D. G. Hart - Calvinism - A History

Hart, D. G. (Darryl G.)

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From sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva to modern locations as far flung as Seoul and Sao Paulo, D. G. Hart traces the entire five-hundred year history of Reformed Protestantism to reveal why and how Calvinism grew to establish a global presence.

Hart brings to light the key episodes and leading figures in the religions institutional development, charting the social, political and religious circumstances that first created space for Reformed churches in Europe and later contributed to Calvinisms expansion around the world. He discusses the effects of the American and French Revolutions on ecclesiastical establishments as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century communions, particularly in Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States and Germany, which directly challenged the churchs dependence on the state. More recently, Calvinism has adapted its bold reformist political stance to become a much more personal faith- and community-based variety of Christianity which has taken root worldwide.

This comprehensive history encompasses vital discussions of secularization, religious freedom, the privatization of faith and the place of religion in public life, and also raises crucial questions about the role of religionTMitical and social life today.

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CALVINISM

D.G. Hart

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Copyright 2013 D. G. Hart

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hart, D. G. (Darryl G.)

Calvinism : a history / D.G. Hart, pages cm

ISBN 978-0-300-14879-4 (hardback)

1. CalvinismHistory. I. Title.

BX9422.5.H37 2013 284'.209dc23

2013003010

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 98765432 1

MIX

Paper from responsible sources

FSC* C013056

To Jim and Nancy Loux

via

xi

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction

City Lights

Gods Fickle Anointed

To Rebel and to Build

Shaking the Foundations

Taking the Word to the World

New Communities in the Land of the Free

An Exhausted Europe

Reformation Reawakened

Missonary Zeal

Kirk Ruptured and Church Freed The Netherlands New Way American Fundamentalists The Confessing Church Conclusion

Timeline for the History of Calvinism Notes

Further Reading Index

Tis the season of Calvinist anniversaries. July 10, 2009 marked the 500th anniversary of John Calvins birthday, an occasion that prompted the appropriate number of conferences, op-ed pieces, biographies, and anthologies. This year was the 200th anniversary of the founding of Princeton Theological Seminary, a United States institution with an international reputation for teaching and studying Calvinism. Next year will mark the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism, a pedagogical device for the Reformed churches in the Palatinate that became a doctrinal standard for Calvinists around the world. We are still over ten years from the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation in Zurich, the first European city to check a religious identity box different from both Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism under Ulrich Zwinglis leadership.

This book is not designed to observe any particular anniversary but it almost coincides with half a millennium of Calvinist developments. It is an audacious undertaking in many respects. Putting so much history in so many places into one relatively small volume runs against the grain of academic history since it requires pronouncements on subjects and eras about which the historian has no professional competency. I am trained as a historian of the United States and have worked generally on subjects since the Civil War. The prospect of writing a paragraph, let alone a section of a chapter, on religious developments in sixteenth-century Poland is almost as scary as bungee jumping. But when an editor at Yale University Press asked me to consider a history of Calvinism that would cover its global dimensions I immediately accepted, maybe because the only legal excitement available to me is one that comes with landing a golf ball on a green surrounded by sand.

Readers will discover soon enough my rationale for organizing material from five different centuries and just as many continents. Finding a single narrative