Calvinism

I

Introduction

Calvinism, multivocal term, initially applied by the theological opponents of John Calvin to certain of his ideas to stigmatize them as the opinions of a fallible man rather than divine truth, subsequently extended to key ideas of his theological disciples, but most often used as a synonym for the entire religious tradition associated with the Reformed family of churches to emerge from the Reformation (the Swiss Reformed, Dutch Reformed, French Reformed, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and so on).

II

Early History and Spread

Distinctive Reformed churches first appeared in Switzerland in the early years of the Reformation. Their great initial champion was Huldreich Zwingli of Zurich. Zwingli was inspired by Martin Luther and his example of rejecting the authority of the Pope in Rome but disagreed with Luther on several key points of doctrine. Where Luther maintained that Christ was physically present in the Eucharist bread and wine, Zwingli understood Christ’s words “this is my body” symbolically. Where Luther purged from worship only those Roman Catholic practices that ran counter to his central principle of justification by faith alone, Zwingli ruled out anything lacking explicit biblical sanction, including removing all images and music from churches. An astute politician, he guided a transformation of Zurich’s church structures that instituted a radically simplified liturgy inside whitewashed churches. Like-minded theologians and acolytes soon implemented similar changes in Bern, Basel, and a number of other Swiss territories. The theological agreement of these localities was sealed through the First and Second Helvetic Confessions of 1536 and 1566.

In 1535 the newly independent city of Geneva, recently allied with Bern, carried out its own reformation. The next year, the French-born 27-year-old Calvin passed through the city and was convinced by the reformer Guillaume Farel to stay and serve its church. Calvin shared Zwingli's fierce antipathy to “idolatry” and “false worship”. He was also an independent theologian who sought to define a middle ground between Luther and Zwingli on the Eucharist according to which Christ was spiritually—not physically—present in the elements of the Eucharist. He taught predestination more forthrightly than either Luther or Zwingli. Influenced by Martin Bucer, he read the New Testament as specifying four orders of ministers in a properly reformed church: pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons. Together, the elders and pastors, operating in a body that came to be known as the consistory, were to exercise spiritual discipline over all church members and to possess the power to exclude notorious and obdurate sinners from the Eucharist. Although Calvin was a foreigner to Geneva, he was able after much turmoil to convince Geneva’s authorities to establish such a church structure and to recognize the consistory’s independent power of excommunication. Under his and the consistory’s watchful eye, Geneva became what pious Protestants from many parts of Europe hailed as a model community, where not only church institutions, but also the life and manners of the inhabitants, were truly reformed.

Between the mid-1540s and the end of the 16th century, Reformed ideas spread across much of Europe. Both Calvin and Zwingli's successor in Zurich, Heinrich Bullinger, wrote hundred of letters to recipients across Europe urging them to embrace and remain steadfast in their profession of the “pure gospel”, appealing to potentially supportive rulers to reform their churches, and even advising ordinary believers to withdraw from the “abominations of popery” to form properly organized counter-churches without official approval. Editions of their writings multiplied in many languages. Geneva became a magnet for refugees, many of whom subsequently went out from the city to spread its doctrines. Between 1547 and 1553 the key theologians around Edward VI, the young king of England, moved the theology and liturgy of that already independent national church in a direction that was not merely Protestant but also, on the evidence of its Eucharistic theology, Reformed. Between 1563 and 1604 a series of princes within the Holy Roman Empire, most importantly the rulers of the Rhenish Palatinate and Hesse-Kassel, transformed their Protestant state churches so as to bring them into line with key Reformed practices and ideas.

In Scotland, France, the Netherlands, Poland, and Hungary, nobles and ordinary believers created hundreds of churches modelled on Geneva and Zurich in defiance of the established authorities. In Scotland, those associated with this cause soon profited from favourable political circumstances and in 1560-1561 carried through a revolutionary reformation that made their faith the established church of the realm (see Church of Scotland, Scottish Reformation). After the long sequence of conflicts that led to Dutch independence (1566-1648, with de facto independence secured by c. 1590, see Dutch Wars of Independence), Reformed churches likewise became the legally favoured church of the United Provinces, although all inhabitants were not required to attend its services as was the norm elsewhere in Europe at this time. In France, Poland, and Hungary the churches were able to win legal recognition of their right to worship but never became the established state church. The right to hold Protestant services extended only to noblemen in Poland; as a vigorous Counter-Reformation won many of them back to Catholicism, the once impressive number of Reformed churches in that land dwindled to a few dozen. The French Huguenots, as the Calvinists were called there, lost their rights of worship when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Some 200,000 fled abroad to Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. A clandestine church later reconstituted itself within the kingdom. The Hungarian Reformed, the largest of all these tolerated churches as a percentage of the national population, retained its strength and its rights better, but it too had to face periods of persecution.

