingli and continued by Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575) after Zwingli's early death at the battle of Kappel in 1531 had deeply colored the theological and political backgrounds where Calvin worked. Bullinger's forty-four years in Zurich over-lapped Calvin's ministry in Geneva (1536–1564) on both ends; fortunately for the Reformed church, his relations with Calvin were entirely amicable. Bullinger's influence on Calvin is difficult to assess: Bullinger's writings saw about three-fourths as many sixteenth-century editions as Calvin's; and Bullinger was a prodigious letter writer, with a corpus of about fifteen thousand extant letters (roughly three times as many as Calvin), so extensive that no scholar has yet managed to read all of them.

Although Calvin is most famous for his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he reworked and expanded several times between 1536 and 1560, it was only one of his many published works. They were widely distributed across Europe, going through almost five hundred different editions in nine different languages between 1532 and 1600. Almost two hundred titles by Calvin were printed in his native French and over one hundred fifty more in Latin, the best vehicle for reaching educated people anywhere in Europe. Another sixty-six editions of Calvin's works appeared in English before 1600, and twenty-eight editions in German. However, the number of sixteenth-century vernacular editions of Calvin's works does not necessarily match the degree of success his ideas enjoyed; for example, there were only fifteen editions in Dutch, although Calvinism became the official state church of the Dutch Republic, barely exceeding his eleven editions in Italian, when Italy had no Calvinist churches whatsoever.

Calvin's emphasis on predestination bothered Bullinger and other fellow Protestant theologians, who agreed with most of the theory but thought it was imprudent to preach in public. However, this doctrine did not necessarily frighten Calvin's local audience. One of them, Michel Roset (1534–1613), a Genevan chronicler, claimed that "great and small spoke of the subject" and called it "a singular grace and counsel of God, who by this means made this subject of predestination (previously obscure and almost inaccessible for the most part) most familiar in this church for the consolation and assurance of its children, who know that their salvation is founded on his eternal and unchangeable judgement" (quoted in Benedict, p. 303). To an optimist, it provided a source of comfort, rather than anxiety, in troubled times.

Discipline and the Consistory

The most famous institution associated with Calvin, the Genevan consistory, was undoubtedly central to his purpose of reforming Geneva's inhabitants into correctly educated Christians who behaved as such. Bullinger, his indispensable ally in Zurich, expressed uneasiness about its "excessive sharpness" and its independence from the magistracy. Nevertheless, Calvin's consistory was widely admired and copied because early Reformed churches needed some way to maintain discipline over their members so that the Lord's Supper—their only important ceremony, usually celebrated only four times a year—could be properly administered. The elders, who staffed and implemented proper Christian discipline, comprised the third of Calvin's four orders of a Reformed ministry, ranking behind the rather ill-defined teaching ministry and ahead of the deacons who were responsible primarily for social welfare. (The four orders are preachers, teachers, elders, and deacons.)

Geneva's new consistory began work in February 1542, shortly after Geneva's government had approved Calvin's set of ecclesiastical ordinances. Lay elders always presided, but Calvin personally attended its meetings whenever he could; in the 1540s, he was frequently the only pastor present. Although its first ten cases concerned marriage promises and it soon handled a few divorce cases, such matters were never its principal concerns. Within a month, the consistory required people summoned before it to demonstrate a satisfactory knowledge of the Lord's Prayer and a short version of the Apostles' Creed in their spoken language, not "papist" Latin. By year's end, although most people were summoned for faulty doctrine or failure to attend sermons, others were accused of quarreling in public, fornication, blasphemy, gambling, singing parodies of hymns, using superstitious cures, or even being disobedient to their parents. Although the consistory occasionally investigated doctrinal issues, such behavioral problems preoccupied it by the mid-1540s and remained predominant until Voltaire's day.

Only after a hard struggle in the mid-1550s was Calvin able to impose the consistory's autonomous power to excommunicate obstinate sinners. Its activities multiplied prodigiously. At its statistical peak in the late 1560s, Geneva's consistory summoned almost one adult in eight every year for reprimands. Nearby rural parishes, which were far slower to become "Calvinist," saw many people excommunicated for superstition, dancing, singing lewd songs, or fornication. Urban misbehavior was different, mainly involving quarrels with family or neighbors and a huge range of "scandals," including such trivial offenses as a woman urinating in a cooking pot or a man urinating in the street without turning his back. No other place in Europe, Protestant or Catholic, even remotely approached these levels of official moral surveillance.

Such extreme measures apparently got results. For example, some bits of statistical evidence support the claim of John Knox (c. 1510–1572) that Calvin's Geneva became "the most perfect school of Christ seen on earth since the days of the apostles." One indication comes from baptisms of illegitimate children, which were recorded throughout Europe in this era. At Geneva, they reached the lowest levels yet found by demographic historians: barely one illegitimate child per thousand live births, a ratio that seems unimaginably low anywhere in the world today. Another indication gains value because it comes from an extremely hostile source, an Italian Jesuit who visited Geneva in 1580. "What caused me some surprise," he noted, "was that during the three days I was in Geneva, I never heard any blasphemy, swearing, or indecent language, which," he hastened to add, "I attributed to diabolic cunning to deceive the simpleminded by having the appearance of a reformed life" (quoted in Benedict, p. 103).

The Marks of Calvinism

Calvinism and the Reformed tradition expanded rapidly after the mid-sixteenth century. From their original base in modern Switzerland (its early French-speaking strongholds, including Geneva, did not become Swiss cantons until the nineteenth century), they reached into most parts of European Christendom, except Scandinavia, which remained entirely Lutheran, and Mediterranean Catholic countries with national Inquisitions (Spain, Portugal, and Italy), where its nascent movements were successfully repressed. Everywhere else—from southern France to Scotland in western Europe, through the Netherlands and scattered bits of the Holy Roman Empire, as far east as Poland and Hungary—networks of Reformed churches were established, decreeing professions of faith and organizing synods. Most of them also included disciplinary organizations modeled to some degree on Calvin's consistory.

Although no early "Calvinist" churches adopted exactly the same confession of faith, they shared many common features. One easy and simple way to distinguish them from other Protestants is by considering what sixteenth-century theologians called notae, or marks of the true church. Luther—and every other Protestant leader—insisted that preaching the Word of God correctly was the very first requirement. Nearly all of them added a second mark: the correct administration of the sacraments (Protestants agreed that there were only two, baptism and the Eucharist, but disagreed vehemently from the outset about how to perform them). Beyond these two, Luther occasionally mentioned other signs of a true church, including proper discipline; some of his more radical rivals added even more (the founder of the Mennonites had six, while other Anabaptists went up to a dozen). In general, churches within Calvin's Reformed tradition acknowledged only three notae, placing a correct form of church discipline immediately after correct preaching and administration of both sacraments. Interestingly, Calvin himself, despite the care he lavished on creating and maintaining Geneva's consistory, never insisted that discipline was a necessary mark of the true church. But many early official confessions of Reformed churches, including those made during Calvin's lifetime between 1560 and 1562 in Scotland, Belgium, and Hungary, made discipline their third and final mark. It was clearly a fundamental aspect of mainstream Calvinism and remained so.

