A History
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.
For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
U.S. Office: sales.press@yale.edu www.yalebooks.com
Europe Office: sales@yaleup.co.uk www.yalebooks.co.uk
Set in Arno Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
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. Calvinism—History.—I. Title.
BX9422.5.H37 2013
284'.209—dc23
2013003010
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
5 Taking the Word to the World
6 New Communities in the Land of the Free
10 Kirk Ruptured and Church Freed
Timeline for the History of Calvinism
’TIS THE SEASON OF Calvinist anniversaries. July 10, 2009 marked the 500th anniversary of John Calvin's 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 Zwingli's 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 ...
|
About Calvinism: A HistoryThe first single-volume history of Reformed Protestantism from its sixteenth-century origins to the present. This briskly told history of Reformed Protestantism takes these churches through their entire 500-year history—from sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva to modern locations as far flung as Seoul and São Paulo. D. G. Hart explores specifically the social and political developments that enabled Calvinism to establish a global presence. Hart’s approach features significant episodes in the institutional history of Calvinism that are responsible for its contemporary profile. He traces the political and religious circumstances that first created space for Reformed churches in Europe and later contributed to Calvinism’s 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, that directly challenged church dependence on the state. Raising important questions about secularization, religious freedom, privatization of faith, and the place of religion in public life, this book will appeal not only to readers with interests in the history of religion but also in the role of religion in political and social life today. |
| Support Info | calvinismahst |