III

Ecclesiastical Structures and Internal Conflicts

Around 1600, perhaps 10 million people in several dozen European territories worshipped in churches that can be called Calvinist, but while these churches recognized their commonality of doctrine by accepting one another’s confessions of faith, they were organized in very different ways. In France and the Netherlands, where the churches took shape in defiance of the established authorities and initially had to rely on their own resources to survive, individual congregations were structured along Calvin’s model of the four-fold ministry, while cooperation and doctrinal unity among them was insured through a hierarchical system of local, regional, and national synods. Scotland reorganized but did not eliminate the system of bishops when its national reformation was first carried through, then added elements of presbyterial-synodal governance like that used in France and the Netherlands. In England, Edward VI’s reign lasted for so short a time that the reformers only had time to alter the articles of faith and modify certain elements of the liturgy; the pre-Reformation system of church government was left entirely intact, except that the king had replaced the pope as the supreme head of the church(see English Reformation).

Where it did not exist or faced competition from bishops, the presbyterial-synodal model of a self-governing church appealed to many as a safeguard against excessive meddling by the secular authorities. Englishmen impressed by “the best Reformed churches” on the continent also deplored the numerous Roman survivals remaining in their liturgy and the absence of a consistorial system of discipline. Theological debates broke out among Reformed theologians as the insights of Zwingli, Calvin, and others were organized into a coherent system of theology in the generations after their death. All these issues created divisions.

In Scotland, partisans of presbyterian and episcopal church government battled for control of the church throughout the late 16th and 17th centuries, with Presbyterianism finally triumphing after the Glorious Revolution in 1688-1689. A minority Episcopalian church subsequently took shape alongside it. Sensitivities about government or lay influence over the church split Presbyterianism itself into rival churches in the 18th century.

In the Netherlands, theological controversy raged from 1603 to 1618 between disciples of Jacob Arminius, a Leiden theology professor who maintained that individuals who possessed saving grace could subsequently lose it, and followers of William Perkins and Franciscus Gomarus, who maintained that God extended his saving grace permanently and irresistibly to those predestined to salvation. An international synod held at Dordrecht (or Dort) in 1618-1619 decided the controversy in favour of the latter position. From this time forward, “Calvinism” was often taken to be synonymous with the strict predestinarian viewpoint enshrined in the canons of Dort. Some Remonstrants (followers of Arminius) rejected this view and broke away to form their own church.

In England, the reign of Elizabeth I saw those enamoured of the practices of the continental Reformed churches seek the elimination of special clerical vestments, the introduction of consistorial discipline, and presbyterian church government. These Puritans did not achieve these aims, but they prompted certain defenders of the status quo to articulate a defence of the Church of England as a happy medium between Catholicism and the continental Reformed tradition, not part of the Reformed tradition. (Calvin in fact was the most widely read theologian in England in the later 16th century.) A tradition of practical divinity also developed from the 1590s onward that encouraged believers to look within themselves for evidence of their divine election. By the 1630s, a few English and New England ministers were sufficiently confident that the marks of election could be known and the elect identified that they restricted full church membership to those who could testify convincingly to the workings of grace within them. All such “visible saints” were accorded a voice in church government and discipline—the origin of Congregationalism. Some reserved baptism for adult visible saints—the origin of the modern Baptists. The English Revolution (1640-1660) brought the downfall of bishops, removed constraints on the press, and allowed groups of all sorts to proliferate. The Westminster Assembly of Divines from 1643 to 1647 sought to end the confusion by drawing up a confession of faith in the tradition of Dort and drafting a presbyterian church order, but this was only imperfectly implemented. The Restoration in 1660 brought back bishops and an Anglican vision of the church that many old Puritans who had worshipped within the Church of England could no longer accept. They now formed separate Dissenting congregations—Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist—that gained legal toleration after the Glorious Revolution.

IV

From the Enlightenment to the Present

In the 18th century, most Reformed churches turned away from the complex discussions of predestination that marked 17th-century theology to preach a simpler creed that emphasized morality. Rational theology advanced in many churches. But older currents of high Calvinist orthodoxy were not entirely abandoned, and periodic revivals encouraged a religion of the heart that presented itself as an antidote to desiccated rationalism and continued to direct the attention of ministers to the workings of grace in the individual soul. Calvinism also became increasingly international between the 17th and 19th centuries, as successive waves of Puritans, Scottish Presbyterians, and German Reformed brought different varieties of the tradition to North America and Australia, while mission societies spread the message to Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania from the late 18th century onward. In the late 19th and early 20th century, such figures as the Dutchman Abraham Kuyper, and the Swiss Karl Barth reinvigorated important portions of international Protestantism through the sympathetic rediscovery and reinterpretation of different elements of Calvin's theology. Today, the various churches attached genetically to the Reformed tradition differ widely in the extent to which they still profess the doctrines of Zwingli, Calvin, the Synod of Dort, or the Westminster Confession of Faith but retain at least a sense of historical attachment to the Calvinist tradition.