The Spread of Calvinism

In the Holy Roman Empire, the year 1555 saw the Religious Peace of Augsburg with its famous formula cuius regio, eius religio—the religion of the prince determines the religion of his people. This was precisely the moment when Calvinism began spreading extremely rapidly across many parts of Europe, and its relative degree of success usually depended heavily on the ruler's attitudes toward the Reformed faith. For example, in France, Calvin's native land and Europe's largest kingdom, steadfast royal opposition prevented its triumph. In the Holy Roman Empire, only one important ruler adopted it: an electoral prince established Calvinism after 1563 much as a Saxon elector had established Lutheranism a generation earlier. Elsewhere, unusual circumstances did enable it to triumph twice despite a sovereign's opposition. In Scotland, an incompetent sovereign enabled Calvinism to become the official faith, while in England, a Protestant (but not Calvinist) sovereign struggled to tame it. In the Netherlands, a powerful but distant and unpopular sovereign ultimately failed to prevent Calvinism from triumphing in half of his lands—although not in the regions where it had originated.

In France, the Reformed faith grew with amazing rapidity in the late 1550s, establishing clandestine churches in towns throughout the kingdom and converting many noblemen, including some from princely houses. Starting in the 1560s, both France and the Netherlands experienced extremely long and bitter cycles of civil wars, which historians conventionally call the "Wars of Religion." Much ink has been shed over how far the Reformed churches went, in both France and the Netherlands, in provoking revolts against legitimate rulers; it seems clear that they provided some of the logistical infrastructure as well as most of the propaganda for these risings, and they reaped the benefits of whatever successes the rebels enjoyed. Although French Huguenots lost both battles and members during the wars, the French crown repeatedly granted them some freedom of worship in order to stop the fighting. In the Netherlands, the rebels also lost most of the battles. However, after they gained a foothold in defensible northern positions after 1572, the greatest civilian mass migration in sixteenth-century Europe eventually brought dozens of thousands of Calvinists into the region. Although the rebels soon established the Reformed faith in Dutch provinces, historians have pointed out how few full members these "official" churches actually had even in the mid-seventeenth century.

In the British Isles, the rapid success of Calvinism in Scotland, destined to become one of its major strongholds, was unexpected. But despite the popularity of both Calvin's works and the Geneva Bible in England, it never dominated the doctrines of the established Protestant church there. In a way, both results connect to a notorious 1558 pamphlet against the "monstrous" rule of women by John Knox, the most famous English-speaking sixteenth-century Calvinist. Knox wrote a history of the Reformation in Scotland, recounting how he outmaneuvered and bullied Queen Mary Stuart until she lost her throne in 1567; however, Elizabeth I, who became England's Protestant ruler in 1558, never trusted Knox or his followers afterward.

The conversion of an unusually studious German prince, the elector palatine Frederick III (ruled 1559–1576), provides our clearest example of a major Calvinist church established solely by the ruler's will. In 1563, he issued a new church order that followed the Reformed manner of celebrating Communion and accompanied it with a relatively brief catechism that quickly provoked Lutheran wrath for upholding the "damnable sect" of Zwingli and Calvin. When other Protestant rulers had Frederick summoned in person to the 1566 imperial diet and questioned him about his religious beliefs, he solemnly swore before the emperor that he had read some of Luther's writings but nothing by Calvin, and pointed out that he had signed the Augsburg Confession. This sufficed. The Palatinate, home of Germany's oldest university at Heidelberg, became Germany's first major Reformed state. It was also the only important one. On the eve of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the German empire counted about a dozen Reformed state churches (scattered among more than two hundred lay and ecclesiastical principalities) and four civic churches (among eighty free cities), plus two confessionally mixed regions in the far northwest. Overall, Reformed Protestants comprised only 6 percent of Germany's population and controlled four of its twenty-six universities, including Heidelberg.

Isolation apparently increased Palatine aggressiveness. Frederick III intervened militarily to help French Huguenots; by grasping for the Bohemian crown in 1618, his successors ultimately devastated their possessions, although the Reformed church they built proved sufficiently sturdy to survive subsequent persecutions. In theological terms, they provided the Reformed faith with one of its major confessional documents, the Heidelberg Catechism; it was adopted by the synod of Emden, on the Dutch border, in 1571, and soon afterward by the Reformed churches of Hungary and Poland. In ecclesiological terms, the Palatinate created the largest network of consistorial discipline in central Europe; but it also produced the doctrine of Erastianism, the most extreme Protestant version of the subordination of church to state.

In eastern Europe, state power was far weaker, and the Reformed church acquired a different configuration. The widespread use of Latin among the nobility and literate minority enabled Calvin and Bullinger to get their message across in Polish- or Magyar-speaking lands. Calvin sent numerous letters to Poland's king and leading noblemen in 1555, and local Protestant churches invited him to come and advise them. Before the tide began turning against them after 1580 and exposed the shallowness of their roots, over 250 Reformed churches had been established in Poland and another 225 in the Lithuanian parts of the kingdom; at that moment, Calvinists formed the largest single religious group in the Polish Senate. Meanwhile, Calvinism sank much deeper roots in the kingdom of Hungary, shattered by a Turkish victory that left Budapest under Ottoman occupation for 150 years. By 1600, the Reformed church claimed almost half of Hungary's population, and they even proselytized among the Orthodox Romanians. Many of Hungary's Reformed churches, like those in the Palatinate, managed to survive despite political persecutions in the seventeenth century.

Seventeenth-Century Calvinism

The history of Calvinism changed dramatically in the seventeenth century. In Europe, it stopped growing through armed struggle with Catholic governments, and instead it lost ground in many places. In Poland-Lithuania, it disappeared entirely through a peaceful Catholic reconquest. Its only new foundations, destined to become important in subsequent centuries, were in overseas colonies like New England or South Africa. Occasionally, Calvinism still seemed bellicose after 1600. Historians still debate the extent to which an international Calvinist conspiracy provoked the Thirty Years' War in 1618 by encouraging the ill-fated adventure of the elector palatine Frederick V, who became Bohemia's "Winter King." It was a last gasp, like the final Huguenot rebellion in France, which broke out in 1621 and ended with Cardinal Richelieu's capture of the greatest Huguenot stronghold, La Rochelle, in 1628. Ironically, the only successful military rising by seventeenth-century Calvinists came against a Protestant ruler, Charles I of England, in 1639. In places where it had become established, like the Netherlands or Scotland, Reformed church membership continued to increase, and Calvinism sank much deeper roots among the population. But elsewhere, it often receded into insignificance. Even in Calvin's native France, where the Reformed church seemed safely protected by the Edict of Nantes after 1598, its seventeenth-century membership eroded slowly before it was formally abolished by Louis XIV in 1685.

Most historians consider the seventeenth century the apogee of a "confessionalized" Europe, and Calvinism fits this pattern perfectly. From the beginning, all Reformed churches had demanded a properly trained clergy; at Calvin's insistence, Geneva had created a famous academy in 1559, and Dutch rebels founded a university at Leiden in 1575. By the time Harvard College was founded in Massachusetts in 1636, Reformed churches had created at least two dozen institutions of higher learning. After 1600, at least 95 percent of all Reformed pastors in the Netherlands or the Palatinate boasted university training in theology; most did even in the remotest Scottish isles. In such places as Scotland, Zweibrücken in Germany, or New England, a typical seventeenth-century Calvinist pastor owned over a hundred books, or about four times as many as their Catholic counterparts in northern Italy (Benedict, p. 450). Under such conditions, theology and ecclesiology, rather than politics, came to dominate its seventeenth-century history. Two major theological "summit conferences" were held, where issues about predestination dominated discussions, with questions about the proper organization of church discipline close behind. Protestantism has always displayed a penchant for spinning off new branches. Even in places where it was established, seventeenth-century Calvinism splintered: Remonstrants opposed Counter-Remonstrants in the Netherlands; Presbyterians and Episcopalians quarreled violently in Scotland. New variants, most notably Congregationalism, emerged elsewhere.

The Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) in the Netherlands, summoned in order to resolve the conflict between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, offers the closest approximation to the Council of Trent within the Calvinist or Reformed tradition. It held no fewer than 154 official sessions between November 1618 and May 1619, and included nineteen voting colleges representing four national churches (the French Reformed church also tried to send delegates, but King Louis XIII forbade them to leave the country). A majority of the voting colleges represented the host nation: nine provincial synods, plus the Walloon churches and the theological faculties of Dutch universities, while the other eight colleges represented British, Swiss, and German churches. The Synod of Dort succeeded in its original purpose by marginalizing the Remonstrants (who included the world-famous jurist Hugo Grotius, already imprisoned before the synod met). Two details suggest its importance in the English-speaking world. John Robinson (c. 1575–1625), the theological leader behind the 1620 Plymouth Pilgrims, greatly admired it; King James I (ruled 1603–1625), who famously vowed to "harry [Puritans like Robinson] out of the land," forbade any public criticism of its resolutions.

The Synod of Dort canonized what subsequently became known as the five cardinal points of official Calvinism, which English-speaking followers memorized through the acronym TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. Considering the importance—and now, the relative obscurity—of these doctrines, they deserve a bit of elaboration. "T" (also known through the famous rhyme in the New England Primer, "in Adam's fall/we sinned all") means that ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, all of humanity has been in a state of corruption and helpless to obtain salvation. "U" asserts that election is founded on God's purpose "even before the beginning of the world." "L" claims that Christ's atonement applies only to the elect but not to the rest of corrupt humankind. "I" claims that the soul's inner regeneration is entirely the "mysterious and ineffable" work of God. And "P" asserts that God will somehow preserve the elect from falling from grace, despite their occasional and inevitable lapses into sin.

A second and much longer lasting institution met during the Puritan revolution and eventually reshaped English-speaking Calvinism into its best-known forms. From July 1643 until February 1649, an Assembly of Divines held 1,163 sessions in Westminster Abbey. Of its 151 members, all but 30 were "learned, godly and judicious divines" hand-picked by the Long Parliament (three, who had settled in Massachusetts, declined the invitation); the remainder were themselves members of Parliament. The assembly prepared a book of discipline for the English church, providing a presbyterian form of discipline similar in essential aspects to arrangements among French and Dutch Calvinists. It then prepared a confession of faith, which essentially repeated the "LIP" parts of the Dort formula while avoiding the most abstract aspects of predestination. In 1647, it produced both shorter and longer versions of what we now call the Westminster Catechism.

Although created in England, the presbyterian system was essentially stillborn in its native land long before the Church of England was restored in 1660. Even in London, its greatest center of support, presbyteries were founded in only 64 of the city's 108 parishes (Benedict, p. 402). However, its arrangements were enthusiastically adopted in Scotland, where they had a durable impact. Following a long episcopalian parenthesis after 1661, they were grudgingly reimposed in 1690 after a Dutch prince, William III, who believed in predestination and spoke about achieving consensus on terms "wherein all the Reformed churches do agree" (Benedict, p. 415), occupied the Scottish as well as the English throne.

In New England, a local "summit conference," the Cambridge synod, which lasted from 1646 until 1648, also adopted the Westminster Assembly's theological decrees. The preamble to its resolutions, which retained nominal authority in New England until about 1760, boasted of their doctrinal agreement with "all the reformed churches of Christ in Europe." But in Massachusetts, Westminster's "presbyterian" decrees about polity and discipline were replaced by an entirely different system, stressing the complete autonomy of every parish. The Cambridge synod thus created a new branch of Calvinism, the one we now call Congregationalism, which became a de facto established church throughout most of New England.

New Englanders were the most famous Calvinists to settle in America before 1700, but they were certainly not the only ones. The Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, later New York, had established their Reformed church by 1640 (by 1665, the Dutch had also established it in South Africa, which still remains a bastion of the Dutch Reformed church). After 1685, some two thousand Huguenots, fleeing France after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, reestablished their Reformed churches after settling in places as far apart as Boston and South Carolina. Soon afterward, thousands of Scots-Irish colonists from Ulster (Northern Ireland) fled in order to escape Protestant persecution; they settled mostly in the middle colonies and formed their first presbytery at Philadelphia by 1706. Methodism, the largest neo-Calvinist Protestant church in America, arrived there by the mid-eighteenth century. As the history of Calvinist emigration to America testifies, such seventeenth-century intra-Protestant confessional quarrels were often high-stakes issues for laymen. They were even more so for clerics because public authorities quickly removed ministers from theologically incorrect factions. After 1619, Remonstrants were deprived throughout the Netherlands; in Scotland, many Episcopalians were deprived after 1639, and Presbyterians were deprived in about one-fourth of its thousand parishes after 1661. The situation was worst in Stuart England, which exceeded its previous pastoral purges under the Tudors in 1553 and 1559. During the Puritan Revolution, over two thousand of England's nine thousand parishes lost Royalist pastors for being insufficiently Calvinist. After the Restoration of 1660 gave the Church of England a head (Charles II) who had once remarked that "Presbyterianism is not a religion for gentlemen," two thousand more were removed as insufficiently Episcopalian. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, another four hundred British clergy were deposed for refusing to swear allegiance to William and Mary.

Calvinist Austerity

The most important features linking the practices of Europe's various "confessionalized" Reformed churches—and simultaneously separating them from other Protestant as well as Catholic traditions—revolved around their methods of disciplining church members for various forms of misbehavior. Wherever the Reformed faith became an official church, as in Scotland, the Netherlands, or the Palatinate, its organizations for ecclesiastical discipline operated hand in glove with public authorities. Records from such institutions in various parts of Europe enable us to form some general impressions about how Calvinist discipline actually worked in the heyday of confessionalism. The first thing to notice is that no established Reformed church even remotely approached the levels of investigation or punishments found in Calvin's Geneva. Consistories in Scotland or French Switzerland summoned between one adult in thirty and one in sixty each year, while those in Holland or France excommunicated no more than one adult in one hundred fifty each year; both ratios were roughly six times higher in Calvin's Geneva.

Another distinctive feature of Reformed Protestantism was its remarkably small number of official holidays. Calvin himself saw no need and no scriptural basis for any holiday other than Sunday, and Reformed Protestants usually celebrated extremely few of them. Their most austere churches, Geneva and Scotland (or seventeenth-century New England), observed none at all—not until Geneva's magistrates overruled their pastors and finally declared Christmas an official holiday in 1694. Such situations were, however, exceptional. The mainstream of established Calvinism, the Reformed churches of Zurich, Bern, France, the Netherlands, and the Palatinate, celebrated four holidays besides Sundays: Christmas, Easter, Ascension Day, and Pentecost; the Dutch and the Palatinate also added New Year's Day. Keeping only a handful of holy days marked an enormous departure from Catholic practices, which in most places celebrated anywhere from forty to sixty holidays each year. Other mainstream Protestants were far less radical than Calvinists: Lutherans kept a large number of holy days, while the Church of England became a target for Puritan scorn by observing a total of twenty-seven holidays. Early Massachusetts went further and took the most extreme Calvinist position about the Christian calendar: not only did the colony ban all holidays, but its General Court briefly reformed the "pagan" names of the months as well, dating by "first month," "second month," and so forth.

Many Calvinists compensated for this paucity or absence of other holidays with a strict observance of Sunday, almost in an exact correlation. Scotland became Europe's most notorious example in 1579, when serious punishments were first threatened for Sabbath-breakers; by 1649, they had forbidden such practices as fishing on Sunday. Scotland's extremely rigid taboos about Sabbath observance lasted far into modern times; it has been suggested that "Thou Shalt Not" made the best title for a history of Scotland, with its longest chapter called "Never on Sunday." Another specifically Calvinist ritual was the special day of community fasting, proposed by pastors and decreed by secular authorities, usually intended to divert God's wrath at times of extraordinary danger. We find fast days observed as early as the 1560s by the beleaguered churches of the Low Countries or France, and later in seventeenth-century New England; they remained a feature of Genevan life until the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

Calvinism's distinctive cultural contributions to the modern world seem more problematic than they did fifty years ago, when historians confidently assumed that Reformed churches had consistently opposed tyranny and fostered individualism. They seem vastly more problematic than they did a century ago, when the German sociologist Max Weber asserted a causal connection between Calvinist self-discipline, which he called "other-worldly asceticism," and economic success. The best way to approach such major issues today is by noting that although Calvinism's various European branches were mostly stable or defensive after 1650, they remained dynamic in Europe's overseas colonies and former colonies until the twentieth century. The consequences seem peculiarly paradoxical in America, where advanced education has become entirely secular, while a crypto-Calvinist "salvation- ist" evangelical Protestantism maintains an enduring hold over much of the population.

Few readers today will swallow the assertion that New England's Calvinist Puritanism "produced a type of human being that no just and informed mind can think of without admiration" (Mc Neill, pp. 340–341). Nevertheless, Calvinism, argues its most prominent recent historian, "still merits a prominent role in certain metanarratives of Western modernization" (Benedict, p. 542). By shrinking beliefs about holy days and seasons to a minimum, it affected a more thorough, although incomplete, "disenchantment of the world" than its rivals, and its strict codes of individual conduct powerfully reinforced individual consciences.

Bibliography

The outstanding recent synthesis by Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Truly Reformed (New Haven, 2002), includes an extremely rich and up-to-date bibliographical survey about various topics connected with "Calvinism." It almost entirely replaces the older account by John T. Mc Neill, The History and Character of Calvinism (Oxford, 1954).

Its fragmented history has often made Calvinism a topic for collective research in multinational contexts during the past generation. A slightly older example of this genre is Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985). Three useful and relatively recent collections of documents and essays should also be mentioned: Alastair Duke, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew Pettegree, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1610: A Collection of Documents (Manchester, U.K., 1992); Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke and Gillian Lewis, eds., Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, U.K., 1994); and Raymond A. Mentzer, ed., Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, XXXII; Kirksville, Mo., 1994). Those who read French can enjoy a handsome coffee-table book: Pierre Chaunu, ed., L'aventure de la Réforme: Le monde de Jean Calvin (Paris, 1986); even those who cannot might enjoy its illustrations. There are some valuable essays in Karen Maag, ed., The Reformation in Eastern and Central Europe (Aldershot, U.K., 1997).

—WILLIAM MONTER

Calvinism
John Calvin
Background Christianity St. Augustine The Reformation Five Solas Synod of Dort
Distinctives Five Points (TULIP) Covenant Theology Regulative principle
Documents Calvin's Institutes Confessions of faith Geneva Bible
Influences Theodore Beza John Knox Huldrych Zwingli Jonathan Edwards Princeton theologians
Churches Reformed Presbyterian Congregationalist Reformed Baptist Low church Anglican
Peoples Afrikaners Huguenots Pilgrims Puritans Scots
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Calvinism (also called the Reformed tradition, the Reformed faith, or Reformed theology) is a theological system and an approach to the Christian life.^[1] The Reformed tradition was advanced by several theologians such as Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Huldrych Zwingli, but it often bears the name of the French reformer John Calvin because of his prominent influence on it and because of his role in the confessional and ecclesiastical debates throughout the 16th century. Today, this term also refers to the doctrines and practices of the Reformed churches of which Calvin was an early leader. Less commonly, it can refer to the individual teaching of Calvin himself.^[2] The system is best known for its doctrines of predestination and total depravity, stressing the absolute sovereignty of God.

Contents 1 Historical background 1.1 Spread 2 General description 3 Distinctives 3.1 Sovereign grace 3.2 Five points of Calvinism 3.2.1 Total depravity 3.2.2 Unconditional election 3.2.3 Limited atonement 3.2.4 Irresistible grace 3.2.5 Perseverance of the saints 3.2.6 Nature of the atonement 3.3 Covenant theology 3.4 Life is religion 3.5 Worship regulated by God 4 Variants 4.1 Lapsarianism 4.2 Four-point Calvinism (or Moderate Calvinism) 4.3 Hyper-Calvinism 4.4 Neo-orthodoxy 4.5 Neo-Calvinism 4.5.1 Christian Reconstructionism 4.6 Calvinism Today 5 Social and Religious Influences of Calvinism 5.1 Usury and capitalism 5.2 Arminianism 6 Notes 7 See also 7.1 History 7.2 Doctrine 7.3 People groups 8 Resources 9 External links 9.1 Calvinist websites 9.2 Calvinism and other theological systems

Historical background

Main article: History of Calvinism

John Calvin

John Calvin's international influence on the development of the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation began in 1534 when Calvin was 25. That marks his start on the first edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion (published 1536). He revised this work several times, and produced a French vernacular translation. The Institutes, together with Calvin's polemical and pastoral works, his contributions to confessional documents for use in churches, and his massive outpouring of commentary on the Bible, meant that Calvin had a direct personal influence on Protestantism. Along with Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin influenced the doctrines of the Reformed churches. He eventually became the most prominent of those reformers.^{[citation needed]}

The rising importance of the Reformed churches and of Calvin belongs to the second phase of the Protestant Reformation. Evangelical churches began to form after Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Calvin was a French exile in Geneva. He had signed the Lutheran Augsburg Confession as it was revised by Melancthon in 1540. However, his influence was first felt in the Swiss Reformation whose leader was Ulrich Zwingli. It soon became evident that doctrine in the Reformed churches was developing in a direction independent of Martin Luther's, under the influence of numerous writers and reformers among whom Calvin eventually became preeminent. Much later, when his fame was attached to the Reformed churches, their whole body of doctrine came to be called "Calvinism".^{[citation needed]}

Spread

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Although much of Calvin's practice was in Geneva, his publications spread his ideas of a "correctly" reformed church to many parts of Europe. Calvinism became the theological system of the majority in Scotland (see John Knox), the Netherlands, with men such as William Ames, T J Frelinghuysen and Wilhelmus a Brakel and parts of Germany (especially those adjacent to the Netherlands) with the likes of Olevianus and his colleague Zacharias Ursinus. It was influential in France, Hungary, then-independent Transylvania, Lithuania and Poland. Calvinism gained some popularity in Scandinavia, especially Sweden, but was rejected in favor of Lutheranism after the synod of Uppsala in 1593.^{[citation needed]}

Most settlers in the American Mid-Atlantic and New England were Calvinists, including the English Puritans, the French Huguenot and Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (New York), and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Appalachian back country. Dutch Calvinist settlers were also the first successful European colonizers of South Africa, beginning in the 17th century, who became known as Boers or Afrikaners.^{[citation needed]}

Sierra Leone was largely colonized by Calvinist settlers from Nova Scotia, who were largely Black Loyalists, blacks who had fought for the British during the American War of Independence. John Marrant had organized a congregation there under the auspices of the Huntingdon Connection. Some of the largest Calvinist communions were started by 19th and 20th century missionaries. Especially large are those in Indonesia, Korea and Nigeria.^{[citation needed]}

Today, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches has 75 million believers.^[3]

General description

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Calvinism has been known at times for its simple, unadorned churches and lifestyles, as depicted in this painting by Emmanuel de Witte where the 17th century congregation stands to hear a sermon.

Calvinism in its present form has multiple main tributaries. This makes the name "Calvinism" somewhat misleading if taken to imply that present doctrines of "Calvinist churches" or all Calvinist movements teach every major feature of classical Calvinism. Others are often credited with as much of a final formative influence on what is now called "Calvinism" as is Calvin himself. These include Calvin's successor Theodore Beza, Dutch theologian Franciscus Gomarus, founder of the Presbyterian church John Knox, and later figures such as English Baptist John Bunyan and American preacher Jonathan Edwards.^{[citation needed]}

A distinctive issue in Calvinist theology that often is used to represent the whole is the system's particular soteriology, its doctrine of salvation. This doctrine holds that humans are incapable of adding anything to obtain salvation and that God alone is the initiator at every stage of salvation—including the formation of faith and every decision to follow Christ. This doctrine was definitively formulated and codified during the Synod of Dort (1618-1619), which rejected an alternative system known as Arminianism.^{[citation needed]}

Calvinism is sometimes identified with "Augustinianism" because the central issues of Calvinistic soteriology were articulated by St. Augustine in his dispute with the British monk Pelagius. In contrast to the free-will position advocated by Charles Finney and other dissenters, Calvinism places strong emphasis on both the abiding goodness of the original creation and the total ruin of human accomplishments and the frustration of the whole creation caused by sin. It therefore views salvation as a new work of creation by God, rather than an achievement of those who are saved from sin and death.^{[citation needed]}

"Calvinism" is virtually synonymous with "Reformed Protestantism", encompassing the whole body of doctrine taught by Reformed churches. The Reformers did not dwell on predestination as if it were a central dogma, but advocated the preaching of "the whole counsel of the Word of God."^{[citation needed]} In addition to maintaining a Calvinist soteriology, covenant theology is the architectural structure of the whole system incorporating all doctrinal topics. In piety and practice, a primary distinction is its regulative principle of worship, which rejects any form of worship not instituted for the church in the Bible. This principle sets Reformed theology apart from Lutheranism which holds to the normative principle of worship.^{[citation needed]}

Distinctives

The distinctives of Calvinist theology may be stated in a number of ways. Perhaps the best known summary is contained in the five points of Calvinism, though these points identify some differences with other Christians on the doctrines of salvation rather than summarizing the system as a whole. Broadly speaking, Calvinism stresses the sovereignty or rule of God in all things — in salvation but also in all of life.

Sovereign grace

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Calvinism stresses the complete ruin of humanity's ethical nature against a backdrop of the sovereign grace of God in salvation. It teaches that fallen people are morally and spiritually unable to follow God or escape their condemnation before him. It is seen as the work of God (divine intervention) in which God changes their unwilling hearts from rebellion to willing obedience.

In this view, all people are entirely at the mercy of God, who would be just in condemning all people for their sins, but who has chosen to be merciful to some. One person is saved while another is condemned, not because of a foreseen willingness, faith, or any other virtue in the first person, but because God sovereignly chose to have mercy on them. Although the person must believe the gospel and respond to be saved, this obedience of faith is God's gift, and thus God completely and sovereignly accomplishes the salvation of sinners. Views of predestination to damnation (the doctrine of reprobation) are less uniform than is the view of predestination to salvation (the doctrine of election) among self-described Calvinists (see Supralapsarianism and Infralapsarianism).

In practice, Calvinists teach sovereign grace primarily for the encouragement of the church because they believe the doctrine demonstrates the extent of God's love in saving those who could not and would not follow him, as well as squelching pride and self-reliance and emphasizing the Christian's total dependence on the grace of God. In the same way, sanctification in the Calvinist view requires a continual reliance on God to purge the Christian's depraved heart from the power of sin and to further the Christian's joy.^[4]

Five points of Calvinism

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Calvinist theology is sometimes identified with the five points of Calvinism, also called the doctrines of grace, which are a point-by-point response to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance (see History of Calvinist-Arminian debate) and which serve as a summation of the judgments rendered by the Synod of Dort in 1619. Calvin himself never used such a model and never combated Arminianism directly.

The five points therefore function as a summary of the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism, but not as a complete summation of Calvin's writings or of the theology of the Reformed churches in general. In English, they are sometimes referred to by the acronym TULIP (see below), though this puts them in a different order than the Canons of Dort.

The central assertion of these canons is that God is able to save every person upon whom he has mercy and that his efforts are not frustrated by the unrighteousness or the inability of humans.

Total depravity

Main article: Total depravity

The doctrine of total depravity (also called "total inability") asserts that, as a consequence of the fall of humanity into sin, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin. People are not by nature inclined to love God with their whole heart, mind, or strength, but rather all are inclined to serve their own interests over those of their neighbour and to reject the rule of God. Thus, all people by their own faculties are morally unable to choose to follow God and be saved because they are unwilling to do so out of the necessity of their own natures. (The term "total" in this context refers to sin affecting every part of a person, not that every person is as evil as possible.)^{[citation needed]}

Jacob Arminius himself and some of his later followers, such as John Wesley, also affirmed total depravity.^{[citation needed]}

Unconditional election

Main article: Unconditional election

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The doctrine of unconditional election asserts that God's choice from eternity of those whom he will bring to himself is not based on foreseen virtue, merit, or faith in those people. Rather, it is unconditionally grounded in God's mercy alone.

The doctrine of unconditional election is sometimes made to stand for all Reformed doctrine, sometimes even by its adherents, as the chief article of Reformed Christianity. However, according to the doctrinal statements of these churches, it is not a balanced view to single out this doctrine to stand on its own as representative of all that is taught. Unconditional election and its corollary in the doctrine of predestination are never properly taught, according to Calvinists, except as an assurance to those who seek forgiveness and salvation through Christ, that their faith is not in vain, because God is able to bring to completion all whom He intends to save. Nevertheless, non-Calvinists object that these doctrines discourage the world from seeking salvation.

Limited atonement

Main article: Limited atonement

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Also called "particular redemption" or "definite atonement", the doctrine of limited atonement is the teaching that Jesus' substitutionary atonement was definite and certain in its design and accomplishment. The doctrine is driven by the concept of the sovereignty of God in salvation and the Calvinistic understanding of the nature of the atonement. Namely, Calvinists view the atonement as a penal substitution (that is, Jesus was punished in the place of sinners), and since, Calvinists argue, it would be unjust for God to pay the penalty for some people's sins and then still condemn them for those sins, all those whose sins were atoned for must necessarily be saved.

Moreover, since in this scheme God knows precisely who the elect are and since only the elect will be saved, there is no requirement that Christ atone for sins in general, only for those of the elect. Calvinists do not believe, however, that the atonement is limited in its value or power (in other words, God could have elected everyone and used it to atone for them all), but rather that the atonement is limited in the sense that it is designed for some and not all. Hence, Calvinists hold that the atonement is sufficient for all and efficient for the elect.

Irresistible grace

Main article: Irresistible grace

The doctrine of irresistible grace (also called "efficacious grace") asserts that the saving grace of God is effectually applied to those whom he has determined to save (that is, the elect) and, in God's timing, overcomes their resistance to obeying the call of the gospel, bringing them to a saving faith.

The doctrine does not hold that every influence of God's Holy Spirit cannot be resisted, but that the Holy Spirit is able to overcome all resistance and make his influence irresistible and effective. Thus, when God sovereignly purposes to save someone, that individual certainly will be saved.

Perseverance of the saints

Main article: Perseverance of the saints

Perseverance (or preservation) of the saints. The word saints is used in the Biblical sense to refer to all who are set apart by God, not in the technical sense of one who is exceptionally holy, canonized, or in heaven (see Saint). The doctrine asserts that, since God is sovereign and his will cannot be frustrated by humans or anything else, those whom God has called into communion with himself will continue in faith until the end. Those who apparently fall away either never had true faith to begin with or will return.

This doctrine is slightly different from the Free Grace or "once saved, always saved" view advocated by some evangelicals in which, despite apostasy or unrepentant and habitual sin, the individual is truly saved if they accepted Christ at any point in the past; in traditional Calvinist teaching, apostasy by such a person may prove that they were never saved.^[5]

Nature of the atonement

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An additional point of disagreement with Arminianism implicit in the five points is the Calvinist understanding of the doctrine of Jesus' substitutionary atonement as a punishment for the sins of the elect, which was developed by St. Augustine and especially St. Anselm and Calvin himself. Calvinists argue that if Christ takes the punishment in the place of a particular sinner, that person must be saved since it would be unjust for him then to be condemned for the same sins. The definitive and binding nature of this satisfaction model has strong implications for each of the five points, and it has led Arminians to subscribe instead to the governmental theory of the atonement. Under that theory, no particular sins or sinners are in view, but all of humanity are included in those whose sins have been taken away. The atonement was not the penalty of the law, but a substitute for the penalty, which allows God to remit the penalty by his grace when any sinner repents and believes in Jesus as the Christ.^[6]

Covenant theology

Main article: Covenant theology

Although the doctrines of grace have generally received the greater focus in contemporary Calvinism, covenant theology is the historic superstructure that unifies the entire system of doctrine.^[7]

Calvinists take God's transcendence to mean that the relationship between God and his creation must be by voluntary condescension on God's part. This relationship he establishes is covenantal: the terms of the relationship are unchangeably decreed by God alone.^[8]

Reformed writings commonly refer to an intra-Trinitarian covenant of redemption. The greater focus is the relationship between God and man, which in historic Calvinism is seen as bi-covenantal, reflecting the early Reformation distinction between Law and Gospel. The covenant of works encompasses the moral and natural law, dictating the terms of creation. By its terms, man would enjoy eternal life and blessedness based on his continued personal and perfect righteousness. With the fall of man, this covenant continues to operate, but only to condemn sinful man.^[9] The covenant of grace is instituted at the fall, and administered through successive historic covenants seen in Scripture for the purpose of redemption. By its terms, salvation comes not by any personal performance, but by promise. Peace with God comes only through a mediator, the fulfillment of which is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Christ is seen as the federal head of his elect people, and thus the covenant is the basis of the doctrines of the substitutionary atonement and the imputation of the active obedience of Christ.^[10]

Life is religion

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The practical theories of church, family, and political life, all ambiguously called "Calvinism", are the outgrowth of a religious consciousness convinced of the sovereignty of God in both his creational and salvific covenants. Thus the goodness and power of God have a free, unlimited range of activity, and this works out as a conviction that God is at work in all realms of existence, including the spiritual, physical, and intellectual realms, whether secular or sacred, public or private, on earth or in heaven.

According to this viewpoint, the plan of God is worked out in every event. God as Creator sovereignly rules over all things, and as Redeemer over those he has saved. The utter dependence on Christ is not limited to the sacred (merely in the church or explicit acts of piety such as prayer), but also to every mundane task and secular vocation. For the Calvinist, while Christ's redemptive kingdom in the church remains distinct from areas of common activity with those who are not Christian, no part of life is truly autonomous from the lordship of Christ.

Worship regulated by God

Main article: Regulative principle of worship

The regulative principle regarding worship, which distinguishes the Calvinist approach to the public worship of God from other views, is that only those elements that are instituted or appointed by command or example in the New Testament are permissible in worship. In other words, the regulative principle maintains that God institutes in the scriptures what he requires for worship in the church, and everything else is prohibited. As the regulative principle is reflected in Calvin's own thought, it is driven by his evident antipathy toward the Roman Catholic Church and her worship, and it associates musical instruments with icons, which he considered violations of the Ten Commandments' prohibition of graven images.^[11]

On this basis, many early Calvinists also eschewed musical instruments and advocated exclusive psalmody in worship,^[12] though Calvin himself allowed other scriptural songs as well as psalms,^[11] and this practice typified presbyterian worship and the worship of other Reformed churches for some time. While music is the central issue in worship debates, other matters have been contentious as well, including doxologies, benedictions, corporate confession of sin, prayer and the readings of creeds or portions of scripture. The presence of any one of these, their order and priority have ranged over various denominations.

Since the 1800s, however, most of the Reformed churches have modified their understanding of the regulative principle and make use of musical instruments, believing that Calvin and his early followers went beyond the biblical requirements^[11] and that such things are circumstances of worship requiring biblically rooted wisdom, rather than an explicit command. Despite the protestations of those few who hold to a strict view of the regulative principle, today hymns and musical instruments are in common use, as are contemporary worship music styles and worship bands.^[13]

Variants

Many efforts have been undertaken to reform or expand on Calvinism, and these variations appear to a greater or lesser degree throughout the history of Calvinism.

Lapsarianism

Main article: Supralapsarianism and infralapsarianism

Within scholastic Calvinist theology, there are two schools of thought over when and whom God predestined: supralapsarianism (from the Latin: supra, "above", here meaning "before" + lapsus, "fall") and infralapsarianism (from the Latin: infra, "beneath", here meaning "after" + lapsus, "fall"). The former view, sometimes called "high Calvinism", argues that the Fall occurred partly to facilitate God's purpose to choose some individuals for salvation and some for damnation. Infralapsarianism, sometimes called "low Calvinism", is the position that, while the Fall was indeed planned, it was not planned with reference to who would be saved.

Supralapsarians believe that God chose which individuals to save before he decided to allow the race to fall and that the Fall serves as the means of realization of that prior decision to send some individuals to hell and others to heaven (that is, it provides the grounds of condemnation in the reprobate and the need for salvation in the elect). In contrast, infralapsarians hold that God planned the race to fall logically prior to the decision to save or damn any individuals because, it is argued, in order to be "saved", one must first need to be saved from something and therefore the decree of the Fall must precede predestination to salvation or damnation.

These two views vied with each other at the Synod of Dort (1618), an international body representing Calvinist Christian churches from around Europe, and the judgments that came out of that council sided with infralapsarianism (Canons of Dort, First Point of Doctrine, Article 7). The influential Westminster Confession of Faith also teaches the infralapsarian^[14] view, but is sensitive to those holding to supralapsarianism.^[15] The Lapsarian controversy has a few vocal proponents on each side today, but overall it does not receive much attention among modern Calvinists.

Four-point Calvinism (or Moderate Calvinism)

Main article: Amyraldism

See also: Moderate Calvinism

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Another revision of Calvinism is called "Amyraldism", "hypothetical universalism", or "four-point Calvinism", which drops the limited atonement in favor of an unlimited atonement saying that God has provided Christ's atonement for all alike, but seeing that none would believe on their own, he then elects those whom he will bring to faith in Christ, thereby preserving the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election.

This doctrine was most thoroughly systematized by the French Reformed theologian at the Academy of Saumur, Moses Amyraut, for whom it is named. His formulation was an attempt to bring Calvinism more nearly alongside the Lutheran view. It was popularized in England by the Reformed pastor Richard Baxter and gained strong adherence among the Congregationalists and some Presbyterians in the American colonies, during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Amyraldism can be found among various evangelical groups in the United States and within the Anglican Diocese of Sydney. "Five point" Calvinism is prevalent in conservative and moderate groups among Presbyterian churches, Reformed churches, Reformed Baptists and some non-denominational churches, and is not uncommon among evangelical members of the Church of England.

Hyper-Calvinism

Main article: Hyper-Calvinism

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Hyper-Calvinism first referred to an eccentric view that appeared among the early English Particular Baptists in the 1700s. Their system denied that the call of the gospel to "repent and believe" is directed to every single person and that it is the duty of every person to trust in Christ for salvation. While this doctrine has always been a minority view, it has not been relegated to the past and may still be found in some small denominations and church communities today. The term also occasionally appears in both theological and secular controversial contexts, where it usually connotes a negative opinion about some variety of theological determinism, predestination, or a version of Evangelical Christianity or Calvinism that is deemed by the critic to be unenlightened, harsh, or extreme.

Neo-orthodoxy

Main article: Neo-orthodoxy

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In the mainline Reformed churches, Calvinism has undergone expansion and revision through the influence of Karl Barth and neo-orthodox theology. Barth was an important Swiss Reformed theologian who began writing early in the 20th century, whose chief accomplishment was to counter-act the influence of the Enlightenment in the churches. The Barmen declaration is an expression of the Barthian reform of Calvinism. Conservative Calvinists (as well as some liberal reformers) regard it as confusing to use the name "Calvinism" to refer to neo-orthodoxy or other liberal revisions stemming from Calvinist churches due to their differing theological views.

Neo-Calvinism

Main article: Neo-Calvinism

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Besides the traditional movements within the conservative Reformed churches, several trends have arisen through the attempt to provide a contemporary, but theologically conservative approach to the world.

A version of Calvinism that has been adopted by both theological conservatives and liberals gained influence in the Dutch Reformed churches, late in the 19th century, dubbed "neo-Calvinism", which developed along lines of the theories of Dutch theologian, statesman and journalist, Abraham Kuyper. More traditional Calvinist critics of the movement characterize it as a revision of Calvinism, although a conservative one in comparison to modernist Christianity or neo-orthodoxy. Neo-Calvinism, "Calvinianism", or the "reformational movement", is a response to the influences of the Enlightenment, but generally speaking it does not touch directly on the articles of salvation. Neo-Calvinists intend their work to be understood as an update of the Calvinist worldview in response to modern circumstances, which is an extension of the Calvinist understanding of religion to scientific, social and political issues. To show their consistency with the historic Reformed movement, supporters may cite Calvin's Institutes, book 1, chapters 1-3, and other works. In the United States, Kuyperian neo-Calvinism is represented among others, by the Center for Public Justice, a faith-based political think-tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Neo-Calvinism branched off in more theologically conservative movements in the United States. The first of these to rise to prominence became apparent through the writings of Francis Schaeffer, who had gathered around himself a group of scholars, and propagated their ideas in writing and through L'Abri, a Calvinist study center in Switzerland. This movement generated a reawakened social consciousness among Evangelicals.

Christian Reconstructionism

Main article: Christian Reconstructionism

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A neo-Calvinist movement called "Christian Reconstructionism" is much smaller, more radical, and theocratic, but by some believed to be widely influential in American family and political life. Reconstructionism is a distinct revision of Kuyper's approach, which sharply departs from that root influence through the complete rejection of pluralism, and by formulating suggested applications of the sanctions of Biblical Law for modern civil governments. These distinctives are the least influential aspects of the movement. Its intellectual founder, the late Rousas J. Rushdoony, based much of his understanding on the apologetical insights of Cornelius Van Til, father of presuppositionalism and professor at Westminster Theological Seminary (although Van Til himself did not hold to such a view). It has some influence in the conservative Reformed churches in which it was born, and in Calvinistic Baptist and Charismatic churches mostly in the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent in the UK.

Reconstructionism aims toward the complete rebuilding of the structures of society on Christian and Biblical presuppositions, not, according to its promoters, in terms of "top down" structural changes, but through the steady advance of the Gospel of Christ as men and women are converted, who then live out their obedience to God in the areas for which they are responsible. In keeping with the Theonomic Principle, it seeks to establish laws and structures that will best instantiate the ethical principles of the Bible, including the Old Testament as expounded in the case laws and summarized in the Decalogue. Not a political movement, strictly speaking, Reconstructionism has nonetheless been influential in the development of aspects of the Christian Right that some critics have called "Dominionism." Reconstructionism assumes that God institutes in the Scriptures everything he requires for the ordering of self and society, extending the regulative principle of worship to all areas of life.

Calvinism Today

Main article: New Calvinism

Calvinism has undergone a resurgence in North America in recent years,^[16] and its adherents are often Baptist and continuationist.^{[citation needed]} TIME magazine described the New Calvinism as one of the "10 ideas changing the world" in 2009.^[17] Figures today which are associated with Calvinism include Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll, Ligon Duncan, Wayne Grudem, Tim Keller, C.J. Mahaney, Al Mohler, and John Piper.

Social and Religious Influences of Calvinism

Usury and capitalism

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One school of thought attributes Calvinism with setting the stage for the later development of capitalism in northern Europe. In this view, elements of Calvinism represented a revolt against the medieval condemnation of usury and, implicitly, of profit in general^{[citation needed]}. Such a connection was advanced in influential works by R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) and by Max Weber (1864–1920).

Calvin expressed himself on usury in a 1545 letter to a friend, Claude de Sachin, in which he criticized the use of certain passages of scripture invoked by people opposed to the charging of interest. He reinterpreted some of these passages, and suggested that others of them had been rendered irrelevant by changed conditions. He also dismissed the argument (based upon the writings of Aristotle) that it is wrong to charge interest for money because money itself is barren. He said that the walls and the roof of a house are barren, too, but it is permissible to charge someone for allowing him to use them. In the same way, money can be made fruitful.^[18]

He qualified his view, however, by saying that money should be lent to people in dire need without hope of interest, while a modest interest rate of 5% should be permitted in relation to other borrowers.^[19]

Arminianism

Main article: Arminianism

See also: History of Calvinist-Arminian debate

A theological and political movement which grew in opposition to Calvinism, now called "Arminianism", was founded by Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius and revised and pursued by the Remonstrants. Arminius rejected several tenets of the Calvinist doctrines of salvation — namely, the latter four of what would later be known as the five points of Calvinism. The term "Arminianism" today often serves as an umbrella term for both Arminius's doctrine and the Remonstrants', but Arminius's followers sometimes distinguish themselves as "Reformed Arminians."^[20]

The Remonstrants' doctrine was condemned at the Synod of Dort held in Dordrecht, Holland, in 1618/1619, and followers of either Arminius or the Remonstrants are not generally considered "Reformed" by most Calvinists. Many Evangelical Christians adopted the position advocated by the Remonstrants, and Arminius's system was revived by evangelist John Wesley and is common today, particularly in Methodism.

Notes

1. ^ Kuyper, Abraham. "Calvinism As A Life System". http://www.lgmarshall.org/Reformed/kuyper_lecturescalvinism.html. Retrieved 2009-07-15. 
2. ^ Warfield, p. 359: "Sometimes ['Calvinism'] designates merely the individual teaching of John Calvin. Sometimes it designates, more broadly, the doctrinal system confessed by that body of Protestant Churches known historically, in distinction from the Lutheran Churches, as 'the Reformed Churches' but also quite commonly called 'the Calvinistic Churches' because the great scientific exposition of their faith in the Reformation age, and perhaps the most influential of any age, was given by John Calvin. Sometimes it designates, more broadly still, the entire body of conceptions, theological, ethical, philosophical, social, political, which, under the influence of the master mind of John Calvin, raised itself to dominance in the Protestant lands of the post-Reformation age, and has left a permanent mark not only upon the thought of mankind, but upon the life-history of men, the social order of civilized peoples and even the political organization of States."
3. ^ Major Branches of Religions
4. ^ Bridges, Jerry. "Gospel-Driven Sanctification". http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var1=ArtRead&var2=270&var3=authorbio&var4=AutRes&var5=42. Retrieved 2007-05-31. 
5. ^ Loraine Boettner. "The Perseverance of the Saints". The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. 
6. ^ John 3:16
7. ^ Michael Horton (2006). God of Promise, Introducing Covenant Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books. ISBN 0-8010-1289-9. 
8. ^ Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) VII.1
9. ^ Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) VII.2; XIX.1, 2
10. ^ Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) VII.3; XIII
11. ^ ^{a b c} John Barber (June 25, 2006). "Luther and Calvin on Music and Worship". Reformed Perspectives Magazine 8 (26). http://thirdmill.org/newfiles/joh_barber/PT.joh_barber.Luther.Calvin.Music.Worship.html. Retrieved 2008-05-06. 
12. ^ Brian Schwertley (1998). "Musical Instruments in the Public Worship of God". http://reformedonline.com/view/reformedonline/music.htm. Retrieved 2007-11-16. 
13. ^ John Frame (1996). Worship in Spirit and Truth. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Pub.. ISBN 0-87552-242-4. 
14. ^ Hodge, Charles (1871). "Systematic Theology - Volume II - Supralapsarianism". Christian Classics Ethereal Library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/hodge/theology2.iv.i.ii.html. Retrieved 2007-06-04. 
15. ^ Hodge, Charles (1871). "Systematic Theology - Volume II - Infralapsarianism". Christian Classics Ethereal Library. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/hodge/theology2.iv.i.iii.html. Retrieved 2007-06-04. 
16. ^ Collin Hansen (2006-09-22). "Young, Restless, Reformed". Christianity Today. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/september/42.32.html. Retrieved 2009-03-13. 
17. ^ David van Biema (2009)). "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now: The New Calvinism". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884760,00.html. Retrieved 2009-03-13. 
18. ^ The letter is quoted in Le Van Baumer, Franklin, editor (1978). Main Currents of Western Thought: Readings in Western Europe Intellectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300022336. 
19. ^ See Haas, Guenther H. (1997). The Concept of Equity in Calvin’s Ethics. Waterloo, Ont., Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN 0889202850. , pp. 117ff.
20. ^ See Stephen Ashby, "A Reformed Arminian View", in Pinson, J. Matthew, editor (2002). Four Views on Eternal Security. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. ISBN 0310234395. 

See also

Calvinism portal

• List of Calvinist educational institutions
• Synod of Jerusalem (1672)

Moderate Calvinism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderate_Calvinism

History

• Crypto-Calvinism: German Protestants accused of Calvinist leanings within the Lutheran church in the late 16th century
• Jansenism: a radical Augustinian group within the Catholic Church with doctrinal distinctives very similar to Calvinism
• Welsh Methodist revival, 1904-1905 Welsh Revival
• Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Doctrine

• Common grace and free offer of the Gospel
• Monergism, as opposed to synergism
• Moderate Calvinism

People groups

• Category:Calvinists
• Puritans: Calvinists in England.
• Pilgrims: Puritan separatists who left Europe for America in search of freedom of religion.
• Huguenots: followers of Calvinism in France, the 16th and 17th century.
• Boer Calvinists: Boere-Afrikaners that hold to Reformed Theology.
• Reformed churches: denominations that have historically adhered to Calvinist doctrine.

Resources

• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil, trans. Ford L. Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960).
• Ford Lewis Battles and John Walchenbach, Analysis of the "Institutes of the Christian Religion" of John Calvin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1980).
• John Thomas McNeill, The History and Character of Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
• Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

External links

Look up calvinism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Calvinist websites

• Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics - offers many materials from a Calvinist perspective.
• Monergism.com - many Reformed and Calvinist resources
• Calvinism Index by Colin Maxwell
• Sola Scriptura A Reformed theology resource.

Calvinism and other theological systems

• Calvinism & Arminianism - a brief comparison of Calvinism and Arminianism from The Five Points of Calvinism - Defined, Defended, Documented by Steele and Thomas
• Argument on the Arminian Controversy - Five Points of Gospel Truth Asserted and Defended (1836) by Moses Roney, defending Calvinism against Arminianism.
• "Calvinism" from the Catholic Encyclopedia

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - kalvinisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
calvinisme

Français (French)
n. - Calvinisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kalvinismus, (Theologie des französischen Geistlichen J. Calvin)

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - Καλβινισμός

Italiano (Italian)
calvinismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - Calvinismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
кальвинизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - calvinismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kalvinism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
加尔文教派, 加尔文主义

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 加爾文教派, 加爾文主義

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 칼빈주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - カルヴァン主義

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مذهب بروتستانتي بسبه الى جون كالفن‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קלוויניזם, תורת התיאולוג קלווין - הגורל הנחרץ מראש והבחירה ע"י האמונה‬

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